Geek News

Motorola might not reserve large updates for its higher-end smartphone models this year. Leaker Evan Blass has posted an image of what should be the Moto E5 Plus, the bigger-screened device in the brand's expected low-cost phone lineup, and it's clearly not just a speed bump for the E4 . For one, there's a different camera array -- there's just one camera (despite the two cutouts), but this definitely isn't a rehash of 2017. The picture also suggests a much sleeker-looking body that tucks the fingerprint reader at the back in return for smaller bezels (albeit large enough for a prominent "Motorola" at the bottom). The image doesn't give too much else away, although the headphone jack survives. It's also reasonable to expect that the E5 Plus will run a lightly customized version of Android Oreo. It's not certain when the E5 Plus would ship, or what price it would have. The outgoing E4 Plus sold for $180 when new, though, and we wouldn'...

Google is the latest company to borrow Snapchat's augmented reality features , although this time it's not grafting them on to a social app . The company has released a new version of Motion Stills for Android that brings AR objects to your animated GIFs and videos. You can add chickens, dinosaurs and other objects to any horizontal surface in your shot, whether it's your hand, a plant or a table. And importantly, you don't have to be finicky when capturing your footage to make the result seem 'natural' -- it's using instant motion tracking tech that avoids the jarring visual anomalies you sometimes get in AR. The moment you tap the viewfinder to place an object, Motion Stills plunks an object in that scene with the assumption that the surface in question is parallel to the ground, using the phone's accelerometer as a reference point. It then separates the camera's rotation and translation estimates to create a 3D translation, and combines that ...

Japan has set a new spaceflight record -- and unlike most of these feats, it's defined by what wasn't involved. The country's Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has successfully launched the smallest-ever rocket to carry a satellite into orbit, a modest SS-520 sounding rocket modified with a third stage inside its nose cone to get its payload into orbit. As you might guess, the key to the record was the tiny cargo -- the rocket was carrying TRICOM-1R, a three-unit cubesat measuring just 13.6 inches long. You don't need a giant vehicle when the mission hardware would fit in the backseat of your car. The success came just over a year after JAXA's original experiment with an SS-520 rocket ended in failure . Crews decided against igniting the second stage when the vehicle lost all telemetry data a mere 20 seconds after takeoff. An investigation later determined that the likely cause was a poorly protected electrical connection, and the agency decided to try agai...