Business Articles

Nokia has just completed its latest product unveiling, and it's a new version of the 8.3 5G. This smartphone is a variant optimized for the Verizon network in the United States. To this end, it has much the same specs as the original mid-ranger on which it is based, but also has 3 "powerful" antennae for its carrier's mmWave 5G.

Square Enix has published its earnings report for the last 6 months (ending on September 30, 2020). It claims to have made 172.7 billion yen (~US$1.7 billion), or 46% more in sales year-on-year (YoY), for this period. This was attributed to strong performance in areas of its business such as its games (mobile titles including) and merchandising arms.

The AMD Ryzen 9 5950X has already shown its overclocking potential with an all-core boost clock of 6.362 GHz. The Vermeer processor has pushed past the 15,000 mark in Cinebench R20 too, albeit at 1.692 V and on LN2 cooling.

GoPro has released its first quarterly financial report since the launch of its 2020 flagship, the HERO9 Black action-camera. It has revealed that the company now has a figure for total revenues that is over 100% what it was for the same quarter of 2019 (3Q2019). It also now has 35% more subscribers compared to 2Q2020, as well as a net profit for its latest quarter.

Qualcomm concluded its latest fiscal year (FY) on September 27, 2020. As a result, it has now revealed that it made approximately US$23.5 billion in this year, about $8.4 billion of which came from its fourth quarter. The company attributed this success to its focus on 5G hardware and expertise.

Smartphone shipments in India - one of the top 3 markets worldwide - shrank by a worrying 48% in the second quarter of 2020 (2Q2020). However, three months later, the story has changed: the same market had posted year-on-year (YoY) gains of 17%, whereas the US and China failed to show any growth for the same quarter at all.

Apple had left its biggest and smallest versions of the iPhone 12 for last in terms of making them available to buy. Now, however, both the successor to the 11 Pro Max and the completely new 5.4-inch Mini variant can be pre-ordered from their maker's website. However, these devices, as with the rest of their series, may not be compatible with a user's old wireless chargers.

The Mi 10 Pro will go down as Xiaomi's first actual flagship phone on par with the regular juggernauts of the segment but the company is already phasing the device out, likely in preparation for the release of the Mi 11. The Mi 10 Ultra remains available, however, but not for much longer.

Sony may boast that 'Play Has No Limits', but there will be a limit to the PlayStation 5 if you try to game at 1440p later this month. According to IGN Italia, Sony has confirmed that its next-generation console will not support the resolution that is popular with PC gamers, for some reason.

Sony bills its XH90 range of TVs as being next-gen ready, thanks to their support for 4K and 120 Hz gaming. However, multiple reports have demonstrated that the TVs do not support high refresh rate gaming at 4K natively.

LG's CX and C9 OLED TVs may look exquisite, but they have a serious issue with displaying content with variable refresh rate (VRR) enabled. From washed-out dark areas to image flickering and instability, VRR is currently a no-go on some of LG's expensive OLED TV series. A firmware update may not be able to resolve the issues, either.

With the Ryzen 5000 desktop CPUs already dominating the consumer market in terms of both raw performance and value, AMD is now working on the next-gen EPYC Milan lineup that will target the server market. An early sample of the 64-core EPYC 7713 processor has recently surfaced online with twice the performance of the Intel Xeon Platinum.

After struggling around the US$10,000 line for most of the year and with the lowest point of 2020 at US$4,887.52, Bitcoin is now above US$15,000. Earlier today, the world's most popular cryptocurrency has reached the highest value of the year — US$15,561.39 — but it would not be surprising to see it hit US$16,000 in the coming days.

Today, (November 5, 2020) Google has released the 5G variant of the Pixel 4a for pre-orders in Germany, France, the UK and Ireland. As with its flagship sibling, the 5, they come with an offer of free Bose wireless headphones with each order (while stocks last). The same phone is also now live in Taiwan and Australia.

Motorola has unveiled the Moto G 5G, its latest mid-range smartphone. Paired with a Snapdragon 750G, the Moto G 5G has a 6.7-inch punch-hole display, a 5,000 mAh battery and up to 6 GB of RAM. The Moto G 5G is available with either 64 GB or 128 GB of storage too and starts at €299.

The newest entry in the Moto G9 family comes with a 6,000 mAh battery that Motorola claims should last up to 60 hours on a single charge. The Moto G9 Power comes with a 6.8-inch display too, along with a Snapdragon 662 chipset, 20 W fast charging and four cameras. Motorola has priced the Moto G9 Power at €199.

It may look like a Blade Stealth at first glance, but the Razer Book 13 is so much more. The new business laptop includes features not found on the Blade Stealth including HDMI, MicroSD, 16:10 display, and even per-key RGB lighting for a starting price of $1200 USD.

After a few luxury handsets available exclusively for the Chinese market, such as the W2018, W2019, and the W20, Samsung is back with the W21 5G. With a 7.6-inch Dynamic AMOLED screen inside and an external 6.23-inch display, the Samsung W21 5G looks like the Galaxy Z Fold2 5G and runs on the same Qualcomm Snapdragon 865+ processor.

Down to one of the less important email service providers from the market leader position, Yahoo Mail continues on its downward spiral. Starting January 1, 2021, those who use free Yahoo Mail accounts will lose the automatic forwarding feature, which will only be available for Pro accounts (US$3.49 per month).

Huami has already released multiple smartwatches under its Amazfit brand, but the company also recently expanded into Zepp. The company started with the Zepp E and has now moved onto the Zepp Z, which it will unveil on November 17. The Zepp Z will feature a circular display, a leather strap and at least three hardware buttons.

A new Geekbench listing has revealed multiple aspects about the Xe-HP Neo, Intel's high-powered graphics chip. The listing not only shows the volume of compute units that the chip has, but shows the volume of cores, clock speeds and built-in VRAM.

It is normal for your Pixel 5 to have noticeable gaps between its display and chassis, according to Google. Apparently, any gaps should not affect dust and water resistance or the functionality of handsets, but people remain unconvinced.

ARM unveiled the Cortex-A78, a new core likely to form part of flagship mobile SoCs in 2021, recently. Now, the company has revealed that it is in fact part of a family of such products. One of them is the A78C, which has been modified for specific, demanding applications that may include mixed reality (MR).

Huawei's mobile division may be on the verge of receiving chipsets from the likes of MediaTek and Qualcomm, according to the Financial Times. The Chinese company is ploughing on with buildings its own chip fabrication plants. It will be years before Huawei reaches parity with mobile chipsets from MediaTek, Samsung and Qualcomm, though.

The Lenovo Legion 5 powered by AMD Ryzen 7 4800H and NVIDIA RTX 2060 will be available in Germany on Black Friday, according to a Lenovo customer rep. This information comes in the wake of an ongoing patent dispute between Nokia and Lenovo wherein the former sought an injunction against Lenovo resulting in a nationwide sales ban. Lenovo has since challenged the injunction and has resumed laptop and tablet sales in the region.

Since Vivo is already receiving both Exynos 980 and Exynos 880 chipsets from Samsung, it would not be surprising to see Xiaomi and Oppo joining them in the coming months. However, it seems that these two companies will only get budget chipsets from the tech giant headquartered in South Korea.

NVIDIA launched the RTX 3000 Founders Edition (FE) series starting at US$499 in the United States. Therefore, Indian flagship GPU fans may not have been impressed to find that the same prices in their market were far above these levels, even without GST. The OEM's division for that country has now fixed this issue, however.

The hints of the upcoming launch of Apple's first ARM-based Macs are slowly building. Apple is hosting another hardware event on November 10, and the company has sold out of many Mac products, while a leaker has suggested that the company's first ARM Mac will be worth the wait.

Razer has already held its first virtual launch event in 2020. Now, it will hold a second to be livestreamed in November of the same year. It apparently consists of a series of "exclusive" product debuts, unboxings and giveaways via the OEM's official YouTube channel.

With a starting price of US$9.99 per month, eligible Google One plans in the US will include the VPN service for free. However, this handy feature will be available only in the Google One application for Android. In the coming months, Google's VPN might become available in other markets as well.

Xiaomi released the Redmi K30S last week. The phone, essentially a cheaper, rebranded Mi 10T, went on sale yesterday, with Xiaomi recording 100,000 purchases in just one minute. That translates into over US$34 million of sales, at the listed discount base price tag of CNY 2,299 (US$343).

The Huawei Mate 40 series was released for sale via e-tailers such as JD.com in China on October 30, 2020. A new report claims that it took this site only 11 seconds to sell out of the new phones completely on this first day. It released light-up drones which synchronized in air to spell out celebratory messages over its Beijing headquarters to mark this event.

Video doorbells enable the user to see who is at their door on their smart screens or mobile devices. A recent study indicates that 10% of US households with high-speed internet surveyed owned one of these devices in the second quarter of 2020, compared to 7% in 2017. This increased popularity has driven doorbell OEMs to improve innovation and integration with other smart things over the years.

The smartphone brand Realme has had an excellent third quarter in 2020 (3Q2020), according to the latest data from Counterpoint Research. Not only did it post a growth of 132% compared to 2Q2020, it also crossed the 50 million units shipped mark. Realme took only 2.25 years to achieve this milestone, meaning that it has officially beaten all other OEMs in this respect.

OnePlus' CEO has reportedly affirmed via Weibo that the Cyberpunk 2077-themed special edition of the 8T premium smartphone will launch in China on November 2, 2020. Little is known about this device, except the obvious point that it has a new brand partner. There are hints that it will share the style of the game's teasers thus far.

Apple's products have shown themselves as resistant to teardowns and re-assembly in the past. The Australian device-repair YouTuber Hugh Jeffreys has posted a new video that seems to demonstrate that this is also true of the recently-launched iPhone 12. The device's UI and cameras exhibited anomalies in response to a motherboard switch.

The Dell Latitude 7410 Chromebook Enterprise represents the absolute best hardware seen in a Chromebook to date. The Comet Lake Core i5 CPU and zippy NVMe SSD make this one of the most powerful Chrome OS devices on the market, but the operating system itself is still limited compared to Windows or macOS.

The PS5 is not a dainty console, by any means. Subject to memes mocking its size, the PS5 will probably be replaced by a more compact edition at some stage in its lifetime. In that vein, a concept has shown what a PS5 Slim could look, and if Sony offered it black, along with its current white finish.

The Tissot T-Touch Connect Solar is a stylish smartwatch that offers several months of battery life between charges thanks to many tiny solar sensors. The hybrid smartwatch will debut on November 2 for around €900.

Sharp has announced the Dynabook Portégé X40-J, its latest ultrabook designed for business users. The X40-J relies on Intel Tiger Lake-U processors, which will offer a giant leap forward from the graphics and CPU power that its Comet Lake-U powered predecessor offered. Sharp has also equipped the X40-J with a 14-inch display and Thunderbolt 4 ports, which are housed in an aluminium chassis.

LG is an OEM that designs and fabricates its smartphones through its own production lines. However, a new report indicates that it is poised to change tack somewhat for 2021, by farming more of their manufacture out to original design manufacturers (ODMs) than usual. These devices include some that the Korean giant normally makes in-house.

The Xiaomi Mijia Paipai is a wireless casting adapter that retails for just US$53.99. Resembling two Chromecasts, the Mijia Paipai Wireless Casting Adapter operates over 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz networks to transmit 1080p content from up to 10 metres away.

Shortly after taking down Xiaomi to become India's biggest smartphone brand, Samsung has also managed to leave Amazon behind in the global tablet market. With an impressive year-over-year growth of almost 90 percent, Samsung managed to ship 9.4 million tablets in the third quarter, which accounted for a market share of 20 nearly percent.

Introduced as a new part of the SmartThings app, SmartThings Find is now available for all Samsung users worldwide. This is a new way to locate a range of select Galaxy smartphones, tablets, smartwatches, and earbuds at once thanks to the Bluetooth Low Energy and ultra-wideband technologies.

Three major market research firms have declared Xiaomi is now the world’s third-largest smartphone company in terms of units shipped for the third quarter of 2020. The good news for Xiaomi comes at the expense of Apple, which slips into fourth. Strong sales for the Redmi 9 series, Redmi K30 Ultra, and Xiaomi Mi 10 Ultra have helped the Chinese OEM achieve impressive growth.

In our test, the Dell Latitude 14 5410 can convince us primarily with two aspects: Upgradeability and battery life. But because Dell insists on only offering Intel CPUs, we can't give the Dell laptop an absolute recommendation.

WearOS smartwatches may not be as popular as Apple's or Samsung's equivalents, but you can currently get one for just US$99, £89 in the UK and €99 in the Eurozone. The Skagen Falster 2 comes in multiple looks and features a heart rate monitor, GPS and NFC for use with Google Pay.