While there have already been reports about replacement Samsung Galaxy Note7 units overheating in South Korea, a new Wall Street Journal report now says that similar complaints have been received by the company in the US as well.
Image Credit: GSM Arena
In many cases, users have complained that the phablet gets very hot during calls. For its part, Samsung has acknowledged the complaints and has said that it's investigating the matter. The company is, however, assuring users that the issue "does not pose a safety concern.”
"There have been a few reports about the battery charging levels and we would like to reassure everyone that the issue does not pose a safety concern," the tech giant said. "In normal conditions, all smartphones may experience temperature fluctuations."
The South Korean firm also said that it's focusing on each case separately and trying to get it resolved through its customer service and warranty process.
The former smartphone giant, BlackBerry has announced that the company will not be manufacturing its own smartphone in house after 14years.
The once smartphone market leader has struggled to keep pace with modern handsets produced by rivals such as Apple and Samsung.
In May, the company's chief executive, John Chen, said he would know by September whether the hardware business was likely to become profitable.
Now, Blackberry says it will outsource hardware development to partners and focus more on software development.
BlackBerry also launched the "Software is the New BlackBerry" campaign.
The company has not yet confirmed when any further Blackberry phones will be released, but Mr Chen said on Wednesday that further devices including one with the "iconic" physical keyboard would go on sale.
"I always wanted to make sure that we keep having the iconic devices," Mr Chen told BNN.
"I just need to find a way to be efficient and be able to make money. I think we found the model."
The company said it sold about 400,000 smartphones in its second quarter - fewer than the previous three months.
"Blackberry can't keep producing its own phones indefinitely just to serve a small subset of its clients addicted to its home-grown devices," said Ben Wood of the CCS Insight consultancy.
"Blackberry had made no secret of the fact that it might shut down its own phone-making business. Pushing it out to a third party is a sensible solution - but any manufacturer making Blackberry branded devices will ultimately face the same challenges."
The world's biggest technology companies are joining forces to consider the future of artificial intelligence.
Amazon, Google's DeepMind, Facebook, IBM and Microsoft will work together on issues such as privacy, safety and the collaboration between people and AI.
Dubbed the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence, it will include external experts.
One said he hoped the group would address "legitimate concerns".
"We've seen a very fast development in AI over a very short period of time," said Prof Yoshua Bengio, from the University of Montreal.
"The field brings exciting opportunities for companies and public organisations. And yet, it raises legitimate questions about the way these developments will be conducted."
Bringing the key players together would be the "best way to ensure we all share the same values and overall objectives to serve the common good", he added.
One notable absentee from the consortium is Apple. It has been in discussions with the group and may join the partnership "soon", according to one member.
The group will have an equal share of corporate and non-corporate members and is in discussions with organisations such as the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence and the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence.
It stressed that it had no plans to "lobby government or other policy-making bodies".
"AI has tremendous potential to improve many aspects of life, ranging from healthcare, education and manufacturing to home automation and transport and the founding members... hope to maximise this potential and ensure it benefits as many people as possible," it said.
It will conduct research under an open licence in the following areas:
ethics, fairness and inclusivity
transparency
privacy and interoperability (how AI works with people)
trustworthiness, reliability and robustness
Microsoft's managing director of research hailed the partnership as a "historic collaboration on AI and its influences on people and society", while IBM's ethics researcher Francesca Rossi said it would provide "a vital voice in the advancement of the defining technology of this century".
Image copyrightThinkstockImage caption DeepMind uses data analysis of a million eye scans to find out more about problems such as macular degeneration
Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of Google's artificial intelligence division, DeepMind, said he hoped the group would be able to "break down barriers for AI teams to share best practice and research ways to maximise societal benefits and tackle ethical concerns".
And Amazon's director of machine learning, Ralf Herbrich, said the time was ripe for such a collaboration.
"We're in a golden age of machine learning and AI," he said.
"As a scientific community, we are still a long way from being able to do things the way humans do things, but we're solving unbelievably complex problems every day and making incredibly rapid progress."
Artificial intelligence is beginning to find roles in the real world - from the basic AI used in smartphone voice assistants and web chatbots to AI agents that can take on data analysis to significant breakthroughs such as DeepMind's victory over champion Go player Lee Sedol.
The win - in one of the world's most complex board games - was hailed as a defining moment for AI, with experts saying it had come a decade earlier than anyone had predicted.
DeepMind now has 250 scientists at its King's Cross headquarters, working on a variety of projects, including several tie-ins with the NHS to analyse medical records.
In a lecture at the Royal Academy of Engineering, founder Dr Demis Hassabis revealed the team was now working on creating an artificial hippocampus, an area of the brain regarded by neuroscientists as responsible for emotion, creativity, memory and other human attributes.
But as AI has developed, so have concerns about where the technology is heading.
One of the most vocal and high-profile naysayers is Tesla's chief executive, Elon Musk, who has tweeted the technology is "potentially more dangerous than nukes [nuclear weapons]" and expressed concerns humans were "just the biological boot loader for digital super-intelligence".
Last year, Mr Musk set up his own non-profit AI group, OpenAI.
It is not, at this stage, part of the Partnership on AI.
Designer says Sex With Glass will enable users to 'see what their partner sees' when making love
GOOGLE GLASS is already the ultimate fashion accessory for geeks, and now the internet-enabled eyewear could become a hit in the bedroom as well.
A new app called Sex With Glass is promising to steam up the spectacles of Glass wearers worldwide, as it allows wearers to see what their partner sees when they're making love.
Sherif Maktabi, the founder of the project, says when he began work on the erotic app he wanted to discover "how can we make sex more awesome with Google Glass". According to a report in the Business Insider his answer is through "shared live streaming, ephemeral video recording and voice controls for your connected home".
Maktabi, a design student at London's Central Saint Martins, has only spent one day with Google Glass at a hackathon held in November 2013, but he was so inspired he's spent his time since then developing Sex With Glass.
"Some people find what we do repulsive," admits Maktabi. "But a lot of other people - and I am basing this from the emails we are getting online - really desire to try this. People have fantasies, desires and needs. It's personal."
Maktabi says live streaming will make sex more steamy enabling wearers to "see what your partner can see... just say 'OK glass, it's time' and Glass will stream what you see to each other. And if you feel like stopping everything, just ask: 'OK glass, pull out'."
But will it catch on?
"What they do with that is up to them," says Maktabi. "Guilt, dogma and shame is something we still widely experience when it comes to sex and how we talk about it."
As well as enabling wearers to share each other's pleasure, the app can control bedroom lights and music if the user's home is wired up correctly. And if any further encouragement were needed the whole experience can be videoed - although the videos are deleted automatically after five hours. ·
