Software

Many Android phones, flagships and budget flagships included, often fail to integrate Widevine L1 support into their software. As a result, they lack the ability to play DRM-protected content such as that provided by Netflix in full HD or HDR. The Mate 20 series was one of these; however, this series has finally acquired the ability to stream in HD, while the Mate 20 itself can do so in HDR.

UMIDIGI has released details on its upcoming new smartphone, the F1, on its official website. This device will come with Android Pie out of the box, as well as SD card support and a 5,150mAh battery. UMIDIGI claims that inbuilt AI helps the battery last longer over time by learning usage patterns and habits.

War Thunder 1.85 "Supersonic" is a major update to Gaijin Entertainment's flagship product and — as its name suggests — it comes with supersonic aircraft. Other noticeable changes include the Italian ground vehicles tree, thermal guided air-to-air missiles, new ships, new locations, and many minor adjustments.

More than a decade after its founding, Tumblr has finally reached a critical point and has decided to turn into "a better, more positive" version of itself by banning adult content, including nudity (with some exceptions). The new guidelines will be enforced starting today, but the affected pages will not disappear overnight.

Razer has unleashed a version of its Raiju controllers for smartphones. It is ostensibly designed to compete with similar products made by Xiaomi and Asus, although it may fit devices besides the company's own gaming-focused smartphones. The 'mobile' Raiju features the Mecha-Tactile action buttons found on the Ultimate variant of this controller.

The most recent versions of Windows 10 has an option in settings that apparently prevent the OS sending your activity history to Microsoft. However, HowToGeek has reported that these options may be insufficient in the case of app-history tracking. This information may still be collected unless every relevant privacy setting possible is modified.

Tetsuya Nomura, the Game Director for the hotly anticipated Kingdom Hearts III, has taken to Twitter to ask the game's fans not to share the recent leaks. This material includes gameplay footage, a secret movie and other spoilers. Nomura claims that this request will enable everyone to 'experience the game equally'.

Discord, the popular communication client, has announced that they will begin a 90/10 revenue share scheme for the Discord store in 2019. This will give 90% of all revenue from game sales on the Discord store to the game developer while Discord keeps the remaining 10%. This is quite a shift from the typical 70/30 sharing scheme and a step further than Epic's 88/12 share.

A list of the 100 worst passwords of 2018 has been published online, and “123456” and “password” have taken the top two spots. These howlers are closely followed by the equally poor “123456789,” “12345678,” and “12345.” The annual list of the most-used worst passwords is compiled by SplashData, the company that created the SplashID and TeamsID password managers.

Get your NES and SNES Classic Edition consoles while you can. Reggie Fils-Aimé, Nintendo of America President and COO, has announced that the company has stopped manufacturing both Classic Edition consoles. Fils-Aimé confirmed that the consoles will be available this holiday season in the Americas, but that Nintendo will not be producing anymore once they go out of stock.

The developer of a new home-made app claims that it allows for the streaming of PC games to the Nintendo Switch. Unlike many other similar attempts in the past, this version apparently has reduced latency and allows for the full control of said games. It is currently available for Windows only, however.

NVIDIA has released a new Game Ready driver that is available to download for RTX and GeForce GPUs. The new driver adds Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) beta to Final Fantasy XV and brings updates to GeForce Experience too.

Chrome 73 is now rumored to add a feature that can organize tabs into certain sets to the browser. This may be most reminiscent of the similar function that Microsoft is reportedly set to bring to Windows File Explorer in the future. In addition, it is now alleged that Google will add a dark mode to Chrome 73 for Macs.

Prior to the release of its 2018 flagship, OnePlus had publicly committed to bringing Pie to its 2016 and 2017 phones. This week, the company partially delivered on this promise, releasing a new beta of its OyxgenOS software based on the newest version of Android for the 5 and 5T. The beta also includes the new OnePlus UI for Pie.

Xiaomi has showcased the fact that 5G is for IoT devices too. This was done via a Tweet by a company spokesperson, containing a video showing how quickly the 5G-enabled variant of the Mi Mix 3 could relay commands to a connected lamp. Therefore, 5G may be an exciting prospect for smart-home fans too.

Although some issues that have been around for ages — such as idle players, a broken matchmaking system, and bots — have not been addressed, World of Tanks 1.3 comes with large-scale decals, a few reworked maps, a new map for the Grand Battles mode, tweaked Personal Missions, and other minor changes.

A recent software update to a Google+ API left some data of 52.5 million users exposed and available to app developers. The data included rudimentary user information, including names and birth dates. As a response, Google has moved up Google+'s kill date from August 2019 to April 2019, four months sooner than previously announced.

AMD will unveil its new version of the Adrenalin drivers for Radeon gaming cards on December 13. The software is thought not to target performance directly, and focus on a variety of novel or improved features instead. For example, it will add a 'tutorial' for Radeon Settings.

Honor recently unveiled a new feature to address slow connections in situations of overloaded or throttled public WiFi in its newer smartphones. This adaptation, known as Link Turbo, is described as capable of delivering consistent data-transfer speeds regardless of how busy a certain wireless service is. In practice, it appears it may be a different or improved form of aggressive hand-over to LTE in a phone's OS.

Although Pixel owners will probably get some exclusive treats, as usual, the Google Sounds app should work with most modern Android handsets. This app — which should be included in the December Android Update — comes with more options for the sounds used for notifications, alarms, and ringtones.

Those who love Facebook's Stories feature can finally enjoy it in their Groups as well. Group Stories has been tested starting earlier this year, and now this feature is finally available for Facebook users all around the world on iOS, Android, or desktop.

Less than eight years since its release, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive has been turned into a free to play title. However, the best part is that the favorite first-person shooter of millions has also received a battle royale mode named Danger Zone that brings together up to 16 players in a fight to the last.

The Samsung Galaxy A8s, which is set to be the world's first Infinity-O display phone, has had all of its details officially released today. There are also real-world photos of the phone now available. This announcement confirms the A8s' previously-leaked specs, including the existence of two RAM SKUs and the Infinity-O display.

Enterprises that choose to assign various tasks to a large number of freelancers often find it difficult to manage all the processes involved, especially when working under strict deadlines. The Microsoft 365 freelance toolkit has been created to help and is freely available for subscribers of Office 365 Enterprise or Microsoft 365 Enterprise.

Apple will make minimal changes to its smartphones for the new year, according to an analyst with the bank Nomura. Therefore, they are likely to end up looking much like the iPhone X of 2017...again. The Nomura research report indicates that the new models will have little to distinguish them besides new or improved software features.

The pop-up camera module was one of 2018's most innovative alternatives to the smartphone notch. Elephone is developing a phone that elaborates on Vivo's original concept somewhat by adding a dual camera to the mechanism. This device, the PX, is available on Indiegogo for about US$249 at present.

Microsoft Edge is changing. 2019 may mark its transformation into a cross-platform and Chromium-based browser, according to a blog post by Joe Belfiore, the Corporate Vice President of the Essential Products Group at Microsoft and a post on GitHub by the Microsoft Edge Team. Expect to see the new Microsoft Edge on Windows 7, 8, 10 and even macOS soon.

The Xiaomi Mi A2 received the Android Pie beta last month and got the stable update just about a week later. The last-gen Mi A1 has now received its Pie beta, and there's a chance it gets the final, stable update before the year runs out.

The Game Awards 2018 has hosted a plethora of announcements, which included details about titles such as Dragon Age 4, Far Cry: New Dawn, Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order, Mortal Kombat 11, Psychonauts 2, Rage 2, The Outer Worlds, and many others. BioWare also teased the action RPG Anthem, which has apparently been in development since 2012.

Red Dead Redemption 2 managed to scoop up four prizes at The Game Awards 2018 while God of War took home the coveted Game of the Year title among its three wins. Fortnite and Celeste also had a successful evening, winning two awards each. Marvel’s Spider-Man was unable to win any of the seven categories it had been nominated in.

The ASUS ROG Phone has multiple USB type C ports, so that it can support accessories that need two of these ports. A Redditor has demonstrated that this feature can be hi-jacked in order to make it appear that the phone can charge itself. However, the effect may be less than authentic.

A phone from the OEM Vivo with the model number V1821A has appeared on Geekbench. This device is likely to be the upcoming Vivo Nex 2, as it packs the Snapdragon 845 which lines up with other leaks about the phone. The phone posted a respectable result, which also revealed its 10GB of RAM.

Earlier this year, Google decided to stop investing in Allo and pushed some of its popular features — such as Smart Reply, GIFs, and desktop support — to the Messages app. Yesterday, Google has finally confirmed that the smart messaging app Allo will go down, but it will continue to work until March 2019.

POCO has released a new MIUI 10 beta for its popular flagship, the F1. It adds "super low light mode" as well as the ability to capture slow-motion videos at 960 frames per second. These new features may make the super-affordable Snapdragon 845 phone even more popular.

The OnePlus 6 and 6T grabbed the ninth and sixth place in the top 10 in terms of Antutu benchmarks for November. However, the Kirin 980 allowed Huawei to bag all top 3 rankings, and the Honor Magic 2 to come in fourth. The rest of this list was made up by Snapdragon 845-powered devices.

The official Android 9.0 (Pie) beta ROM for the Galaxy Note 9 is now available. Not only does this software contain the latest OS update, it also replaces Experience with One UI, the revamped interface for Samsung mobile devices. So far, this beta is available in certain countries.

Two separate app developers, Kika Tech and Cheetah Mobile, have had 1 app each blocked from Google's Play Store following a BuzzFeed article detailing an 'investigation' of fraudulent activity on the part of both companies. The site, alongside the tech analyst firm Kochava, claims to have uncovered evidence of click injection and click flooding in the code of the 2 apps.

OPPO has announced that it has been successful in a test involving using WeChat for a video call over 5G. It was made using a phone customized with 5G-compatible hardware. This breakthrough puts the Chinese OEM one step closer to commercializing hardware based on the new radio standard.

Scott Johnson, the Google manager in charge of the app Hangouts, has taken to Twitter in order to refute a report that the same app is to shut down shortly. Instead, Johnson asserts, its functions are to be split across two new services: Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meets. Those who still use "Hangouts Classic" will be "upgraded" to these new apps as they roll out.

A new report from a Korean media outlet details Huawei's plans to introduce an in-house OS for its mobile devices. Should this prospect be realized, the Chinese company may drop its Android skin (EMUI) for completely separate software along the lines of Tizen or, well...iOS. This suggests that Huawei wants to build its own ecosystem for the use of its hardware.

Epic Games has silently enabled 60 FPS for the iPhone XR, XS and XS Max in its latest update for Fortnite on iOS, according to the Senior PR Manager at the company. The update (v. 6.31) is live now on the App Store.

Google has filed a patent with the United States Patent and Trademarks Office (USPTO) that depicts motion sensors built into a smartwatch. They expand the wearable's range of user interface feedback to the device's immediate surroundings. In practice, this means the watch can turn part of the user's arm into a 'mousepad' to select letters while typing and for other similar actions.

Bootloops may as well be LG's calling card at this point, as the company has a long line of devices that have displayed that behavior at certain points. The G7 ThinQ may join that special group if recent reports are anything to go by, but it would appear that it mostly isn't even LG's fault this time out.

Huawei has announced that full-screen gesture controls shown on its Mate 20 Pro — and in beta on the Mate 10 Pro — are now coming to the Huawei P20 and Huawei P20 Pro with the full release of EMUI 9.0 in China.

Amazon Alexa is probably Google Assistant's most consistent competitor. The voice-powered software will add another feature to its set soon: Apple Music support. Amazon has announced that users will be able to play tracks associated with this streaming service from December 17, 2018.

3DMark's long awaited ray tracing benchmark Port Royal is finally coming out in January of next year. After Battlefield V, it will be the world's second ray tracing compatible application that focuses on gaming and the world's first dedicated ray tracing benchmark for gamers.

Amazon Web Services has announced the development of its own in-house CPUs to power the next generation of its cloud and deep learning services. These processors, called the Graviton and Inferentia respectively, were unveiled at this year's AWS re:Invent conference. As with Google's TPUs, customers will buy time on what is run by these CPUs rather than the chips themselves.

The fourth major update for Microsoft's Sea of Thieves arrives under the "Shrouded Spoils" banner and includes new Merchant Alliance items, six new skeleton forts (in addition to the three existing ones), improved skeleton ships, new custom ship items, more frequent Kraken appearances, new Megalodon variants, and more.

Although the TIDAL music streaming app is now freely available for Windows 10 users via the Microsoft Store, to access the entire library of over 60 million tracks and 244,000 music videos, a paid membership is required. The two choices available are the US$9.99/month Premium plan and the US$19.99 HiFi membership.