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The winner in the war on Huawei is Samsung

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No such thing as bad publicity! Huawei ban raises brand profile
Huawei says it is aiming to be biggest smartphone brand by 2020. Read more: https://zd.net/2vaXxJ0

The past week of off-again, on-again support from Google to Huawei concerning Android, combined with the potential killer blow of Arm joining the party to shun Huawei, should be regarded as a warning shot to what sort of impact a proper trade war between the United States and China could have on the tech sector.

Despite the bluster and rhetoric out of the Oval Office, the simple fact is that the supply chains between the nations are far too intertwined for either country to avoid high amounts of pain as they get untangled.

Whatever device you are reading this on, there’s a fair chance it was assembled in the Middle Kingdom, using componentry and intellectual property from the US.

Given the lead time needed for design and manufacturing, an edict out of Washington to separate this ecosystem should be measured on a timescale of years, not months.

The isolation of Huawei from software, hardware, and intellectual properly would be enough to sink many other companies, but if any company was capable of bouncing back from such an edict, it would be Huawei.

Its success in China alone makes it one of the world’s biggest manufacturers. it’s also been working behind the scenes on replacement software for such an occasion, and the company also has a chip arm in the form of HiSilicon.

Should Huawei have its access to Android cut off when the dust has settled, the big missing puzzle piece would be the Google Play Store. But it’s not hard to imagine Huawei quickly starting up its own store, or combining with other Chinese handset manufacturers to create a nationalistic alternative.

Read more: Google suspends Android support for Huawei: What it means for your smartphone

In the world of Android, there is regular Android, and then the very different flavours of it that appear out of China such as ColorOS. What we could be seeing here is the bifurcation of Android brought on by the White House.

Importantly, Huawei’s lack of non-employee shareholders means it can make tough decisions to go dark, go rogue, or reform itself without needing to answer to a stock exchange. This will be vital if its access to chip designs from Arm is cut off, and it needs to begin developing its own.

There is also the prospect that all the banning could be for nought, if the White House trades the ban away to get a deal with Beijing.

Hitherto unmentioned, but certainly having a keen interest and laughing it up is Samsung. The schadenfreude levels in Seoul would certainly be high.

Despite the Korean behemoth rising to smartphone prominence off the back of Google’s mobile operating system, Samsung and Google are at best frenemies living in a dysfunctional wedded state.

If the second biggest Android smartphone maker in the form of Huawei were hamstrung for a period of time, it would certainly help Samsung.

But there are also other prizes at stake as Samsung looks toward cementing a spot as one of the world’s top 5G network equipment manufacturers.

Must read: Samsung and 5G: Will this time be different?

Samsung might be able to boss its way around many business sectors — whitegoods, shipbuilding, and semiconductors being among them — but its network business has failed to take off time and time again.

The opening for Samsung to quickly step into the void left by Huawei in the wake of 5G equipment bans was best summed up by Australia’s 29th and most recently knifed Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull.

“In many discussions with my western counterparts, I raised the concern that we, and in particular the Five Eyes, had got to the point where there were now essentially four leading vendors of 5G systems — two Chinese, Huawei and ZTE, and two European, Ericsson and Nokia,” Turnbull said in March.

“With the benefit of hindsight it beggars belief that the countries which pioneered wireless technology — the United States, the UK, Germany, Japan and with WiFi, Australia — have got to the point where none of them are able to present one of their own telcos [as] a national, or a Five Eyes, champion in 5G.”

Samsung is throwing $22 billion into its 5G networking business, with the aim of claiming a minimum 20% of the market by 2020.

So far, the Korean giant has done well on its home turf, and the clouds surrounding Huawei should continue to give Samsung the long-desired leg up in equipment sales it has longed for.

At the same time, any hit to Huawei’s phone business will only help Samsung’s mobile business, which has struggled to bank the massive profits it saw five years ago.

ZDNET’S MONDAY MORNING OPENER

The Monday Morning Opener is our opening salvo for the week in tech. Since we run a global site, this editorial publishes on Monday at 8:00am AEST in Sydney, Australia, which is 6:00pm Eastern Time on Sunday in the US. It is written by a member of ZDNet’s global editorial board, which is comprised of our lead editors across Asia, Australia, Europe, and North America.

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10 Apple Vision Pro Features Already Available With Meta Quest

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Apple’s headset features a number of high-definition cameras which record the room around you and relay that recording to the device’s impressive screen. As a result, you can see exactly what’s going on in the room, and this can serve as a background to what you’re doing. Once again, however, this innovative feature is already available on Quest headsets, where it is known as Passthrough — although it varies in quality. 

Older headsets, like the Quest 1 and Quest 2, use a greyscale Passthrough system, which appears in black and white. The Quest Pro has color Passthrough, though this is the same greyscale system as its predecessors use but with color added before it hits your eyes. As a result, it isn’t what you’d call an HD experience.

That said, the Quest 3 is putting a heavy emphasis on augmented reality and may have a higher-quality Passthrough feature. It may also include the depth sensor that was supposed to be built into the Quest Pro, which will be very useful for augmented reality experiences. Instead of trying to tell the headset where the floor, walls, or tabletops are, the depth sensor can just work it out. 

Either way, you can see your surroundings through a Quest headset. In addition, you can also select various environments to work in on the Quest if you hate the things you’re surrounded by in reality — just like you can with the Vision Pro.

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Features Of The Eurofighter Typhoon That Make It One Of The Best Fighter Jets Ever Built

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Like a lot of military technology, development of the Eurofighter Typhoon began around the Cold War. It was intended as a revolutionary aircraft that would defend Europe as a new time of uncertainty unfolded, as a joint venture between Spain, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom.

Equipped with a pair of Eurojet EJ200 afterburning turbofan engines and at a cost of $90 million each, the Eurofighter was also expected to keep pace with the developments such aircraft as the United States’ formidable Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor, according to Aerocorner. Alas, its fielding was no easy ride: The collaborative nature of development proved difficult to manage, and certain futuristic elements of the aircraft made its development time-consuming and costly. It wasn’t until 2002 that it began serving the U.K., German, Spanish, and Italian militaries, before being purchased by Austria and Saudi Arabia as well.

The Eurofighter Typhoon boasts revolutionary technology to aid in both defensive and offensive endeavors.

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Elon Musk Says Tesla Is Open To Licensing Out Autopilot And Other EV Tech

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Now, Musk’s offer isn’t a philanthropic endeavor to redeem humanity from the environmental burden of gas-guzzling cars. Licensing only means the automaker that eventually bites will have to pay a fee for every car in which the Autopilot tech is used, just the same way Arm collects royalty for its chip design. But the bigger question is, who will embrace Tesla’s Autopilot and Full Self-Driving (FSD) tech?

In 2016, Musk claimed at a conference that “a Model S and Model X at this point can drive autonomously with greater safety than a person.” Multiple accidents happened in the years that followed, some allegedly due to issues with the Autopilot system in Tesla cars.

Interestingly, when Musk’s claims about Tesla Autopilot tech were brought forth in a lawsuit involving a fatal crash, Musk’s defense argued that those statements were possibly deepfakes. In January, another bombshell allegation dropped in which it was claimed that early promotional videos for the self-driving tech weren’t real, but staged. In light of these things, there’s a big question with no clear answer: given Tesla’s checkered track record with its in-house Autopilot tech, would any rival EV maker be willing to utilize the system in its own cars?

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