Business Articles

Epic has announced plans to create its own game platform, which will be known as the Epic Games Store. Fueled by the incredible success of Fortnite, Epic is hoping to take on big names in the video-game digital distribution world such as Steam and Google Play. The company is offering 88% of store revenue to developers, with no tier system being incorporated.

Two separate app developers, Kika Tech and Cheetah Mobile, have had 1 app each blocked from Google's Play Store following a BuzzFeed article detailing an 'investigation' of fraudulent activity on the part of both companies. The site, alongside the tech analyst firm Kochava, claims to have uncovered evidence of click injection and click flooding in the code of the 2 apps.

A new report on the wearables market shows that Xiaomi was the single biggest company in this space in the third quarter of 2018, keeping Apple as the runner-up in terms of market share. The market also grew by 21.7% in general compared to last year. This was attributed to the release of new products and increased uptake in the Asia-Pacific region.

Razer’s first major laptop was the 14-inch Blade over five years ago in 2013. Ever since then, the Blade family has expanded to include 12.5-inch, 13.3-inch, 15.6-inch, and 17.3-inch models. The central 14-inch series, however, will be on hiatus for the time being.

The upcoming flagship SoC from Qualcomm was believed to be called Snapdragon 8150 due to its SM8150 denomination found in early benchmarks, but the official name will be Snapdragon 855. Details on the modem, NPU, GPU, CPU clusters and imaging features were also leaked ahead of the official announcement that is scheduled to take place later today at Qualcomm's Technology Summit.

The Korean electronics giant Samsung will reportedly debut a line of notebooks with 4K OLED panels at CES 2019. These devices will come in 13.3 inch, 14 inch, and 15.6 inch variants. However, don't expect the consumer models of these new machines to come cheap.

Months after getting caught using DSLR shots as camera samples for the Galaxy A8, Samsung has been nabbed doing the exact same thing with the Galaxy A8 Star. Companies like Huawei and Xiaomi have also been caught in similar acts of crookery in the past.

Huawei ambassador Gal Gadot was revealed to have been tweeting with an iPhone a long while ago and if you thought that was bad, you'd be shocked, as an official Samsung account was caught parading the streets of Twitter with an iPhone in tow.

Honor's current-gen mainstream premium phones are the Honor V10 and Honor 10. The successors to the duo are expected to be the Honor V20 and Honor 11, but while the former should be out by now, it would appear that it is still in development.

New data from market research company Gartner depicts a strong third quarter 2018 for Chinese manufacturers Huawei and Xiaomi. Both companies managed to increase their global smartphone market share from 3Q17, whilst the big hitters Apple and Samsung have experienced flat growth and considerably diminished market share, respectively. Overall worldwide smartphone sales have risen by 1.4%.

A new article in Bloomberg substantiates earlier claims that Apple will not adopt 5G in its next-generation iPhones. In fact, the outlet's sources have suggested that this may not happen until after 2020. The company's current enmity to Qualcomm may be a factor in the apparent delay.

OPPO has announced that it has been successful in a test involving using WeChat for a video call over 5G. It was made using a phone customized with 5G-compatible hardware. This breakthrough puts the Chinese OEM one step closer to commercializing hardware based on the new radio standard.

Scott Johnson, the Google manager in charge of the app Hangouts, has taken to Twitter in order to refute a report that the same app is to shut down shortly. Instead, Johnson asserts, its functions are to be split across two new services: Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meets. Those who still use "Hangouts Classic" will be "upgraded" to these new apps as they roll out.

A new report from a Korean media outlet details Huawei's plans to introduce an in-house OS for its mobile devices. Should this prospect be realized, the Chinese company may drop its Android skin (EMUI) for completely separate software along the lines of Tizen or, well...iOS. This suggests that Huawei wants to build its own ecosystem for the use of its hardware.

The EPYC CPU line, based on AMD's Zen 2 platform, was released recently in order to compete with Intel's x86-based processors for server-grade applications. DRAMeXchange has reported that the new alternative has already managed to reduce Intel's market share by 2%. This may not sound impressive, but it is also significantly better compared to the 0% they commanded prior to the release of EPYC Naples.

Recently, the news of a theft of Samsung tech secrets by a supplier to the company has come to light. As a result, more than one Chinese company may have gotten its hands on the ability to make folding screens of its own. Samsung now estimates that the damage done to its revenues as a result could easily exceed US$5 billion dollars.

AMD might not be doing that great on the stock market, but the data provided by Germany's largest e-tailer shows that this brand is actually doing great. In November, Mindfactory has sold two AMD processors for each Intel processor. The best seller was the Ryzen 5 2600, followed by the 2700X and the 2600X.

Lenovo tends to release a number of devices that fly under the radar in the western market, and the upcoming Lenovo K5X will likely be one such phone. The mid-ranger is expected to feature a Snapdragon 636, dual selfie cameras, and a 4050 mAh battery.

Amazon Alexa is probably Google Assistant's most consistent competitor. The voice-powered software will add another feature to its set soon: Apple Music support. Amazon has announced that users will be able to play tracks associated with this streaming service from December 17, 2018.

Apple is facing a lawsuit pressed by 3 plaintiffs in the United States. It concerns a claim that the company has breached Californian advertising and representation laws in selling Macbook and iMacs. These plaintiffs assert that Apple's allusions to longevity and robustness when marketing its devices are contrary to their experiences of reduced or impaired functionality in their devices.

The first noticeable result of the new strategic partnership that involves Xiaomi and IKEA will come forward next month when IKEA's line of smart lighting products will be connected to the IoT platform of the Chinese company. Obviously, more IKEA smart home products should get the Xiaomi treatment in 2019.

Bitcoin has closed at a price of US$3,964.89 today, keeping the well-known digital currency under the US$4,000 mark. Its value actually dropped to a low of US$3,505 on November 25 but has managed to gain a little over the last few days. However, a market analyst for IG Group has stated that the virtual currency is coming close to a crucial “capitulation moment.”

Microsoft has become more valuable than Apple in terms of market capitalization. At the time of writing, Microsoft’s value stood at US$846.76 billion compared to Apple’s US$844.39 billion. The Redmond-based company has passed Apple a number of times over the last few days, only for the Cupertino rival to temporarily bounce back.

MediaTek started out as a provider of mobile SoCs for emerging Chinese smartphone makers. Up until now, the Taiwanese company presented solid entry-level and mid-range solutions, but, with the upcoming Helio P90, MediaTek is aiming to compete with the best SoCs from Qualcomm, Apple and Samsung. The Helio P90 SoC was recently teased as a "powerful" and "efficient" chip with "groundbreaking AI."

For much of 2018, increasingly convincing leaks indicated that Qualcomm would be dropping the 'SD 8xx' nomenclature for its premium line of smartphone CPUs. However, the latest rumor is that the anticipated new name of '8150' is for internal use only, and not what the SD 845's successor will be marketed as at all.

The world's first pop-up-camera phone, the Vivo Nex, is set to launch in Europe soon. According to a new report, it may cost as much as €849 (about US$967) in this region. On the other hand, as this is mainly based on rumor so far, this story should be treated at least a little skeptically at this point.

Huawei, in partnership with the New Zealand telecommunications company Spark, has had its proposal to provide 5G hardware for the country blocked. This action was taken by the NZ Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB). The body stresses that this decision was not specifically related to any possible connection between Huawei and the Chinese government.

Even though the crypto market is at it its lowest this year, getting some cryptocurrency as passive income never hurt anyone. Asus and Quantumcloud joined forces in order to make it easier for Asus GPU owners to mine cryptocurrencies when the graphics cards are mostly idle. At current prices, the profits are pretty minimal, but no one knows when the next big swing would hit the crypto world and turn those modest profits into small fortunes.

Apple became the world's first trillion dollar company this past August. Since then, the Cupertino giant has struggled to hit sales targets for its latest iPhone family. Despite this, Apple VP of product marketing Greg Joswiak said that the iPhone XR has been "the most popular iPhone" since its launch. However, "most popular" does not mean "selling well."

Dell has published a press release that will be of some concern to customers that use its network. The company suffered from a recent cyber attack, and although the attempted hack was apparently “detected and disrupted” it is possible that some information was stolen. The attack targeted names, emails, and hashed passwords; credit card details were not extracted.

It has been claimed that Microsoft is mulling over using AMD chips in a future Surface Laptop refresh. Apparently, the Redmond-based company has become frustrated with Intel, especially over the chipmaker’s long delay in shipping 10 nm Cannon Lake processors. It would be a considerable coup for AMD if Microsoft went ahead and utilized the red team’s upcoming Picasso APU.

Fresh details about Microsoft's first store in the UK have emerged online. Published on the City of Westminster's planning portal, Microsoft has confirmed the size of its London store's retail floor space and offered more details about its layout.

Amazon Web Services has announced the development of its own in-house CPUs to power the next generation of its cloud and deep learning services. These processors, called the Graviton and Inferentia respectively, were unveiled at this year's AWS re:Invent conference. As with Google's TPUs, customers will buy time on what is run by these CPUs rather than the chips themselves.

Nine people and two companies in South Korea have been charged with selling Samsung technology to a Chinese rival. It is believed bendable OLED technology, which is expected to be incorporated in the South Korean company’s upcoming foldable smartphone, was included in the criminal exchange. The Chinese company that received the information has not been named.

Advertised as a "Salute to Speed," the upcoming OnePlus 6T McLaren Edition will be unveiled on December 11, at the McLaren Technology Centre in Woking. This limited edition handset is expected to be the first OnePlus device to feature 10 GB of memory and 256 GB of internal storage space.

Although the TIDAL music streaming app is now freely available for Windows 10 users via the Microsoft Store, to access the entire library of over 60 million tracks and 244,000 music videos, a paid membership is required. The two choices available are the US$9.99/month Premium plan and the US$19.99 HiFi membership.

Jon Peddie Research informs that the GPU market is doing relatively well, even though the AIB GPU sales saw a significant decline. The overall GPU sales (including iGPUs and mobility GPUs) were up 10.64% compared to Q2 2018, and Intel is still dominating the iGPU/embedded GPU maret with an increase of ~13%.

Launching for users in North America only for now, the Eurocom service promises to update your laptop software, BIOS, anti-virus, operating system, and more for a small fee. A "deep cleaning" of the fans, hinges, and motherboard is also an option even for difficult-to-service laptops.

Two days ago, Huawei finally brought its Mate 20 Pro flagship to the Indian smartphone market. The device is billed to go on sale on December 4, and with an MSRP that translates to just under US$1,000.

DriveSavers, one of the world's leading data recovery companies, now offers a service for unlocking smartphones and tablets that have a locked passcode, including iPhones and iPads. DriveSavers claims to be the only company that offers this level of device unlocking and data recovery outside of law enforcement, but the service costs a staggering US$3900.

DigiTimes reports that Intel will be holding a conference for discrete GPUs in December, specifically about Arctic Sound. Raja Koduri will be presenting in the conference but went on the record to explicitly state that it is an "architecture day, not a DGPU day."

PUBG Mobile managed to eclipse Fortnite’s earnings for two days in a row on iOS, according to market analyst SensorTower. This is the first time the Tencent game has managed to beat out the effort from Epic on Apple’s platform in terms of global player spending. Last week was a good week overall for PUBG Mobile, with revenue rising 166% from the previous week (total for iOS and Android).

The refreshed models have a brand new design inspired by the Spectre and Envy series. In other words, the new systems have 180-degree hinges and narrow bezels for a slimmer and sleeker look without sacrificing key ProBook features like BIOSphere Gen 4 and 4G LTE connectivity.

The new 860 QVO SSD drive uses a Samsung MJX controller and will be available next month in 1 TB, 2 TB, and 4 TB versions. This 2.5-inch SATA drive provides sequential read/write speeds of up to 550/520 MB/s and random read/write performance of up to 97/89K IOPS. The prices will start at US$149.99.

Apple has reportedly reduced orders from iPhone component suppliers again. According to DigiTimes, a "second wave" of order cuts is beginning to bring pain to some Taiwanese manufacturers. Apple is continuing to blame poor sales of the iPhone XS, XS Max, and XR for the order reductions.

Engaging in conversations over media such as SMS with corporations is an increasingly popular and effective method of driving brand engagement and sales in the US. This behavior increased by over 400% in some instances on 2018's Black Friday compared to this time last year. It is thought to have a generally positive effect on consumer spending.

Samsung is determined to make its 2019 S10 flagships some of the most impressive Android devices in recent times, and that determination shows in the camera hardware the phones are said to sport, with the S10+, for example, touted to feature five cameras in total.

The Nokia 9 Pureview could be the most interesting device to come out of the stables of the Finnish OEM but its launch has apparently been delayed once again. That isn't a bad thing by itself but circumstances effectively make the Nokia flagship DOA, just like the Nokia 8 Sirocco was at the start of the year.

The new Redmi Note 6 Pro went on sale in India across the weekend. Xiaomi sells its phones in the region using flash sales, and the first of such sales saw over 600,000 units of the mid-range phone sold.