Daily Roundup: Nokia making phones again, Sony wants better selfies and more!
Today, read how Nokia is planning to get back into the phone game, ponder why Sony's added image-stabilization technology to the front of its new flagship phone and get all the details on the best vaporizers around -- because it's that day. All that and more, just after the fold.
Recode: Nokia's planning a return to phones next year
When Nokia sold its devices and services business to Microsoft, we assumed it was getting out of the hardware game for good. Not so. The company has since launched its N1 tablet in China and now, according to Recode, it's developing a new phone too. Exactly what it'll look like and, perhaps more importantly, the software it'll run is unclear at the moment though.
Sony's new flagship smartphone has an image-stabilizing selfie camera
Sony's unveiled its new smartphone in Japan, the Xperia Z4, and like you might tell from the press images, it's a mighty familiar-looking one from a company still looking for its next big hit. Yep there's a lot of similarities compared to the Z3 (a phone that we were pretty happy with), including a 5.2-inch screen, metal frame, support for Hi-Res audio and the same wide-angle 25mm lens on the main camera. But that front camera....
The Pax 2 vaporizer makes its predecessor look half-baked
I immediately fell in love with the original Pax vaporizer when it debuted back in 2012. Its compact and lightweight construction belied a powerful three-stage conduction oven, while the sleek, push-button design made it far more intuitive and user-friendly than other portable vaporizers available at the time. Granted, the OG Pax wasn't perfect -- what with its habit of clogging every few sessions or so. Now, more than two years after the release of the first Pax, PAX Labs is back with a new iteration that's smaller, lighter and more powerful than its predecessor. Say hello to the Pax 2.
The Best Portable Vaporizer (so far)
After testing ten portable vaporizers so far, we recommend the Crafty, a new portable model from Storz and Bickel. Out of all the models we tested, the Crafty was one of the few that could produce the kind of truly tasty, powerful vapor you get from a much bigger unit. At $400, it's an investment, but will make up its cost over time because it vaporizes cannabis more efficiently than its peers.
Elon Musk nearly sold Tesla to Google in 2013
Tesla frequently comes across as a fiercely independent automaker, but that wasn't always the case... at least, if you ask Bloomberg. Its sources claim that Elon Musk almost secured a deal for Google to buy Tesla in early 2013, when vehicle sales were tanking so badly that Tesla closed its factory. Reportedly, the deal would have kept Musk in charge of his company for eight years, or until Tesla's mainstream electric car (the Model 3) was on the road.
It took two days before someone built their own BB-8 ball droid
The first proper trailer may have stolen the show at Star Wars Celebration, but the revelation that spherical droid BB-8 was a physical prop came a very close second. Like a lot of people, when industrial designer Christian Poulsen saw the adorable sentient ball roll onto stage, he decided he had to build one of his own. Unlike plenty of others, however, the BYU student was able to design and build a working copy the following day. Turns out that you can too, as long as you've got a Sphero and a CNC machine lying around the place.
The law that predicts computing power turns 50
Today represents a historic milestone in technology: it's the 50th anniversary of Moore's Law, the observation that the complexity of computer chips tends to double at a regular rate. On April 19th, 1965, Fairchild's Gordon Moore (later to co-found Intel) published an article noting that the number of components in integrated circuits had not only doubled every year up to that point, but would continue at that pace for at least a decade.
