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GM's self-driving car reportedly has trouble recognizing pedestrians
It seems that General Motors' self-driving car unit, Cruise, is running into major difficulties, and will likely not be able to hit its late 2019 launch target. Sources close to the project have told Reuters that engineers have been hitting unexpected technical challenges, like being able to detect objects if objects are in motion. For example, vehicles would hesitate or stop when passing a row of parked bicycles, would mistakenly see "phantom bicycles" that caused jerky stops, and would even fail to recognize pedestrians. "Nothing is on schedule," one GM source told Reuters, as Cruise has already missed mileage targets and milestones.
Huawei pushes Ascend D Quad production to August, pins it on processor hiccups
Those of us yearning to bring Huawei's Ascend D Quad on summer vacation will have to file that dream away for next year. The company's consumer division chief, Richard Yu, has pushed back the phone's volume production from this month to August. Blame for the setback rests squarely on that custom-developed K3V2 processor -- there have been "technical problems" getting it ready, if we go by Huawei's less than precise explanation. The timing certainly isn't what we'd call ideal: now that the Galaxy S III and One X are both common features of the smartphone landscape, the Ascend D Quad's performance won't be turning nearly as many heads when it arrives. We'll have to make do with the solid Ascend P1 in the meantime.
Samsung's iCloud rival delayed after in-house service deemed 'unsuitable'
Korean newspaper ETNews is developing a reputation for bold claims, the latest being that Samsung's "answer" to iCloud, S-Cloud has been significantly delayed. SDS, the conglomerate's IT infrastructure division had originally been tasked to build the network, but its work was found to be "unsuitable." After the setback, Samsung's Media Solution Center had to enlist KT, operators of public cloud services in Korea and Amazon to help move things forward. An unnamed "cloud industry" source who spoke to the daily pointed out that one of the burdens of releasing so many (oh so many) devices is that the company has to work a lot harder to ensure all of them are compatible with any unified cloud service -- but them's the breaks, eh?
Optimus keyboard hits OLED snag, production still on track?
The Optimus keyboard has been a long, long time coming, and unfortunately for everyone with the $1,200 $1,490 ready and waiting, you might have to test your patience still. While release date rumors have come in all over the place, the dashing keyboards were slated to ship sometime near the end of this year barring any major production problems, but alas, it looks like the dreaded manufacturing hiccup has reared its ugly head. Apparently, the OLED producer that the Optimus creators were relying on have encountered some "serious financial difficulties" and won't be delivering the displays at all. Thankfully, it looks like the team is moving forward with other production steps anyway, and they plan to retrofit the keyboard cases with the just-in-time OLEDs (to be sourced from a currently unknown supplier) after most of the assembly is already done. So while we're hearing that the pre-order stage is still set for "near April," and the shipping timeframe is still penciled in for December, it could take a Christmas miracle to pull it all together.
