The Tech Weekender | Top news from the world of technology this week

Samsung officially confirmed the date for the next Galaxy Unpacked event where it will unveil the Galaxy S23 series. The first Galaxy Unpacked event of 2023 will take place on February 1. The company will unveil the Samsung Galaxy S23, Galaxy S23 Plus, and Galaxy S23 Ultra at the event. Samsung also opened bookings for its upcoming Galaxy S-series in India, which will be launched in the country on February 1. Buyers can reserve the phone on Samsung's online store, Samsung exclusive stores, Amazon India and select retail outlets for a token amount of Rs 1,999.

Ubisoft has now cancelled three more unannounced projects that join the bin with four others it cancelled in July 2022. To make matters worse, the long in-development Skull & Bones has been delayed yet again. The pirate themed action-adventure game has already seen many delays since its first reveal in 2017. The release window has now been pushed to April 2023. Ubisoft said that it was writing off an estimated 500 million euros instead of the projected 400 million and will cut its full-year revenue targets after ending 2022 with weaker than estimated sales.

Audio streaming platform Spotify was down for thousands of users in the early hours of Saturday, according to a Reuters report which cited outage tracking website Downdetector.com. The outage tracking website Downdetector showed more than 38,000 affected users from the United States at the peak of the disruption. The website uses a range of sources including user reports. Since then, the popular music streaming service is back online with Spotify confirming that everything was back to normal through its official Twitter handle.

Global personal computer (PC) shipments dropped to 286.2 million units in the calendar year 2022, down 16.2 percent from 2021. The shipments fell to 65.3 million units in the fourth quarter of 2022, a 28.5 percent decline from the year-ago period, the steepest drop since it started tracking the PC market in the mid-1990s, research firm Gartner said. Amidst the gloom, Lenovo finished at the top of Gartner's PC Vendor Unit Shipment Estimates, with a market share of 24 percent in Q4 2022.

The iQOO 11 5G recently debuted as the first Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 powered smartphone in India. The iQOO 11 price in India is set at Rs 59,999 for the 8GB/256GB model and Rs 64,999 for the 16GB/256GB variant. Apart from the Snapdragon chip, the iQOO 11 also features a 144Hz 2K E6 AMOLED display, a 50 MP triple-camera setup, a 5,000 mAh battery with 120W charging, LPDDR5X RAM, and UFS 4.0 storage. For more details, head on over to the link.

Reliance Jio recently announced the rollout of its highspeed 5G network in Assam. Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, while inaugurating the services at an event in Guwahati, said the 5G network will be made available in all towns of the state by the year-end. "Apart from their existing investment of Rs 9,500 crores, Jio is additionally investing over Rs 2,500 crores to deploy True 5G network in Assam and this shows their immense commitment towards our state’s development," Sarma said. Additionally, Jio also launched its 5G-powered Wifi services in the state on January 10.

After Sony, tech giant Google and chipmaker Nvidia have "expressed concerns" to the United States Federal Trade Commission (FTC) over Microsoft's proposed $69-billion acquisition of Call of Duty maker Activision Blizzard. According to a Bloomberg report, Google and Nvidia have told FTC that Microsoft would gain an unfair advantage in mobile, subscription and cloud services if the merger goes through.

After being accused of ad practices that enabled advertisers to exclude users by gender or family ties, Meta has now rolled out a new Variance Reduction System (VRS) that the social media giant says will help in equitable distribution of ads. Meta said that they had launched the new system for housing ads in the United States. Over the coming year, this will grow to include US employment and credit ads. The new system is part of the settlement that Meta reached with the US Department of Justice (DOJ).

Intel recently announced a flagship processor for its 13th Gen Raptor Lake series of CPUs. The Core i9-13900KS is now the fastest processor the company has ever launched with a boost clock of 6GHz, achieved without any overclocking. It does this with the help of Intel's Thermal Velocity Boost, which can fillip clock speeds on processors well past their turbo frequency threshold, provided the CPU has enough power and thermal headroom to do so, the company said. The Core i9-13900KS has similar specifications to the Core i9-13900K. It has the same 24 cores (8 P Cores + 16 E Cores) with a slightly improved base frequency on the P Cores at 3.2GHz and the same 2.2GHz based on the E Cores.

The UK's Guardian Media Group has confirmed that it was the victim of a ransomware attack in December and the incident was a "highly sophisticated cyber-attack involving unauthorised third-party access" to parts of the publication's network. In December 2022, The Guardian said it was "hit by a serious IT incident" that "affected parts of the company’s technology infrastructure".

Samsung has announced the 'production readiness' of a new high-performance Solid State Drive (SSD), the PM9C1a. The PM9C1a has the company's seventh-generation V-NAND technology, which is a method of stacking multiple flash memory layers vertically on a single NOT AND (NAND) operator chip. The PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD boasts 1.6X faster sequential read speeds and 1.8X faster sequential write speeds compared to the previous generation of Samsung SSD storage. It can reach transfer speeds up to 6000 megabytes per second (MB/s) and 5600 MB/s.