Design
Latest Andru Edwards Videos
Jaguar’s Type 01 Is Real. Nobody Agrees on What It Costs in the US.
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Design, Transportation,
Jaguar spent nearly two years as a car company you could argue about but not buy a car from. That ended at a world premiere in New York on October 7, where the Type 01 turned up as a finished production car with a factory, a build date, and prices in at least two currencies. It is a four-door electric grand tourer, and it is the first Jaguar you will be able to order since the company tore its own brand down and started again.
The hardware is serious. Three motors make a combined 758 kW and 1,365 Nm of torque, which other outlets have converted to roughly 1,015 hp, and the reported 0 to 62 mph time is about 3.2 seconds. Jaguar also built the car around its own 850-volt architecture, so it takes up to 350 kW on a DC charger. The company says that puts about 320 km of range back in 13 minutes. On a long drive, that is the difference between a coffee stop and a meal.
Click to continue reading Jaguar’s Type 01 Is Real. Nobody Agrees on What It Costs in the US.
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Bentley’s First EV Charges to 80 Percent in 16 Minutes. It Also Pipes In Fake Engine Noise.
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Design, Transportation,
A lot of what you paid for in a Bentley was sound. The big engine clearing its throat outside a restaurant did real work for the sticker price. The Torcal, Bentley's first electric car, revealed in London today, has none of that. So Bentley composed some and named it Bentley Dynamic Symphony.
The car under the soundtrack is serious. It's a five-meter SUV, designed, engineered and built in Crewe, with two permanent magnet motors driving all four wheels. That's 821 PS in the standard car and 888 in the S, good for 0 to 60 mph in 3.3 seconds, or 2.8 if you buy the S. Top speed is 155 mph, or 162 in the S. Those are the numbers Bentley led with. The one it left out is the price.
Audi’s A2 e-tron Starts at €38,200 With Up to 646 km of WLTP Range
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Design, Transportation,
Audi has spent the last few years selling big, heavy, expensive electric cars. The A2 e-tron is the correction. It's a compact hatchback about the size of a Volkswagen ID.3, it starts at €38,200 in Germany, and its best trick is how little electricity it uses. The efficiency champ of the lineup needs 12.8 kWh to cover 100 km on the WLTP cycle, which Audi says makes it the most efficient production car the company has ever built.
Pricing went public this week, and it splits into four versions, all built in Ingolstadt. The 125 kW car with a 52 kWh LFP pack is €38,200. The 140 kW car with 61 kWh of LFP is €41,900. Step up to the 84 kWh NMC pack and you pay €48,900 for 170 kW or €51,200 for 240 kW. Order books open September 10, with first deliveries in December.
Click to continue reading Audi’s A2 e-tron Starts at €38,200 With Up to 646 km of WLTP Range
Huawei’s Mate XT 2 Tri-Fold Lands Two Days Before Apple’s Foldable iPhone
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Smartphones, Design, Displays,
Apple's first foldable iPhone is expected on Wednesday. Huawei got out ahead of it on Monday with a phone that folds twice, and at the moment no other major manufacturer is selling one.
The Mate XT 2 Ultimate Design went official at Huawei's HarmonyOS 7 launch in China on September 7. It is the follow-up to the 2024 Mate XT, the first tri-fold phone anyone actually shipped, and it starts at 19,999 yuan. That is the same opening price the original carried two years ago.
Click to continue reading Huawei’s Mate XT 2 Tri-Fold Lands Two Days Before Apple’s Foldable iPhone
Maingear’s New Gaming PCs Hide Every Cable, and the Top One Costs $6,499
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Design, PC / Laptop,
You know the moment. You've finished a build, the glass side panel is on, and instead of admiring the graphics card you're staring at a nest of black cables you spent forty minutes trying to route behind a motherboard tray that was never going to fit them.
Maingear's new Zero lineup is built so that never happens, and you don't have to do the building. These are pre-built desktops that use the company's rear-connection design to move every power and data cable to the back of the board, out of sight. Look through the glass and you see the CPU socket, the memory, the water cooling tubes, the PCIe slots. Nothing else.
Click to continue reading Maingear’s New Gaming PCs Hide Every Cable, and the Top One Costs $6,499
Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 Hands-On: The Foldable Finally Got the Shape Right
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Smartphones, Design, Product Reviews,
For six years, Samsung's big foldable has been shaped a little like a TV remote. Tall, skinny, and a bit awkward to hold shut. The Galaxy Z Fold 8 finally does something about that, and the fix is almost embarrassingly simple. It got wider.
That one change reshapes the entire phone. Closed, the new Fold looks and feels like a passport, with a 5.5-inch cover screen at a 10:16 aspect ratio that you can actually type on with two thumbs without popping the thing open. Samsung is calling this the biggest redesign since the original 2019 Z Fold, and after a few minutes in the hand, that reads as more than marketing. It borrows the squat, wide silhouette the first Pixel Fold pioneered, and it turns out that shape was right all along.
Click to continue reading Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 Hands-On: The Foldable Finally Got the Shape Right
Samsung Is Betting Titanium Can Finally Flatten the Galaxy Z Fold 8’s Crease
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Smartphones, Design, Displays,
Every foldable phone comes with an asterisk, and it sits right in the middle of the screen. The crease. That soft valley where the display bends has been the one thing keeping foldables from feeling like the future they keep promising to be, the little dip your thumb finds every time you scroll. Samsung has spent seven generations trying to make it go away. With the Galaxy Z Fold 8, the company says it finally has a real answer, and its name is titanium.
Ahead of its July 22 Unpacked event, Samsung revealed a new display technology it’s calling Flex Titanium, built to flatten the crease on the Z Fold 8 and the higher-end Z Fold 8 Ultra. Notice the careful wording, though: Samsung is promising “reduced crease visibility,” not a crease that’s gone for good. That gap between “better” and “invisible” is the whole story here, so it’s worth understanding what the titanium is actually doing inside the phone.
Geared Up: Riding in Tesla’s Cybertruck, & Samsung Tech Day w/ Special Guests Ben Sullins & Jim Elliott
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Corporate News, Design, Features, Handhelds, Internet, Science, Storage, Transportation,
This week we talk about the newly-announced Tesla Cybertruck, Tesla’s take on what a modern (if not futuristic) pickup truck should be, along with thoughts on riding inside the vehicle. Joining us for that segment is Tesla expert Ben Sullins from Teslanomics. Ben and Jon were on-hand at the Cybertruck reveal event, while Andru watched from home, left out from the annals of history. We also have an interview with Samsung Semiconductor’s Senior Vice President of Sales & Marketing Jim Elliott, talking about the new tech we can expect in upcoming Samsung smartphones, as well as how 5G, autonomous driving, high-bandwidth memory, and more are changing the future!
LINKS MENTIONED IN THE SHOW
- Video: Riding in the Tesla Cybertruck
- Video: Samsung Tech Day Announcements
- Geared Up on YouTube
- Jon Rettinger on YouTube
- Andru Edwards on YouTube
SPONSOR: National Car Rental - skip the line with the Emerald Club. Go National. Go Like a Pro.
Listen to the episode in the player above or subscribe to Geared Up in your favorite podcast app to listen on the go:
Panasonic Lumix S1, Harley-Davidson LiveWire and more from Panasonic’s CES 2019 booth!
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: CES, Design, Smart Home, Transportation,
As part of CES 2019, I spent a lot of time with Panasonic (they were one of our sponsors this year,) checking out a bunch of their current and future tech innovations. We shot a video that teased the top 5 tech that we were going to be exploring in the booth, (don't miss the Harley Davidson electric motorcycle!) Here's the breakdown:
- Harley-Davidson LiveWire electric motorcycle
- Panasonic Projection Mapping and Real-Time Tracking
- Panasonic CIRRUS Intelligent Transportation Solution
- Human Characteristic Sensing and AI
- SPACe_C eMobility Concept 48v ePowertrain platform
- ELS Studio 3D Premium Audio System (bonus!)
Adobe Photoshop Elements 14 review
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Design, PC / Laptop, Software,
Here at Gear Live, reviewing gadgets, putting together gadget photo galleries, and creating image thumbnails for our YouTube videos. The thing is, there isn't much I need to do to make the images look great, and as such, Photoshop has always felt like overkill--a tool that is way more powerful than I need. I recently spent time with the new Adobe Photoshop Elements 14. This is the prosumer version of Photoshop that immediately felt way more accessible upon launching the application than it's more capable big brother.
Click to continue reading Adobe Photoshop Elements 14 review