Daily Authority: ???? Oppo’s retractable trick

Oppo Inno Day is set for December 14 and 15 next week, with the company expected to show off new tech that it’s working on bringing to its phones over the coming years.

But, in a possible tease or a possible oopsie moment, Oppo’s Philippines-based Twitter account published a video of a “self-developed retractable camera” complete with #OPPOINNODAY2021 hashtag.

And there’s a close-up of the text:

What does it all mean?

• What we can see here from the text on the camera housing is a 1/1.56” sensor size, which would match up with the Oppo Find X3 Pro and its Sony IMX766 sensor. 
• But, maybe that’s now with an improved optical zoom thanks to the retractable camera, complete with 50mm focal length and f/2.4 aperture. 
• Maybe: we don’t know for sure if it’s for zoom capabilities or some other camera performance options

Competition:

• Xiaomi told the world it was toying with the technology just over a year ago, and said at the time, by adding retractable lenses, as you might see on digital cameras of the past and present, devices can have a larger aperture. 
• That then “increases the amount of light input by 300%,” Xiaomi said, and “showcases better performance in portrait photography and night photography compared to currently-used camera structures.”
• The telescopic aspect also means the phone still tucks away into your pocket, and Oppo’s video showed the mount all soaked in water, implying there’s no lost water resistance with the addition of the lens.
• Of course, we didn’t actually see that in the hand from Xiaomi, and Oppo’s Inno Day announcements are usually far, far ahead of commercialization, so true performance isn’t exactly known.
• In any case, we’ll likely hear more from Oppo when the Inno Day event kicks off next week.

???? Intel to take Mobileye public next year: purchase price was $15B back in March 2017, it may list for $50B. Mobileye will need huge capital to outfit a bunch of autonomous cars/taxis, so maybe this is how Intel raises the capital? (TechCrunch).

???? Life360, the company buying Tile, is purportedly selling the location data of millions of families and kids (Gizmodo)… Life360’s data-selling practices were revealed in a damning report published by The Markup on Monday. Worse than GasBuddy! (Speaking of, shout out to our old friend Adam Doud who’s now full-time writing for Digital Trends!)

???? The Matrix Awakens is an Unreal Engine 5 demo you can preload today, and it seems related to the Game Awards streaming on Thursday (Engadget).

Here are the world’s shipping lanes:

• You can spot the Rhine river flowing through The Netherlands and Germany, plus the Snake river going all the way into Idaho.
• We’ve definitely all seen something similar to this before, but shipping is particularly interesting, again, at the moment, and not just because giant ships are again crossing the Suez Canal (successfully, for now!)

Cheers,

Tristan Rayner, Senior Editor