Business Articles

The upcoming PlayStation Classic has been found to use the open-source PCSX ReARMed emulator to run its games. The emulator has been developed by retro gaming enthusiasts, not Sony. It's curious that Sony opted to use an emulator rather than develop their own system for the retro console.

Nvidia's entire mobile Pascal GeForce lineup has been Max-Q-ified conveniently before CES 2019. With seemingly no other major Pascal or Max-Q products to release for laptops, the time looks ripe for an official announcement about mobile Turing in the coming months.

Micron has announced that it has commenced mass production of the industry's highest capacity monolithic 12 Gb LPDDR4x DRAM for mobile devices. The latest LPDDR4x chips aim to offer double the memory capacity while consuming lesser power and still retaining the same footprint as the previous generation.

After spending a bit over a month in the Beta stage, Microsoft Launcher 5.0 is finally available for everyone as a stable release. The most important changes are the introduction of an updated Your Feed page and Windows Timeline support, but there are various other goodies in store as well.

This year's Samsung Developer's Conference (SDC) has been interesting already. This is mainly due to the Infinity Flex Display that had finally been confirmed during the event's first day. However, other SDC presenters made announcements that indicate that Samsung also has non-foldable displays in the works - with notches.

At the Samsung Developer Conference 2018 (SDC 2018), Samsung showed off their first working foldable display smartphone. The actual details about the device itself was kept under wraps but Samsung is calling this display 'Infinity Flex'. Samsung said that this foldable AMOLED display is designed to be folded hundreds of thousands of times and is also making an emulator SDK along with guidelines available for developers for testing their apps. Some of the specifications of the foldable display are also now available.

Not a fan of carbon fiber? Dell will begin offering brushed aluminum options for its top Latitude laptops later this month. The unexpected cosmetic feature is a tease for more Latitude announcements to come in January.

A new report by Kantar World Panel indicates that the number of iPhones sold in Europe in the third quarter of 2018 fell by 1.6%. This may have been driven by increased competition from Xiaomi and Huawei. These brands are also now contending with more established brands such as Samsung in the region.

AMD's Next Horizon event held yesterday was important for not only AMD's datacenter business but also for the company as a whole. AMD finally has revealed key information on Zen 2, Rome, the 7nm, new Vega GPUs, and what it means for AMD's business.

During Christmas time, Amazon traditionally hires thousands of seasonal workers to meet the sharp rise in demand. However, the number of these workers is said to be declining by almost 20,000 this year. The reason for this is the ongoing automation.

Intel may look like it is doing well right now, but the production problems will hit it hard in 2019. AMD ill not cut it any slack and will hit hard with the new 7 nm CPUs, but Intel has some retaliation plans, at least on the server side of things. The upcoming Xeon Scalable CPUs slated for late 2019 will integrate Multi-Chip Packaging technology that allows to fit 48 cores on a single chip, plus 12-channel DDR4 support.

OPPO and Pokemon have teamed up so that the OEM can offer its newest power bank with a trademark yellow-and-black Pikachu theme. Appropriately enough, this device has the next generation of OPPO's impressively fast VOOC charging system.

SK Hynix managed to beat Samsung and Toshiba once again in being the first one to unveil a flash memory product. This time, it is the world's first 96-layer 512 Gb 4D NAND flash chip. Mass production will start before the end of the year and the first products to use the new chips should show up in the first quarter of 2019.

The first Lenovo Lecoo Unmanned Store is located in Beijing, at the company's tech campus. Its goal is to help Lenovo test its facial recognition, electronic payment, IoT, AI, and AR technologies. The catch is that Lenovo tablets are being used instead of the human staff one would expect to see in a store.

More than three years since Adobe Systems completed the acquisition of the Fotolia microstock agency, this service that provides more than 57 million high-resolution royalty-free images and videos has finally been integrated into Adobe Stock.

Apple has instructed its smartphone assemblers Foxconn and Pegatron to halt plans for allocating additional production lines to the new iPhone XR model sensing low product demand. Another iPhone assembler, Wistron, has been ordered to standby for any rush orders. Interestingly, Apple has ordered increased production of the year-old iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus from its suppliers.

Apple’s share price fell below the US$200.00 mark today, reaching a low of US$198.17 at the time of writing. The continued stock plunge has devalued the company from its previous trillion-dollar valuation; market capitalization currently stands at US$950.8 billion. In early October, the share price stood at just over US$230.

Apple's in-house refurbished store has started selling 64 GB iPhone 8 handsets for $499, $100 less than a new phone. Apple's refurbished iPhones are basically used internals that are cleaned and repaired, then placed into a new chassis with a new battery. Higher capacity iPhone 8 models and the iPhone 8 Plus should be available in the refurbished store soon.

Location intelligence is based on the locational data of consumers gathered through IoT and similar means. Its market is thought to be capable of strong growth for the next 7 years, at which point it may be worth just over US$25 billion.

Huawei includes access to its Mobile Cloud subscription service in its version of Android, EMUI OS. It is dropping the price for this 50GB cloud storage solution to US$0.011 (€0.01) for Huawei device owners in the EU for this month. The price increases to €0.99 when this promotion expires.

5G adoption should explode in 2019 and MediaTek is ready to capitalize on it both with standalone 5G modems and 5G-enabled SoCs. The Taiwanese company would supply big names like Apple with standalone chips, while Chinese phone-makers would benefit from 5G-enabled mid-range SoCs that will help reduce the integration costs.

Global smartphone shipments for the third quarter have fallen by 6% over the last 12 months, according to data from IDC. The shipment volume for 3Q 2018 stood at 355.2 million units, compared to 377.8 million smartphones shipped in 3Q 2017. Samsung remains the overall pack leader, but Huawei has made significant ground on the South Korean manufacturer.

It has been reported that Apple will no longer provide detailed sales figures for its products in future financial reports, starting in Q1 2019. The Cupertino-based tech giant has just released its fourth quarter results; the quarterly revenue amount posted was US$62.9 billion. The company’s stock prices plunged as investors fretted over the surprising announcement.

The Precision 7530 is a powerful and hefty workstation, but it's definitely not smaller than the XPS 15. Dell has confirmed a minor measurement error on its product page and will update the dimension from 337.6 mm to a more accurate 375.92 mm.

The shares of the company Spotify were down 11% at the start of today (November 1, 2018) due to a forecast that shows relatively poor fourth-quarter performance. In addition, Spotify is now reported to be committed to new investments to boost innovation and future-proofing in its products.

QNAP's new TS-2888X AI-ready NAS starts at US$4,900 (discounted) and can be pre-ordered for 15 percent off until the end of the month. All available models come with Intel Xeon W series processors, ASETEK liquid cooling, up to 512 GB of memory, up to 4 graphics cards, and a 2,000 Watt PSU switch and connector.

After failing to fulfill a contract with Snapchat's PR firm, PR Consultants (PRC), Instagram influencer and actor Luka Sabbat is being sued by PRC for $90,000. Sabbat signed a contract with PRC to promote Snapchat's Spectacles v2 with some Instagram posts and real-world appearances, but he failed to fulfill the terms of the contract.

Even though AMD may look like it has lost focus of the GPU market, CEO Lisa Su reassures everyone that the red team is not giving up on the high-end gaming GPU market that easily. AMD is currently in the process of developing high-performing quality products, and the first cards are expected to hit the market in 2020.

Some users who managed to get the Nvidia RTX 2080 Ti Founders' Edition claim that the GPUs have critical instability issues that lead to black screens, BSoDs, and artifacting. There are instances where the cards were dead on arrival, and the replacement cards sent by Nvidia were still affected. Nvidia stats that this is normal, the number of affected users is limited, and they are dealing with each customer.

Red Dead Redemption 2 has been the talk of the town since it was released last week. All of that talk translated into hard cash for Rockstar Games, though, as the game sold over US$725 million in retail over its first three days.

HMD Global launched the Nokia 7.1 at the start of October. The mid-ranger, as promised, is now on sale in the US, with a US$350 price tag granting buyers ownership of a 5.84-inch FHD+ device with dual rear cameras and a Snapdragon 636.

There's no doubt that this year's Surface Pro models are significantly faster than the last generation since Kaby Lake-R doubles the number of cores from Kaby Lake. The bigger question, however, is how much or little the models will throttle when under load. Performance throttling was abysmal on the 2017 series and it's just slightly improved for this latest iteration.

The 8-inch convertible is off to a good start as far as user interest is concerned. Nearly 400 backers have already pledged an average of $450 USD each for the device. We obtained an early sample of the unit and can vouch for its robust chassis quality and stable CPU performance with minimal throttling.

Although this is only about connecting a custom R15 to a 5G network in the company's research lab for now, OPPO is planning to become the first Chinese company to bring a 5G smartphone to the market in 2019. Unfortunately, they will have to beat Huawei, LG, ZTE, and all the others who are also chasing the same goal.

The 48 MP ISOCELL Bright GM1 and 32 MP ISOCELL Bright GD1 are Samsung's new 0.8-micrometer image sensors for mobile devices that enable camera module manufacturers to build smaller modules or cram more pixels into existing designs. These sensors support Gyro-based image stabilization and the Tetracell technology for increased light sensitivity.

Google launched a new grant initiative today, seeking to fund teams that want to develop "AI for social good." Dubbed the AI Impact Challenge, the initiative will award $25 million across multiple teams that qualify based on the scalability, feasibility, and impact their project can have.

Microsoft has raised the prices of Office Home & Business 2019 and Office Professional 2019 to US$249.99 and $439.99 respectively. This is an approximate 10% hike compared to the corresponding Office 2016 suites.

Code buried in Google's Play Store app hints that Google may one day offer an app bundle subscription service that offers access to several apps for a monthly fee. A question circulating through Google's Opinion Rewards app seems to corroborate this notion, asking users if they feel the word "Pass" would describe a subscription service that offers "hundreds of dollars worth of paid apps" for a monthly fee.

The Swiss firm ABB appears to believe that robotics is the future. To this end, it has spent US$150 million on a new plant in China. This factory will focus on three main areas: manufacture by automatons, R&D and AI development.

Although it might not be doing great on the stock exchange yet, Xiaomi managed to hit its sales target for this year already. Still trailing Huawei and OPPO in China, Xiaomi managed to go from 70 million units in the first 10 months of 2017 all the way to this year's rather ambitious target of 100 million units.

Twitter might remove the red heart-shaped Like button soon as per reports by The Telegraph. According to the report, the decision to remove the Like button is to foster a healthier climate for debate. Twitterati, on the other hand, aren't too happy with the proposal.

Although LG Pay was supposed to reach the US back in June, it still needs to get there. However, LG has just registered the LG Pay Quick trademark in South Korea, Europe, and the US. There might not be a launch date to talk about yet, but it seems that everything is finally moving in the right direction.

In a deal valued at US $34 billion, IBM will acquire Red Hat, the organization behind Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora, and CentOS. IBM is buying Red Hat in order to compete in the cloud computing market against the likes of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and others. IBM has stated that Red Hat will operate as an independent unit with IBM's Hybrid Cloud team and will continue Red Hat's commitment to open source software.

Gab, a social media alternative to the likes of Facebook and Twitter, has come under fire yet again for posts from its users. This time, anti-Semitic posts from the Pittsburgh shooter, who shot and killed 11 people in a synagogue yesterday, prompted PayPal to ban Gab from its payment services and platform.

The latest update pushed to Tesla cars in the United States includes the feature 'Navigate on Autopilot'. It allows the car to suggest the next turning, if this movement will take it off or onto a highway, and complete it by itself. However, this new function still needs human approval to take effect.

Snap Camera is a freshly-launched desktop app that adds Snapchat Lenses to webcam feeds for vlogging or Twitch streams. Like all similar things Snap, it relies on facial mapping to super-impose a range of effects on a video's subject. Snap Camera is available for download now

Xiaomi's new Mi Mix 3 made the trip over to DxOMark just after launch and impressed, delivering performance figures on par with devices carrying twice its price tag. The Chinese flagship may be far from the priciest on the market, but you'd be hard-pressed to find a phone with better cameras, according to DxOMark.

The Mate 20 Pro was released a short while ago but its DxOMark review is yet to be seen. Sources claim that the report hasn't been published yet because the Mate 20 Pro's scores were just too high and Huawei believes releasing that information to the public would do more harm than good.