A quick look at the Galaxy S25 FE, home lighting getting even smarter and more in a grab-bag of tech stories from the last 24 hours grabbing my attention.
In Tech News Today, I muse over news stories from the past 24 hours that catch my attention
It’s been a couple of weeks since a Samsung phone launch… oh, look, here’s one
The Galaxy Z Fold7 and Galaxy Z Flip7 are on store shelves right now, so that must mean that Samsung’s cooking up further premium phone adventures… and indeed it appears that it is, with Android Headlines reporting and publishing purported images of the new handsets.
Alex’s Quick Thoughts: Nothing terribly surprising there on the looks front – the FE phones always look like their pricier siblings and that’s very much the point of them.
Here the pricing will be key, however, because while I did love 2024’s Galaxy S24 FE, the big selling point for the FE line has long been on better affordability within the premium phone space.
Telstra hits 95% 5G population coverage
Where can you get 5G coverage in Australia? If you’re a Telstra customer, the answer would appear to be “mostly where you live”, with (as per Whistleout) Telstra announcing in its yearly results that it’s hit 95% 5G coverage by population in Australia.
Alex’s Quick Thoughts: More coverage is always better, of course, and if the figures are right Telstra’s got a pretty commanding lead on its rivals, with Optus reporting 80.5% 5G coverage and Vodafone… not releasing real coverage figures at all, just that it has coverage in “over 3,400 suburbs”. Hmm.
Of course, we live in a big wide brown land and there’s a huge gulf between having population coverage and landmass coverage.
We mostly live clustered around the coastlines by population, and what that effectively means is we’re talking thin strips of coastal coverage plus blobs of regional centre coverage, but there’s still going to be huge swathes of the country that aren’t covered by 5G – or in many cases, by any direct mobile coverage at all, at which point you’re best off having something that can at least send out an emergency satellite message or two.
Philips Hue lights are about to become motion sensors
According to leaks reported by HueBlog, Philips Hue (it’s a separate company to Philips, if you care about corporate branding) is set to reveal a new Philips Hue Bridge Pro for its smart lighting system that will enabled features such as using individual Hue bulbs as motion sensors.
Alex’s Quick Thoughts: I do like smart lighting systems and Hue is indeed the system I use myself – this isn’t a sponsored thing, it’s just what I actually have – so the prospect of upgrading those lights to also be part of a secure or self-lighting system has a lot of appeal.
My inner pessimist can’t help but worry that my own Hue bulbs, which are on the older side, might not be compatible with the new system. I don’t mind shelling out for a new routing bridge, but replacing working smart bulbs while they’re still functional doesn’t sound smart to me.
It’s Apple update day!
If you’ve got an iPhone or an Apple Watch, there’s a minor point update to their operating systems out today, with iOS jumping to iOS 18.6.1 and WatchOS bumping up to watchOS 11.6.1.
Not that this is likely to be a big deal for Australian users, as the primary upgrade is the return of Blood Oxygen monitoring to those devices for users in the United States.
Alex’s Quick Thoughts: I think it had honestly escaped me that Apple had restricted that functionality in the USA, really.
It does make me wonder what happened if you travelled to the US with an Australian Apple Watch that had blood oxygen enabled – did it stop working, or did it slide under the radar?
Years ago when Google had its Project Soli radar system on the Pixel 4 (I did say this was years ago, right?), it wasn’t allowed to use it in Japan, and so, me being me, I asked what would happen. Apparently, it would use geolocation to note it was in 日本 and disable itself quietly behind the scenes…
Google Flight Deals: For when you don’t know where you want to go, you just want to get on a plane
Google Flights allows you to search for (theoretically) lower cost flights through Google itself, and in the US, it’s just launched Flight Deals, an AI-powered system that uses a rough description, rather than an ideal destination as a way of finding flights.
Alex’s Quick Thoughts: I would ask who’s mad enough to book flights on the basis just of flights not on the destination, but I have a close family member who would do exactly that, so I probably shouldn’t complain.
Still, it does feel a little weird to me; if I’m booking flights somewhere, it’s usually because I want to go to that somewhere, not just a non-specified destination.
That can’t just be me… can it? Flight Deals is for the moment US, Canada and India only – and it’ll be interesting to see if it ever lands here given the much smaller number of local domestic players in the airline space.
Additional tip here, by the way: While flight searching sites (including Google) can be good for surfacing bargains, it’s always worth checking on the airline’s own site for the same flights as well, as often the cut that those intermediary services take means that you can get even cheaper travel.
Yes, I’m experimenting with a format. Let me know your thoughts below!
About the Author
