How to watch Samsung Galaxy Unpacked
This evening will see Samsung’s first Unpacked event of the year, just a week after the end of CES. We’ve already got a pretty good idea of what to expect when the South Korean conglomerate takes to the stage later in San Jose, California.
If the onslaught of rumours and Samsung’s own rigid schedule are anything to go by, we’ll likely get a look at the line-up for the S24, S24+, and S24 Ultra, and possibly a few other products that might not interest South Africans much. Take that all with a pinch of salt, though. Samsung has yet to confirm anything — and it won’t do so until the event’s start.
Speaking of which, kicks off at 1 PM E.T — or 8 PM SAST. We’re going to take a wild guess and say that you aren’t reading this from San Jose, meaning you’ll need to tune into one of the several other spots to get your information. Your best bet — if you want to see the coverage live, that is — will be to head over to Samsung’s official YouTube page (or by clicking right here) to see the entire Unpacked stream. (Or you could just check out the embedded stream that’s sitting right there ^).
Samsung’s website will also be home to the live stream, standing alongside the event’s tagline: “Galaxy AI is coming.”
But if you’d rather give the whole stream a miss, Stuff will be attending the event in the flesh, providing on-the-ground coverage to the website right here. Stuff’s official Twitter/X.com account will also be keeping up with the announcements as they happen — confining it all into byte-sized chunks. And pictures!
Chrome for Android’s big privacy updates
In a bid for parity, Google’s Chrome for Android might soon be seeing some changes in the interest of user privacy — more specifically in the realm of limiting personal information — to bring it up to scratch with the browser’s web version.
The news comes from Android Police and @Leopeva64 on X, who spotted the new privacy features in the latest Chrome Canary build — version 122 — which involve the browser allowing the user to gain access to more controls pertaining to specific websites, and allowing for more control over the sort of permissions and personal data it currently has access to in the form of new permissions.
The feature is still being worked on according to Leopeva, and doesn’t function just yet. He did, however, give an idea of what to expect by the time Google makes a move to release this most recent version globally. When a website tries to get hold of certain functions, such as your location, camera, or files, a new pop-up will appear with three options; ‘Allow this time’, ‘Allow on every visit’, and ‘Don’t allow’. The first of the three is new, and would only dole out information to the website for that session and that session only.
Don’t expect that extra layer of security to reach your smartphone for at least a couple of months.
Prison Architect 2 is real and it’s only coming to next-gen
Imagine our surprise when we woke up this morning (or any morning for that matter), to find that one of our favourite simulators of all time; Prison Architect was getting an unimaginatively named sequel. Even better, it’s not even particularly far away from an official release, with the game’s developers confirming it would be hitting PC, PS5, and the Xbox Series X/S on 26 March 2024. It’s also an entirely cartoony 3D affair now, with Introversion Software scrapping the 2D top-down view that initially had us falling in love back in 2015.
The game, as the name describes, involves building and fleshing out a prison — while keeping track of its inmates at the same time. How you treat the prisoners is all up to you — as long as it makes the prison money, with the entire “point” of the game being to sell off your prison by the game’s end for the most profit possible. The game’s tagline poses the question perfectly: “Will your prisons end up being monuments to rehabilitation or retribution? Most importantly, will they pay the bills?”
It’s not just rehashing the same gameplay with a shiny new exterior, though don’t go in expecting the core gameplay loop for 2 to be any different. The developers reckon the inmates are now a whole bunch smarter than they were in the last game, giving the difficulty a kick in the right direction. Those prisoners can now also begin developing personal relationships with one another, with every decision of your prison-building skills affecting “every aspect of your inmates’ lives, so make your schemes accordingly!”
There’s even a trailer to get you hyped up ahead of the March 2024 release date.
Apple is King, Samsung dethroned
For the first time since 2010, Samsung is no longer the manufacturer of the world’s best-selling smartphones, having lost out on the top spot to Apple in 2023 according to a new report from Bloomberg.
Research firm IDC reckons Apple’s iPhone made around 235 million shipments in the last year, nabbing a fifth of the global smartphone market in that time. Samsung has retained a spot on the podium, holding onto second place in the market with 226.6 million shipments — a slump from the Korean giant’s previous years — just ahead of third-place Xiaomi.
In previous years, Apple has dominated smartphone sales during the holiday season, with Samsung retaining control over sales across the rest of the year. With such a sudden change in the hierarchy suggests that smartphone sales, in general, are experiencing a slump and that Apple is “weathering” that slump better than anybody else, convincing a larger market share to pick up its premium smartphones.
You might not think that would be the case considering the excessive price of the iPhone 15 line-up, but the IDC makes the case that Apple’s trade-in strategy and interest-free financing are to blame for the shift in the industry. That’s despite the iPhone 15’s poor reception in China, which has been a massive money-spinner for Apple in the past.