There are big changes about to take place over at Google, or Alphabet, or whatever they call it now. Eric Schmidt, who is Executive Chairman of Google’s umbrella-slash-parent-company Alphabet, says he’s resigning from that position to be a “technical advisor” to the company that he helped grow from a rebel search engine in 2001 to one of the biggest and most influential tech firms in the world.
Schmidt was hired by Google guys Larry Page and Sergey Brin back when the company had just a few hundred employees and was battling it out with then-online heavyweights like AOL, GeoCities and Microsoft. Back then, Enron was the nation’s 7th largest company and Apple wasn’t even in the Top 200. Anyway, Page and Brin said Schmidt helped them see the broader path forward for Google, and thanked him for his service.
Schmidt says his lesser role at the company – he’ll still be on the board, by the way – will allow him to focus more on “the latest in science, technology and philanthropy.” Good luck, Eric. And as a side note, we think it’s very interesting that Regina Dugan, ex-Google Advanced Technology and Products team leader, and ex-head of government skunkworks DARPA, suddenly left a prime post at Facebook’s tech skunkworks “Building 8” just two months ago.
Talk about a hard act to follow…
Speaking of things ending and new things sort of beginning, it’s been quite a run for Nintendo’s mega-hit Switch gaming console and its equally mega-popular game: Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Now, Slashgear is saying a Japanese site posted interviews with Breath of the Wild game developer team members, and they claim there will be no more big updates to the hit game, which made a lot of Best Game of 2017 lists.
Apparently, Champion’s Ballad, the last “downloadable content” update, or DLC, will be the last major update for the game. But, don’t shed any tears for Link, because the good news is that a completely new game is in the works, of course. DT voted the Nintendo Switch as our product of the year and Breath of the Wild as game of the year, both for good reason: they’re both tons of fun, and they’re game changers.
Bixby, plug in my headphones
Tech writer Gordon Kelly over at Forbes says he’s been digging around to see what the upcoming Samsung Galaxy S9 smartphone is going to look like, and here it is, in all its looks-pretty-much-like-the-S8 glory. Kelly says he’s been working with casemaker Ghostek and these images show what Samsung’s next halo phone will look like. Like the S8, it’s going to have minimal bezels, but not quite as minimal as the iPhone Ten. However, it won’t have that little notch thing.
That gives it a slightly higher screen-to-size ratio, which is something I guess we’re measuring smartphones by these day. Anyway, while these images show a single camera and a fingerprint reader on the back of the phone, Kelly says the upsell S9 Plus will feature some sort of dual-camera setup. No pictures of that just yet. Another feature of the S9? A good ‘ol headphone jack. And the Bixby button: still there. Maybe there’s an app for that.
So, while the S9 might be a little… underwhelming, we’re still holding out for the mythical Samsung Galaxy X. The secret sauce there? It may be the first truly foldable phone, and Kelly says Samsung told him it’s coming out in 2018.
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