Business Articles

New research has found that nearly 50% of all US households with broadband subscribe to 2 or more subscription-based services in 2019, whereas this figure was 33% in 2017 and only 20% in 2014. The apparent demand has driven the number of individual services to match in the country. It has grown by 1.4 times since 2014.

Intel has issued a new Product Change Notification (PCN) document that lists the Kaby Lake-G family as End of Life (EOL) citing market demand for other Intel products. The EOL date is effective from today and OEMs will not be able to order Kaby Lake-G products after January 31, 2020.

Hewlett Packard's mobile workstation features good input devices and a great display. This is joined by a docking port, good battery life and a Thunderbolt 3 port. There are problems with performance.

The Acer ConceptD 7 and 9 models have won at this year's Good Design awards. Unsurprisingly, this is due to their innovative, creator-focused form factors. Acer have also won 2 more of these honors for the Swift 7 and TravelMate P6 laptops.

Sony has unveiled another device, the Xperia 8. The Xperia 8 is a mid-range phone that raises more questions over the logic in Sony's naming scheme while simultaneously managing to offer an overwhelmingly disappointing package at a ridiculous price point.

Libra Association, the 28-member nonprofit organization that was formed back in June 2019 to oversee the creation of Facebook's cryptocurrency and its consumer rollout, has just lost one of its supporters. Sadly, the brand that has decided to pull out of the project is one of the most popular providers of online money transfer solutions — PayPal.

Computational photography - or imaging that depends at least as much on software as on hardware - was worth US$7.9 billion as a market in 2018. However, the latest analysis indicates that this valuation will grow to $29 billion over the next 5 years. This market is led by companies such as Qualcomm, NVIDIA, Alphabet and Apple.

Apple has initiated a recall for certain iPhones of the 6S series, saying that it has found that the relevant units may become unable to start under certain circumstances. The Cupertino-based OEM will not disclose which aspects of the phones causes these potential failures, but has announced that it will rectify it if those who own these device send them for servicing.

Sony has launched its latest alpha-series flagship, the a9II. This new 24.2MP premium unit is distinctly pitched at professional photographers in sports reporting and other fast-moving fields. It is designed for continous shooting while still delivering top-flight auto-focus and auto-exposure.

The blog ChargerLab claims to have found that some wireless chargers are being restricted to 5 watts (W) of power while iPhones are placed on them with the new iOS update, whereas the same devices could deliver 7.5W under the older software version. However, this apparently does not affect those brands that are sold in the Cupertino giant's stores.

The highly anticipated launch of the Mi Mix 4 has been something of a wild ride so far. Fans expected a launch event last month but were left disappointed. Since then, though, it's been multiple conflicting reports on the existence of the Mix 4, and the latest one will leave rekindle the flames of hope in fans of the series.

The Reno2 line of smartphones will become available in a new market, the UK, on October 16, 2019. OPPO is calling this event "Reno Studio Earth", during which the Reno2, Reno2 Z and Reno2 F will be released to this region. The last of these is also now on sale in India.

A new report from Taiwan indicates that Apple needs new stocks of its iPhone 11, but not of the Pro or Pro Max variants. Sources who claim to be close to the suppliers in question have noted that this is a surprising uptick in orders from the Cupertino giant compared to last year. This behavior may be related to economic forces driving sales of the most 'budget' 2019 iPhone.

Google has announced the re-institution of its Shopping service, albeit for users located in the US only. The company claims that the renewed feature can analyse millions of retail listings and other data in order to show customers the best deals. It is also now possible to order the resulting items directly through Google.

The Dell Latitude 3400 offers excellent battery life, input devices and a wide selection of ports. Our review unit impressed us during our tests, not least because of its value for money. However, there is one area that could have people looking elsewhere.

Although it plans to keep selling mobile devices in China, Samsung no longer intends to make them in the same country. This move is thought to have been taken in order to cut costs, and also due to overwhelming competition from other OEMs such as Huawei. The South Korean company will transfer production to other nations such as Vietnam in the future.

The latest leaked research note allegedly sent to TF International Securities by the analyst Ming-Chi Kuo indicates that Apple does have a second-gen SE in the works. It will apparently be released in the first quarter of 2020 and be "more affordable". It is also now said to assume a form-factor similar to the iPhone 8.

The first generations of the Surface Laptops were good laptops, but they had some drawbacks. One of them was that it was nearly impossible to repair these devices, as Microsoft used to glue the chassis shut. With the new Surface Laptop 3, Microsoft will now improve the repairability of its laptops to make them more attractive for enterprise customers.

AMD and Microsoft have collaborated to create the AMD Ryzen Microsoft Surface Edition processor — a Zen+ APU custom-built for the new 15-inch Surface Laptop 3. The Ryzen Microsoft Surface Edition constitutes two SKUs — Ryzen 5 3580U and Ryzen 7 3780U with Vega 9 and Vega 11 graphics respectively. The integrated Vega GPU also comes with an extra CU for enhanced compute performance.

Along with its (impressively varied) new PCs, Microsoft also introduced its first-ever true wireless earbuds today (October 2, 2019). These Surface Earbuds are capable of noise-canceling and voice-activation features. However, they are also designed to carry out tasks such as slide-switching and translation during PowerPoint presentations.

The Surface Pro 7 has finally stepped up to USB type C support. Otherwise, it remains a 12.3-inch 2-in-1 with advanced Pen features and a refined Type Keyboard attachment. The Pro 7 starts at US$749 and ships from October 22, 2019.

TSMC strikes back with a "retaliatory litigation", claiming that GlobalFoundries infringed on 25 of its patents that include FinFET designs for the 40 through 12 nm nodes. Unlike GlobalFoundries who sued TSMC's fab-less companies like Apple and Nvidia, TSMC is looking to halt all GlobalFoundries production and sale processes for the infringed nodes.

Huawei has had its latest phablet series on shelves in its home country for only 6 days now. In this time, it has reportedly sold out on a popular online sales platform, accrued 1 million sales in 3 hours and may have raked in half a billion yuan per minute in the process. This apparent success is ascribed to the uptake of Google-less EMUI 10 in China.

Although this is not official yet, it looks like Samsung has already disbanded the entire team that was working in its Austin R&D center to develop architectures and designs for the System LSI division so next-gen Exynos chips will — most likely — use solutions developed by ARM instead.

Intel has not only confirmed the product stack of its Cascade Lake-X series but has also priced it unbelievably competitively. The series starts at just US$590 for the 10 core Core i9-10900X, before rising to US$979 for the 18 core Core i9-10980XE. Your move, AMD.

DNS over HTTPS is a new way of connecting to websites proposed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in 2018. Google is reportedly working on implementing it in an upcoming version of its Chrome browser. However, an anti-trust task force associated with the US Congress has taken issue with this new measure.

Samsung India will open registrations for the Galaxy Fold in this country on October 4, 2019. On this date, it will reportedly be sold for INR 164,999 - which equates to about US$2320. This price includes a discounted for 1 repair should the new phone's display get damaged.

The demonstration of the HPC chiplet proves that semiconductor production is not TSMC's only strong point. The Taiwanese company is trying to prove that its new LIPINCON architecture used in the chiplet interconnect mesh is a better solution compared to Intel's AIB or AMD's Infinity Fabric, and it should make its way to commercial processors in 2020.

The Mi Mix 4 has been a rollercoaster so far. The flagship was hyped up to high heavens but it turned out that most of those rumors were for the Mi Mix Alpha concept phone instead. A recent leak may have led Xiaomi fans to keep faith in the future launch of the Mix 4 but Xiaomi has now doused the flames of those hopes in brutal style.

Visionox is a company involved in the manufacture of flexible display panels. Its latest trick has been the Mi Mix Alpha, Xiaomi's new limited-edition wraparound-screen phone. It has recently opened a new assembly line on which similar screens measuring up to 18 inches can be produced.

Sony recently launched the Xperia 5 and is already working on a new flagship phone. This device, likely to be the Xperia 2, will be powered by the upcoming Snapdragon 865, and has now appeared on the company's official servers.

Following the reveal of the release date of the much-awaited PS4 exclusive, the Last of Us 2, new information has surfaced about the game itself, and not all fans will be pleased.

Xiaomi recently released the Mi Mix Alpha and that may have led some to believe that the Mix 4 was dead in the water. Apparently not, if new rumors are anything to go by. The Mix 4 is touted to be on the way, and it could come with the same 108 MP sensor we saw on the Alpha.

Xiaomi India's managing director, Manu Kumar Jain, has tweeted a photo of himself and a second executive in what appears to be the OEM's regional office. The background of this image contains a whiteboard on which a possible yearly timeline is sketched out. If so, the word "F2?" is found under the "November" point of the same.

After months of limited availability, Lenovo's ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen 2 is finally available with all the announced hardware options. This includes more affordable configurations with i5 CPUs as well as high-end ones with Intel Core i9 processors and OLED screens.

A while ago, Xiaomi launched the Redmi Note 8 and Note 8 Pro but the duo never quite hit the heights of their predecessors. The company is apparently set to release a more attractive device in a purported Redmi Note 8T, and it will be powered by the Snapdragon 730G.

The Manifest has conducted a study to find out which name was most familiar in the wearables sphere. 77% of those polled were able to name Fitbit in this context, compared to 73% for the next most recognized name ("Apple Watch"). Ironically, the latter sold a million more units in the second quarter of 2019 (2Q2019) than the former.

Other differences include a pulse-width modulation of 1020 Hz an even warmer CPU temperature of 85 C on the slower Core i5 IPS configuration. DPC latency issues continue to be present on both the Core i5 and Core i9 SKUs.

The market for fingerprint readers (from capacitive to thermal, and consumer- to government-grade) is estimated to be worth about US$3.5 billion at present. This worth is thought to grow to as much as $7.1 billion by 2024, however. The scanner type we have become most familiar with is thought to represent the largest sector over these next 5 years.

After our extensive review of the Lenovo ThinkPad T490s with Intel CPU and the much cheaper Thinkpad T495s with AMD Ryzen CPU, we can pronounce an almost unrestricted recommendation for the AMD variant. Why this is and whether there may not be a catch here, read here.

Samsung has been unable to compete with Huawei in the camera hardware department but tables may be set to turn with the Galaxy S11, as a new report touts some monstrous camera hardware for the upcoming Samsung flagships.

Less than six months after the release of the Redmi 7A, Xiaomi has launched a successor, the Redmi 8A. The Redmi 8A offers a tangible upgrade over the 7A, with a bigger battery, fast charging, and a very interesting main camera being the biggest talking points, while still managing to keep its sub-US$100 pricing.

Current PCBs are eating too much space and researchers think these can easily be replaced with a new silicon-interconnect fabric that would lead to more powerful devices in reduced form-factors. The use of such new fabrics would also cut production costs and improve heat dissipation. Smartphone SoCs and servers may also benefit from the more streamlined design introduced with the silicon-interconnect fabric.