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News Weekly is our column where we highlight and summarize some of the week’s top stories so you can catch up on the latest tech news.
This is Android Central’s News Weekly, your go-to source for a concise roundup of the week’s most significant tech stories. This is where we delve into the top headlines that provide the latest developments and innovations contributing to the digital landscape.
This week we get into the nitty-gritty of the new AI on the block Deep Seek, Garmin watch owners had a rough few days, Samsung and the S Pen saga, Meta announced its earnings, and Pebble watches made a comeback. Let’s get into it.
DeepSeek in the spotlight
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DeepSeek is what’s been on most people’s minds this past week as a Chinese AI model has decided to go head-to-head with its U.S.-rival AI companies. So what exactly is this?
DeepSeek is an open-source AI ChatBot based on Meta’s free and open-source Llama 3.3, trained by the DeepSeek team. But what’s fueling the hype is that the company claims they developed this LLM at an exponentially lower price than most other LLMs we know of today. By comparison, OpenAI charges $200 a month for ChatGPT Pro, while DeepSeek R1 gives you the same skills as the LLM for free.
While understanding how this large language model is gaining its skills, AI analyst Alexander Doria confirmed in a recent X post the chip powering the DeepSeek R1 model, stating that DeepSeek’s R1 large-language model (LLM) was first trained using NVIDIA’s H100, but now it fully functions on Huawei’s Ascend 910C chip to generate responses.
DeepSeek seems to be shifting the norm by making well-developed AI accessible to everyone for free and being independent of U.S-based chip companies putting them at risk. For the first time, NVIDIA took a massive hit on Monday, losing $593 billion in market value as their stocks tanked.
It remains to be seen how this AI model will take on the big players in the business and whether it will be able to keep up its hype.
Garmin’s blue triangle of death
(Image credit: Michael Hicks / Android Central)
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Garmin watch users had a rough 2-day period dealing with their wearables, as most of them were in a frozen state.
Several users globally were impacted by a Garmin GPS-related outage that made these wearables practically useless and stuck on the boot screen or displaying a blue triangle. Several Forerunner models (265, 965, 255, and 955), the Garmin Venu 2 and 3, the Garmin Fenix 7, and the Epix Pro Gen 2, and more faced this issue.
Initially, Connect Garmin’s Status website indicated that Activity Uploads are down, with the warning “We are aware of an issue causing some devices to be stuck on the start-up screen or a blue triangle.”
(Image credit: Reddit)
The company also issued a temporary fix to those affected, asking them to hard reset their devices. DC Rainmaker reported that the issue stems from a bad “satellite pre-cache file” that was putting these watches in a bootloop.
The recommendation is still to hold down your watch’s Light or Power button for up to 30 seconds to turn it off, then turn it back on and see if the problem is resolved. After two days of experimenting with a fix, Garmin said, “We have resolved the underlying issue causing some devices to be stuck on the startup screen or a blue triangle” on a banner located on its Garmin Support page.
And if you “Press and hold the power/light button on the device until the watch shuts off,” turn it back on, then sync it with your Connect app or plug it into your computer’s Garmin Express app, it should solve your watch’s issue and replace the malicious file that caused this issue.
Samsung and the S Pen saga
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Earlier this week, Samsung had to do a bit of damage control on the S Pen situation. It all began when a Samsung blog and some Amazon listings suggested that a Bluetooth S Pen that is compatible with the Galaxy S25 Ultra could be bought separately.
The Galaxy S25 Ultra launched without a Bluetooth-enabled S Pen, built-in or sold separately. This is why, when a Samsung Business Insights blog suggested that Galaxy S25 Ultra owners could buy a Bluetooth S Pen separately, it came as a relief for some. Additionally, some Amazon listings for the official S25 Ultra S Pen in certain regions also mention Bluetooth support. Samsung’s official listings didn’t mention this; however, the situation quickly snowballed since the listing shows only the standard Galaxy S25 Ultra S Pen and the S Pen Pro.
Later, attempts to link the S Pen Pro to the S25 Ultra during a media briefing failed, and a Samsung exec eventually confirmed the two aren’t compatible.
Fast forward two days, Samsung had to remove all mentions of a Bluetooth-enabled S Pen from the blog post.
(Image credit: Michael Hicks / Android Central)
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On Thursday (Jan. 30), Meta reported another record-breaking quarter for Q4 2024, showing a 21% uptick in revenue over the same quarter in 2023. Meta earned $48 billion in revenue during Q4 2024, and the company’s full-year earnings totaled $164 billion, a 22% increase over 2023’s $134 billion in overall revenue.
Meta attributed these massive numbers to ads revenue, bringing in a record-breaking $46.7 billion, while Meta’s Reality Labs division also broke records with $1.08 billion in revenue. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that ad revenue was up for two primary reasons: 3.35 billion people used Meta products and services in 2024, delivering more ad impressions, while the average price per ad simultaneously increased 14% YoY.
Looking into 2025, Meta will be launching “a new, more personalized AI,” and the company expects to reach 1 billion users by year’s end. The company teased 2025 as the year “we get back to the OG Facebook” but didn’t expand on that. Instagram, Reels, WhatsApp, and Threads also are expected to continue to grow throughout 2025.
Furthermore, Meta revealed that it plans to have billions of smart glasses on the market, which sounds like a hefty goal given the current growth trajectory of the market.
Pebble watch resurrection
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Pebble watches have been extinct, so to speak, since the past decade, and this week, PebbleOS’s code was made open-source by Google. The Google Open Source Blog announced that it will be sharing the Github repository for the PebbleOS source code.
Although some “proprietary source code” was removed, anyone can take the remaining code and generate a new version of PebbleOS, with functionality like “notifications, media controls, fitness tracking, and support for custom apps and watch faces” available.
Now Pebble’s former founder, Eric Migicovsky, has announced plans to bring back the brand, launching a new watch with “the same specs and features as Pebble, though with some fun new stuff as well.”
Now that PebbleOS is officially open source, Migicovsky and his “small team” can work on bringing us a new and improved Pebble-like watch.
“Lessons were learned last time,” Migicovsky admits in his blog post, referring to how he oversaw Pebble’s popularity on Kickstarter and the rise and fall of the company — having to sell it to Fitbit.
More stories this week
Those are some of the biggest stories from this week. Meanwhile, here are some other stories that are worth catching up on:
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