Software

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.

Launching for users in North America only for now, the Eurocom service promises to update your laptop software, BIOS, anti-virus, operating system, and more for a small fee. A "deep cleaning" of the fans, hinges, and motherboard is also an option even for difficult-to-service laptops.

It seems HMD has an internal Android Pie beta for the Nokia 8, presumably in the process of working on a stable version for the 2017 flagship. However, this build is now out there for the public to download, thanks to an XDA leaker. It can be tested via this website's forum for the phone.

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 636-powered Nokia 7.1 has been around for only a few weeks, but it arrived with Android Oreo onboard. Now, this Android One device is already receiving the Android Pie treatment as promised, and the units located in all regions of the world should get the new software in a few days.

Nubia has released the second generation of its Red Magic gaming phone, the 'Mars'. The device is as expected based on several leaks and rumors: it is powered by the Snapdragon 845 chipset, runs Android Pie and has a 10GB RAM variant. The Red Magic Mars also follows the RGB trend.

Among the Windows 10 October update's many bugs, Apple's iCloud stopped working and could not be installed on the build. Microsoft and Apple had announced that they would collaborate to resolve this bug. With iCloud's newest update, it appears that this has been achieved.

Just in time for their winter break, students can enjoy YouTube Music and YouTube Premium at affordable prices. The special plans come for US$4.99 a month for YouTube Music Premium and US$6.99 for YouTube Premium, but those who sign up by the end of January 2019 can get YouTube Premium for the special rate of US$5.99.

Engaging in conversations over media such as SMS with corporations is an increasingly popular and effective method of driving brand engagement and sales in the US. This behavior increased by over 400% in some instances on 2018's Black Friday compared to this time last year. It is thought to have a generally positive effect on consumer spending.

Antlion Audio claims that its ModMic Wireless attachment adds mic capabilities to any kind of headphone. It has the aptX low-energy Bluetooth codec, 16-bit 48khz audio and a USB type A receiver. The ModMic Wireless also has a patented clasp to stay attached to its headphone cup.

Huawei's Honor 8X mid-range phone is currently receiving the Android Pie-based EMUI 9 beta update in China. The Honor 8X has been confirmed for a US launch, and we expect a late December event.

In a blog post released earlier today, Sony revealed that it would be using the PAL version of nine titles on the PlayStation Classic. The PAL versions will be included in the North American PlayStation Classic as well. Considering that North America televisions operate on the NTSC standard, the format difference could cause these games playing at different speeds or glitch out, rendering them unplayable.

A group known for Nintendo Switch piracy has obtained and distributed a full file dump of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, set to release in two weeks on December 7th. While early game leaks are not uncommon, a leak this far in advance is quite unusual, especially a leak of a game as hotly anticipated as Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.

The upcoming refresh — which will bring Microsoft's Android launcher to version 5.1 — already looks impressive. The Beta build shows To-Do integration, Sticky Notes, as well as a set of features that are Microsoft's answer to Google's Digital Wellbeing. This update should arrive in a few days.