Latest Tech News

HYPER's 2nd-generation USB type C hub for laptops such as MacBooks has been launched via crowd-funding platforms. The resulting Indiegogo campaign has now attracted over US$1 million in backing, whereas the company had originally looked for about a tenth of that. This version of the HyperDrive has 3 SKUs with up to 18 ports each.

Based around a Raspberry Pi Zero W, a community project has transformed the popular single-board computer into a compact weather station. Comparatively easy and inexpensive to create, the system can be wall-mounted and features a 2.8-inch touchscreen display.

Popular navigation app HERE WeGo is now available for download on Huawei's Play Store alternative AppGallery. The application has been around for a long time offers several useful features such as turn-by-turn navigation, a voice assistant, and offline maps.

A new operating system for the Raspberry Pi is available. This should trigger nostalgic feelings among numerous users and is visually reminiscent of Windows XP and also supports old software with various emulators.

With MIUI 12 rumoured to be available from MIUI 12, Xiaomi has decided to push another Android 9.0 Pie-based update to the Mi Note 10 and Mi Note 10 Pro. While Xiaomi has pledged to update the CC9 Pro to Android 10 by the end of this month, the arrival of the latest update for EU handsets all but ends hopes that they were in line for the same treatment.

TCL launched its latest 10-series of smartphones earlier in April 2020. Now, it has announced that the Pro variant of the same has won some prominent awards. In addition, the OEM's PLEX phone has also won similar gongs, as has 1 of its Wi-Fi routers.

Oranth is a company that makes smart TV equipment, some of which are sold under the brand-names of other OEMs. It has announced that a new 4K series of the same will run on SoCs supplied by HiSilicon, a division of Huawei also responsible for more premium Kirin smartphone chipsets.

Get Amped for GTC 2020, according to NVIDIA. Rescheduled for May 14, CEO Jensen Huang previously stated that the event would not disappoint. The company is expected to announce its first Ampere GPUs, the next-generation successors to the RTX 20 series and the Turing architecture.

GeForce NOW has had games made by Codemasters, Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, Klei Entertainment and XBOX Game Studios pulled from its platform. However, the news on NVIDIA's take on cloud gaming is not all bad: Ubisoft has added a total of 36 new games to its portfolio. A representative for this publisher has also endorsed it as "a leading-edge service".

The 2018 Intel Hades Canyon NUC was one of the only bright spots to come out of the ill-fated Kaby Lake-G series. It continues to be both the most balanced and most powerful NUC available due largely to its atypical 100 W processor. We take a look back at the mini PC to see how it holds up against the latest laptops of 2019 and 2020.

Huawei has ditched the design of the FreeBuds 3, according to leaked renders of new TWS earbuds published by WinFuture. Featuring a white design, silicone tips, ANC and a compact charging case, the FreeBuds 3i will likely be pitched as AirPods Pro competitors.

Rumour has it that the Mi Mix 4 has been sighted on Geekbench, complete with 10 GB of RAM and a Snapdragon 865+ processor. While the Mi Mix 3 is long overdue an upgrade, there is no truth to this latest Mi Mix 4 rumour.

Dell has not yet officially announced any Renoir-based laptops, and rumor has it that we will not only see Renoir-based laptops, but models powered by the Renoir successor codenamed Cezanne, as well, next year. Cezanne will get a Navi23-based iGPU and is supposed to be AMD's answer to Intel's Tiger Lake-H. Dell's Cezanne-H laptops will additionally feature high-quality FHD and QHD displays with high refresh rates.

Tipster @evleaks outed what appears to be an official render for Huawei's purported Y8S smartphone. The midrange device takes a lot of cues from the Huawei Y9, with a similar design and camera setup. The device looks likely to take the fight to Xiaomi's Redmi Note 9 lineup later this year.

A Samsung Community forum moderator has stated that the company is reportedly working on delivering the One UI update to Samsung Galaxy S9 and Galaxy Note 9 users. Unfortunately, there is no word about when the firmware will be available for download, but it is reassuring to know that it will make its way to the devices eventually.

Launching on May 7, the LG Velvet will arrive in four colours and with a 4,300 mAh battery, along with a Snapdragon 765, 8 GB of RAM and 128 GB of storage. Sporting a 48 MP ISOCELL Bright GM2 camera, the LG Velvet is rumoured to cost over ~US$700.

News of the Redmi K30i from Xiaomi has only just started appearing and now an alleged first promo image has been leaked. The budget 5G smartphone from the Chinese manufacturer looks exactly how a “lite” version of the popular Redmi K30 5G would look like. However, the K30i only has one camera on the front.
A noted Xiaomi tipster has stated that the supposed K30i promo image is a fan render.

The specifications for the upcoming Xiaomi Mi 10 Youth Edition smartphone have been posted online along with an official render of the device. The Chinese-language documents reveal a frequency of 2.4 GHz for the processor, which suggests it will be Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 765G powering these colorful smartphones.

Xbox boss Phil Spencer recently hinted in a tweet that the next Xbox Series X preview stream may focus on game titles. It is speculated that this event should be streamed in early May, while a later stream scheduled for June is likely to unveil details for the lower-priced Xbox Series S console.

Said to be launching on May 6 in Germany, the Surface Earbuds are rather late the party. Announced last October for US$249, it seems that their delay has coincided with a price cut. The Surface Earbuds will not come cheap, though.

Nvidia and AMD have picked up any spare capacity on TSMC’s 7nm foundry as the companies ready their next generational GPUs. The report comes from Taiwanese rag Digitimes that says the new orders will help to ensure TSMC posts relatively strong results compared with its competition.

A particular string of characters in the Sindhi language seems to be wreaking havoc on iOS devices worldwide. Upon receiving the text in question, iOS crashes completely. A force restart is required to get the iPhone/iPad operational again. The only workaround is to disable notifications for all instant messaging applications until Apple rolls out a fix.

It’s believed that Xiaomi will soon be releasing the Xiaomi Mi Note 10 Lite, the Redmi Note 9, and the Redmi Note 9 Pro smartphones onto the European market. The Lite version of the Xiaomi Note 10 has been in and out of the news lately, and it is expected it will come with a large battery and penta-camera setup on the rear.

Samsung's upcoming Galaxy Note 20 series might not come with a ToF sensor. The company cites a lack of user interest as one of the primary reasons. Additionally, some of the ToF sensor's work can now be done via software.

Mobvoi - the OEM behind the TicWatch line of wearables - has unveiled its latest product, the Cololight. It consists of hexagonal LED panels that can be connected and thus arranged into a variety of patterns at the user's discretion. Its starts at a pack of 3 lights and their necessary components for US$59.99.

The positively-received Zenfone 6 was launched right about a year ago, but there doesn't seem to be much information on its successor, the Zenfone 7. In a world dominated by quad-digit-priced flagship phones, that's a right shame.

A security group has reported the detection of 267 million Facebook profiles on a server being offered in exchange for £300 (~US$340). The users in question are apparently mostly located in the United States. This allegedly hacked info includes their names and phone numbers.

It has been fifteen years since Apple switched from PowerPC to Intel processors. Now, the next paradigm shift is almost upon us, with Apple set to change to ARM processors from as early as 2021. Set to be based on an improved A14 chip, the first ARM-powered MacBook will supposedly exceed all performance expectations.

Huawei has debuted the Nova 7 SE, 7 and 7 Pro today (April 23, 2020). These phones closely resemble the Honor 30 devices from the front, but their rear panels are a different matter. Each variant has a 4-camera array on its back, each of which has its 64MP main shooter.

From the MacBook Pro 14 to the iPhone 12 and everything in between, Apple is planning a bumper hardware refresh by the end of the year. Expect new iMacs, AirTags, Watch Series 6 and MacBook Pro 16 releases.

Huawei's latest tablet is the MatePad 10.4, a slate with a 2K display with the diagonal length it is named for. It is powered by the Kirin 810 and has 4GB or 6GB RAM options, which come in Wi-Fi only and Wi-Fi or LTE SKUs. The OEM has revealed that its starts at 1899 yuan (~US$269).

Rockstar Games' Red Dead Redemption 2 will be available for Xbox Game Pass subscribers on May 7th. It comes with a trade-off, however, as Grand Theft Auto V will no longer be available for subscribers from that day onward.

The Mi A3 has already received three Android 10 updates but both were filled with bugs. Xiaomi is now sending out yet another build to the phone with the version number "V11.0.14.0.QFQMIXM", and it appears to fix most of the bugs from previous updates.

The CPU and GPU clocks appear to be quite low compared to mobility models like the Ryzen 7 4700U, but the "Artic" chip proves to be faster, at least in CPU-related tests, and the DDR4-3200 support certainly helped. On the iGPU side, however, the performance is not that great, as it turned out to be slower than a Vega 6 model.

Apple is underclocking the A13 Bionic in the iPhone SE, so the story goes. Citing AnTuTu scores, the new iPhone SE cannot match the performance set by the iPhone 11 Pro or iPhone 11 Pro Max, its A13 Bionic-powered siblings. However, there is little use in deducing this from these scores, as we shall discuss below.

References to what may have possibly been a Lenovo Legion 5 SKU powered by the AMD Renoir Ryzen 4000 and the NVIDIA RTX 2060 have surfaced on the Lenovo BIOS Simulator Center and a driver download page. However, that SKU is not seen in the PSREF indicating that it may have been shelved mid-way. The PSREF spec sheets also seem to indicate the Legion 5 SKUs powered Ryzen 4000 as having nearly double the battery life compared to their Comet Lake-H counterparts.

According to South Korean media, Xiaomi has sought clamshell foldable panels from Samsung in the hope of mass-producing a Galaxy Z Flip-type smartphone in 2H 2020. Xiaomi is aiming to release a CNY 999 (~US$141) 5G handset before the end of the year too.

The budget AMD Ryzen 3 3300X Matisse desktop processor has been tested on Geekbench 4 in combination with an ASRock X470 Gaming-ITX/ac motherboard. The new CPU has thrown up a single-core score and multi-core score that can beat the median scores for the thousands of Intel Core i7-7700K that have appeared on the same benchmark.

The vulnerability allows attackers to gain control of all the data stored within the mails received via the Mail app on iOS devices. Apple has recently become aware of the security problem, but the vulnerability may have been exploited since early 2018. A fix will soon be released, and, until then, iPhone and iPad users are advised to deactivate the Mail app and use other solutions like Gmail.

iQOO just unveiled its latest gaming smartphone in the form of the iQOO Neo3. It comes with a 6.5-inch 1080p 144Hz HDR 10-ready IPS LCD panel, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 SoC coupled with up to 12GB of RAM, and 256GB of storage, a 4,500mAh battery that supports 44W wired charging, and more. The device will be available for purchase in China next week. Prices start at CNY 2698($380) for the base variant.

Microsoft has revealed the specifications required to power its all-new Flight Simulator on PC. In a pleasant surprise, a PC with mid-range specs from 2013 will be able to play it, but a higher end rig from 2019 will be best placed to demonstrate everything the game has to offer visually.

A recent leak concerning an alleged Redmi Pad 5G tablet depicted a very attractive device at an almost unbelievable price. A well-known tipster has taken a closer look at the leaked image and believes its contents are fake. The Redmi Pad 5G was billed to bring 5G connectivity, a Snapdragon 765G SoC, and 30 W fast charge for just 1,999 yuan (US$282).

Magic Leap has announced that it is cutting staff and reorienting from a consumer focus to an enterprise focus. The company blames COVID-19 for at least some of its woes but the reality is that it never really gained traction as it has thus far overpromised and underdelivered.

An AMD Ryzen 3 3100 CPU has been spotted on Geekbench being put through its paces, and the new Matisse processor performed well considering its entry-level status. The scores it achieved are similar to those of the Kaby Lake Intel Core i7-7700K, which could indicate the Zen 2 chip’s ability to hold up well against the upcoming Intel Core i3-10100.

Qualcomm launched the Snapdragon 855+ last year as a better-performing refresh of the Snapdragon 855. There's unlikely to be a repeat with the Snapdragon 865, however, as an OEM exec has confirmed that Qualcomm will not release a Snapdragon 865+.

Details about the upcoming Redmi 10X smartphone from Xiaomi have been published, and it seems this will be the Chinese market version of the Redmi Note 9. The entry-level phone will cost 1,499 yuan (US$212) and comes with a Helio G85 from MediaTek. No specific release date has been revealed yet, but it will likely come to market soon.

The expensive pricing of the Mi smartphones is the right choice for Xiaomi and the only path to long-term success. In hindsight, the US sanctions against Huawei are an advantage for Xiaomi that should not be underestimated.

In our review of the Mi 10 Pro, the Xiaomi smartphone shows strengths in a lot of areas that have traditionally been weaknesses of previous generation Mi phones. However, one thing is still missing from the Xiaomi Mi 10 Pro ...

The OnePlus 8 Pro tops out at US$1000, and one would expect a problem-free user experience. Just like the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra, however, the phone seems to suffer from a green tint display issue—albeit only on some units.

There is good news for those considering an upgrade from their existing rigs with a Noctua cooler and that are based on an Intel 300-series chipset to one with certain newer 400-series options instead: they may be able to switch the former from one to another. Some of this brand's products are even compatible with Comet Lake-S processors out of the box.