What's more excited than a British politician thinking about Miss Piggy? That's right: it's tech! While Twitter exploded with jokes about pork, the tech world has said hello to new smartwatches and smartphones, discovered exciting new notebooks, printed some ears and wondered why you can't add sick on Snapchat. And not only that, but we got through this intro without making any gags about pork scratchings or hambulances. Oink oink! It's week in tech!
Give us a P! Give us an X!
What do they spell? Er… new Nexuses! The new 2015 Nexuses have names, and they are Nexus 5X and 6P respectively. Google hasn't said what the letters stand for, so we'll just guess: our money's on Xylophone and Perineum. The LG-made Nexus 5X is the slightly smaller flagship, and it'll be launched next week for shipping in October. We're expecting the even bigger Nexus 6P to launch then too. Both devices are expected to show off Android M in all its glory.
iPhone 6S, watchOS 2 and unsafe apps
The iPhone 6S – the S was introduced to mean "speed" way back when the 3GS came out – looks awfully like its predecessor, but there are lots of new things to be excited about. Gareth Beavis explains: "Apple's done what we all expected – finely balanced its latest phone. 3D Touch is a genuine innovation, and the phone works fluidly at nearly every task."
The watchOS 2 update finally rolled out this week too, bringing some interesting new features to the Apple Watch after a last-minute bug discovery delayed the original release, but Apple's woes weren't over: this week it had to pull hundreds of iOS apps from the App Store after the discovery of malware called XcodeGhost. The malware came from developers using counterfeit copies of Xcode, Apple's own software for making iOS and Mac apps.
Slimming Pebbles
What's more important in a smartwatch: style or battery life? Pebble, maker of not-that-pretty smartwatches that last for ages, has taken a new direction with its Pebble Time Round: the world's thinnest, lightest smartwatch looks great but has a battery that needs charging after two days, so now you have the choice of a pretty Pebble with short battery life or a more lumpy one like the Pebble Time that lasts a lot longer. You can reserve the Round now on the Pebble website for £229 ($249).
Nvidia gives laptops serious graphics grunt
For years laptops have been the poor relations of desktop PCs graphics-wise: cutting-edge graphics cards have been too big and too power-hungry for mobile computing. No more, says NVIDIA: it's stuck a desktop-class GTX 980 into what Kane Fulton calls "a new fleet of monster gaming machines." The move is all about 4K video and VR, which needs serious horsepower to deliver realistic graphics. No prices yet, but you don't need to be Mystic Meg to predict that they'll probably be quite expensive.
The best laptops for gaming right now…
If you prefer portability to sheer power but still want to get your game on, Techradar can help: we've updated our list of the very best gaming laptops in the world to cover the latest Skylake processors and spec bumps. From slim and light to oversized and overspecced behemoths, we've got the right laptops for every kind of gamer and every kind of budget.
…and the best phones too
What's the best mobile phone in the world today? The Kindle Fire, of course! We kid. Our updated guide to the best phones around has seen some movement, and we suspect the rankings are going to change again once a certain Cupertino company's newest models start shipping this weekend.
Why Oculus isn't VR vapourware
To some observers, VR has looked suspiciously like vapourware – a product that's announced but never actually ships. We've been promised endless delights that never quite made it to our heads. But as Lily Prasuethsut discovers, that's because engineers at Oculus are rushing around like mad trying to solve some really complex problems. We think the Oculus will be worth the wait.
Rainbow sick: no longer on Snapchat
Did you get excited about the new Snapchat lenses that enabled you to add rainbow sick or scary faces to your photos? Then we've got bad news: they're gone. As a spokesperson for Snapchat told techradar: "A new Lens appears each day, with one dropping off when a new one is added." Don't get too attached to mustache man or cracked screen.
Ear we go, ear we go
3D printing plastic is sooooo 2014. This year we're all about printing ears, thanks to Biobots. Their BioBot 1 is a $10,000 3D printer that uses a liquid containing a mixture of cells, and so far it's been used to print a replica of Van Gogh's ear. That's not all, though: in the future Biobots hopes to print blood vessels and even create organs, which is potentially life changing. However, before that happens we'll need some law changing: 3D printing things for human use hasn't been approved by organisations such as the US FDA, and the public health implications may just open a great big box marked "Pandora".
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Original source: Week in Tech: Week in Tech: Poison Apple apps and shiny Pebbles.
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