Yesterday, Samsung announced a slew of new products, including the Galaxy S24 FE, Galaxy Tab S10 series and the Galaxy Watch FE LTE. The former two we were completely right, with our leaks, but not’s the topic of discussion today.

Something that really stood out to me from this announcement from Samsung was, the lack of Qualcomm. Samsung has almost always used Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processors in its products, particularly here in the US. Very rarely do we see Exynos chipsets in products sold in the US – mostly only on super cheap devices. But this year, the Galaxy S24 FE is running the Exynos 2400e, and the Galaxy Tab S10 Plus and Ultra are running the new MediaTek Dimensity 9300+ chipset. Meanwhile the Galaxy Watch FE LTE is using the Exynos W920, but that’s not a big surprise, seeing as most recent Samsung smartwatches have been Exynos-based.

Could Samsung ditch Qualcomm in more products?

But the real question here is whether this is a sign of things to come. We’ve heard rumors that the Galaxy S25 series (sans the Ultra) could be sporting Exynos chipsets worldwide, while the Galaxy S25 Ultra would stick with the latest and greatest Snapdragon chipset. Samsung has almost always used two different chipsets in the Galaxy S series, worldwide. Sticking with Qualcomm in most LTE markets, thanks to Qualcomm’s patents, and using Exynos in other markets – mainly Europe.

However, Exynos has been ridiculed for years. Many in Europe have complained about how much slower and laggy the Exynos version of the Galaxy S series has been over the years. So this rumor isn’t one that was met with excitement. But we’ve heard both Snapdragon worldwide and Exynos worldwide, so who knows until Samsung actually announces it in January.

Is MediaTek a real downgrade from Snapdragon?

For years, MediaTek has been seen as a “cheaper” and less powerful (and efficient) chipset compared to what Qualcomm offers with the Snapdragon series. Of course, a big part of that is due to the fact that it is based in China. But is it that really true? Well, according to benchmarks, it does appear to surpass the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 in terms of performance and efficiency. Which you might think, wow big deal, Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 is being announced next month. True. But so is MediaTek’s newest flagship processor – on October 9.

Of course, we’ll be putting it through its paces once we get our hands on the Galaxy Tab S10 Ultra in the next few days, and see if it’s really a downgrade from the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 for Galaxy that was packed into the Galaxy Tab S9 Ultra last year.

MediaTek has quietly been taking more and more market share away from Qualcomm. That’s not a good sign for Qualcomm, but a great sign for consumers. With MediaTek gaining market share from Qualcomm, it’s making them a bigger competitor and forcing Qualcomm to be more innovative and competitive. Qualcomm used to completely own the mobile market, especially in the US, but that’s starting to change.

Not to mention, many OEMs are unhappy with Qualcomm, because of the way they charge for their processors. Instead of simply charging a company to buy so many Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chips, Qualcomm also charges royalties to use the chipset and the technologies included in it. Apple’s been very vocal about this, having to pay about 5% in royalties to Qualcomm just to use their modem, and on top of that there was a large “CDMA tax” that Apple had to pay Qualcomm too. This is the kind of thing Qualcomm can do when they own the market, especially when it came to CDMA. Qualcomm owns the majority of patents for CDMA networks, which is why US versions of phones typically came with a Snapdragon chipset versus those sold in Europe.

Should Samsung continue diversifying their chipsets?

There’s only one thing wrong with selling devices running three different company chipsets – Exynos, Dimensity and Snapdragon. And that is software. You see, software needs to be optimized for each of these platforms, so Samsung running One UI 7 on now three different platforms, is going to mean quite a bit of work needs to go into making this run efficiently across the board.

But on the business side, this means that Samsung isn’t relying on a single company to make its chipsets for its products. Apple does this quite a bit actually. It relies on two suppliers for almost every part of its iPhone.

One thing that Samsung does very well is, choice. It has a phone at nearly every price point, and now you’ll be able to choose a product based on the chipset inside.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has officially issued its full recommended fine against political consultant Steve Kramer. This is after he initiated a series of robocalls to New Hampshire residents with pre-recorded audio of President Biden’s voice, using deepfake AI technology. The fake Biden told voters not to vote in the upcoming primary, saying “Your vote makes a difference in November, not this Tuesday.” Kramer must pay $6 million in fines in the next 30 days or the Department of Justice will handle collection, according to a FCC statement.

Kramer doesn’t just face a fine; he also has criminal charges against him. New Hampshire Attorney General John M. Formella announced that he’ll face multiple counts of voter suppression and impersonation of a political candidate.

It wasn’t a hugely difficult process, either. Kramer hired New Orleans magician (an actual magician) Paul Carpenter to make the phony recordings. Carpenter showed NBC News how he made the deepfake audio files using ElevenLabs. He said it only took around 20 minutes.

— Mat Smith

The biggest stories you might have missed

It’s incredibly thin, once again.

In a surprise short-notice (and short!) event yesterday, Samsung unveiled new additions to its portfolio of devices, including the Galaxy S24 FE and the Galaxy Watch FE LTE. The highlight had to be the new Galaxy Tab S10 Ultra tablet. With the Tab S10 series, the company is adding to its flagship S24 phones features like Circle to Search and Sketch to Image. Those features that work with the S Pen on the S24 Ultra, like Handwriting Assist and Note Assist, are here too. While software is the main draw this year, the Tab S10 Ultra has a 120Hz 14.6-inch screen with an anti-reflective finish and a MediaTek Dimensity 9300+ processor, instead of the usual Qualcomm chip. The Galaxy Tab S10 Ultra will be available starting at $1,200 for the 256GB model — pre-orders are open now and the tablet will launch October 3.

Continue reading.

Cheap picks for noise canceling, workouts and more.

It’s now very possible to find a clean-sounding, richly featured pair for well under $100, but there are, unsurprisingly, a lot of bad earbuds too. We’ve pulled in the best buds, including some that even manage to pack in noise cancellation. Expect capable buds from Anker, Jlab and even Amazon.

Continue reading.

The PostgreSQL 17 database is generally available today, marking a new milestone in the decades-long history of the widely deployed open-source technology.

The PostgreSQL database (sometimes also referred to simply as Postgres) is one of the most established database technologies in existence. Developers have been working on the database for more than 35 years, tracing its roots back to the University of California at Berkeley and evolving it as an open-source technology.

Technically the database development is run under the governance of The PostgreSQL Global Development Group, an association of volunteers and contributing companies that support the project with code contributions. For the PostgreSQL 17 release, there were over 450 individual contributors across many companies. Every major cloud provider including AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud has managed PostgreSQL offerings and numerous vendors including EDB, Percona, Instaclustr and Aiven also provide commercial support and technologies.

The new update marks the first major milestone since developers released PostgreSQL 16 in 2023. As with all PostgreSQL releases there is a focus on improved performance. For enterprise users, a key focus of the update is a series of innovations that will make the database easier to use and manage. PostgreSQL has always been a relational database, but with the new release, it now integrates more JSON document database capabilities, that many enterprises commonly associate with the MongoDB Atlas database.

Jonathan Katz, a core team member and contributor to the PostgreSQL Global Development Group, told VentureBeat that he sees the improvements for database administrators as being about performance, scale and ease of development. 

“There’s a heavy focus on improving foundational operations and user-facing operations,” Katz explained. “These build on scale, and particularly, if you note the logical replication features, which are used to distribute data, PostgreSQL 17 makes logical replication more reliable for production use.”

Improved memory management and query execution in PostgreSQL 17

A key challenge for all database users has long been memory management, as database administrators always seem to want more. In many databases, including PostgreSQL, there is a “vacuuming” operation that will suck up or “vacuum” up space after a row is deleted in the database. Katz explained that PostgreSQL 17 has a new memory management system for vacuum.

“Under many situations, this will significantly reduce the amount of memory it takes to complete a vacuum and can improve overall vacuuming performance,” Katz said. “In other words, PostgreSQL 17 makes vacuum more efficient and performant.”

A core operation of any database is to execute queries. Database administrators will notice potentially significant query execution gains with PostgreSQL 17. The gains will be noticeable for queries that use the ‘IN’ clause with a B-tree index which is the standard index type in PostgreSQL. An ‘IN” clause is used to check if a value matches any value in a list. There are also improvements for query planning that will further optimize performance.

Sometimes to get the benefit of SQL query optimization, a database administrator might have to rewrite a query, which can be a cumbersome process. But that’s not the case here.

“The only thing the database administrator has to do is upgrade to PostgreSQL 17, and run an ANALYZE, which they need to do after upgrading,” Katz explained. “PostgreSQL 17 will automatically optimize the execution queries with ‘IN’ clauses that use a B-tree index.”

How PostgreSQL 17 will help enterprises and their database operations

For enterprise database administrators in particular there are a series of features in PostgreSQL 17 that will make life easier. Among the key features highlighted by PostgreSQL contributor EDB are incremental backups, logical replication and SQL: JSON functionality.

Many third-party developers have long created tools for use with PostgreSQL, including tools for incremental backup. What PostgreSQL 17 does is standardize the approach and directly integrate that capability into the core open-source database. Jozef de Vries, chief product engineering officer at EDB told VentureBeat that while having lots of third-party tools is useful, it also complicates operations for organizations.

“The kind of thesis here with this incremental backup work is bringing more of that database lifecycle management functionality into the core server itself, to make the adoption, deployment, and day two activities, easier on our customers and more consistent,” de Vries said.

There are also a series of logical replication enhancements in PostgreSQL 17. Logical replication is a feature in PostgreSQL that allows for replicating data between different PostgreSQL databases. 

“One big problem PostgreSQL has had for years with logical replication is if you failover to a standby, you have to resync the replication,” Tom Kincaid, senior VP of database server and tools at EDB told VentureBeat.

Kincaid explained that if the master table in a logical replication scenario failed and a standby node got promoted to be the new master, database tables would need to be resynchronized. That process, especially with large tables, could take a long time. PostgreSQL 17 eliminates the need for the resync process.

“The logical replica will failover, which I think will save the DBA (database administrator) a lot of pain,” Kincaid said.

There is also an update that enables DBAs to more easily take a physical database replica and turn it into a logical replica.  Kincaid expects that the capability called PG create subscriber will enable faster database replication overall.

Why JSON in PostgreSQL simplifies enterprise database deployment

Over the last several years, PostgreSQL has been incrementally adding support for the SQL: JSON standard. JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a format that is very popular with developers and is the basis for document databases like MongoDB.

Kincaid said that PostgreSQL 17 now supports JSON tables, which is a major step forward. What that means is a database administrator can take a JSON document and turn it into a table that runs in PostgreSQL.

“JSON is still very popular for developers, and PostgreSQL has won StackOverflow’s most loved database by developers,” Kincaid said. “So we think this will make them love it even more.”

Acer has released a new AI-driven laptop designed with business professionals purely in mind.

The Acer TravelMate P6 14 AI comes with a choice of Intel Core Ultra 7 or Ultra 5 processors and it supports a suite of powerful AI tools to help businesses improve productivity and collaboration – including Copilot+ PC AI experiences available through free updates later in 2024.