Latest Tech News

Rockstar Games has released the latest trailer for Red Dead Redemption 2. The dramatic clip offers a glimpse into the game's gritty open-world environment and seems to hint at some of the expected gameplay the title will offer, such as fist-fighting. The scheduled release date for the anticipated prequel is October 26, and it will be available for the PS4 and Xbox One platforms.

By pulling the Inspiron Gaming notebooks away from the Inspiron series, Dell can now offer more options and sizes to better cater to budget-mainstream gamers who may not want to spend an arm and a leg on a hulking Alienware. The new Dell Gaming G series competes directly against the HP Pavilion Gaming series where the GTX 1050 and GTX 1060 Max-Q are common finds. No word yet on if future SKUs would also carry AMD options.

The only two quad-core Kaby Lake-X CPUs launched back in summer 2017were supposed to provide an entry point for the Intel's HEDT chips, but sold very poorly, because the Coffee Lake hexa-cores launched just a few months later. OEMs and resellers will be able to order the two chips up until November 30 and Intel will be pulling the plug on May 31, 2019.

Sony's futuristic Xperia Ear Duo headphones are now up for pre-order in the US. The headphones allow listeners to hear both music or voice overs at the same time as being able to hear ambient sounds around them.

Samsung has launched the latest line of its popular A-Series mid-range Galaxy-branded handsets. The new A6 and A6+ pick up features that are comparable to some of Samsung's higher-end Galaxy S-Series.

The Oculus Go standalone VR headset has officially been launched and is available for immediate purchase. The Facebook-owned company is shipping the headset to 23 countries starting today, from US$199 for the 32 GB model.

Despite concerns that Apple might miss its targets for the quarter, the company has instead returned record numbers for its fiscal Q2. The Cupertino giant raked in a net profit of US$13.8B for the quarter on gross revenue of US$61.1B.

The Vostro 15 5000 gets a 40 percent price cut with a free Western Digital HDD thrown in for good measure on some deals. The promotion includes systems with 8th gen Intel Core ix CPUs as well. The timing of the price cuts are in line with the recent announcements of a refresh across the Precision and Wyse Thin Client families set to launch towards the end of the month.

It looks like a certain type of governments does not like Telegram at all since Iran is now banning the popular encrypted messaging service that was recently taken down in Russia. Telegram has about 40 million users in Iran and has been apparently used to organize the protests that took place back in January.

Although Xiaomi might be leading the Indian smartphone market when it comes to the totals, things look quite different in the premium area. Here, Samsung leads with a 29 percent share, followed by OnePlus and Apple. However, the best-selling premium handset seems to be the OnePlus 5T, which accounts for 25 percent in this small niche.

The 128 GB and 256 GB versions of the Galaxy S9 and Galaxy S9 Plus are now available for pre-order in the United States. These have previously been available in some select markets and are now exclusively available from Samsung's own website.

Dell is refreshing the Wyse small form-factor PC series with Intel Gemini Lake ULV CPUs. The new Wyse 5070 family will include two lower-end Celeron models and two higher-end Pentium models with up to 1600 factory configurations, which can be further customized with additional RAM, storage and even discrete GPUs.

Global tablet shipments are expected to drop to a little more than 31 million units in the second quarter of this year, reveals DigiTimes. This all-time low comes one year after the market bottomed at 33 million units (in the first quarter of 2017). However, the market is expected to bounce back a bit later this year thanks to the introduction of the new Apple iPad Pro and the Amazon Prime Day.

The successor to the BlackBerry KEYone is coming soon, if reports are to be believed. The device will be powered by a Snapdragon 660 and will feature dual rear cameras and, of course, a physical keyboard.

A firmware teardown by XDA-Developers has revealed the existence of two new Android One Xiaomi devices. The first of those will be powered by the Snapdragon 660, while the other will feature a Snapdragon 625 and will likely be a budget Redmi device.

The testing of the downvote button continues with a limited number of Facebook users, but now this feature rolls out to those in Australia and New Zealand. Just as before, this button allows the users to provide feedback about the comments on public posts, so the dislike button remains nothing more but a wish that Facebook continues to ignore for the time being.

Ming-Chi Kuo, serial leaker of Apple's product plans, has left KGI Securities. The news could mean a slow down in the number of accurate leaks about Apple's product plans, much to the relief of many an executive at Apple's Cupertino HQ.

A new analysis of MacBook Pro keyboards suggests that since their introduction, there have been twice as many service requests for keyboard repairs. The study seems to align with reports that MacBook Pro users have had to deal with stuck keys or keys that are non-responsive.

The new update for Windows 10 brings the build number up to 17134.1 and includes a large number of noticeable changes, as well as a few completely new features. The essentials include Timeline, Nearby Sharing, Edge Extensions in the Microsoft Store, Focus Assist, an improved Game Bar, and much more.

Barclay's analyst Blayne Curtis is predicting that Apple will stop bundling the Lightning to 3.5mm audio adapter with the iPhone released this fall. If this prediction comes true, iPhone users that want wired audio would have to separately purchase the adapter at a small (but annoying) additional cost.

When Chris Hook first announced he was leaving AMD, many analysts speculated that he could join Intel and his long-time partner Raja Koduri, who has been working for Intel since late 2017. Hook recently confirmed these rumors and explained he is starting a new marketing leadership role at Intel in Santa Clara. The two former AMD gurus will be working on the Arctic Sound and Jupiter Sound discrete GPUs with which Intel is planning to take on AMD and Nvidia.

Atari has announced in a new press release that the Atari VCS hardware platform will have a pre-sale starting on May 30. The console will be available from US$199 during the pre-sale, which is being exclusively held through the crowdfunding website Indiegogo. However, the first actual shipments aren’t expected to start until spring 2019.

The venerable Core architecture first released in 2006 is rapidly approaching its final days, as Intel is hard at work on a next gen microarchitecture that should take performance to the next level. A recent job listing revealed that this architecture is codenamed Ocean Cove, and it could be implemented in Alder Lake cores some time in 2020 or 2021.

LG is set to send out The Android 8.0 Oreo update to the LG G6. Considering the fact that the G6 is the current LG flagship in that series, an Oreo update by this time is rather shambolic. The G5 and V20 are expected to receive theirs in a bit, too.

The Android Oreo OTA update rollout for the Honor 7X begins today. While users of the mid-ranger will get their full taste of Android Oreo today, there's still no specific date for the Oreo update rollouts of the Honor 8, Huawei Mate SE, Honor 6X, and Huawei P9.

Although the Xperia XZ Premium supports video decoding at 120 Hz, Sony has chosen to "to strike a balance between power consumption and consumer benefit" and so this display mode has been disabled to ensure an increased autonomy for this handset. In addition to the XZ Premium, it seems that other Xperia handsets have this hidden setting as well.

Manufacturers may have been artificially inflating DRAM prices by restricting supply and agreeing to not cannibalize the market share of others. The abnormal rise in revenue by as much as 166 percent YoY has caused at least one U.S. law firm to investigate further into the matter with correlative results.

According to an exclusive report that recently surfaced online, the LG Watch Timepiece runs Wear OS and combines a quartz movement watch with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 2100-powered smart module that features a circular 1.2-inch LCD display with a resolution of 360 x 360 pixels. This wearable could be announced this week and might hit the market in June.

Initially planned for launch in 2016, Intel has delayed the launch of the 10nm based next-generation 'Cannon Lake' CPUs to 2019, which the company announced in their first-quarter earnings report of 2018. It is not the first time Intel has delayed 10nm process-based CPUs; furthermore, there is no mention of as to when in 2019 will Intel release 'Cannon Lake' chips.

The upcoming Samsung Galaxy A6 and Galaxy A6+ come with mid-range specs and feature a flat Infinity Display panel. Out of the two, the A6+ is the only one with a dual camera setup on the back and a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor. Their official release should take place in early May.

Dell commissioned a study in collaboration with Researchscape to understand the PC gaming community. The study brings forth some new facts about gamers, their habits, and attitudes and breaks the typical stereotyping commonly associated with them.

It seems that the delay of the 10 nm Intel Cannon Lake processors and the current pricing of 32 GB memory modules compatible with Apple's requirements are both pushing the launch of the next-gen MacBook Pro to 2019. Two years ago, Apple was afraid that 32 GB of memory would require a different design with reduced battery space, but those fears are gone now.

LG has just revealed that the upcoming G7 ThinQ flagship will feature a "Boombox Speaker" that packs a resonance chamber which allows it to provide 6 dB higher base sound levels and twice the amount of bass that the brand's existing flagships can deliver. The G7 ThinQ will also feature a HiFi Quad DAC and DTS:X 3D Surround Sound.

Google has updated its Chrome OS to version 66, bringing with it numerous bug and security fixes. Chief among the security updates is a patch for Meltdown for Intel-based Chrome OS devices closing off the vulnerability across all Chrome OS devices.

Shortly after finding out that AMD is working on 7 nm Vega 20 GPUs, the alleged benchmark results for this upcoming product were spotted in the 3DMark 11 database. According to the listing, the Vega 20 with 32 GB of HBM2 memory clocked at 1.25 GHz is about 70 percent faster per clock than the RX Vega 64 Liquid.

There has been a growing wave of people in the community calling the Exklim eX Core a scam. Some feel that the eX Core fills a new niche, some think that it can't achieve the claimed performance, while others believe it doesn't exist at all. We haven't seen any working products and we don't endorse the eX Core, but we did feel it was important to give Edgar the chance to answer some of the communities questions.

Samsung recently divulged the name "Max-P" to describe the GTX 1060 GPU in its upcoming Odyssey Z gaming laptop before quietly removing the word. However, we can confirm that "Max-P" is simply a standard GPU without the Max-Q designation. The GTX 1050, 1050 Ti, 1060, 1070, and 1080 found on most gaming laptops are all technically "Max-P" graphics cards so long as they are not Max-Q GPUs.

Although similar rumors that we heard in the past did not come to fruition, this time we might finally get an LG flagship phablet with stylus support. For now, the only certain thing is that LG has registered the Q Note trademark in South Korea earlier this month, so the upcoming LG Q7 flagship might not launch alone.

A firmware teardown by XDA-Developers has revealed the details of the Redmi S2, a device that looks to be Xiaomi's next budget king. The S2 features an 18:9 display, dual rear cameras with EIS, and the trusty Snapdragon 625. Update: Further details and live images of the Redmi S2 have surfaced.

Xiaomi has apparently reached a "top secret" agreement with Taiwanese semiconductor company TSMC that will see the latter produce Xiaomi's upcoming in-house Surge SoC on its 16nm manufacturing process.

Sony's PlayStation 4 remains one of the company's biggest revenue sources. The console sold 2.5 million copies in the first quarter of this year to extend its all-time sales to a massive 76 million. That figure is expected to rise across all coming quarters of the year, with new games like God of War, and the upcoming Red Dead Redemption 2 and Spiderman.

Canalys's latest report provides valuable information on the state of the Chinese smartphone market at the end of Q1 2018. Going by the data, the market saw a whopping 21% YoY drop in shipments, with companies like OPPO, Vivo, and Samsung all seeing dwindling sales numbers.

The CDMA giant has only one-third the install base of the largest smartphone carrier in the U.S. at only 53 million users. Should it merge with T-Mobile, the combined user count would still be millions fewer than Verizon and AT&T, but the combined resources would allow Deutsche Telekom and SoftBank to better compete in the wake of 5G technology. Talks between T-Mobile and Sprint have been on and off for the past 4 years due to anti-trust concerns.

The AMD processors that will probably hit the market soon were recently spotted in the official product master list available on AMD.com. In addition to the dual-core and quad-core desktop and mobile Ryzen processors, there are also three Threadrippers: the octa-core 2900X, the 12-core 2920X, and the 16-core 2950X.

Although the new XPS 15 2-in-1 (9575) was supposed to begin shipping more than a week ago, Frank Azor has just confirmed that many early adopters still have to receive their machines due to a delay that has been caused by "a small bad batch of the Mag lev keyboard." Even more, the i9 processor upgrade for the XPS 15 9570 is not available yet but will be added on May 10.

The company behind the development of Frostpunk has announced that 250,000 copies of the game have already been sold in just 66 hours. 11 bit studios posted a message on the game's official Twitter account to share the impressive achievement. The game developer has already announced plans for additional content and bug fixes for the snowy steampunk-inspired city-building title.

It has been reported that Huawei is working on a possible replacement of the ubiquitous Android OS. Anonymous sources talking to the South China Morning Post have commented that the Chinese tech giant is developing the alternative operating system in case the company ends up receiving a similar US-imposed ban to the one that ZTE is currently facing.

A previously unseen series of patent applications and associated imagery for the rumored Surface Phone / Andromeda PC have emerged. They show that Microsoft is mulling a range of solutions for making the device responsive to how it is being held or used at any time.

The Windows 10 April 2018 update is scheduled to begin its rollout on April 30. Its list of new features includes better voice recognition, Timeline to easily retrieve your content across devices, Focus Assist to get things done without distractions, various Microsoft Edge improvements, and more.

The second-generation Spectacles camera glasses by Snapchat no longer feature a yellow ring that alerts people and can also shoot images, not just video. Capable of shooting underwater, this new accessory also comes with faster syncing, a slimmer frame and charging case, prescription options, and a price of US$149.99.