OPINION: As the week draws to a close it’s time for us to choose our winner and loser from the last seven days in the world of tech.
Aside from the exciting OnePlus 11 launch, the first week of February wasn’t exactly full of eye-grabbing headlines. This isn’t entirely surprising as with Mobile World Congress on the horizon, we’d expect many tech brands to be holding back their February announcements for the event.
OpenAI launched a new subscription-based tier for ChatGPT, while Microsoft revealed it’d teamed up with the ChatGPT and Dall-E 2 creator to reinvent its Bing search engine with new AI smarts.
Read on to discover which companies we named our winner and our loser this week.
Realme GT 2
Winner: Realme
Our winner this week is Realme, after the phone maker confirmed that it’d be bringing 240W charging to the global market with the Realme GT 3.
The news came in a roundabout way as Realme was actually in the process of unveiling its newest flagship phone, the GT Neo 5. One of the key features here was 240W charging, however, this particular model will not be making its way beyond China.
Realme was quick to reassure international fans that they would be able to get their hands on these super fast charging speeds in the form of the Realme GT 3, a follow-up to 2022’s 4-star Realme GT 2.
The GT 3 launch is expected to take place this month, one year after parent company Oppo first showcased the 240W version of its SuperVOOC fast charging technology at MWC 2022.
Not only can 240W SuperVOOC bring a 4500mAh battery up to 50% in 3.5-minutes of charging, but it can reach full capacity in just 9-minutes. That’s blazingly fast and the quickest charging we’ve seen on a smartphone yet, maxing out what is possible on the current USB-C standard.
It’s also significantly faster than the 80W SuperVOOC found on Oppo’s own flagship Find X5 Pro. We’re excited to see 240W charging expand beyond China, especially seeing as it’s coming from such an affordable brand.
Loser: Netflix
This week’s loser is Netflix as the streaming service doubled down on its heavily criticised plan to end password sharing.
The company that once tweeted the words “Love is sharing a password” published a blog this week explaining exactly how it planned to stop users from handing out their account information to friends and family.
Starting in Canada, New Zealand, Portugal and Spain, Netflix will begin asking its subscribers to identify a primary location for their Netflix account.
Once they’ve picked out their household, users will have the option to add up to two extra profiles for people they don’t live with – at a price, of course.
“Today, over 100 million households are sharing accounts — impacting our ability to invest in great new TV and films”, explained Netflix in its blog.
We expect to see some incredible new content from Netflix in the next few years to make up for this sweeping change. If not, it’s likely users will start abandoning the ever-more-expensive streaming platform for something more affordable, or one that’s willing to turn a blind eye to password sharing.
