Latest Tech News

The uber-popular indie farming simulator Stardew Valley is getting an iOS port this month. The title is up for pre-order on the Apple App Store now and will be available for download October 24 for US$7.99. An Android port will be coming soon. If you haven't tried one of the many ports of the excellent farming/relationship-building/role-playing game, you can check it out on your iPhone later this month.

Nubia has made a name for releasing catchy devices with great designs and the next device to trot out of the company's stables will be no different, with it said to feature two displays—and no selfie camera.

Gaming phones are the order of the day and Huawei looks set to join that trend with the upcoming Mate 20X, a gaming device that could come with a big battery, liquid cooling system, and, possibly, a larger than normal display.

Xiaomi has announced that its Mi 8 flagship has sold 6M units worldwide, with the budget Redmi 5A that was launched about ten months ago having sold 10 million units in India alone. The first achievement ensures that Mi 8's are temporarily cheaper in China due to a 200Y price slash.

The Razer Phone 2 has "big ass side bezels" and Razer isn't afraid to show it. The company claims that its thick bezels will allow for a more comfortable grip when gaming with room for improved sound quality. The smartphone is now available for $799 in North America with an expected ship date in the next few weeks.

While the C64 Mini has been widely available in Europe for some time, the U.S. has missed out on the console's retro computing goodness until today. The C64 Mini is now available Stateside for US$80 through Amazon, Walmart, and GameStop.

The new color choice will carry no price premium over the standard black color for full price parity with existing configurations. All SKUs of the single storage Blade 15 will have a Mercury White option including the base configuration for $2200. Users in Europe, however, will be missing out as this will be exclusive to North America and China for now.

The new Blade 15 addresses the most pressing concerns that original Blade 15 fans have been clamoring about for months. Namely, the new model integrates secondary HDD storage, RJ-45, a lower starting price, and potentially quieter fans all without significantly changing the sleek design of the original.

Settling for lesser-known brands like UMIDIGI, LeEco, Ulefone, or Voyo is a guaranteed method to save on hundreds of dollars. The store-wide sale also includes Huawei and Lenovo tablets for those who still prefer brand new devices for peace of mind.

Research data, created by BofA Merrill Lynch Global Research and shared by Horace Dediu on Twitter, has shown that Apple and its products seem to be succeeding in tempting Android users away from their currently owned devices. For example, according to the statistics in the chart, 19% of Samsung-smartphone owners are considering an Apple device as their next purchase.

The Pixel Slate is Google's latest tablet. It comes in one colour (Midnight Blue) and has an optional Pixelbook pen and keyboard with a dedicated Google Assistant button. The Pixel Slate runs Chrome OS and has its own Play Store apps.

The Google Pixel 3 and 3 XL have been released. Their appearance will surprise nobody, as both phones look exactly as described in all their leaks. The Pixel 3 XL has a notch, but may also have a lot of interesting new Google features behind it.

Could a Razer desktop be in the works? The Singaporean-American OEM is set to announce a line of brand new products in San Jose next week. Hopefully, more concrete details about the Razer Phone 2 and its unique docking station will be on show.

Right after the official launch of the 9th gen CPU lineup, Intel hired professional overclockers to demonstrate the potential of the new Core i9-9900K processors. Using liquid nitrogen, the 8-core CPU was pushed to 6.9 GHz (7.1 GHz unstable), but performance gains do not look that impressive. The CPU can easily be pushed to 5.3 GHz using watercoolers, though.

Since triple-cam setups are becoming the norm, Samsung is upping the ante with rear quad-cam setups now. Surprisingly enough, the first quad-cam model will not be a high-end device, but a premium mid-range one powered by a Snapdragon 660 SoC coupled with 6 GB of RAM. This model should be officially unveiled on October 11.

It has been reported that Essential’s next smartphone-related product may be saturated with enough AI technology to enable users to have a full-fledged virtual assistant in their pockets. Apparently, there is a prototype in the works, and it could even see the light of day at the 2019 CES event in January. It's unlikely it will be a successor to the Essential Phone PH-1 though.

2018 is definitely the year of the at-least-three-camera phone. Some upcoming devices may have even more. However, Google seems content with the single rear shooter it has incorporated into the new Pixel 3 series.

With rumors swirling around a possible iPad Pro announcement later this month, 9to5Mac has reported new features supposedly coming to Apple's upcoming tablet refresh. Citing sources familiar with the development of the iPad Pro, the new devices will bring an almost bezelless display, Face ID, and a few new tricks to Apple's "prosumer" tablet line.

Not long after halting the rollout of a Windows 10 feature update for the first time ever, Microsoft has finally announced that the cause of the user content removal bug — which affected only a few users who installed the update — has been isolated and a fix is rolling out to Windows Insider Program members.

Although the rumors about it surfaced back in April, it took a while for Niantic to finally confirm the arrival of the fourth-generation Pokemon from the Sinnoh region. However, the details are still not out yet, but Pokemon GO players should get ready to capture Turtwig, Piplup, Chimchar — or at least one or two of them.

The T-Mobile exclusive Alcatel 3T 8 is just another budget tablet with enough of a punch to act as a device for the kids, although it is not designed specifically for them. This 8-inch slate runs Android 8.1 Oreo out of the box and is the first one to support T-Mobile's Extended Range LTE 600 MHz spectrum.

There have been rumors swirling for a while that Google is planning on adding support for Windows 10 on Chrome OS devices. The inclusion of Intel silicon inside the new Pixel Slate instead of ARM hints that Google still has plans to support Windows dual-booting on Chrome OS.

As if having a notch on the Google Pixel 3 XL wasn’t bad enough, Google apparently wanted to include one on the smaller Pixel 3 as well. The only reason it didn’t also end up with a notch was that hardware restrictions got in the way.

It appears Microsoft is looking to buy out Obsidian Entertainment, if a report from Kotaku is accurate. Microsoft has acquired a number of video-game studios over the last few years, including paying US$2.5 billion to take over Mojang, the company that created Minecraft, in 2014. Obsidian has been behind titles such as Fallout: New Vegas and Pillars of Eternity.

The Radeon RX 570/580 successors are rumored to feature 12 nm Polaris 30 cores with increased frequencies, but same 8 GB GDDR5 VRAM. Performance-wise, these new models will most likely not be faster than the Vega 56/64 cards and will go head to head with Nvidia's GTX 1060/1070 chips.

When Intel commissioned Principled Technologies to benchmark its as of yet unreleased i9 9900k CPU, many voices in the tech press spoke out against such a practice, such as Steve Walton, saying it "undermines what we do." Now, more reliable figures have come out, and it seems like Principled Technologies did not run an unbiased test.

In an interview with the Financial Times, Sony’s CEO Kenichiro Yoshida has admitted that the company is working on a new console, which is more than likely going to be the PlayStation 5 (although that name has yet to be confirmed). A number of sources have speculated that the PlayStation 4 successor will see the light of day in 2019 or 2020.

The Home Hub is the newest form of domestic voice assistant from Google. It has been revealed as part of the Made by Google event, along with the new Pixel phones and Pixel Slate. The Hub is supposedly designed to subtly blend in with a home, while forming a central control point for its connected devices.

The embedded flash drive is no different in volume than existing 64-layer solutions for compatibility with a wide range of other consumer devices. Storage capacities begin at 32 GB and top out at 256 GB for high-end smartphone SKUs.

Apple has just released iOS 12.0.1, just in time to stop what appeared to be an upcoming "charge gate" scandal caused by an issue that made iPhone XS handsets fail to charge when using a Lightning cable. This brand-new iOS update also irons out a WiFi-related problem, a Bluetooth bug, and more.

The Honor 8C has just been spotted on Huawei's Vmall online store and is expected to officially debut soon as the world's first Qualcomm Snapdragon 632-driven handset. This 6.26-inch handset also features 4 GB of memory, 64 GB of internal storage space, and a dual main camera that combines a 13 MP and a 2 MP sensor.

The new mainstream Core and Core-X HEDT processors represent Intel's retaliation against AMD's Ryzen 2000-series and Threadripper 2000 HEDT lineups. Looking at the MSRPs, it seems like Intel does not want to outprice AMD, while the core configuration suggests lower overall performance, at least for the HEDT models.

The all-screen-no-notch Honor Magic 2 is expected to debut on the last day of October with the HiSilicon Kirin 980 processor under the hood. Its specs are also rumored to include an in-display fingerprint reader, an AMOLED display, as well as a graphene-based battery — the first handset to use this technology.

On the heels on Intel unveiling its new desktop CPU lineup, Asus has announced an upgrade to its ROG GL12 gaming desktop. The new ROG GL12CX is now available with the latest Intel Core i9-9900K on the Intel Z390 platform and can be configured with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti GPU. The ROG GL12CX is now up for pre-order and is expected to ship this November.

Unveiled at IFA 2018, the 15.6-inch Lenovo Yoga Chromebook convertible is now finally available for purchase. Sadly, there is a single configuration available for now, which carries a price tag that reads US$699 and features an Intel Core i5 processor, 8 GB of memory, and 128 GB of internal storage space.

Back when Motorola unveiled the three Moto E5 handsets, only the E5 Play and E5 Plus were announced for the US. Now, the regular E5 has just become available for purchase in the US via Best Buy. This US$99.99 Qualcomm Snapdragon 425-powered handset will also reach Target and Walmart next week.

Last year's W2018 seems to have been successful enough to get a successor, and so the flip phone refuses to fade away. The upcoming Samsung W2019 has just received its WiFi certification and is very likely to arrive in December. The rumors mention a Snapdragon 845 processor and a dual camera setup on the back.

Facebook has introduced a smart home product it has dubbed Portal. Available in two sizes, the device offers similar functionality to the Amazon Echo Show, but focuses on providing seamless video chatting through its Messenger app.

In our HP Spectre x360 review, we found that GPU performance was very poor in games, where it often throttled down to 400 MHz, less than half of its rated clock speed. Thankfully, there is a solution that should prevent such throttling.

A patent has been unearthed that has led some media outlets to speculate that Sony could be planning on delivering a PlayStation 5 console offering backwards compatibility. The patent for “remastering by emulation” was filed on November 22, 2016 by Sony Interactive Entertainment America LLC. However, some commentators have argued that the patent simply covers a method of sprucing up dated software.

Although the Mi 8 might beat it by around 10 percent in the graphics department, the upcoming Huawei Mate 20 appears to be faster in the other areas, scoring a total of 313,561 AnTuTu points vs. 287,469 for the Xiaomi flagship. The Huawei handset sports a HiSilicon Kirin 980 processor, 6 GB RAM, and 128 GB internal storage.

A well-known iOS developer, Luca Tudesco, is reported as stating that jailbreaking in the iPhone XS Max's A12 chip is possible. It may be a follow-up in which the related group Pangu claimed that they had done the same in iOS 12. However, there is no evidence that this option is more generally available yet.

OnePlus has revealed the date of the launch event for its upcoming 6T smartphone: October 30. The event will take place at Pier 36 in New York City and will give users a chance to check out the “innovation” that the Shenzhen-based company has been promising for its latest release. Event tickets can currently be purchased from the OnePlus website for US$20/£16/17 Euros.

How about a new Galaxy S9, S9 Plus or Note 9 for your iPhone X? No? What if you get $600 as well? This is the premise of Samsung USA's new promotion. The company will increase its usual trade-in price, even for Apple products, for a limited time.

First teased at Computex 2018 but without a firm price or launch window, the mid-sized Trident X desktop is now ready to ship just in time for the all-important Holiday shopping season. MSI is going all out in terms of CPU and GPU horsepower for a generational leap in performance over the last generation Trident 3.

Today, Armored Warfare celebrates the third anniversary since it became available for all those interested across Europe and North America. To bring back some of those who lost interest and to make everyone happy, the developer decided to offer the IT-1 tier 5 premium tank destroyer for free. To get this vehicle, a battle won in any game mode is enough.

Although Samsung has completed the work on its first-generation neural processing unit, it looks like the successor will be employed by the processor of the company's upcoming flagships, including the Galaxy S10. The new NPU architecture is expected to be used by the Exynos 9820 processor, which is supposed to arrive with a 2+2+4 core configuration.

HP will be integrating some features mainstream consumers have been enjoying these past few years onto its upcoming Chromebook. Namely, the new Chromebook x360 14 will be getting USB Type-C charging and narrow 7.5 mm bezels for improved convenience and portability. Expect a launch in just a couple of weeks for a starting price of $599 USD.

Narrow bezels are all the rage these days—so much so that some OEMs have been overtly exaggerating their claims through marketing material. We want users to be aware of deceiving product shots that are seemingly becoming more commonplace amongst smartphone OEMs.

About a month ago, Chiphell user Gtx9 leaked what he alleged was a Cinebench score of AMD's "Rome" server architecture. As Cinebench scores are easily manipulated, the weight behind Chiphell's leak was very weak. However, Gtx9 has returned with more convincing proof.