Almost the entire world is under lockdown and social distancing can make you anxious. We’re fortunate to live in a time when digital entertainment is abundant and so easily accessible. Amazon Prime Video, one of the most popular sources of online cinema and long-form video content, is now adding the new Profiles feature which will make entertainment even more convenient for users. It lets you share your account with your family and friends without worrying about messing up your watch history and recommendations.
The Profile option has long been present on Netflix. It not only allows multiple users to use the same account to watch different content but also isolates their content feeds and seasons’ progress. Among the features that Amazon Prime Video borrows from Netflix, Prime subscribers can use the latest one to add up to six profiles. Out of these six profiles, at least one (admin profile) needs to be an adult while the remaining five can either be profiles for adults or kids under 12 years of age.
You can either create profiles from the Amazon Prime Video apps on Android or through the web portal. Tap on the “My Stuff” button with the blank avatar icon in the menu bar at the bottom of the screen. Then tap on your name and followed by the “Create profile” button from the drop-down menu. On the Prime Video website, you can access this menu directly from the top right corner of the web page. You can also tap on Manage Profile to rename profiles or delete them.
There’s also a Kids profile that filters content unsuitable for kids. On the My Stuff page, you can access the content you’ve downloaded or saved for watching later. Unlike Netflix, however, there is currently no option to change the avatar of Amazon Prime Video profiles.
The Profiles feature is currently limited to certain countries as per Amazon’s support page and is rolling out to users gradually.
Google’s ARCore (now Google Play Services for AR) is an SDK that allows developers to add augmented reality features to apps. While it doesn’t require any specialized hardware, Google still has to work with OEMs to create custom calibration profiles for each device. Since each device has a different camera and sensor setup, getting the calibration correct is crucial for the AR features to work properly. Google regularly keeps expanding the list as more and more devices receive support, and since our last coverage, many more devices have gained official support for ARCore.
This means that all of the above-mentioned devices perform as expected with ARCore. Google provides ARCore certification on the basis of camera quality, motion sensors, and design architecture to ensure that the device would perform as AR developers would expect it to perform. The phone also needs to have a powerful enough CPU that integrates with the hardware design to ensure good performance and effective real-time calculations.
The full list of supported devices can be found here. If you have one of these supported devices and you want to try out augmented reality apps, you don’t have to do anything special. Google Play Services for AR should automatically get pushed to your device, but you can force an update by downloading the APK yourself. Once it arrives, you can download and start using any app or feature that makes use of it, such as Google Maps’ Live View mode or Pokémon GO’s AR+. Devices that are supported by Google’s AR service (as in, they have the necessary calibrations done and are recognized by the app) but aren’t listed on Google’s webpage can’t download the app from the Play Store, but it’s still possible to sideload Play Services for AR and then play around with apps that use the service.
Earlier this year in February, we learned that the team behind Google Podcasts was working on creating a new desktop interface for the service. While the desktop version of the service is limited to a homepage on the web with several features missing, Google has now started rolling out a major redesign for the app. As per a recent report from 9to5Google, the redesign is rolling out to a few users and brings a couple of much-awaited features like auto-downloading.
Once you receive the update on your device, you’ll be greeted with a “Check out the new Google Podcasts” prompt. The prompt runs you through all the major changes in the app, including the three parts of the app that are accessible from the bottom bar. As you can see in the attached screenshots, the “Home” tab shows all the latest episodes from your subscription and has a new scrollable carousel for the shows you follow, instead of the current grid layout. Additionally, new episodes are now marked by a prominent red dot on the cover art which is housed in a cutout in the top-right corner.
The updated design gets rid of recommended podcasts from underneath the latest episodes from your subscriptions, giving way to a list of subscribed episodes. The list includes two lines of show notes and three buttons that will allow you to start playback, add to queue or initiate downloads for offline access. Podcast suggestions have now been moved to a dedicated “Discover” tab which has a search bar at the top to help you find new shows and episodes. And finally, the “Activity” tab lets you “manage your queue, downloads, and subscriptions.”
The Google Podcasts update also brings some meaningful changes to playback management, which now allow you to queue episodes one after another and you also get the option to disable auto-play. The app also has a couple of default playlists, including “Downloads,” History,” and “Subscriptions.” Over in the app settings, Google has now added a new “Auto Downloading” feature that will automatically queue up a download for the next episode and auto-delete older episodes to conserve on-device storage. The app now also has new notification settings to help you get alerts from your subscriptions whenever they post a new episode. Interestingly, the preferences aren’t available on the show page and must be managed from within the full notification preferences.
As mentioned earlier, the newly redesigned Google Podcasts app is only rolling out to a handful of users right now, even on the beta channel. The redesign is expected to roll out to a wider audience in the coming weeks, once Google has ironed out all the kinks.
Huawei is gearing up to launch its upcoming flagship P40 series through an online-only event on March 26, 2020. We are just a few days away from the launch, and in typical fashion of product launches, we already have a good idea of what to expect from the event. Huawei will be taking to stage to announce at least three smartphones: Huawei P40, P40 Pro, and P40 Pro Premium Edition. Now, most of the specifications of the devices have been leaked by leaker @IshanAgarwal, corroborating the information we have received from previous leaks.
Huawei P40
The Huawei P40 is expected to come with a 6.1″ display with a wide hole in the display. Ishan says that the phone will have only one 32MP front-facing camera, but in the render that he shares in his tweet, we see two cameras for the front. Previous renders also showed off two front cameras, so we do not know the cause of this information conflict. The back camera setup will comprise of 50MP, 16MP, and 8MP “Leica Ultra Vision” sensors. One of these sensors would be a telephoto camera, as the specs indicate support for up to 30x digital zoom. There’s also Huawei XD Fusion Engine for Pictures, which sounds like specialized software image processing. The phone is expected to come with a 3,800 mAh battery, as well as the Kirin 990 with 5G support.
Huawei P40 Pr0
According to Ishan, the Huawei P40 Pro will come with a 6.58″ display that is expected to be curved on all four edges. The only slices of bezel visible on the front are on the corners. The camera setup on the Pro variant will be branded Leica Ultra Vision Quad Cam and will comprise of a 50MP, 40MP, 12MP, and a ToF sensor. As is visible, one of the sensors will be a periscopic zoom camera, capable of 50X SuperSensing Zoom with Telephoto Stabilisation. Huawei XD Fusion Engine for Pictures will also be present on this phone. The front camera will comprise of a 32MP sensor as well as a depth sensor. The P40 Pro will come with a 4,200 mAh battery, with support for 40W wired charge. The leaker is not very sure about the wireless charging speeds, and they could be either 40W or 27W wireless SuperCharge. Of course, the device will be powered by the Kirin 990.
Ishan did not detail the specifications of the Premium Edition yet. There’s also no real clarity on whether the camera sensors will adopt the conventional RGGB color filter or the newer RYYB color filter as seen on previous Huawei flagships. We hope to learn more about these details soon enough.
System-wide Dark Mode has been one of the highlight features of Android 10. Dark mode had been a long-requested feature from the Android community, especially from AMOLED smartphone users. Several app developers had independently adopted Dark themes for their apps prior to Google’s adoption; but with the rollout of Google’s system-wide dark mode, many others jumped on the opportunity and offered their users an alternative darker theme. But there were still others that seemed curiously hesitant in offering a Dark mode, taking their own sweet time to implement the same (we’re looking at you, WhatsApp). Despite dark mode options being well-received by users, there are apps that continue to roll around with predominantly light themes, either out of stubbornness or out of apathy. Android 10 also comes with an option to force blanket dark themes across all apps, but that is not an ideal option for all apps. OEMs thus have to consider providing their users with an option of selectively enforcing this mode, and OnePlus appears to be moving towards the same as it tests out a new forced dark mode for more apps, within OxygenOS.
We found strings within the Settings app in the latest OxygenOS Open Beta 11 that was released for the OnePlus 7 and OnePlus 7 Pro. These strings suggest that OnePlus is looking to bring over a forced dark mode for certain apps:
<string name="oneplus_global_dark_mode_description">"Make apps that don't support dark theme also appear as dark tone. Some apps may not perform as expected, you can disable them in the list below."</string>
<string name="oneplus_global_dark_mode_only_valid_in_dark_mode">This feature is only available under dark tone</string>
<string name="oneplus_global_dark_mode_summary">Make more apps that do not adapt to dark mode turn into dark automatically when dark tone is turned on</string>
<string name="oneplus_global_dark_mode_title">Enable dark tone in more apps</string>
We managed to surface the Settings page for the feature, but we were unable to ascertain which apps will be supported under the feature.
The idea behind this feature appears to be similar to DarQ. DarQ allows users to enable Android 10’s built-in forced dark mode on a per-app basis, so you can choose which apps you wish to darken. This lets you retain light themes on apps that do not react well with enforced dark themes, while still darkening apps that react well with enforced dark themes but where developers have not implemented a dark theme yet. We hope to see the feature rolled out soon.
The Huawei Mate 30 Pro is a powerful flagship device with a large 6.71″ display. The large screen has a resolution of 1440x3120p which makes is a great phone for video and gaming. The selfie camera is a dual-sensor setup, with two 32MP cameras. The back camera is fitted with four different sensors to make up the quad-camera. There’s a 40MP wide camera, 8MP telephoto camera, 40MP ultrawide camera, and a TOF 3D depth camera. The HiSilicon Kirin 990 is the latest in-house chipset from Huawei and is paired with 8GB of RAM and options for 128GB and 256GB of storage. This is all powered by the large 4500mAh battery.
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Smartphone screens continue to improve in visual quality every year in typical ways like color accuracy, color gamut, and brightness. However, we’ve come to a point where many of the technical advancements in even the top-tier displays are now imperceptible or unnoticed. Panel vendors and OEMs are constantly trying to come up with new ways, besides “just make it bigger” and form factor, to make the most engaging part of your phone even more attractive. Pixelworks and their Iris visual processor aim to improve the smartphone display experience by integrating unique display features and adaptive elements based on human visual perception.
Black Shark 2 / Pixelworks Promo
Pixelworks and the Iris 5 visual processor
Pixelworks has mostly been low-profile in the smartphone space, but the company has been working with video and display solutions for about twenty years. They debuted their first partnership with a smartphone maker in 2016 with ASUS on the ZenFone 3 Ultra, integrating an early version of their Iris visual processor. Their most noteworthy smartphone collaborations to date include the Nokia 6.2/7.2, the ASUS ROG Phone, and just recently, the Black Shark 3 and the OPPO Find X2. The latter two phones include the newest fifth generation of Pixelwork’s Iris processor. The Iris 5, along with the company’s software which they coin “Soft Iris”, are responsible for the company’s display-facing features, which we’ll get to later.
Pixelworks’ key customers and partners
The Iris chip is a display processor that sits between the device SoC and the display driver IC, connecting to both via the MIPI DSI, supporting dual MIPI. However, for me, this raises immediate concerns for display latency and video hardware acceleration: any bandwidth/stream compression requires additional decoding on the Iris chip so that pixel data can be processed, then it’s re-encoded and sent to the DDIC where it must be decoded again. Furthermore, many video apps utilize display acceleration by directly rendering a chroma-subsampled pixel format through MIPI; I imagine that some of the Iris 5’s frame operations may require subsampled display data to be first converted to RGB before processing and recomposition. Brief preliminary findings of ours also hint that some of the Iris 5’s features don’t work with full hardware-accelerated video playback. We reached out to Pixelworks if they could provide any details about the processing pipeline or architectural information about their Iris chip, but they declined to provide details.
Arbitrary display “enhancements”
Many display “enhancements” that OEMs provide generally involve artificial and arbitrary picture adjustments that may skew the artistic intent of content. One common way that smartphone OEMs help their displays to stand out is by using a very vibrant color profile that expands all the colors on the screen to appear more saturated than originally intended. This is also usually accompanied by a blue-ish white point, which most consumers find more appealing than the standard white point known as D65.
Both of these characteristics were originally artifacts of crude color calibration and the lack of color management in past displays, but improvements to both have been poorly received by many; accurate colors have a common perception as being the constraint of display color, while the standard white point appears warmer than what most people had been used to.
To remain attractive to consumers, smartphone makers had to continue to artificially oversaturate their screen color and to use a colder white point. This is done by many OEMs even to this day. Samsung had been notorious for shipping all their OLED phones with oversaturated displays, but they stopped this practice with the Galaxy S10 and they now ship them with an accurate color profile in most parts of the world (with exception of their in-store demo units, which understandingly defaults to that vibrant color profile to compare with the others that do, too).
It takes more than a “well-calibrated” display for an accurate viewing experience. Lighting conditions in a display’s viewing environment can significantly alter the look of content on the display. For content to look right, it should ideally be viewed in the environment that it was mastered for. And for this reason, color standards that displays conform to also impose a reference viewing environment for which those colors appear accurate. When viewing the display in other environments, the colors on the display may appear incorrect. Thus, a “well-calibrated” display should also be calibrated for its viewing environment.
Smartphones, however, are used in all sorts of viewing environments: outside in the bright sunlight, in bed at night, or perhaps in a venue with multi-colored lights. All these different environments change the perceived look of the content on your smartphone’s screen.
Pixelworks’ auto-adaptive displays
Pixelworks focuses on improving display accuracy in these real-world conditions and recreating the artistic intent of the content creator. Instead of frivolous boosts to image contrast/quality/saturation, Pixelwork’s solutions are based on improving content fidelity by adjusting the display and its contents to adapt to ambient conditions.
Here’s what Pixelworks and their Iris 5 chip can do:
Factory display calibration First and foremost, Pixelworks tells us that they take responsibility for the full display calibration job of the phones that they work with. They perform individual display calibrations of every unit at the factory, and they claim that their calibration results are within delta E < 1 of their targets — we have not yet reviewed a display with Pixelworks’ calibration to verify this, so we’re currently skeptical about this claim. The Iris 5 is also capable of handling the color management for a device, but since Pixelworks works closely with Qualcomm, it is generally left to the Snapdragon and its display processor.
Real-time motion processing on the Iris 5
Motion processing, when done right, is a key component in reducing judder and in dealing with framerate mismatch. Pixelworks emphasizes that this is not to be confused with generic motion interpolation, which results in the nefarious “soap opera effect“. We’re told that their motion processing preserves the intended motion appearance of content and adapts it to the type of content and to the environment. This is important since many films are not intended to have super-smooth motion, while perhaps a sports stream should. Additionally, the perception of judder increases with the contrast of the content, and contrast is further affected by the viewing environment. Pixelworks claims that they compensate for both these factors in their motion processing. This is especially important for HDR content, which has the potential for very high contrast. The motion processing is also said to work for mobile games. Pixelworks has previously won the Hollywood Professional Association (HPA) Award and the Advanced Imaging Society’s (AIS) Entertainment Technology Lumiere Award for their TrueCut motion grading video platform used in cinema films.
Automatic display white balance & contrast adjustments
Mentioned earlier, the appearance of content on a display changes depending on the viewing environment. Pixelworks deals with the effects that ambient brightness and color have that changes your perception of colors on a display. A warmer viewing environment will make a display’s white balance appear relatively colder — and vice versa– an effect known as chromatic adaptation. To compensate, a display should adjust its colors towards the color of the ambient light so that the display appears perceptually similar under different color lighting. Many phones now provide this feature, arguably popularized by Apple’s True Tone which was introduced in their 9.7-inch iPad Pro. However, True Tone only adapts to ambient color, while ambient brightness has a further effect on the contrast of a screen. The brighter the ambient light (relative to the display), the darker the colors on the screen appear, compressing towards black. And the brighter the display (relative to the ambient light), the lighter the colors on the screen appear, compressing towards white. This is known as the Bartleson-Breneman effect, and Pixelworks is capable of compensating for this by adjusting the system gamma and using local contrast enhancement. However, the details of correctly implementing this are intensely complicated, from perceptual measurements to the mapped display pixel values. Samsung is one other smartphone OEM that considers this, though only for sunlight high brightness mode.
The positions of the two 6-channel color sensors on the OPPO Find X2 Pro are indicated in red. Source: OPPO. Retrieved via: GSMArena.
DC dimming to prevent OLED flicker
In most phones with an OLED screen, the display brightness is adjusted by quickly flickering the screen on-and-off, a method called pulse-width modulation (PWM). For most phones, this flickering happens at about 240 times per second, and the resulting display brightness depends on how long the display is in the “on” state. However, some consumers claim to have induced headaches from this flickering, and it’s exacerbated at lower display brightness levels. DC dimming attempts to remedy this by instead adjusting the display brightness via traditional analog control. While this eliminates the flickering, display calibration and uniformity can be negatively impacted since changes in an OLED’s voltage can significantly alter its output characteristics. However, we may be seeing OLEDs with higher DAC bit-depths, which can rely more on the current to adjust the amplitude of the individual LEDs.
SDR-to-HDR conversion for videos and games
The Iris 5 is capable of converting standard content into HDR. Pixelworks declined to state how exactly they’re doing this, but it’s done in real-time on the Iris 5 DSP. We’re told that the HDR output format is based on HLG and that that conversion works alongside their other adaptive features. I wrote a whole precursor about arbitrary display enhancements, so this feature sort of feels like a slap to the face. Pixelworks rationalizes that there is a drought of HDR content that’s available and that this feature allows us to take advantage of our display hardware’s current capabilities. However, I’ll reserve harsher judgment until I can demo this feature.
HDR10 for low- and mid-range devices
While HDR10 is typically reserved for more-premium devices, Pixelworks can collaborate with mid-range and budget devices to bring “certified HDR” to the masses. The Iris 5 supports native 10-bit processing, which most budget SoCs don’t support. Cheap mobile displays are now capable of at least the 95% DCI-P3 and about 400 nits with 1000:1 static contrast, which can serve a passable mobile HDR experience for the price. In addition, for LCDs the Iris 5 can manage the display backlight, employing dynamic backlight control for reduced power consumption and improved dynamic contrast. Most LCDs are already capable of this, however.
The “Natural Tone Display” and the “O1 Ultra Vision Engine” are features found on the OPPO Find X2 Pro. These features are powered by Pixelworks’ Iris 5 visual processor.
Pixelworks and their chip also provide some other minor features, such as video upscaling and sharpness/edge enhancements, and they claim that the Iris 5 can offload some display processing from the SoC. Embedded below is a promotional video the company shared that highlights the main features of Pixelworks’ visual processor. We uploaded the video to YouTube with permission from Pixelworks, but if you prefer to watch the uncompressed video, you can do so here from the Pixelworks website.
The improvements that Pixelworks claims to bring are all sound and dandy on paper, but I’m yet to experience the actual effectiveness of these features. None are entirely new ideas, but at the same time, none of them have been implemented very well on a smartphone. From these features, the concept of adapting display contrast to the environment is arguably the most important in further improving content fidelity in a world where every flagship phone seems to have an “A+ display” with colors “indistinguishable from perfect” (not actually). Along with what Pixelworks touts as “industry-leading” factory display calibration, I’m eager to see how this all performs when I get my hands on a phone with their latest Iris 5 chip.
Pixelworks reached out to brief us about their product and services. The opinions written above are my own.
