Welcome to the Techmeme Ride Home for Wednesday, October 16, 2024. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Kindles come roaring back with significant updates to the paperwrite and the scribe, but also for the first time ever, a Kindle with a Color Screen. Why has ASML suddenly plunged so much if chips are so hot right now, Android 15 is beginning to roll out, and Sonos is back to releasing new speakers again. Here's what you missed today on the world
of Tech. Hey, it's Kindle day, everybody. First up, Amazon has updated Kindle Paperwhite, adding a larger, brighter 7-inch display and faster page turns, starting at $160. Also, the regular old Kindle added color options and speed improvements, quoting the verge. The Paperwhite is getting one of its biggest design refreshes ever with a larger screen that's completely flush with the bezels of the device, while the entry level model is
getting updated with a pop of color and some speed improvements. Of the two e-readers, the Kindle Paperwhite is receiving more significant changes. The e-reader is now bigger with a 7-inch screen while boasting the highest contrast ratio of any Kindle. It's also brighter and pages turn faster. Amazon says they're 25% faster to be specific, but the upshot is that pages switch practically as fast as you can tap. Full flash page refreshes are
less common now, and they're subtle enough that we barely notice them in demos. Amazon says the new model can last three months on a single charge up from 10 weeks, but will need some time to find out if that's true. In our case, the standard Paperwhite model will start at $159.99, a $10 increase from its predecessor. Amazon is also introducing
a signature edition of the Paperwhite, which costs $40 more. This $199.99 model is identical to the regular Paperwhite, but comes with twice as much storage at 32GB, optional wireless charging, and an auto-adjusting front light. A number of executives at Amazon's launch event raved about the wireless charging, saying that they use their bedside dock and their
Kindle just seen permanently charged. The entry level Kindle is receiving more of an iterative update with a new dark mode, a backlight that's 25% brighter, and improved contrast levels. Amazon also claims it now offers faster page turns, though side by side with the new Paperwhite, it was noticeably slower. The new model is supposed to last slightly longer, with up to eight weeks on a single charge, and it's a few grams lighter. The Kindle
now comes in a lovely, much green color in addition to Black 2. Amazon has clearly seen the trend of people customizing and bedazzling their Kindles and is leaning into it. Otherwise, it's similar to its predecessor, with the same 6-inch 300 PPI display as before 16GB of storage and USB-C support. It'll sell for $109.99, also up $10 over the last model.
Note that the Kindle scribe got updated too with some modest design improvements like white bezels, a new stylus, and a more paper-like feel, shipping in December for $400, quoting the Verge. The most noticeable change is the bezels which are now white and the same size on all four sides. The goal is evidently to make the scribe look and feel more
like a piece of paper, both when you look at it and when you write on it. Amazon has also updated the included stylus, the texture and color mask of the 10.2-inch E-inch screen, and the scribe's internal software to make it feel more papery. Even the stylus' eraser is supposedly better. Amazon executives raved about how many people tried to brush dust
off the device after they work the eraser. I got a brief demo of the new scribe at an Amazon Lodge event in New York City, and the scribe does indeed feel nice to write on. In particular, it seems to have done away with some of the delay you might have felt in the previous model. The gap between glass and E-inch surface felt smaller to me, which makes everything feel more immediate and tactile. It didn't necessarily feel better than what
I'm used to from remarkable and others, but it felt just as good. But that's one short demo. We'll have to see how this thing holds up under real testing. Either way, the scribe software updates are its most exciting new features. Most of them are designed to make the device more useful for writing. A new feature called Active Canvas, for instance, lets you write notes on books or PDFs that are actually anchored in line with the text
you're reading. The other thing the scribe can do now is convert your handwriting into text. Once it does so, it can send your notes to one of Amazon's large language models in order to do one of two things. Summaryse either a single page or an entire notebook, or automatically refine your handwritten notes by translating them into a handwriting style series of fonts and formatting them more cleanly. Eventually, you'll also be able to search
your handwritten notes too. That's interesting. Clean up my handwriting as a service, but anyway, the big headlines were reserved for this. The $280 Kindle ColorSoft Signature Edition. The first Kindle ever with color. It's got a regular paper white like design, but it has color e-ink for the display, shipping on October 30th.
Quoting well, again, the verge. The color soft is based on e-ink's collido technology, but uses an entirely new display stack for Kindles all the way back to a newly designed oxide back plane that makes it easier for e-ink panels, tiny bits of ink to move around quickly. The e-ink world has been working on similar tech for a while, and Amazon thinks it's the key to making color work well. The color shift has new LED pixels and a new
way of shining light through them individually to enhance colors. It's also brighter than ever to help the whole thing feel more vivid. Some of this tech also helped the new paper white turn pages faster and easier, but it was designed to make color soft work. All of that display tech allowed Amazon to introduce color without adding page turn latency, lowering the device's resolution or hurting contrast on the display. In a brief demo at Amazon's
launch event, I was impressed with the color soft's display. It's no iPads green, but it's sharp enough and bright enough to make comics pop without being so saturated. It looks wrong. The most obvious drawback is that when there's a color image on the page, the device does a full flashing refresh every time you turn the page. Amazon says that only happens when there's a sufficiently large image on the screen, but it happened to me even with some
pretty tiny images. But those images look good. Again, not iPad level good, but certainly sharper and brighter than some color e-inx screens we've seen on devices like the Kobo Clarec color. Best of all pages turn fast and books open quickly. If this thing is meaningfully slower than the new paper white, I didn't really notice. On a regular book, the 300 ppi screen
looks about as good as the other Kindles 2. You can pinch to zoom on most images and in my demos, the image will zoom smoothly, but pixelate until it refreshes a moment later. We'll have to do a lot more testing though, and I worry all the screen flashing might get annoying as you navigate through a long graphic novel. The biggest upside of a color screen so far is just that it makes the whole interface
a little nicer. It makes your home screen and library better to browse, now that you can see your book covers in full color, it's also a big win on the lock screen which now presents a much more vibrant standby screen while it's on your bedside table. The only really color specific feature is that you can now add highlights in multiple
colors and then look them up later by color in the Kindle app on your phone. For more traditional readers, the color soft is really just a more expensive Kindle paper white with one neat new trick. But don't be shocked to see the color soft tech eventually come to other parts of the Kindle lineup. Amazon waited so many years to add the tech, waiting to get it just right before it offered it to buyers. Now it feels it got it right, which means eventually it might be everywhere.
This is sort of a shocker. ASMR's stock has fallen the most since 1998 after projecting sluggish sales, erasing around 50 billion euro from its market cap and causing Nvidia and other chip stocks to fall in sympathy. Quoting Bloomberg. ASMR shares tumbled by the most since 1998 in Europe after the manufacturer of the world's most advanced chip making machines. Cut its outlook on sluggishness in areas beyond AI. It lowered the top end of its guidance range for 2025 total net sales
to 35 billion euro from 40 billion euro. While a week 2025 forecast was expected from ASMR given slowness in non AI applications as well as reduced spending by Intel and others, the magnitude of the correction is a negative surprise at if Malik and Analysts at City Group wrote in a note exacerbating the situation was the lack of a company color
as a result of a release mistakenly a day earlier than scheduled. Shareholders are accustomed to the well-oiled machine of investor relations to explain the workings of the business and timing of orders, bookings, revenues and shipments. Tuesdays collapse in the share price of ASMR erased about 50 billion euro from the company's market value. That places it among Europe's five biggest single day market capitalization wipeouts ever. It ranks alongside the plungers
recorded by Nokia and Vodafone when the internet bubble burst some 25 years ago. Despite the market reaction, some investors see ASMR's woes as possibly specific to the Dutch company. AI demand remains brisk and Beijing's efforts to revive its economy are seeing helping
a broader recovery. We believe chipmakers are strategically reducing orders for ASMR and this is negatively affecting ASMR's earnings said, Jung In-Yun, chief executive officer of Fibonacci asset management global, whether the driver is cost cutting or other strategic reasons is unclear, he said, noting that stimulus from China may spur a rebound in chip demand.
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YouTube has rolled out a new captured with a camera label using the C2PA standard to detect if the video in question came from a real camera with unaltered footage and sound. Coding the verge. The new captured with a camera label can be seen in action courtesy of Digital Content Authentication Service TruePick, which uploaded a video to its channel, triggering the disclosure in the video description panel. TruePick says it has the first authentic
video with C2PA content credentials on YouTube. YouTube is leaning on the C2PA standard to detect the authenticity of uploaded videos, meaning the feature will work only with recording devices and tools that support the metadata. The site's help page for the new feature says the label signifies that the creator used specific technology to verify
the video's origin and confirm its audio and visuals haven't been altered. Additionally, creators must specify the use of tools with C2PA version 2.1 or higher for the label to appear. So you probably won't see this label regularly for a long time. Companies like Likus started implementing content credentials in hardware last year. However, it isn't yet clear whether
those credentials will trigger YouTube's labels. In an email to the verge, Google says it's been exploring how to relay C2PA information to YouTube viewers and pointed us to its blog that explains its goal to increase transparency on AI generated content on YouTube. Videos don't necessarily need to be unedited to get the label, but every step of the process must support C2PA and avoid edits that break the chain of provenance or make it impossible
to trace the video back to its original source. For example, if you capture an image with C2PA metadata and then save it to your phone's photo album, that doesn't support C2PA version 2.1 or higher, that may break the chain of provenance. Significant alterations to the video's core nature or content, including its sound and visuals, are verboten as well and edits that make the video incompatible with C2PA standards version 2.1 and above end quote.
Google has rolled out Android 15 to pixel devices adding privacy features like a private space for apps, security tools and foldable and tablet improvements as well. Quoting the verge. One major new feature in Android 15 is the ability to make a private space for apps you might want to keep hidden from other people who get a hold of your phone. Google gives the example of social dating or banking apps. Apps you put in the private space
won't show up in your recent apps notifications or settings according to Google. To access the space you'll have to provide additional authentication and you can even hide the existence of private space from view on your phone. Google says on Photables and tablets Android 15 will let users pin and unpin the taskbar so they can choose to have somewhat easier access to their apps and if you have certain apps that you frequently use side by side, you can set up an app pairing and access
that pairing from one icon. Many devices running Android not just Android 15 will also be getting theft detection lock which lets your phone automatically lock itself if it detects with the help of AI that it has been stolen. Google is also adding a feature called remote lock that lets you lock your phone using another Android phone using your phone number and a simple security check. The company says that most devices on Android 10 and newer will get these features and some
people already have them. Google is also starting to roll out a new pixel feature drop for October that includes night sight for Instagram for taking better low light photos and more controls for audio magic eraser. In the next few weeks Google is also adding a feature that lets you move media from a pixel tablet to a pixel phone by holding the device next to each other and quote. And finally on a weirdly hardware heavy day, Sonos I guess has made enough fixes to that broken
app that it thinks it can roll out products again. Question mark, but they say this one is a big deal quoting the verge. Today the company has announced the ARC Ultra and sub four. The $999 ARC Ultra is a more powerful take on the original ARC and it's the first Sonos product to feature unique transducer technology from mate. A startup that Sonos acquired in 2022. Sonos refers to this as sound motion and says it allows the ARC Ultra to produce richer even more immersive sound than
the original. The company is touting sound motion as quote one of the most significant breakthroughs in audio engineering in nearly 100 years and says it quote unlocks greater clarity depth and balance than ever before possible from a sound bar this sleek. The ARC Ultra has 14 drivers in total three more than the ARC and they include seven tweeters, six midwoofers and the built-in sound motion woofer. With that array of speakers Sonos says the new sound bar is capable of
delivering 9.1.4 output all on its own. The ARC Ultra should also deliver clear dialogue thanks to an advanced version of speech enhancement. It'll support true play EQ tuning including for Android
users and also offers Bluetooth audio playback something the original ARC lacks. Like other Sonos sound bars the ARC Ultra can be paired with the company's Sonos Ace headphones for private listening of audio from any input device plugged into the Ultra along with the new sound bar Sonos is introducing its latest full-size subwoofer the sub 4 which now has a matte finish.
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