Business Articles

Details of Huawei's upcoming Mate trio of devices have surfaced, showing devices with five cameras, wireless charging, and huge batteries.

Market analysts claimed sales of the Samsung Galaxy S9 was one of the worst ever in the series but Samsung has other ideas, and also believes the new Note 9 will outsell the Note 8.

PUBG Mobile crossed 100 million downloads this month, cementing it as one of the most popular Battle Royales for smartphones and tablets. Despite its success, it still trails behind Fortnite, which hit 100 million downloads last month on iOS only. The new Android version of Fortnite may spell trouble for PUBG Mobile and Tencent games.

Google is aiming to bring its Cloud platform and AI solutions to the forefront of enterprise-level computing. The company outlined its plans to do so at its relevant Next '18 event in San Francisco this year. The Edge TPU, which could make Google's AI provision end-to-end, was also unveiled.

Uber lost a net $891 million this quarter as it continues to aggressively invest in new ventures and technologies. Despite bringing in almost $3 billion, the company hemorrhaged cash as it acquired new companies, started new lines of business, and invested in new technology. Despite this massive loss, investors remain optimistic about the company's future.

Sony has dethroned Canon as the leading US retailer of full-frame cameras. The milestone will be celebrated with a new "Be Alpha" campaign, which will focus on connecting creatives across North America via social media and pop-up events. It will be interesting to see how Canon and Nikon, the two biggest names in the camera world, will react to the shift.

Asus' main flagship for the year, the Zenfone 5Z is finally making it over to the US. While currently unavailable, it's said to be on pre-order at the moment and will go on sale on August 13 with a bargain price tag of US$499.

Motorola has launched three new devices in China. The E5 Plus and Z3 are known quantities, so the main arrival is the Snapdragon 636-powered Moto P30.

Xiaomi released the Mi A2 in India last week, with the device being, for the most part, an Android One rebrand of the Mi 6X. It also fails at being a worthy successor to the popular last-gen Mi A1.

Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo believes Apple's next trillion dollars could come from its services business, AR glass, and Apple Car. The Apple Car is expected to launch sometime between 2023 to 2025 and will be positioned as the 'next star product'. While the idea of an Apple-branded vehicle was shelved sometime ago, some of the recent hirings of the company might mean Apple is indeed reconsidering getting into the automobile industry.

Although ZTE can sell its products to the civilian consumers all over the US, a recent bill that was signed by Donal Trump bans the government use of any device made by the Chinese brand due to security issues. Even more, this bill also forbids the use of Huawei hardware for the same reason.

The NVIDIA Quadro RTX GPUs implement Samsung's latest 16 Gigabit GDDR6 memory. The enhanced bandwidth of GDDR6 helps in improved performance and memory efficiency while consuming 35% less power. The Quadro RTX is the first product to implement Samsung's GDDR6 VRAM.

Macs are more or less impervious to hacking, right? Not any more, according to two cybersecurity researchers during a briefing at the Black Hat USA Conference 2018. However, the attacks involved are difficult to achieve and need to be launched at very specific times during the computer's set-up.

India remains a solid market for the Chinese smartphone brand, as Xiaomi accounted for no less than 10 million units sold in Q2 2018, which translates to a market share of 29.7 percent. Samsung got the second place, while Vivo and OPPO came in third and fourth. The Indian market grew by 20 percent since the same period of 2017.

MSI has announced a new mobile workstation for creatives. The WS65 is a professional makeover for the GS65 Stealth Thin and comes with processor options up to the Intel Core i9-8950HK and GPU options up to the NVIDIA Quadro P4200. The MSI WS65 will be on display during SIGGRAPH 2018 and is expected to be available from September.

The new Radeon Pro WX 8200 only gets 56 CU and 8 GB HBM2 VRAM, but the Vega 10 GPU can still boost to 1.5 GHz and the memory bandwidth is slightly higher than that of the WX 9100 flagship. Even with these downgrades, the WX 8200 is only ~20% slower than the WX 9100, but its price is more than halved.

Expect the same ThinkPad carbon fiber and magnesium alloy finish but in a newer design inspired by the ThinkPad X1 Carbon series. Intel 8th gen Xeon and Quadro GPUs complete the package, but the high starting price of just under $2000 USD may turn off some workstation users.

Apart from introducing their thinnest mobile workstation ThinkPad yet, Lenovo updated their most powerful ThinkPad laptop today as well. The new ThinkPad P72 ditches the DVD drive and opts for a thinner chassis, while also offering far more powerful GPU options than any other ThinkPad, up to the Nvidia Quadro P5200.

Google is expected to miss out cashing in on the Fortnite craze due to Epic Games' decision to distribute the Fortnite Mobile APK outside the Play Store. App Store intelligence firm Sensor Tower projects that Google might stand to miss out on more than US$50 million in platform fees for the remaining part of 2018. Circumventing the Play Store might have a slight impact in overall downloads of the game but its revenue potential stands to remain fairly unaffected.

Those who had any hopes of being able to acquire the Dell XPS 15 9570 updated with NVIDIA GeForce GTX 11 graphics before the end of the year should change their shopping plans because Frank Azor has just confirmed that this machine will not receive any hardware refresh in Q4.

The upcoming Pocophone F1 is more than just another Xiaomi handset because this will be the first smartphone by POCO, which is a new sub-brand of the Chinese company. POCO's first effort focuses entirely on speed and sports a Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 with liquid cooling, an IR blaster, and a generous 4,000 mAh battery.

The Xeon processors employed by data centers in various artificial intelligence applications provided Intel with over US$1 billion in revenue in 2017, and the future looks even better. According to the company's officials, the data-centric businesses can provide a market worth US$200 billion in 2022.

Diablo III is arguably the weakest link in Blizzard's current portfolio, and, although the company is not really pressured by upcoming Korean MMOARPGs, it at least owes it to the fans to hype things up for the Diablo franchise once again. Blizzard acknowledged the existence of multiple Diablo-inspired projects already in development, some of these being scheduled for a reveal at Blizz Con this year.

Although the recent official teasers have not revealed what is this all about, insiders familiar with the matter revealed that Qualcomm will launch a new mobile chip on September 10. As its alleged name suggests, the upcoming Snapdragon Wear 3100 is the successor of the Snapdragon Wear 2100, which was released two years ago.

The new 4 TB 4-bit QLC SSD by Samsung comes with a 3-year warranty period and has a level of performance similar to the company’s 3-bit design. The new SSD for consumers provides read speeds of up to 540 MB/s and write speeds of up to 520 MB/s. This drive arrives more than a decade after Samsung's 32 GB 1-bit SLC SSD that was introduced in 2006.

Although it might not affect all Dell XPS 15 9575 units that were patched with the latest BIOS update, it seems that at least some of this convertible's users are now facing a buggy trackpad. For now, the problem is being investigated by Dell's engineers, so a solution should surface as soon as possible.

Xiaomi's Director of Product Marketing, Zhi Zhiyuan, has confirmed that the company has no plans of releasing an Mi Max 3 Pro. Previous word claimed that the Pro variant of the newly launched Mi Max 3 would be powered by a Snapdragon 710.

God of War was released back in April and it has recorded some fantastic sales numbers on its way to becoming the fastest-selling PlayStation release ever.

Huawei has now launched its latest device in India. The Honor Play is notable for being the cheapest device to be released with Huawei's flagship Kirin 970 SoC.

The European Union is looking into the current fragmentation in smartphone connectors and has setup an inquiry to see if a single connector type can be mandated across all smartphones. While the issue of multiple plugs is almost passe, Apple's Lightning Connector differs from the standard micro-USB or USB-C connector that is common amongst Android smartphones prompting the EU to investigate if some sort of standardization can be achieved.

A recent smartphone sales report for the first half of 2018 by Sigmaintell Consulting shows that Huawei shipped more than 25 million handsets (out of a 100 million total) with a notched display during the given period, followed by Apple with over 20 million units. The third position goes to Chinese brand OPPO.

AMD has announced that its latest HEDT CPUs, the Ryzen Threadripper 2, are available for pre-order starting today for a retail launch on August 13. The second generation Ryzen Threadrippers come in multiple SKUs targeting different segments of the enthusiast gaming and content creation market with prices starting from US$649 for the Threadripper 2920X and going all the way up to US$1,799 for the Threadripper 2990WX.

Apparently, Motorola has two mid-range devices in the works. One is the Motorola One, and the other is the Motorola One Power. Both are Android One devices but it remains unknown what actually separates them.

The biggest headline from Counterpoint Research's newest report on the smartphone market may have been Huawei's dethroning of Apple to become the second-largest smartphone company in the world, but equally impressive is HMD's showing in the global market.

Sony has released its sales numbers for the first quarter of its fiscal year. According to the report, the company's PlayStation division saw sizeable rises in income and profit but the reverse was the case for the floundering mobile division.

The quad-core 3 GHz Ryzen CPU will integrate a 1.3 GHz Vega-based GPU with 24 Compute Units connected to 8 GB of GDDR5 VRAM. This particular SoC will debut on a gaming console designed specifically for the Chinese market by PC maker Subor. Prices are still unknown.

Microsoft MVP Susan Bradley has written an open letter to top management at Microsoft about the quality of Windows 10 patches. She has also pointed to results of her survey of IT admins who are admittedly not very happy with shoddy patches and that the Windows Insider program isn't helping in identifying issues. Microsoft, however, thinks otherwise.

The processor supplier MediaTek have posted an increase in second-quarter profits; however, its sales may have been unchanged compared to last quarter. Accordingly, the company's CEO has predicted a slight downturn in MediaTek's main market for the rest of 2018.

HMD may be set to open up shop in the US, with the Finnish OEM said to be sending out ads for a number of job positions based in the US. This move may mean we get to see more of the company's high-value devices in the US soon.

Samsung may be the biggest smartphone brand in the world but the company's policy on software updates is far from the best. According to a notice sent to users of Galaxy devices, a number of Galaxy A, J, and C smartphones will not receive the Oreo update till December—four months after the release of Android P.

OnePlus overtook Samsung and Apple to become the biggest smartphone brand in India's premium smartphone segment, with the OnePlus accounting for 30% of sales of premium devices in Q2.

HTC's smartphone sales have floundered globally over the past two years, and the company has finally closed shop in India. This is only relevant for smartphone sales, though, as the company's VR division still holds strong.

Samsung has introduced the Galaxy Tab S4, which is aims to satisfy those who swear by Android tablets for personal and professional use. The Galaxy Tab S4 comes with the S-Pen, Snapdragon 835 SoC, and DeX support. The asking price of US$650 gets you the S-Pen but doesn't include the Book Cover Keyboard.

Its still not clear when Lenovo will announce the upcoming ThinkPad P1 – but an official release might be in sight, as two new official renders of the ThinkPad P1, a thinner 15-inch workstation laptop, have appeared on the internet.

Thanks to record-breaking P20/Pro smartphone sales and additional support from the secondary Honor brand, Huawei snagged Apple's second place for most handhelds sold in Q2 2018. The Chinese company also aims to break into the U.S. market, a move that could pose some serious problems for Samsung's leading position.