Weekly News: Your Phone is an Earthquake Detector

If you are one of the 2.5 billion Android device users out there, you now have a brand new conversation topic. Soon your phone will be part of a worldwide earthquake detection network. Yes, your phone is an Earthquake Detector soon…

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Your Phone is an Earthquake Detector

While using smartphone sensors to build an okay seismometer app
is nothing new, Google has a better idea: integrating it into the phone’s
operating system directly. 

All devices running Android 5.0 and up will get the new feature
through a Google Play Services update, essentially becoming decentralised
tremor-monitoring stations that one day will help detect earthquakes early on
and warn users. 

For now, Google plans on collecting data for a while to fine-tune
the system before rolling out proactive alerts. But don’t worry. You can
opt-out of the service via your phone’s settings. Although most people won’t
even know it is there.

Toshiba-bye

Thirty-five years
after debuting its first laptop, the Japanese conglomerate Toshiba announced it
is abandoning the portable PC market. 

The entire PC hardware market, in fact. In 2018, Toshiba had
already sold most of its PC business to Sharp, the same buyer this time
around. 

The decision comes as the company announced its first quarterly
losses in 4 years and officially marks the end of an era in laptop
history. 

Toshiba laptops reached their heyday in the 1990s, when they came to dominate the global market. They started losing ground in the late 2000s after an industry shift towards more attractive designs and more powerful machines   

A good reminder of how important it is to adapt and keep innovating.

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