Volkswagen is calling time on its US wagons, with the Golf Alltrack and Golf SportWagen both facing the axe by the end of the 2019 model year. As you might expect it's SUVs that are to blame for the decision, with VW conceding that drivers are voting with their wallets and it's not in favor of the humble station wagon.
In the United States in the second quarter of the year 2019 it was the iPhone XR that did best in unit sales, followed soon thereafter by a couple other Apple devices. At the same time, both Apple and Samsung unit sales have slid downward just a bit as two other brands saw relatively significant gains. Both big gainers sell Android phones: Google and Motorola. Motorola saw a 3.3% increase vs this same period one year ago, coming up to an 8.1% share - that's nowhere near the leaders, but it's still big news for a brand that's fallen so far from dominance in the past half-decade.
Nintendo is having a pretty big day, first revealing an upcoming refresh of sorts for the Switch and now revealing that two new pairs of Joy-Cons are coming down the pipeline. Joy-Cons, of course, are the standard controller for the Nintendo Switch, and they attach to the sides of the console when it's being used in handheld mode.
Today DJI introduced a new $440 gimbal that allows mirrorless camera users to take command of stabilization in videos of all sorts. This machine is simple-to-use, relatively small, and right on the high end of all the pro points. DJI suggests on their site that "due to limited new product availability," they'll only sell two units to each prospective customer.
Autonomous cars may be a sexy, sci-fi vision of the future, but autonomous trucks could be far closer to reality - and a lot more beneficial. Peloton today is showing off its new Automated Following system, a straightforward name for Level 4 autonomy that the company believes is far closer to public highways than others might have you think.
A week after announcing the Switch Lite, Nintendo is back at it today with the announcement of a new standard Switch model. Thanks to FCC filings, we had some idea that this announcement was coming, but don't expect this to be a big mid-generation update on the same level of something like the Xbox One X or the PS4 Pro. In fact, there doesn't seem to be very much that's changed with this new model.
Researchers the world over are working on drones of all sizes for all sorts of future tasks like delivering goods to areas where traffic is a big issue. Being able to deliver goods by air and having the ability to land in tight urban confines is a big deal and could help eliminate traffic and pollution in cities. Scientists are creating custom hybrid drones that promise the best of traditional multi-copter design with the efficiency and payload capacity of a fixed-wing aircraft.
Mercedes has pulled the covers of a pair of new shooting brake cars that we will never see Stateside. The cars are the Mercedes-AMG CLA 45 4Matic+ and the CLA 45 S 4Matic+. Both of the cars use the same 2.0-liter four-cylinder turbo engines, but the power output is different between the two.
Scientists are working hard to perfect tiny robots that can work with more of their kind to perform tasks on a larger scale. The tiny robot seen below was created by Georgia Tech and is called micro-bristle-bot. The scientists say that these tiny robots might one day work in groups to sense environmental changes, move materials, and possibly one day repair injuries inside the human body.
Microsoft was mighty proud of its shift to a "Windows as a Service" strategy almost four years ago. It definitely has reason to boast, considering its history of painfully slow updates that came via the rare Service Pack. Redmond, however, seems to have swung to the other extreme in its desire to portray a company that can quickly respond to problems and feedback. Now it has to slow down and take stock of its obviously broken update process to ensure that what's left of Windows 10 credibility won't go down the drain.
HTC might soon be doing a BlackBerry though the exact details of how that will happen are still unknown. In Russia, at least, the phone maker will reportedly be re-launching its old Wildfire series of phones via a local company. But it won't just be the HTC Wildfire E either. It turns out, there might be four new Wildfire phones, with as many as 10 in total coming soon.
It's not rare to hear about malware that gets past Google Play Store's defenses or even some that masquerade as legitimate apps. But when malware gets embedded inside those legit apps in an official manner things are bound to get messy. Unfortunately for Chinese software house CooTek, it is on the receiving end of a sanction that bans it not just from Google Play Store but even from Google's ad platforms.