Latest Tech News

Huawei's Consumer Business head Yu Chengdong has posted the date of a new launch event on Weibo. This message also contains references to the Mate line of devices, indicating that it is to get new additions at this show. They may include the rumored MatePad Pro tablet.

The hand-sized Cubi 5 mini PCs from MSI now come with Intel's 10th gen Comet Lake CPUs up to a Core i7 U-series. This can be coupled with up to 64 GB of DDR4-2666 RAM and a storage solution that combines an M.2 NVMe SSD with a 2.5-inch SATA SSD/HDD.

Sony has now released its official Android 10 update roadmap. The Xperia 1 and Xperia 5 will receive the OS update before the year runs out, while other phones will follow next year. Sadly, the Xperia XZ1 phones are missing from the list, which means they've been abandoned after getting just one OS update, and that's a shame.

Google Stadia is launching in just a few days, but it looks like a fair number of its features will not be available at launch. Most of these features are related to multiplayer gaming and include State Share, Crowd Play, Stream Connect and Buddy Pass. Additionally, there will be limited functionality for PC, Chromecast Ultra and the wireless controller.

Current rumours are that NVIDIA has delayed the release of its Ampere GPUs, the next-generation successors of the company's current RTX 20 series product stack. Initially expected in the first half of next year, the 7 nm chips may make an appearance as early as March, but will not hit shelves until several months later.

Xiaomi's newly released Mi CC9 Pro and Mi Note 10 phones have received plenty of praise for their impressive camera performance. According to a new leak, however, that isn't as good as it gets, with the Chinese company touted to be working on an even more impressive camera phone.

Black Friday deals typically bring more value to the table, and Motorola's offerings this time will likely be enticing to most, with discounts of up to US$320 being on offer, starting November 24.

Huawei is expanding the launch of its FreeBuds 3 beyond China within the next few days. The wireless earbuds will undercut the Apple AirPods Pro on price while featuring active noise cancellation (ANC) and a Kirin A1 SoC. Some preorders will include a complimentary 15 W wireless charger too.

Lenovo now offers better GPU options and for the first time, an OLED display in its 15-inch workstation. Nvidia's Quadro RTX 5000 offers a level of performance that is usually exclusive to 17-inch models.

MSI has brought its updated Content Creator lineup to the Indian market. This includes the flagship P series followed by the Creator, Prestige, and Modern series. The Modern and Prestige series offer Intel Comet Lake-U and NVIDIA MX250 and GTX 1650 Max-Q options while the P and Creator series sport Intel Coffee Lake-Refresh 9th gen CPUs and graphics options ranging from the NVIDIA 1660 Ti to the RTX 2070 Max-Q.

A concept video for the Xiaomi Mi 10 has been posted on YouTube along with a set of optimistic specifications. Whether the Chinese manufacturer will fit the successor of the Mi 9 with a 108 MP sensor and a Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 SoC remains to be seen, but the “waterfall” display gives the concept Mi 10 an enviable screen-to-body ratio.

The 15.6-inch MSI GL65 is one of the lighter gaming laptops in its size category due to its narrow bezel design and no-frills approach. Its GeForce GTX 1650 GPU can play the latest games at native 1080p and decent graphical settings without much of a hassle.

As the first 15.6-inch MSI laptop with an Intel Core i7-10710U CPU, the Prestige 15 has some big shoes to fill. Performance and clock rate sustainability are good at the cost of high core temperatures stabilizing at ~95 C when under stressful processing loads.

Ten of the mainline Final Fantasy games are coming to Microsoft's Xbox Game Pass subscription service. Every main Final Fantasy game since Final Fantasy VII, save for the two MMORPGs (Final Fantasy XI and Final Fantasy XIV), will be released for Xbox Game Pass throughout 2020.

The blog TigerMobiles claims to have dug up a couple of patents that may show the directions in which Xiaomi intends to take the foldable trend. One shows a clamshell design like that of the new Motorola Razr, whereas the other is more like the Huawei Mate X, but with an impressively extensive pop-up camera.

Google will begin rolling out RCS support to all Android devices today. The rollout will happen in stages. Additionally, RCS will only be available through Google's Messages app. However, the rollout will eventually come to all Android devices, replacing the outdated SMS system currently employed.

MediaMarkt Saturn, a European retail conglomerate, released a video showing off renders of what it thinks the retail version of the PlayStation 5 will look like. Conjectures include wireless charging, controllers with full touchscreens, and complete backwards compatibility with all PlayStation consoles. Of course, these renders are just based on rumors and are unlikely to be reflective of the final product.

Minecraft Earth, the latest augmented reality title from Mojang, is now available in the United States and a few other countries. The title is currently in Early Access. In true Minecraft style, Minecraft Earth focuses on collecting materials and building structures. However, the title uses AR to simulate the structures in real life.

Brave, a Chromium-based browser designed around user privacy and anonymity, has finally released version 1.0 after four years in development. The browser has a unique method for upending the traditional ad-revenue basis of websites built around blockchain technologies and anonymity.

DJI has introduced its Remote ID, which allows a drone to "beam" its identity and other prevalent information to any smartphone on the ground via Wi-Fi. The company has developed this modality, which can be used through an app, in accordance with government recommendations for safety and compliance while flying personal aerial robots.

A new study of wearable uptake in the US shows that 56% of its participants own such a device. Furthermore, another 13% of this group reported considering the purchase of one by 2020. This study's publication also contained some recommendation for Google's next moves in this game following its Fitbit acquisition.

Carrying around a hefty laptop can prove tiresome if you are often on the move. However, many lightweight laptops are underpowered and struggle in office tasks, which is where the Acer TravelMate X514 steps in. Acer has designed the laptop to be simultaneously lightweight and powerful while retaining features that many businesses may find attractive too. It is not all rosy, though.

Vivo's S5 might be taken for just another device in a steadily-growing range of mid-range quad-cam products, were it not for the rather more original way in which the OEM has arranged its rear image sensors. They are in a square housing, but one rotated through 90 degrees compared to that of, say, the Pixel 4.

Based on the same Navi 14 chip, the Radeon RX 5300M comes with the same number of compute / texture units and ROPs, but it gets lower bandwidths and VRAM capacities limited to 3 GB when compared to the 5500M model. The reduced specs may lead to a performance drop of around 20%.

The immediate availability of the Rambus PCIe 5.0 controller could bring the first PCIe 5.0 commercial products sooner than previously estimated. This would indeed prove that PCIe 4.0 was doomed for a short-lived interim. Features include backwards compatibility with versions 4.0, 3.0 and 2.0, plus 128 GB/s bandwidth in x16 configuration.

Motorola officially announced the Razr 2019, a new foldable that harkens back to the glory days of flip phones. The Razr 2019 features a traditional clamshell design to house its 6.2-inch OLED foldable display. Thanks to a clever hinge mechanism, that display may not suffer the same crease- and dust-related issues as other foldables. However, the spec sheet leaves quite a bit to be desired, especially considering the phone's $1499.99 price tag.

John Carmack, the creator of Doom and a pioneer of virtual reality, is stepping down as the CTO of Oculus to focus on artificial general intelligence, which can be considered a super-powered version of artificial intelligence. Carmack will work from his home to develop machine intelligences that learn like humans do rather than through algorithms.

AMD’s Ryzen 9 3950X processor has been spotted on PassMark. The chip was tested on the CPU Mark benchmark for “high end CPUs” and scored magnificently. Only Epyc server processors from the same manufacturer prevented the sample from hitting the top spot, while Intel rivals such as the Core i9-9980XE had to make way for the upstart super-processor.

The concept of expensive laptops with little performance is not new, but buyers have mostly received high-quality components and a special design in return so far. Although the latter is in Porsche Design's name, the manufacturer doesn't take it very seriously when it comes to the high-quality hardware.

Until now, value for money has been one of the main reasons to buy an Honor smartphone, even at launch. The latest generation changes that, and not for the better. While the Honor 9X is a good device, it pales in comparison with other smartphones that have been released this year.

The first reviews for Pokémon Sword and Pokémon Shield have started coming in, and it appears the latest Pokémon titles are not a disaster. After being subject to numerous massive leaks and the controversial “Dexit” storm, the 8th Gen games have been praised for being streamlined and enjoyable, but they have not been met with universal acclaim.

Google has reportedly set up partnerships, or at least talks for partnerships, with various US banks and credit unions to offer a new kind of checking account linked to the Pay service. This may help it battle Apple, not to mention other bodies such as AliPay and Samsung Pay.

Motorola has finally certified its first-gen foldable with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The device's documentation reveals everything about the phone - well, from the outside, at least. Its new regulatory images dovetail with its most recent leaks.

Microsoft has let it be known that checking for updates on Windows 10 PCs that run the stable-channel 1903 version may result in the ability to download its successor, 1909. This November 2019 replacement for that build can also now be accessed by business users and server maintainers.

Machine learning is already making its way into IoT devices, as Google and Asus are now collaborating to release single board computers the size of credit cards. Even though they are small, these devices are powerful enough to enable AI-assisted applications for image recognition and upscaling.

The wait is over for long-suffering Apple MacBook Pro fans as the company’s rumored 16-inch MacBook Pro finally debuts. Among the headlining features is a new Magic Keyboard with scissor switch, up to 64 GB of RAM and the option to ramp storage all the way to an 8 TB SSD.

The Sky X4C / X7C laptops can easily replace a gaming desktop system, as they integrate desktop-grade components such as the Core i9-900KS CPU and the RTX 2080 or Quadro P5000 GPUs. Additionally, users can add up to 128 GB of DDR4 RAM and up to 20 TB of storage space through 2x NVMe slots and 2x 2.5-inch SATA bays.

In a Reddit post, AMD has detailed the reasoning behind its choice of moving to a new socket sTRX4 for the Threadripper 3000 processors. AMD is looking at both near and long-term scalability for the sTRX4 platform, but current Threadripper users feel otherwise.

Intel unveiled its upcoming vision processing unit (VPU) for edge computing devices. Dubbed Keem Bay, the new chip offers major improvements over existing VPUs from Nvidia and Huawei. Additionally, Keem Bay offers better performance with a significantly lower power draw.

Google's Stadia app is now available for iOS. However, this version of the app will not be able to play games when the service launches next week; rather, it is designed to manage a user's Stadia library. Surprisingly, the app already has a 4.6-star rating despite not being able to do anything yet.

Huawei launched the EMUI 10 beta a while ago, and has now started sending out the full, stable Android 10-based EMUI 10 update to its current-gen flagship device, the P30 Pro. The OTA comes in as a heavy 4.99 GB download, though.

Snap Inc has officially launched its new Spectacles 3. The Spectacles 3 feature dual built-in cameras that can shoot photos and video in 3D at up to 60fps with the ability to overlay 3D AR-style effects.

With the ConceptD series, Acer has launched a completely new product lineup. The premium white multimedia system tries to appeal to creators of digital multimedia content. However, as our review shows, it comes with a few drawbacks.

Leaks about the Samsung Galaxy S11 continue to grace the rumor mills and this time, we get to learn some additional information about S11's display, camera, and expected color options. The Galaxy S11 could sport a new AMOLED display type with a smaller central punch hole and offer excellent low-light imaging thanks to the large 108 MP sensor.

Leaked information about the Comet Lake-U powered Intel Frost Canyon NUC indicates that it will be an incremental update over the Coffee Lake-U-based Bean Canyon with the only changes being the availability of a USB Type-C port in the front panel and internal CPU upgrades. Frost Canyon will be available in both ultra-thin and standard form factors and is expected to launch on December 12.

There is a growing belief that Sony may be planning on offering expandable storage in the form of SSD cartridges for the PlayStation 5. A patent drawing originally thought to be a game cartridge is now being reconsidered as a possible straightforward external solution for supporting the PS5’s internal custom SSD when it is reaching its storage limits.

NVIDIA is offering a free copy of the latest Call of Duty PC game with every purchase of an RTX graphics card, desktop or notebook. However, this deal's window is shrinking: it is only available until November 18, 2019. The GPUs must be bought from nvidia.com or its official partners for the promotion to apply.

Back in July, a Blizzard employee unveiled most of the details presented at BlizzCon, but the Reddit post was dismissed as pure speculation. Nevertheless, the details are spot on for the most part, and there is some info on aspects that haven't been touched in the BlizzCon presentations, like the full class roster, planned classes, next gen console support and closed beta planned date.

The Galaxy A51 will probably be one of Samsung's new phones for 2020. It has attracted its first 360-degree set of renders (from OnLeaks), which incorporate rumors and theories about the phone such as that it will have quad rear cameras. The phone is also now depicted as having a punch-hole camera in its display.

The upcoming Snapdragon 865 is supposed to integrate a high-performance Kryo Gold Cortex-A77 running at 2.85 GHz plus 3 more A77 cores clocked at 2.42 GHz, along with 4 more Kryo Silver Cortex-A55 cores clocked at 1.8 GHz. This new cluster should boost performance by 20% compared to Snapdragon 855, while the new Adreno 650 GPU is expected to be 17-20% faster than the 640 model.