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LONDON, April 13 — In a bid to prove that keen drivers put too much emphasis on cylinder count rather than torque, horsepower and weight, Jaguar has decided to take its F-Type sports coupé and jettison the usual V8 or V6 in favour of a four-cylinder engine.

But don’t panic, it’s not just any old four-pot. It’s one of Jaguar’s new hyper-efficient 2-litre Ingenium turbocharged units and therefore is capable of serving up 300PS (296bhp). Throw in the fact that the smaller block and some other adjustments have shaved 52kg off the car’s weight and that little engine is good for a 0-60mph time of 5.4 seconds (exactly the same as the V6 F-Type) and on to a top speed of 155mph.

Yet the car’s fuel economy is a 16 per cent improvement over the 340PS V6 model and emits 163g of CO2 per km.

“The 300PS Ingenium petrol engine is engineered to deliver a compelling blend of performance, refinement and efficiency,” said Ron Lee, Engineering Director of Powertrain, Jaguar Land Rover. “Not only is this the most powerful four-cylinder ever offered in a production Jaguar, it also develops the highest specific power and torque ratings of any engine in the F-Type range. It’s a natural fit for a Jaguar sports car.”

The lighter engine has also changed the car’s handling characteristics, turning it into a vehicle that craves country backroads as much as long highway straights.

“Most of the weight reduction is over the front axle, making the car beautifully balanced and really agile to drive — as you’d expect, the car is really at home on beautiful twisty roads,” said Erol Mustafa, Chief Product Engineer, Jaguar Sports Cars. “This particular F-Type has a character all of its own. I like to think of it as the feisty younger brother of the V6 and V8 models.”

And while the company has cut back on cylinders, it’s been generous with active safety and creature comforts. The car comes with a Touch Pro infotainment system, autonomous emergency braking and lane departure warning; other options include lane keep assist, traffic sign recognition and even a driver condition monitor.

The F-Type 300PS 2-litre will cost from £50,000 (about RM278,000) when it goes on sale later this year. — AFP-Relaxnews

THIS WEEK, NASA ANNOUNCES FRESH DISCOVERY ON OCEAN WORLDS IN OUR SOLAR SYSTEM

NASA is holding a major press conference this week to reveal its latest results on ocean worlds in our own solar system.

At the said mysterious event, the U.S. space agency will disclose findings on its “broader search for life beyond Earth,” as well as things that could potentially affect “future ocean world exploration.”

News On Oceans Beyond Earth
Cassini’s Planned Demise
Other Recent Space Adventures

The announcements, to be given in a news briefing 2 p.m. EDT this Thursday, April 13, will relate to findings from its Cassini spacecraft as well as the Hubble Space Telescope. They will be made at the NASA headquarters’ James Webb Auditorium in Washington, with remote participation from experts across the United States.

“These new discoveries will help inform future ocean world exploration — including NASA’s upcoming Europa Clipper mission planned for launch in the 2020s — and the broader search for life beyond Earth,” NASA said in a statement.

Participants in the media briefing will include Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for Science Mission Directorate; Jim Green, Planetary Science Division director; and astrobiology senior scientist Mary Voytek.

The panel and remotely positioned experts will entertain questions during the event, while the public can also ask their own questions using the hashtag #AskNASA.

The Cassini spacecraft, launched in 1997 and which arrived in the Saturn system in 2004, is bound to end its two-decade mission on Sept. 15 with a planned probe kill. In a final maneuver, Cassini, currently facing a fuel crunch, will be set on a collision course with Saturn’s atmosphere and is expected to “break apart, melt, vaporize, and become a part of the very planet it left Earth 20 years ago to explore,” according to project manager Earl Maize.

This crash has been planned by the agency to avoid contamination of a nearby moon hoped to potentially harbor alien life.

Afterward, NASA’s planned Europa Clipper will position a spacecraft in orbit around Jupiter to perform a detailed probe of moon Europa. The giant planet’s moon has exhibited strong proof of an ocean of liquid water, situated beneath icy crust and which could be hospitable to life.

Cassini has been deemed generally productive given the high-value investigation of Saturn, its rings, and moons. It transmitted, for instance, images that highlighted Enceladus’ geysers with a hint of an ocean underneath, as well as the Earth-like moon Titan.

Other NASA missions are marking their own milestones. Just recently, the New Horizons probe successfully reached the halfway point between Pluto and its second target for flyby, the remote Kuiper Belt object 2014 MU69.

The probe reached this milestone on April 3 at midnight UTC (April 2, 8 p.m. ET), at a distance of 486.19 million miles from Pluto and the same distance to the remote asteroid. New Horizons eyes swooping past the object, located about 1 billion miles beyond Pluto, on Jan. 1, 2019 — another record for space explorations.

New Horizons reached Pluto in July 2015 after its launch from Cape Canaveral in Florida back in January 2006. As Pluto’s first guest from Earth, it is currently 3.5 billion miles from our planet, taking radio signals five hours and 20 minutes to get from the control center in Johns Hopkins University in Maryland to the spacecraft.

MOTO Z2 LEAKS IN A PRESS RENDER, TO SPORT A DUAL CAMERA WITH MOTO MOD SUPPORT

The past few days have been quite interesting especially if you are a Motorola fan. First it was the Moto E4, then the Moto C and C Plus and today we have yet another leak around an upcoming Moto smartphone.

Moto’s flagship last year, the Moto Z, was probably one of the most unique approach towards a modular smartphone design. This year the company is expected to bring a successor in the form of the Moto Z2. According to an alleged press render, you can see that it won’t come with a radical design change. Most of the design queues are going to remain the same.

It still seems to have a slim profile, the 16-pin connectors at the back and a round bulging camera hump. There are minor changes though. The camera module seems to be housing two lenses which means a dual-camera setup. It will be interesting to see how Moto implements the dual setup.

Also, the front facing fingerprint scanner has been changed. The square shaped one from last year has now been replaced with an oval shaped sensor, similar to what we saw on the new Moto G5 series.

There is no information about the hardware, but we expect that Moto will update the internals considering they cannot overhaul the design. In the past we have seen a leak pointing to a Moto Z smartphone running on a Snapdragon 835 SoC.

New Moto Mods are also expected to arrive this year as Moto and Lenovo announced a few at Mobile World Congress when it showcased the new Moto G5 smartphones.

AT&T’S UNLIMITED PLUS WIRELESS PLAN NOW INCLUDES FREE HBO

AT&T’s $85.4 billion acquisition of Time Warner hasn’t yet completed, but the company is already leveraging Time Warner assets to boost its own services – first with its streaming TV service DirecTV Now, which is currently giving out free HBO, and now today it’s rolling out free HBO to AT&T’s “Unlimited Plus” wireless plan subscribers. The channel will be offered to both AT&T video subscribers and wireless-only customers, AT&T says.

For any Unlimited Plus wireless customer who also subscribes to one of AT&T’s video services, including DirecTV Now, DirecTV, or U-verse, the channel will be offered for free through the service they already use. If they had previously signed up for HBO, they’ll no longer have to pay for it. And if they didn’t, it will become free.

This goes beyond the “free HBO” that DirecTV Now was touting earlier, as that was meant to be a limited-time promotion that would expire after a year’s time.

That wasn’t the first time that AT&T used HBO to attract customers. Before, AT&T had launched DirecTV Now with an offer of HBO for only $5 extra per month – well under the price for the streaming service HBO NOW, or the add-on available on rival streaming services, like Sling TV.

Along with the launch of free HBO, AT&T is also incentivizing customers to sign up for its video services by offering a $25 monthly video credit towards DirecTV, internet-only DirecTV Now, or U-verse. This credit remains as long as the customers are on the Unlimited Plus wireless plan.

But you don’t have to subscribe to an AT&T video service to take advantage of the free HBO, AT&T says (though clearly it would like you to do so.) If you don’t, you’ll instead be able to log in to either the DirecTV Now or HBO GO app to watch the HBO content.

DirecTV Now users get three HBO channels (HBO, HBO East, and HBO Family), while DirecTV customers get 10 (East and West coast feeds of HBO, HBO2, HBO Family, as well as HBO Comedy, Latino, Signature, Zone, and On Demand). U-verse customers gain 14 channels.

The Unlimited Plus plan itself includes unlimited data, talk and text, plus 10 GB of Wi-Fi tethering per phone, with speeds that slow after 22 GB of data usage per line.

Streaming HBO doesn’t count against the data cap, a practice known as zero rating.

Zero-rated video services is something rival T-Mobile is also doing, through its Binge On service, which also includes HBO NOW, and most other top video services like Amazon, YouTube, Netflix, Sling TV, Hulu, WatchESPN and more.

Under the Obama administration, the FCC was concerned about zero rating – especially AT&T’s plans to zero rate DirecTV Now and Verizon’s zero rating of go90 [disclosure: Verizon owns TechCrunch parent AOL] – which it felt could give the companies an unfair advantage.

But under the Trump administration, probes into zero rating were killed off, as new FCC chairman said the organization’s focus would no longer be on “denying Americans free data.”

We should also note that free HBO via AT&T’s wireless plan isn’t a promotion for new customers – it will apply to existing subscribers, too.

APPLE’S PATENT APPLICATION SHOWS TOUCH BAR FOUND IN MACBOOK PRO COULD BE ON MAGIC KEYBOARD

The Touch Bar OLED on the latest MacBook Pro is one of its iconic and perhaps coolest features. However, for those utilizing the iMac and Mac Pro, you guys are out of luck, for a while at least.

Apple's latest patent application shows the Cupertino-based tech giant exploring the idea of bringing the Touch Bar and the Touch ID to the new Magic Keyboard. There have been images from the new patents published by the US Patent and Trademark Office last Thursday.

There were 3 patent applications, 20170090596, 20170090597, and 20170090654, all of which identified as  "Keyboard with Adaptive Input Row." These patent applications were filed last September 26 crediting 10 people as inventors.

If these were to come true, it would bring the Touch Bar functionality and fingerprint unlocking feature found on the latest MacBook Pro to the iMac and Mac Pro. As an added bonus, the upcoming Magic Keyboard could also be paired with older MacBook Pro models, MacBook Air, and of course MacBook.

The patent describes the Touch Bar interface as a compact screen offering extra commands that the user can trigger, thus changing based on the task the user is performing and its application.

Plus, Apple could have included the separate keyboard image so that the tech giant could cover as many areas with the tech as possible. However, this does not guarantee that Apple does indeed plan on bringing the Touch Bar functionality to the Magic Keyboard.

But at least they are exploring the idea. You never know, this might actually happen in the near future.

In fact, Apple is already holding discussions with Sonder, the dynamic keyboard maker. This could possibly hint that there is more than meets the eye with these recently published patents.

However, the Cupertino-based tech giant has to solve a couple of issues first like frame-rates when using a wireless connection, battery life, and cost. Although judging by the launch of the new Touch Bar functionality, perhaps cost may not be an impossible roadblock to the future of keyboards.

If you want a detailed look at the Apple's published patents, click here. In the meantime, stay tuned for more updates on whether the Touch Bar functionality and other features found on the latest MacBook Pro will make it to the Magic Keyboard.

UBUNTU SWITCHES TO GNOME DESKTOP AND GIVES UP SMARTPHONE HOPES

Some of you may have been surprised when Canonical's founder Mark Shuttleworth announced Ubuntu Linux was ending its "investment in Unity8, the phone and convergence shell". I wasn't. Ubuntu had long been a cloud power and it's been building its Internet of Things (IoT) reputation. Shuttleworth and his executives finally decided to play to the company's strongest suit.

Say goodbye to Ubuntu's Unity desktop. Starting in 2018, Canonical is switching back to the GNOME interface.

In some ways, it was an easy choice. Shuttleworth wrote, "The cloud and IoT story for Ubuntu is excellent and continues to improve. You all probably know that most public cloud workloads, and most private Linux cloud infrastructures, depend on Ubuntu. You might also know that most of the IoT work in auto, robotics, networking, and machine learning is also on Ubuntu, with Canonical providing commercial services on many of those initiatives."

But, it was also a painful one. Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, had invested blood, sweat, and tears in its Unity interface for smartphones, tablets, and PCs, and its smartphone. Shuttleworth said, "I took the view that if convergence was the future and we could deliver it as free software, that would be widely appreciated both in the free-software community and in the technology industry, where there is substantial frustration with the existing, closed alternatives available to manufacturers. I was wrong on both counts. In the community, our efforts were seen fragmentation not innovation."

Moving forward on the desktop, Ubuntu is abandoning the long-delayed Unity 8 interface to return to the GNOME desktop starting with next year's Ubuntu 18.04 release.

Some will miss Unity. Software designer and Ubuntu user Richard Gaskin wrote, "'I've found Unity more productive, and have come to rely on it like a trusty friend." Ubuntu Touch developer Mitchell Reese said, "We love Unity8! There is so much promise, and you are so close to success!" If Canonical doesn't move forward with Unity, he, for one, is interested in continuing the project as a fork.

Shuttleworth emphasized that while the company won't be working on the smartphone, the desktop remains a high-priority. "I'd like to emphasize our ongoing passion for, investment in, and commitment to, the Ubuntu desktop that millions rely on. We will continue to produce the most usable open-source desktop in the world, to maintain the existing LTS releases, to work with our commercial partners to distribute that desktop, to support our corporate customers who rely on it, and to delight the millions of IoT and cloud developers who innovate on top of it."

This isn't surprising. Dell, among other PC makers, is investing more in Ubuntu laptops.

Other Ubuntu desktop-related efforts, such as the Mir display server, are also presumed to be coming to an end now. Wayland, another open-source display server, will probably replace it in future Ubuntu releases.

Jono Bacon, noted open-source community leader and former Canonical employee, tweeted: "Tough decision, but the right one. Will make a tighter machine and alignment and overall good for the desktop."

On Google+, Bacon added, "While Unity didn't pan out, and there were many good steps and missteps along the way, I am proud that Canonical tried to innovate. Innovation is tough and fraught with risk. The Linux desktop has always been a tough nut to crack, and one filled with an army of voices, but I am proud Canonical gave it a shot even if it didn't succeed its ultimate goals"

Other open-source industry figures such as Nextcloud founder Frank Karlitschek think Ubuntu's desktop move is a smart one. On Google+, Karlitschek wrote, "This is a welcoming surprise." Others, such as Bryan Lunduke, SUSE's social media manager, saw it as Canonical finally abandoning a failed idea. "Official: Ubuntu ditching Unity for GNOME. Called it. Years ago."

Looking ahead, Shuttleworth outlines Ubuntu's future as investing "in the areas which are contributing to the growth of the company. Those are Ubuntu itself, for desktops, servers and VMs, our cloud infrastructure products (OpenStack and Kubernetes) our cloud operations capabilities (MAAS, LXD, Juju, BootStack), and our IoT story in snaps and Ubuntu Core."