Samsung

Samsung's Bixby Voice assistant on the Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+ is still absent in the US, and there are now reports that the virtual agent will miss its expected launch window. Announced alongside the Galaxy S8 as Samsung's response to Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri, and the Google Assistant, Bixby promises not only natural language recognition for questions but full voice control over just about every aspect of the smartphone. However, come the S8's launch, and Bixby Voice was conspicuously missing.

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What do you do when nobody is buying expensive plasma TVs any more? If you're Samsung, you reboot your plasma panel plant into a market that's far more lucrative: electric vehicle batteries. That's just what Samsung SDI, the South Korean behemoth's battery manufacturing arm, has done in Europe.

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Samsung is bringing the S Pen to its notebooks, with the Samsung Notebook 9 Pro packing both digital stylus support and a 360-degree hinge. Helping tide us over between now and the Galaxy Note 8 expected to be released later in the year, the new convertible will be offered in two sizes, 13.3-inches and 15-inches. Either way, it packs some of the advanced pen features we tested out on the Galaxy Book earlier this month.

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Is Samsung over its foldable display obsession? Well, yes and no. It has more or less mastered that, pending coming out with an actual device that takes advantage of that. In the meantime, however, it has turned its attention to another kind of deformable display. At the Display Week in Los Angeles, it showed off to a limited audience a 9.1-inch "stretchable" OLED display. And now it is sharing a video for the rest of us to gawk at the screen's elastic properties.

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Last week in Shanghai, away from the very scrutinizing eyes of Western media, Microsoft unveiled the New Surface Pro, a.k.a. not the Surface Pro 5. Reception has been mixed, ranging from "this should have been called the Surface Pro 5" to "meh". Fortunately, Microsoft's "tablet that can replace your laptop" is no longer the only game in town. In fact, there's quite a few of them right now. We take a long at some of the most recent and most enticing 2-in-1 options so far this year to see which one might be the best for your mobile Windows 10 needs.

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Imagine a smartwatch with a big camera right in the middle off it. Taking photos would be awkward, likely, since you'd have to point the top of your wrist at the subject. Such seems to be the reality posited by a recently surfaced Samsung patent, which shows a smartwatch with a camera in the middle of the 'display' portion; the camera has a zoom lens that extends out of the watch when needed.

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The next big bit of Samsung technology is going to be very, very tiny. So tiny, in fact, that the company suggests they'll be leading the way to the product before anyone else - and that's a big deal. "The ubiquitous nature of smart, connected machines and everyday consumer devices signals the beginning of the next industrial revolution," said Executive Vice President of the Foundry Business at Samsung Electronics, Jong Shik Yoon. This week Samsung announced that they'd push the semiconductor industry forward with a variety of new sizes in process technology on a new roadmap for the company.

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A couple of days back, we got word that a group of developers had found a way around the Galaxy S8's iris scanner. According to the folks at Chaos Computer Clubs, the iris scanner in the Galaxy S8 can be beaten with a high-resolution, infrared photo of the iris in question with a contact lens laid over it. That, obviously, is a pretty discouraging bit of news, but now Samsung has responded to this report.

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When Samsung unveiled the Galaxy S8, it didn't just unveil a new smartphone. It also announced a whole ecosystem around it, including, of course, a VR ecosystem. Although the new Gear VR with Controller is in a bit of a legal bind, its camera partner is going full steam ahead. The 2017 Gear 360 camera has just landed on stores, both physical and digital ones, ready for the task of capturing and making memories in glorious 360 degrees.

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With the announcements of both the new Surface Pro and the Huawei MateBook E today, we find ourselves in a heated 2-in-1 competition. Huawei and Microsoft aren't the only ones participating, though, as Samsung has also entered the ring with its new Galaxy Book 12. Make no mistake, these three devices certainly have a lot in common, but more importantly, there are a few key differences between them. Here's everything you need to know.

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The folks at Chaos Computer Clubs have shown how to bypass biometric security on the Samsung Galaxy S8 with a set of simple tools. Infrared camera capture of the target user's face creates a photo which is then printed. This printed photo is combined with a contact lens, and placed in front of the smartphone. The next step is opening the phone - which then allows the user in without real eyeballs.

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You wait for one premium 2-in-1 Windows 10 hybrid, and along come a whole selection at once. Samsung is hoping the Galaxy Book 12-inch will catch your eye out of a growing market, promising the latest in digital S Pen technology plus more processing power than you might expect from such a skinny slate. Question is, does the Galaxy Book do enough to warrant its $1,129.99 price tag?

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