Phone companies asked to help tackle rise in thefts, Huawei names tri-fold smartphone
Phone companies are to be called into the Home Office to discuss measures to tackle crime after snatch thefts more than doubled in England and Wales over the last year. Government figures indicate that, in the year to March, there were an estimated 78,000 thefts from the person – defined as items such as phones, bags and wallets being taken without force being used or threatened. The figure for the previous year was 31,000. Policing Minister Dame Diana Johnson said the government wanted manufacturers to ensure that any stolen phone could be permanently disabled to prevent it being sold second-hand. BBC
Health authorities in Sweden have urged parents to ban all screen time for two-year-olds and limit teenagers to just three hours a day. The new screen time guidelines, set by the nation’s Public Health Agency, come amid widespread global concerns about the effects of TV, tablet and smartphone usage on children. Swedish officials warned of a “sleep crisis” among teenagers and said phones and tablets should be kept out of bedrooms. Jakob Forssmed, Sweden’s public health minister, said: “For too long, smartphones and other screens have been allowed to enter every aspect of our children’s lives.” Telegraph
Huawei has been teasing its first tri-fold smartphone for a few weeks now and we finally have a name for the device – Mate XT. Huawei’s Mate series is one of two flagship smartphone series from Huawei alongside the Pura series. The Mate series is usually geared towards early adopters and was the first lineup from the brand to feature a foldable device with the Mate X back in 2019. Mate XT will be part of the Ultimate Design brand which is the highest-end lineup from Huawei and a spiritual successor to the Huawei – Porsche Design partnership which ended back in 2022. GSM Arena
Apple’s new Macs with M4 processors are set to go on sale in November, we’ve heard from the rumor mill. MacRumors, to be precise, has word from a supposedly reliable source that all Apple’s apparently planned M4-toting Macs are going to be released in November. As the tech site points out, this doesn’t preclude Apple from announcing the M4 Macs before November. As ever, the standard way of doing things is to reveal the hardware first, and it doesn’t go on sale until a bit later. Tech Radar
Public transport charity Campaign for Better Transport (CBT) has called upon chancellor Rachel Reeves to impose a ‘pay-per-mile’ scheme on British drivers, days after motoring service company RAC described such a scheme as ‘the way forward’. Pay-per-mile’ schemes (also known as ‘road pricing’) have been discussed due to an increasing shortfall in fuel duty due to the adoption of electric vehicles. Duties levied on petrol, diesel and other fuels currently generate around £25 billion a year in revenue for the Treasury. Yahoo!
Uber and other ride-hailing apps should be forced to publish data on drivers’ workloads so that regulators can tackle exploitation and cut carbon emissions, campaigners argue. Analysis by the pressure group Worker Info Exchange suggests drivers for Uber and its smaller rivals may have missed out on more than £1.2bn in wages and costs last year because of the way they are compensated. Its report claims that ride-hailing apps – and food delivery services such as Deliveroo – are able to operate “a business model reliant on an oversupply of vehicles to service an always-on, on-demand marketplace and the exploitation of workers often trapped in debt and in-work poverty”. Guardian
