Weekly Authority: Buds, rivals, events, leaks, and more

⚡ Welcome back to another edition of The Weekly Authority, the Android Authority newsletter that keeps an eye out for the top Android and tech news from the week.

👋 Tristan Rayner here, and I might've be swapping to cold brew coffee at this point!

June 6, 2021

Popular news this week

This week, events, and announcements, with the build-up to E3 and WWDC:

Galaxy S21 FE: New Samsung Galaxy S21 FE leak shows off its look-alike S21 colors, including an unusual olive. The renders probably don’t do the actual colors much justice, but there you go.
Google: Google finally launched the new Pixel Buds A earbuds. These are a much cheaper TWS entrant from Google, but bring improvements to connection quality without sacrificing audio. They drop features like wireless charging and built-in volume controls to account for the cheaper $99 price tag. Here’s what you need to know about Google’s new cheaper Pixel A buds. Also, some talk of new Pixel features coming next week, including a cool-sounding new “astro timelapse” feature.
OnePlus: OnePlus announced a June 10 launch for the upcoming OnePlus Nord CE, and the full specs leaked in advance. Looks decent!
Computex 2021: The PC event saw announcements from Intel, AMD, and Nvidia. Neither of them showed off game-changers, but we still saw fresh chips and features. Intel was first with a new Tiger Lake-U mobile chipset and Intel-branded MediaTek 5G modems (AnandTech). AMD announced ray-tracing will make it to Samsung Exynos GPUs and showed off 3D stacked chiplets for triple-L3 cache on its flagship Zen 3 CPUs. Nvidia announced a new RTX 3080 Ti graphics card, though again, with limited availability (The Verge).
Chip shortage: Intel said the global chip shortage could be with us for “several years,” a much grimmer picture than others have painted.
Nintendo and Sony: In other events news, Nintendo announced a Nintendo E3 event on June 15, but said nothing about a next-gen Switch. Sony announced, via a YouTube live stream link, that the “truly silent” new WF-1000XM4 buds will go official on June 9. Finally!
Snapdragon: The next flagship Snapdragon chipset for 2022 flagships was leaked via Evan Blass. Mostly it’s what you expect in terms of packing the next generation of CPUs, GPUs, modems, and so on. It’s also worth mentioning the chip will be based on Arm’s new v9 architecture, and built on a 4nm process, too.
Harmony OS: Huawei made big announcements for its new Harmony OS, which is now rolling out. Huawei said it will update over 100 devices with Harmony OS, dating as far back as the P10 and Mate 9. Exactly what’s going on with Harmony OS, though, depends on who at Huawei you speak with… (Twitter). Huawei is calling every OS it uses Harmony OS. From a tablet to a watch to a smart device to a smartphone, it’s all Harmony OS, even when the devices run very different software. Embarrassingly, Huawei’s first Harmony OS tablets have a very familiar iPad-like interface…
Digital ID: Europe announced a digital identity wallet, driven by the need to get the EU more digital (Reuters). What’s fun is that the EU said this will create 27,000 jobs, somehow!