Fail

The Moto G5 and Moto G5 Plus are now receiving an update to Android 8.1 Oreo. While receiving a year old update is bad enough, the phones are also receiving the June 2018 Android security patch, putting the devices' security four months behind the curve.

After numerous delays, the RED Hydrogen One will finally go on sale at Verizon and AT&T this Friday, November 2. Despite the initial hype built around the device last year, the steep price tag and disappointing feature set threaten to kill the Hydrogen One at launch. The device will be available for $1295.

Gab, a social media alternative to the likes of Facebook and Twitter, has come under fire yet again for posts from its users. This time, anti-Semitic posts from the Pittsburgh shooter, who shot and killed 11 people in a synagogue yesterday, prompted PayPal to ban Gab from its payment services and platform.

The Nokia 8 Sirocco was extensively tested on DxOMark and came out of it beaten, with the device achieving relatively poor scores across the board, a continuation of the refreshed Nokia brand's trend of poor camera performance.

Android distribution statistics for the month of September showed that pretty much no one was on Android Pie at the time. It's been a month since then and, well, things haven't changed.

Yesterday, we reported on a catastrophic failure related to a setting in the UEFI-firmware of recent ThinkPads. Essentially, if the users changed a certain setting in the UEFI of their ThinkPad, there is a good chance that the machines is bricked in the process. Now, a user of an affected machine has managed to repair it. Doing so does however require some know-how, as well as the right tools.

Although LG Electronics has reported a profit of almost US$668 million for the third quarter of 2018, the LG Mobile Communications Company had to face a weakening demand and increasing competition and reported an operating loss of roughly US$130 million. However, LG mobile branch seems to be on the right path.

After years of users complaining about spam and irrelevant ads, Google will finally shut down the Nearby Notifications system on December 6th. Google said that the service did not meet the "high bar" the company holds to when delivering a user experience and will be shuttering the feature this winter.

Some modern ThinkPad laptops apparently have an issue with the UEFI-BIOS. When a certain setting is activated, this action can potentially brick the laptop. The only fix in this situation: Exchanging the motherboard.

Web service provider Yahoo has agreed to pay out US$50 million in damages in response to the huge data breaches the company suffered from in 2013 and 2014. Once the settlement has been legally approved, Yahoo accountholders affected by the breaches will be able to make financial claims against the company and gain free access to a credit-monitoring service.

The latest Apple flagship smartphones are facing yet another issue that means they do not work out of the box as described. This time, it seems that one of their dual speakers does not fire while playing audio. The bug has been reported numerous times on several different types of forum by now.

The Pixel 3 XL's display notch is a matter of taste at best, and a matter of tolerance at worst. Google's own rules for notch support in the latest version of Android stipulate only one of them per screen edge. However, some Pixel 3 XL owners claim that the software is not complying with them.

Google and Apple can celebrate because the Huawei Mate 20 Pro and its non-Pro sibling will not give them a hard time in the US. Unfortunately for Huawei's US fans, the Chinese company has just confirmed that these two devices will not be available locally. However, European and Asian variants might be imported.

At first glance, the Dell XPS 15 9570 is a good choice for those who are looking for a powerful yet portable machine to use for music production. Sadly, a DPC latency issue makes it unsuitable for this task, but Frank Azor has just confirmed that the company is working on fixing this issue, so it should be patched soon.

In-house tests by 3DMark show Oppo falsifying performance scores for its latest Find X flagship smartphone and more. The news further damages the reputations of Chinese smartphone OEMs at a time when the U.S. government is already suspicious of telecommunication devices from China.

The newest Windows 10 update (1809, or October update) has been plagued with teething issues. Most recently, some users have documented one of them on Reddit. This bug results in the failure to bring up dialogs that prevent the loss of data through conflicts or duplication during transfer.

Some Pixel 2 and 2XL units do not save the pictures taken using Google Camera properly, so that they do not show up in Photos or in the phones' storage. This is now apparently happening to some newer Pixels as well. This issue may be linked to the HDR modes and how it processes photos.

As if the various taxes already in place are not enough, Android users in the EU will end up paying more for their phones starting next year due to the licensing fees that Google will start charging for devices that are activated starting on February 1. These fees will start at US$2.5 per device and can hit US$40, depending on the pixel density and market.

Samsung has shut down services in the past and will surely do the same in the future, so the fact that Family Square is going down is nothing out of this world. This app came with the 18.4-inch Galaxy View and its goal was to enable users to put images on a virtual wall, including from other devices connected to the local network.

A report from Bloomberg has stated that Essential Products has cut its workforce by about 30%. An email received by the media outlet from the Palo Alto-based technology company mentioned that regardless of the cutbacks, the firm still intends to develop a “game changing consumer product.” It is believed the layoffs will mostly affect the hardware and sales divisions.

Gigabyte had released a promotional Halloween-season banner including the words "AORUS RTX 2070 Ti/2070 Graphics card". This was enough for some to run with the rumor that the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 was getting its own Ti variant. However, Gigabyte has taken to Reddit to squash this speculation once and for all.

While the reason is — and will probably remain — unknown, it has been officially confirmed that the Android Pie update for the OnePlus 5 and OnePlus 3 handsets will not arrive as soon as expected. Although an official launch date has not been revealed, the aforementioned smartphones will probably receive the update by the end of the year.

The latest Google Chrome browser comes with a new setting that allows its users to have a better control over the sign-in and sync features, the AV1 video streaming codec, as well as a rather large number of minor tweaks, fixes, and improvements. Chrome 70 is available for Windows, macOS, and Linux.

Google has admitted that its social media app, Google+, has been hacked. This data theft has affected approximately half a million profiles. The users in question may have had many points of important user data extracted from their Google accounts.

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.

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.

A user on Xiaomi's MIUI forums has reported that their Mi A1 went up in flames while they were sleeping beside it. Xiaomi is yet to respond.

A notice has been published on Microsoft’s support site for Windows 10 stating that the rollout for the scheduled update for October 2018 (version 1809) has been paused. It seems a number of users have reported grave issues with the update, including considerable loss of data and even detrimental effects on a device’s battery life.

Elon Musk, the CEO of e-automotive company Tesla, has sent a Tweet seeming to criticize the US Security and Exchange Commission. It was posted shortly after this body's decision to fine Tesla and strip Musk of his position on its board. The tweet may be linked to a subsequent 7% drop in the company's share price.

Reports coming from several different sources claim that some brand-new iPhones are not charging unless their screens are on. This issue apparently affects both the iPhone XS and XS Max. However, the reports also suggest that this problem is software based, yet not constant across all devices.

A Facebook breach has compromised almost 50 million accounts. After discovering the breach on September 25, the company reset the access tokens of the 50 million affected accounts and 40 million others as a precautionary step. The attackers accessed the accounts via a vulnerability involving Facebook's access tokens which keep users logged in.

The new iPhone XS and XS Max may have inherited the iPhone 4's poor cellular connection strength. Several users are complaining of poor or dropped cellular and WiFi connections. While these claims are still just conjecture, they are rapidly growing in number.

The latest version of Google's Chrome browser will now automatically log users in if they log into any Google service. This, in turn, opens the door for the user's browsing data to be accessed by Google. While this isn't the case now (Chrome's sync features aren't turned on by default), it raises several red flags as to the future of the privacy of user's browsing data.

Only a week after a woman in New York claimed her new Samsung Galaxy Note 9 went up in flames, a Redditor's S7 Edge has also exploded, and this time the user has substantial proof.

According to TENAA, the iPhone XS has a 2658 mAh battery, a small downgrade from the iPhone X's 2716 mAh battery. Considering that the iPhone X was criticized for its mediocre battery life last year, this could be a sticking point for the XS.

Over the past week, fewer and fewer Chinese users have been able to access Twitch. As of September 20th, Twitch's site and official iOS App were shut down in China, rendering them inaccessible within the nation. While the reason for the ban is unknown, it is not unlike other censorship measures exercised by China.

Less than 24 hours after its launch, Nintendo's Switch Online service has already been hacked to allow gamers to load their own custom NES ROMs in to the NES library. The process, which seems to be simple, is possible because of Nintendo's use of common .nes ROM files, the same filetype used by ROM sites online.

Apple's Homepod has so far been a flop, only managing to capture 6% of the smart speaker market as of June 2018. The picture is even more bleak among Apple's own consumers; of Apple users that own a smart speaker, only 2% have purchased a Homepod.

The United States Department of Justice (DOJ) may have opened up a criminal investigation into Telsa incorporated after statements made by CEO Elon Musk last month. Two sources familiar with the company and this matter have stated that DOJ is investigating potential fraud. This investigation, if true, would coincide with a similar investigation started by the SEC last month.

Punkt, a designer electronics company, is now taking preorders for the MP02, a basic phone running a heavily stripped down version of Android 8.1. The MP02 is meant to be used for phone calls, SMS texting, and a few basic apps like a calendar and clock. Pricing is set at USD $350, which is a steep cost to ask for such a simple phone.

Using the rather new backdrop-filter CSS property can lead to a crash of the entire iOS on an iPhone. An exploit that does this and the code behind it have recently been unveiled by a software engineer and security researcher at Wire. The even worse part is that this issue might affect macOS-driven systems as well.

Although it has grown to become an excellent Gmail alternative, Google's Inbox app remains an experimental piece of code. This means that Google is using the data provided by its usage to improve Gmail and, unfortunately, it seems that the internet giant has decided to discontinue Inbox at the end of March 2019.

According to AMD, third-party analytical tools may not be giving correct information on Raven Ridge SoCs like the Ryzen 5 2500U or Ryzen 7 2700U. It's unknown if popular tools like HWInfo or AIDA64 would ever be updated to fully support Raven Ridge SoCs. For now, AMD μProf is the only reliable method.

Samsung continues to ignore those still using premium handsets that are far from museum material yet. The latest victims are the Galaxy Note 5 and Galaxy S6 Edge+ — both being barely three years old — which have just been dropped off the list of Samsung devices still receiving monthly security updates.

Purism's upcoming Linux phone, the Librem 5, has run into some development delays that have pushed its release back 3 months to April 2019. Due to a flaw in the phone's CPU, the battery drains in less than an hour. Purism is working with the distributor to fix the flaw. In the meantime, dev kits are still scheduled to ship out in October.

Huawei ended support for bootloader unlocks a few months ago but, apparently, that isn't where the company ends its battle against community development.

Xiaomi’s new Poco F1 may be a great device but the company has gone the extra mile to make us all appreciate that fact, by advertising the F1 using pictures taken by the flagship Mi Mix 2S.

Although this Chinese brand is premiering multiple 5G technologies in Berlin this week, it looks like ZTE will not be able to deliver its first 5G phone on time. Previously announced to arrive in early 2019, the device has been now pushed to the last part of the year for undisclosed reasons.

The Tesla Wireless Charger surfaced on the company's official store but was removed after less than a day. This power bank features 5 W wireless charging and USB Type-C wired charging at 5 V and 1.5 A, has a rather modest capacity of 6,000 mAh, but it lives up to the Tesla name and sports a not-so-friendly US$65 price tag.

The LG V20, G6, and Q6 are finally receiving their Oreo updates. It's only taken the V20 two years to receive its first major update, so LG must be applauded. And yes, that is, indeed, sarcasm.