Daily Authority: ???? Oppo’s foldable on show

Oppo’s commanding the tech cycle at the moment with well-placed teaser videos about its upcoming innovations, and the latest is pretty big: its foldable.

What happened: 

• Oppo put out a teaser on Weibo to its home country showing off the Oppo Find N, a foldable phone coming December 15, day two of the Oppo Inno Day event. 
• This follows the retractable camera teaser, and some details around a new imaging chip for photography, AR glasses, and “Digital Human,” which isn’t threatening at all.

But wow, the foldable — here’s a GIF of the main moment from the 15s video:

• The teaser shows a much smaller foldable than the Galaxy Z Fold 3, and has that same form-factor versus the clamshell style of the Z Flip 3.
• There are hints of design choices: a roughly 4:3 display, a side-mounted fingerprint scanner, both like the Fold 3.
• Oppo’s Chief Product Officer, Pete Lau, who you’d know as CEO of OnePlus as well, revealed in a blog post that this has taken Oppo four years of R&D, and is the sixth generation of foldable prototypes that have been built.
• Lau: “This device is Oppo’s answer to the future of smartphones … As early as April 2018, the first generation of the Find N prototype was born internally. Although a handful of other brands have already introduced foldable devices to the market, barriers such as utility, durability, and user experience continue to prevent foldable devices from becoming a more feasible daily driver for most people. So when I returned to Oppo last year, I was excited to take over this major project and guide the team to overcome the final hurdles to turn this dream into reality.”
• Finally, I have a little nit to pick with this line towards the end: “The Find N is Oppo’s unique solution in an increasingly homogenized smartphone industry.”
• Mmhmm, totally unique! Making it slightly smaller makes it nothing at all like the Fold 1, 2, or 3…
• Anyway, the smaller overall size might make this a real competitor to the slightly unwieldy Fold 3, but we don’t yet know availability (China first? Global launch later?) or that all-important price point.
• The Inno Day event next week is going to be killer.

⚰️ Amazon will shut Alexa.com, its global website ranking system, on May 1 next year, after 25 years. Wonder what that URL could be good for… (BleepingComputer).

???? “ELI5: What is déja vu? (r/explainlikeimfive)

Tomorrow will mark 28 years since Doom was released by id Software, a follow-up to Wolfenstein. Actually, the timing is kind of tricky. 

• The story (Wikipedia) is that it was released after the team worked on it for 30 hours straight, at midnight on December 10, 1993.
• Which means late on December 9, i.e. today, 28 years ago, the development team was getting ready to upload the first episode of the game to the Internet.
• The FTP server at the University of Wisconsin–Madison was the first to receive the game as shareware.
• And, accordingly, the strategy to let the game be shared out freely, worked: “Within hours of Doom’s release, university networks were banning Doom multiplayer games, as a rush of players overwhelmed their systems.”
• “In late 1995, Doom was estimated to be installed on more computers worldwide than Microsoft’s new operating system, Windows 95.”

Cheers,

Tristan Rayner, Senior Editor.