Business Articles

The Samsung Galaxy S10 is still probably months away from release. However, this has not stopped the case-maker Olixar from designing a whole range of cases for it already, or the e-tailer site MobileFun from posting a product page for them, prices and all. The Galaxy S10 in these images appears to mimic an earlier leak.

Sources involved in the investigation of the Marriott/Starwood data breach have revealed that Chinese hackers are believed to be behind the incident. Marriott International announced at the end of November that 500 million customer records had been affected by the hacking activity, which apparently had been ongoing since 2014. Information was taken from the Starwood guest reservation database.

A recent software update to a Google+ API left some data of 52.5 million users exposed and available to app developers. The data included rudimentary user information, including names and birth dates. As a response, Google has moved up Google+'s kill date from August 2019 to April 2019, four months sooner than previously announced.

Huawei’s Chief Financial Officer, Meng Wanzhou, has been granted bail at a hearing in a court in Canada on Tuesday (December 11). The executive’s bail has been set at CA$10 million (~US$7.5 million) and she has had to give up her Chinese and Hong Kong passports. In a possible act of retaliation, Chinese officials have detained a Canadian citizen.

Supermicro has published a letter to its customers to explicitly state that no evidence of tampering was discovered in its hardware during a recent thorough internal review. An article from Bloomberg claimed that Supermicro products had been compromised by Chinese spy chips, which had then affected servers used by companies like Amazon and Apple.

A phone that may have been the Vivo Nex 2 - as this phone has been alleged to come with 10GB in RAM and the Snapdragon (SD) 845 appeared on Geekbench recently. However, another device from the same company with a completely different model number has surfaced on this same benchmark site. Oddly, this 'new Vivo' also has the SD 845 and 10GB RAM.

Honor recently unveiled a new feature to address slow connections in situations of overloaded or throttled public WiFi in its newer smartphones. This adaptation, known as Link Turbo, is described as capable of delivering consistent data-transfer speeds regardless of how busy a certain wireless service is. In practice, it appears it may be a different or improved form of aggressive hand-over to LTE in a phone's OS.

OnePlus unveiled its special McLaren edition of the 6T today in the UK. This version of the OEM's current flagship comes with 10GB of RAM and improved fast charging. The McLaren Edition will become available in two days and cost US$699.

Huawei is set to unveil its new premium phone, the Honor V20, on December 26. The device will feature a single rear camera, albeit a 48 MP one.

Xiaomi spokesperson Lin Bin recently teased a new Xiaomi phone featuring a 48 MP camera. Initial reports claimed it could be a flagship of sorts but new information shows that is rather unlikely, as the device is said to be powered by the new mid-range Snapdragon 675.

The Fuzhou Intermediate People's Court in China has granted preliminary injunctions against the import, sale, and offers for sale of various older Apple iPhone models in the country. The Court granted the injunction against Apple as it found that it infringed on two Qualcomm patents. This is being seen as a big win for Qualcomm, which has been at loggerheads with Apple over various patent infringement issues for a long time.

An AMD-related image trademark has been discovered that has led to some discussion about its possible meaning, if any. The application in question shows a logo that is very similar to the well-known Vega logo, but the right-hand wing of the “V” has been dissected with two vertical lines. Unsurprisingly, some have speculated that this could herald a planned Radeon Vega II refresh.

Those who love Facebook's Stories feature can finally enjoy it in their Groups as well. Group Stories has been tested starting earlier this year, and now this feature is finally available for Facebook users all around the world on iOS, Android, or desktop.

The Navi 10 is AMD's upcoming 7nm-based architecture for its next-gen GPUs. A post on the Chiphell forum now alleges that it could compete with NVIDIA's RTX 2080 in certain configurations. This contravenes earlier leaks pitting the flagship Navi card up against the 2070.

Smart fabric is a form of textile containing nano-tech threads that can form circuits and battery connections when woven together. Google has been developing its own take on this new type of electronics, in the form of 'Project Jacquard'. Its first commercial application is a jacket designed in collaboration with Levi's, with touch-sensitive sleeves that interact with a phone as a Bluetooth device might.

The Samsung Galaxy A8s, which is set to be the world's first Infinity-O display phone, has had all of its details officially released today. There are also real-world photos of the phone now available. This announcement confirms the A8s' previously-leaked specs, including the existence of two RAM SKUs and the Infinity-O display.

Enterprises that choose to assign various tasks to a large number of freelancers often find it difficult to manage all the processes involved, especially when working under strict deadlines. The Microsoft 365 freelance toolkit has been created to help and is freely available for subscribers of Office 365 Enterprise or Microsoft 365 Enterprise.

Advertised as a multi-screen 5G smartphone with a professional camera and a mobile gaming console, the HubblePhone K3-XR Copernicus is supposed to arrive in about a year, but there are two more models — Cassini and Herschel — that should hit the market in 2020. The pre-orders (roughly 1850 to 4250 USD) can be paid using BC or USDT.

Based on the very few Polaris-based gaming laptops we've tested, they're just not worth the errors, crashes, and glitches when gaming especially when an equivalent Intel/Nvidia gaming laptop is available for the same price.

Sales of laptops, traditional PCs, and mobile workstations are expected to remain relatively flat for the next few years. Even so, the fast decline of traditional slate tablets will allow laptops and PCs to regain lost market share. Detachable tablets will continue to grow and eat up sales of slate tablets.

Apple will make minimal changes to its smartphones for the new year, according to an analyst with the bank Nomura. Therefore, they are likely to end up looking much like the iPhone X of 2017...again. The Nomura research report indicates that the new models will have little to distinguish them besides new or improved software features.

Hyundai-Kia Motors has already doubled the number of electric vehicles it has exported from South Korea in 2018 compared to 2017, according to a Korean news report. This article also claimed that sales of cars (conventionally-fueled ones included) in the country has fallen slightly, and that their exports have risen by only 0.9%. This, then, may be a new indicator that traditional combustion-powered cars are losing ground.

The headphone jack began its mass exodus away from flagships last year, with Sony ditching it on the Xperia XZ2 phones. For the first time, though, we could see a company bring back the much-wanted port.

Since the company's conception two years ago, HMD Global has sold 70 million phones. Of course, that figure also includes feature phones, and we expect the number of Android smartphones sold to be in the ballpark of 25 million, which is still impressive, all things considered.

The pop-up camera module was one of 2018's most innovative alternatives to the smartphone notch. Elephone is developing a phone that elaborates on Vivo's original concept somewhat by adding a dual camera to the mechanism. This device, the PX, is available on Indiegogo for about US$249 at present.

The Kingpin series is a super-high-end, super-powered line of premium GPUs designed by EVGA. Given this reputation, IT correspondents speculate that the next generation of these cards will be based on the RTX 2080 Ti. The existence of this new card has been leaked on Instagram.

HMD Global spoke with Roland Quandt of Winfuture.de yesterday, and the latter has now revealed a few takeaways from the interview, including the company’s commitment to the mid-range and plans for the Nokia 9.

The Snapdragon 855 was unveiled a few days ago, and one of the biggest talking points was its 5G modem. Most companies will release 5G phones in 2019 and OnePlus is billed to be among the first, although the device could very well come with an MSRP in the region of US$800.

The Game Awards 2018 has hosted a plethora of announcements, which included details about titles such as Dragon Age 4, Far Cry: New Dawn, Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order, Mortal Kombat 11, Psychonauts 2, Rage 2, The Outer Worlds, and many others. BioWare also teased the action RPG Anthem, which has apparently been in development since 2012.

The 2018 Global Semiconductor Alliance (GSA) Awards have been handed out, and companies like Nvidia, AMD, and Samsung have not gone home empty-handed. Dr. Lisa Su, who is the current CEO and president of AMD, was given the prestigious Dr. Morris Chang Exemplary Leadership Award for her contributions to the industry. Other winners included Marvell, Silicon Labs, and Nordic Semiconductor.

Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft have all suffered on the stock market today amid growing concerns over US-China trade relations. While some investors have been selling stock to reduce the chance of risk, others have been nervously watching recent events such as the trade talks between President Donald Trump and President Xi Jinping and the arrest of a high-ranking Huawei executive.

Huawei’s Chief Financial Officer, Meng Wanzhou, has appeared in court in Canada today. The high-level executive was at the Supreme Court of British Columbia for her bail hearing where she listened to the reasons behind her recent arrest. American officials want Meng to be extradited to the US to face charges of offenses relating to fraud.

Epic has officially launched its Games Store with just half a dozen “hand-curated” titles. In fact, just three third-party games are currently available: Hades, Ashen, and Hello Neighbor: Hide and Seek. Unreal Tournament and Shadow Complex, both by Epic Games, are also listed. But it’s likely the store’s main attraction will be the PC and Mac versions of Fortnite.

A new official battery case for the iPhone XS or possibly the XS Max may be available soon. This possibility has arisen from clues found in the code of an Apple software beta, which has resulted in accurate predictions about upcoming products in the past. This case, should it exist, has undergone somewhat of a design update to match the new iPhone.

The Helio M70 baseband chipset was showcased at the China Mobile Global Partner Conference in Guangzhou today. This modem, unlike the Snapdragon X50, is backwards-compatible with 4G to 2G. It is also 3GPP-compatible and rated for speeds of 5 gigabits per second.

Earlier this year, Google decided to stop investing in Allo and pushed some of its popular features — such as Smart Reply, GIFs, and desktop support — to the Messages app. Yesterday, Google has finally confirmed that the smart messaging app Allo will go down, but it will continue to work until March 2019.

Gorilla Glass, which has become a nearly indispensable component of fullscreen phones everywhere, is most likely to become available in a form that can protect flexible displays for phones. However, Corning has indicated that it may not be there by the time the first generation of these devices are ready for production.

The View 20, a Honor device likely to be shipped with the Kirin 980, is to be launched at an event in Paris on January 20, 2019. This is according to a leaked teaser image GizChina claims to have found, in addition to internal Huawei code that may pertain to the device. This material also hints at a punch-hole selfie cam for the View 20.

The chip currently known as the Snapdragon 6150, which could be the 675's successor, has appeared on Geekbench incorporated into an unnamed reference device. It is an octa-core chip, as expected, and runs at 1.8GHz. The 6150 posted a single-core score of over 2500 and a multi-core score of over 5400.

In addition to the 8th generation Intel Core processor options and Thunderbolt 3 connectivity, the new TVS-x72XT NAS by QNAP also features HDMI 2.0, M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD slots, and 10 GbE connectivity. The lineup includes models with 4, 6, and 8 drive bays, all of them already available for purchase worldwide.

At an event in Dubai yesterday, HMD Global launched the new Nokia 8.1, featuring a Snapdragon 710, dual rear cameras with OIS, a 20 MP selfie camera, and a 3500 mAh battery. Impressively, it also runs on Android Pie out of the box.

Sales-wise, Apple's current generation of devices may be the most lukewarm the company has put out in the recent past, and the fact that the cheapest device of the lot is the best-selling is unlikely to be considered a positive by the company's executives.

AdoredTV is back with yet another juicy leak, this time regarding AMD's upcoming 7 nm Navi gaming GPU lineup that is scheduled to be released in the first half of 2019. If the information is right, it looks like AMD is going for aggressive price points in the mid-range GPU market, making the upcoming Radeon RX 3080 / 3070 / 3060 models a very tempting alternative to Nvidia's RTX 2070 and GTX 1070 / 1060 cards.

The Russian Internet-related tech company Yandex has announced its foray into the world of smartphones with the aptly named Yandex.Phone. The 5.65-inch device will sport a Qualcomm Snapdragon 630 SoC and features Yandex’s proprietary intelligent assistant, Alice. The smartphone will be released on December 6 at a store in the company’s headquarters in Moscow, and it will be priced at 17,990 rubles (~US$270).

A spokesperson for the Canadian Department of Justice has confirmed the arrest of Meng Wanzhou, the current Chief Financial Officer and Deputy Chairwoman of Huawei Technologies. It’s believed Meng was detained by Canadian authorities for possible extradition to the US. Meng Wanzhou, also known as Sabrina Meng, is the daughter of Huawei’s founder and president, Ren Zhengfei.

The Qualcomm tech summit of 2018 highlighted the company’s strength of conviction that 5G is the future of consumer electronics. It promoted the new radio standard’s ‘near-zero’ latency and increased transmission rates, and the advantages for communications, business and media these properties would bring.

During the Snapdragon Summit in Hawaii, Qualcomm officially announced the new Snapdragon 855 high-end mobile platform. Details are still sparse, but the main focus lies on an improved AI engine, the first computer vision hardware in an ISP and the possibility to attach the dedicated X50 5G modem.

AMD CEO Lisa Su already expressed the intent to bring back high-end GPUs into the game in the Q3 financial report from last month, and now Su is reiterating these plans, saying that AMD is ready to dominate all GPU sectors once again. Navi would be AMD's answer to Nvidia's mid-range RTX 2070 cards, while Arcturus (expected in late 2019) would take on the RTX 2080 Ti and beyond.