If you have not known yet, Google Drive is not completely free anymore. If you check your gmail accounts and Google tells you that your storage is running out, that is because Google has brought down the capacity for free users to 15GB of storage. 15GB of storage is really not a lot and runs out pretty quickly.
Google Photos used to also offer unlimited photo storage, as long as you are not demanding for a full-resolution photo backup. Google ended that service in June and users would have to start paying for storage services under the Google One storage subscription package. Users can start with 100GB plan for MYR 8.49 a month onward. Users can opt for up to 30TB in cloud storage too for up US$ 150 (MYR 624*) onward.
The subscription plans are quite robust for users though. You can opt for 200GB, 2TB, 10TB, and 20TB storage options, if 100GB is too little, or 30TB too much for you. There was nothing between the jump between 2TB and 10TB options before this though, and that puts users in a bit of a pickle.
Google has an answer now with a 5TB Google One package. They also have priced it exactly in between the 2TB and 10TB options at US$ 25 (MYR 104*). There is a small caveat here though.
Source: Google
Eagle eyed viewers might find that most of the prices quoted are in US$. That is not on purpose though, Malaysia only gets the Google One storage at up to 2TB. You can subscribe to the 2TB Google One plan for MYR 42.99/month, or MYR 429.99 for an entire year’s worth of 2TB storage. There are no mentions on when Malaysia will get a higher tier Google One plan, if it ever happens at all.
As mentioned, the Google One storage plan is built to be Google’s answer to Google Photos backup and Google Drive. You still get to use Google Drive for free, but you are limited to 15GB in storage. The Google Drive app is also available for free on Google Play Store and Apple App Store.
When I was a young boy growing up in Jersey in the British Channel Islands, I’d turn on the grainy TV to warm up so I could watch sports with my father and brother. FORMULA 1 racing was the most exciting sport for us, even though the cars often sped by faster than the camera operator and the technology could keep up.
Now, racing is covered in a far richer and more engaging way, especially since F1 launched F1 Insights powered by AWS in 2018, bringing data analytics as a live feed to my screens. Watching on my phone in Singapore, I love the real-time Car Performance Scores, which include thousands of data points streamed every second from every car on the track, giving me a much better understanding of where my favorite car ranks in the field – and what’s driving its performance.
It’s exactly this type of real-time information that businesses need to understand their performance, so they can make decisions rapidly and keep up with market changes. During the pandemic, we have learned that speed matters, whether you’re a digital native or a more traditional organization. As all businesses faced social distancing measures, those who survived the pandemic adopted new ways to do business, and they adapted fast using the cloud.
Some moved faster than others. Some enterprises with legacy systems seem resigned to moving slowly. Even today, I often hear comments like, “It’s just the nature of our size and heritage.”
We must debunk that myth. Speed is not preordained by heritage. Speed is a choice that any organization can make if it is prepared to harness the cloud. As a recent McKinsey article put it: “For CEOs, cloud adoption is not just an engine for revenue growth and efficiency. The cloud’s speed, scale, innovation, and productivity benefits are essential to the pursuit of broader digital business opportunities, now and well into the future.”
Culture Change
Many organizations can look for ways to change their culture and embrace speed, creating an environment that values urgency. In a culture designed for speed, people are actively encouraged to experiment and are rewarded for it. Although, flipping a switch won’t suddenly deliver speed – companies have to build muscle while they learn how to innovate at pace, all the time.
Amazon has been around for nearly 27 years, and to this day we maintain what we call a “Day 1” culture – approaching everything we do with the entrepreneurial spirit of being on the first day of your organization. We do this by giving our teams autonomy, on the understanding that they operate within the guardrails of our culture.
We believe the more we can equip people to make high judgment decisions at all levels, the better off we, and our customers, are. We encourage employees to make high-velocity, high-quality decisions by setting the vision and context for teams. Since Amazon was founded in 1994, we’ve consistently operated based on three big ideas that every employee knows. The first is to obsess over customers. This is cemented in our mission statement to be “earth’s most customer-centric company.” The second is that if we focus on the customer it will force us to innovate – to look at new ways of solving problems on behalf of our customers. The third is to be stubborn in sustaining our long-term vision while being flexible in how we get there.
As Jeff Bezos explains, “In a traditional corporate hierarchy, a junior executive comes up with a new idea that they want to try. They have to convince their boss, their boss’s boss, their boss’s boss’s boss and so on – any ‘no’ in that chain can kill the whole idea.” Systems and processes that identify, validate, and approve new ideas from within the business are invaluable in democratizing company-wide idea exploration and driving experimentation in business as usual. For example, at Amazon, we make it easy for those closest to our customers to raise ideas for speedy review. Imagine a time-wasting process or one that results in a poor customer experience. People complain about it regularly, but they know that it can be so hard to implement change, that it’s not worth the effort. The problem is put in the “too hard” basket and no one says anything. Now, imagine actually rewarding teams for suggesting a fix. Imagine if the process was fast and painless and resulted in change. How many great ideas would happen every week?
Thinking Big and Acting Small
Thinking big is the hallmark of innovation. But, as we look to move quickly and embrace greater experimentation, we should also look to de-risk the process. This means recognizing that the most powerful innovations often come through simplification. One small, seemingly insignificant cost or time-saving can drive enormous benefits for both companies and their customers when applied at scale. Thinking big also means starting big ideas with very small, reversible experiments. At Amazon, we look for “two-way doors.” If an experiment fails (as they often do), we can back out of the decision rather than being committed to moving ahead through a “one-way door,” which can be expensive and difficult to undo. This way, you learn quickly with very low stakes.
A great example of innovative thinking in the face of legacy technology is FashionValet. As the modest fashion brand grew, its multi-environment hybrid technology infrastructure was unable to keep up with demand during product launches. In 2019, FashionValet went all-in on AWS to optimize processes and meet growing demand. With Auto Scaling Groups and RDS Aurora features, FashionValet can now run 10x more servers during product launches to meet demand, then scale down automatically with no downtime. Using this technology, FashionValet has also accelerated their product development timeline by 200% and reduced their infrastructure management costs by 75%.
Companies don’t have to bet their business on innovation, but they shouldn’t let legacy thinking hold them back. By actively empowering teams, clearing the path to “Yes,” and using small experiments, companies can build capability to promote high-velocity decisions – helping them operate at the speed of F1.
Edge computing is the ability to give life to the transformative use cases that businesses are dreaming up today and bring real-time decision making to last-mile locales. This can include a far-flung factory or train roaring down the tracks, someone’s connected home, or their car speeding down the highway or even in space. Who thought we’d be running Kubernetes in space?
This shows that edge computing can transform the way we live, and we are doing it right now.
Why Collaboration Is Critical
Edge technologies are blending the digital and physical worlds in a new way, and that combination is resonating at a human level. This human resonance might sound like an aspirational achievement, but it is already here. A great example is when we used AR/VR to improve safety on the factory floor.
Continued collaboration, however, is necessary to keep enabling breakthrough successes. Across industries and organizations, we are all highly dependent on one another. Thinking about the telecommunications and industrial sectors, in particular, there is a mutually supportive, symbiotic relationship between these industries—5G development cannot be successful without industrial use cases, which, in turn, are based on telco technologies.
However, numerous challenges remain: reducing network complexity, maintaining security, improving agility, and ensuring a vibrant ecosystem where the only way to address and solve those is by tapping into the collective wisdom of the community.
With open-source, we can unify and empower communities on a broad scale. The open-source ecosystem brings people together to focus on a common problem to solve with software. That shared purpose can turn isolated efforts into collective ones so that changes are industry-wide and reflect a wide range of needs and values.
The collaboration that open source makes possible continues to ignite tremendous change and alter our future in so many ways, making it the innovation engine for industries.
If we collaborate on 5G and edge in this manner, nascent technologies could become exciting common foundations in the same way that Linux and Kubernetes have because when we work together, the only limit to these possibilities is our imagination.
From Maps to Apps and Much More
Do you remember having to use a paper-based map to figure out driving directions? Flash forward to today: Look at the applications we take for granted on our phones or in our homes that allow us to change our driving route in real-time to avoid traffic, or to monitor and grant access to our front doors—to the point that these have shaped how we interact with our environments and each other. Yet not too long ago, many of these things were unimaginable. We barely had cloud technology, we were in the transition from 3G to 4G, and smartphones were new.
But there was important work being done by lots of people who were improving upon the core technologies. The convergence of three technology trends, as it turns out, unlocked a hugely disruptive opportunity: a cloud-native, mobile-device-enabled transportation service that picked you up wherever you were and took you wherever you wanted to go.
This opportunity was only possible because each trend built on the others to create a truly novel offering. Without one of these trends, the applications from the ride-sharing apps of the world would not have been the same or as disruptive. Imagine yourself scrambling to find a WiFi hotspot on the street corner, whipping out your laptop outside a restaurant while standing in the rain, or starting your business by first constructing a massive data centre. The convergence of smartphones, 4G networks, and cloud computing has enabled a new world.
Today we are creating the next set of technologies that will become the things so embedded in our lives and so indispensable to our daily habits that we will wonder how we ever got by without them. Are you ready to be wearing clothes with sensors in them that tell you how healthy you are?
The possibilities with edge technologies are equally as exciting. It starts with the marriage of the digital world with the physical world. Adding in pervasive connectivity—leveraging a common 5G and edge platform—we can transform how operational technologies interact with the physical world and that changes everything.
The Future Is Now
We are creating this new world that is hard to imagine, yet it is not so foreign because we have seen how this story has played out before. Expect these new technologies to have profound implications for humanity—in our daily lives, how we interact with one another, and the social fabric of our world.
We have only to look at how open source has empowered collaboration and how working together has helped people across organizations and industries build more robust, shared platforms more quickly and differentiate on top of them—with apps and capabilities built on the foundation of Kubernetes and Linux, for example.
Just when we thought AMD is done with being the best at gaming, they proved that one title is never enough. They want to retain their title as the most powerful ever, with a full-stop right after. So, they went ahead and introduced what seems to be the most powerful processing chips in the world, the EPYC 7003 series server processors.
The new EPYC 7003 series is the third-generation server processors by AMD. That also means that it gets the Zen 3 architecture that the AMD Ryzen 5000 series line-up got. That same architecture also means that AMD’s processing core clusters gets to access all of the available cache memory module when necessary, instead of just half of it. Again, if you were doing some research with AMD’s latest Ryzen 5000 with Zen 3 architecture, it might sound like something simple and small. The results are quite significant though.
At least in terms of a server, Zen 3 architecture also allows the cores to process more data at any single time than before. In practical terms, that also means a much faster processor compared to before. Of course, AMD’s implementation also means more efficient power consumption.
The headline figures for EPYC’s flagship is up to 64 cores and 128 threads. With 64 cores, the processor features 256MB of cache, that is the first indication that this is not your regular consumer gaming PC stuff. All cores are clocked at 2.45GHz and can be boosted up to 3.675GHz when necessary.
Of course, these chips are also embedded with extra security measurements and algorithms. In a server, data center, cloud seservice, and virtualisation environment, protecting your data is of utmost importance. Security, in this case, has to start from the processors itself with AMD’s own Infinity Guard suite encryption technologies to keep everything it processes secure.
Of course, you are not going to see the AMD EPYC processors out on the street. These are highly specialised processors made for Artificial Intelligence implementation, data centers, and data backbones for larger organisations. These are the stuff that keeps thigs like Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services running for you.
The AMD EPYC processors range from 32 cores to 64 cores. The EPYC processors are usually the base for AMD’s Ryzen Threadripper platforms. There are obviously no announcements made yet on the availability of the prosumer processor platforms at this time. If they are launching a Threadripper soon though, the AMD EPYC processors could probably give you an insight to what you can expect.
COVID-19 poses a unique challenge to businesses, forcing them to adopt practices which many only saw further down the road when it came to their digitization plans. In fact, we’ve seen the effects of the pandemic on many businesses who have failed to adapt or adopt plans to build in resilience in these unprecedented times. That said, the big question remains, “How can businesses be more resilient with the COVID-19 reality?”.
There are many factors that lend itself to a business’s resilience but one of the biggest factors is the company’s progress in their plans for digitization. Conor McNamara, Managing Director of ASEAN at Amazon Web Services (AWS), highlights that a company’s progress towards digitization, particularly in their adoption of cloud technologies, has been one of the determining factors of resilience during these times. He has also highlighted that the transition to the cloud isn’t simply a technological one, it’s a multifaceted one that builds in capacity, increases agility, changes mindsets, and transforms the culture of an organisation.
Thriving Businesses Have Used COVID-19 as an Impetus for Digitization
No one can deny it. The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way that companies and businesses need to operate. Research has shown that the new realities of the pandemic have led to an increase in demand for resources such as the internet. This is inevitably spurred by the increased adoption of work from home policies necessitated by lockdowns the world over – a clear indication that our business realities have changed. This is corroborated by AWS, which reported an increased uptake of services such as Amazon Chime, their web-conferencing platform, Amazon Workspaces and other productivity related services.
“The COVID-19 pandemic has underscored the importance of digital transformation across all industries. So far indications are that organizations, including those in ASEAN, have already adopted DX plans and/or accelerated their transformation plans have been known to have coped better with the crisis.”
Daphne Chung, Research Director, IDC Asia Pacific (excluding Japan) cloud services, and software research group
That said, digitization doesn’t happen overnight. Companies have to create an environment that allows and empowers staff and decision makers to adopt technologies such as AWS. The adoption of public and private cloud technologies have allowed many AWS customers to adapt to the new realities more seamlessly. In fact, Globe Telecom was able to spin up virtual call centers with Amazon Connect which allowed them to adapt to the new realities with ease and even increase staff productivity since the pandemic hit. What’s more, the company was able to affect this transition in 24 hours. Of course, the reality is that not many companies will be able to do this.
“Many businesses and organizations have now understood the importance of the cloud and are committed more than ever to get their business on the cloud. At AWS, we keep many organizations functioning, and allow them to adapt when a crisis such as the pandemic occurs.”
Conor McNamara, Managing Director of ASEAN at Amazon Web Services
The new realities of the pandemic have allowed companies to expedite their plans for digitization and cloud adoption. Those who have been successful in taking advantage of the new realities as an impetus for plans already in the pipeline are the ones who have most demonstrated the most resilience with the current situation.
It’s always been said that digitization is a journey. Yet, we never think to ask who would be the best to guide and determine the course the company takes. Conor McNamara stresses that the business resilience of any given orgranisation is very dependent on the company’s executives. Decisions and policies made by CXOs are what will enable companies to maximize the opportunity that COVID-19 has presented to accelerate a company’s digital trajectory.
It’s pretty simple; when the decision to adopt cloud technologies and further advance the company’s digital journey comes from the level of CXOs, it naturally sets off a cascade which will allow companies to think differently. The CEO’s acceptance that the future of business is in the cloud sets off a cascade of events that start with the search for and upskilling of staff to meet the new needs of the business. The demand for skills that enable the company to be competitive and prepared for further advancements in their journey. It also creates a new mindset mired in the need to be agile and proactive to meet customer needs.
IDC sees an opportunity to manage the downturn better by using technology to minimize the impact of the current crisis and emerge on the other side of the curve resilient, more digitally fit and agile, and ultimately, better equipped to capture their share of the new opportunities as part of the “next normal”.
Daphne Chung, Research Director, IDC Asia Pacific (excluding Japan) cloud services, and software research group
This impetus prepares businesses to handle situations like the current pandemic. The skills, demands and needs of businesses literally changed overnight as countries began to lockdown. Brick and mortar businesses were forced to consider adopting digital and cloud technologies to keep their businesses viable. Businesses which were already making the shift to cloud and digital technologies with CXO driven policies have so far been the most resilient and adaptable.
In fact, the current realities have been used as an opportunity to upskill workforces. AWS shares that since the beginning of the lockdowns, there has been a sharp uptick in the demand for certification courses and trainings in their AWS Education platform.
It’s a People Related Change
Perhaps the most important quote we can share from Conor McNamara is this: “[Digital Transformation] is a People related change”. He said this while he was explaining some of the new realities AWS’s customers have been facing – and when it comes to it, it seems like the statement rings true in every aspect of a business’ digital transformation; every step of the way involves dealing with people.
The digital transformation journey is one that involves a major cultural change. A change that shifts the mindset of preparedness to deal with any given situation. Creating a culture of work which prepares staff for ambiguity and change. In some cases, these businesses have made failure a norm. They adopt providers such as AWS to minimise the cost of failure and continue to innovate. This is one of the hallmarks of a business which has been able to deal with the realities of the pandemic. These companies are ready or have already adopted cloud and are prepared for the new work from home norm; it wouldn’t be too farfetched to say that they may be the ones best prepared for the next norm post COVID.
Adopting cloud and shifting to digital usually has the connotation of being cold and impersonal. However, one take away from businesses that are showing resilience is that it couldn’t be further from the truth. These businesses have shifted their focus to their clients and customers building solutions catered to their needs. Perhaps more importantly, their digital transformation and shift to the cloud has made them more cognizant to the needs of their clients and customers.
Business Resilience is Built from the Top Down and Empowered by the right technologies
Essentially, business resilience is built from the top down with policies spearheaded by CXOs and CEOs that drive a cultural change in the company; one which prepares them for sudden and constant change, allowing businesses to be agile and adaptable. That said, these changes are empowered by companies such as AWS who provide the cost optimizations and technologies that allow this shift to happen. This has been tried and tested with the harsh realities of the pandemic.
The Samsung Galaxy S20 was launched earlier this year in March. It was touted as a very capable device with what plenty of fans wanted from a Samsung Galaxy device. In theory, it sounded like the Samsung Galaxy S20 was a capable smartphone with all its bells and whistles. In reality, its price point is a little steep for its price point and that made it a little less desirable.
It has come to this, the new smartphone that will correct all the problems with the ultra-premium S20 line-up. The regular Samsung Galaxy S20 line-up starts at MYR 3,599. The new Samsung Galaxy S20 Fan Edition (FE) will go for MYR 3,399 instead, even cheaper than the regular Samsung Galaxy S20 device.
Source: Samsung
What do you get for MYR 3,399? You get the best parts of the Samsung Galaxy S20 device in a package at a more reachable price point, in short. You get a 32-Megapixel front-facing camera greeting you as you lift the device to face you. This is an even higher resolution than what you are getting from a regular Samsung Galaxy S20.
The display might seem like a little bit of a downgrade at first with no curved edges. It is not technically a downgrade though as you are still working with a Full HD+ 120Hz display for a super smooth experience. It is not like you are getting a much smaller display with the Super AMOLED Infinity-O display measuring at 6.5-inch.
Source: Samsung
Turn it around and you see a sort of matte textured back that makes it stand out in the crowd a little bit. It comes in six funky colours too, to fit your personalities and moods. It comes in Cloud Red, Cloud Orange, Cloud Lavender, Cloud Mint, Cloud Navy, and Cloud White. These colours are completely new to the Samsung Galaxy S line up and is more inline with the Samsung Galaxy Note20 series colours as well, so some premium touch there.
The matte backing surrounds a triple camera module that is the Samsung Galaxy S20 FE’s main shooters. It houses a main 12-Megapixel camera flanked by a 12-Megapixel ultra-wide sensor and an 8-Megapixel telephoto sensor making the photo trinity. You can take advantage of all the cameras at a single touch via Samsung’s Single Take feature in the camera app. The telephoto lens and main shooter combination give the Samsung Galaxy S20 FE the very impressive 30X Space Zoom capabilities too.
Within all the prettiness and IP68 rated body is an immensely powerful Qualcomm Snapdragon 865. No Exynos here, they have listened to the fans. Paired to the chipset is an ample 8GB of RAM too (up to). Thanks to the chipset too, you get 5G connectivity out of the box.
Source: Samsung
Source: Samsung
Source: Samsung
Source: Samsung
Source: Samsung
Source: Samsung
Source: Samsung
Source: Samsung
To top it all off is a big 4,500mAh battery that should keep the device running all day. The large internal battery is also a Super-Fast Charging capable battery as well, so if you do have a charger capable of 25W of output, your device can charge from an empty battery to full in less than one hour and a half. The charger that is included with the Samsung Galaxy S20 FE though is a 15W charger, a regular Fast Charging wall adapter.
Dual SIM model (Hybrid SIM slot) – One Nano SIM and one Nano SIM or one MicroSD slot (up to 1TB)
Battery
4,500mAh (typical)
Charging
Fast Wireless Charging 2.0 USB PD 3.0 (PPS) certified Fast Charging for wired charging (AFC and QC2.0 compatible) *WPC certified Wireless charging *Wireless PowerShare
OS
Android 10
Network
[5G] 5G Non-Standalone (NSA), Sub6 [LTE] Enhanced 4×4 MIMO, Up to 5CA, LTE D/L Cat.19 (1.6Gbps),LTE U/L Cat.18 (211Mbps) [Wi-Fi] Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac/ax 2.4G+5GHz, HE80, MIMO, 1024-QAM, Up to 1.2Gbps Download / Up to 1.2Gbps Upload [Bluetooth] Bluetooth® v 5.0, USB type-C, NFC, Location (GPS, Galileo, Glonass, BeiDou)
Lock type: pattern, PIN, password, Fingerprint sensor, Face recognition
Audio
[Stereo speakers sound by AKG] Surround sound with Dolby Atmos technology (Dolby Digital, Dolby Digital Plus included.) – [Ultra high quality audio playback] UHQ 32-bit &DSD64/128 support PCM: Up to 32 bits, DSD: DSD64/128 * DSD64 and DSD128 playback can be limited depending on the file format. [Audio playback format] MP3, M4A, 3GA, AAC, OGG, OGA, WAV, WMA, AMR, AWB, FLAC, MID, MIDI, XMF, MXMF, IMY, RTTTL, RTX, OTA, APE, DSF, DFF [Bluetooth] Dual Audio: connect two Bluetooth devices to the Galaxy S20 FE to play audio through the two devices simultaneously. * The two connected devices may exhibit a slight difference in sound output. Scalable Codec: Enhanced Bluetooth connection under ambient radio frequency interference. * Available only for certain accessories made by Samsung. [Recording] Recording quality is improved with the High AOP Mic that minimizes distortion in noisy environments. * AOP: Acoustic Overload Point
Video
[Video playback format] MP4, M4V, 3GP, 3G2, WMV, ASF, AVI, FLV, MKV, WEBM [TV connection] Wireless: Smart View (screen mirroring 1080p at 30 fps) Wired: supports DisplayPort over USB type-C. Supports video out when connecting via HDMI Adapter. (DisplayPort 4K UHD at 60 fps)
Water Resistance
IP68
Price and Availability
The Samsung Galaxy S20 FE is now available for pre-order from Samsung Experience Stores, Authorised Partners and Samsung Malaysia’s E-Store until the 8th of October 2020. As mentioned, there are six colours available for the Samsung Galaxy S20 FE – Cloud Red, Cloud Orange, Cloud Lavender, Cloud Mint, Cloud Navy, and Cloud White. If you pre-ordered your device, you get a UV Sterilizer Wireless Charger box, Samsung’s One-Time Screen Crack Protection, and a Clear Standing Cover worth MYR 586 in total. You can get your hands on one for MYR 3,399 (US$ 699.99*) onward.
*Official U.S. pricing based on Samsung U.S. website
