Android

If you were hoping for a stunning dual-tone blue and papaya orange color scheme for the OnePlus 6T McLaren Edition, prepare to be disappointed. Instead, what you will get is a rather bland looking carbon fiber rear case with perhaps a hint of orange trim.

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.

If there is one thing that seems almost certain for the Samsung Galaxy S10 is that it will feature “punch hole” cut outs for its front-facing cameras. The only question appears to be whether they will be positioned to the left, center or to the right at the top of its Infinity-O display.

HMD Global spoke with Roland Quandt of Winfuture.de yesterday, and the latter has now revealed a few takeaways from the interview, including the company’s commitment to the mid-range and plans for the Nokia 9.

The Snapdragon 855 was unveiled a few days ago, and one of the biggest talking points was its 5G modem. Most companies will release 5G phones in 2019 and OnePlus is billed to be among the first, although the device could very well come with an MSRP in the region of US$800.

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.

A couple of images of what could be an actual physical Samsung Galaxy S10 series device have been leaked online. One of the images appeared on the Weibo social network site while another was sent directly to SlashGear. It has been speculated the images show the S10 Plus variant of the upcoming flagship series. There is a chance that either image is actually a render rather than a real-world photo, though.

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.

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.

The Exynos-powered models from previous Galaxy S models appeared to be slightly faster than the Snapdragon versions, but it looks like the situation is now reversed for the upcoming Galaxy S10 handhelds. Early samples of the Exynos 9820 and Snapdragon 855 tested in AnTuTu show a slight advantage for Qualcomm's chip, but the final versions might provide different results.

Although he did not confirm the name of the handset — which might be the Xiaomi Mi 9 — Lin Bin has recently shown a teaser of a 48 MP camera phone. If no other Chinese brand that often goes for the "first one to release" crown — such as Oppo or VIVO — launches such a handset first, the Xiaomi Mi 9 could become the first 48 MP handset.

The Helio M70 baseband chipset was showcased at the China Mobile Global Partner Conference in Guangzhou today. This modem, unlike the Snapdragon X50, is backwards-compatible with 4G to 2G. It is also 3GPP-compatible and rated for speeds of 5 gigabits per second.

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.

Gorilla Glass, which has become a nearly indispensable component of fullscreen phones everywhere, is most likely to become available in a form that can protect flexible displays for phones. However, Corning has indicated that it may not be there by the time the first generation of these devices are ready for production.

The View 20, a Honor device likely to be shipped with the Kirin 980, is to be launched at an event in Paris on January 20, 2019. This is according to a leaked teaser image GizChina claims to have found, in addition to internal Huawei code that may pertain to the device. This material also hints at a punch-hole selfie cam for the View 20.

The chip currently known as the Snapdragon 6150, which could be the 675's successor, has appeared on Geekbench incorporated into an unnamed reference device. It is an octa-core chip, as expected, and runs at 1.8GHz. The 6150 posted a single-core score of over 2500 and a multi-core score of over 5400.

At an event in Dubai yesterday, HMD Global launched the new Nokia 8.1, featuring a Snapdragon 710, dual rear cameras with OIS, a 20 MP selfie camera, and a 3500 mAh battery. Impressively, it also runs on Android Pie out of the box.

The Qualcomm Tech Summit is in full swing in Hawaii. The star of the show so far has been the announcement of the Snapdragon 855 SoC and its support for 5G. However, Samsung has captured the attention of journalists with a strange looking prototype that the company has been using to demonstrate the capabilities of the new cellular network technology.

The Qualcomm tech summit of 2018 highlighted the company’s strength of conviction that 5G is the future of consumer electronics. It promoted the new radio standard’s ‘near-zero’ latency and increased transmission rates, and the advantages for communications, business and media these properties would bring.

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.

Even more renders of the Samsung Galaxy S10 and S10+ have surfaced. The devices can be seen with circular cutouts at their top right corners—in the case of the S10+ two circles overlapping to form a pill of sorts.

The Moto G7 will be bang right in the middle of the next-gen Moto G lineup. The device is expected to feature a 6.24-inch display with a teardrop notch, dual rear cameras, and a 3000 mAh battery.

Hot on the heels of the official launch of the Snapdragon 855 is a leak suggesting that the Sony Xperia XZ4 will be the first smartphone to ship with Qualcomm’s freshest silicon. If the rumor is accurate, it could be just what Sony needs to help lift the sales of its latest flagship.

During the Snapdragon Summit in Hawaii, Qualcomm officially announced the new Snapdragon 855 high-end mobile platform. Details are still sparse, but the main focus lies on an improved AI engine, the first computer vision hardware in an ISP and the possibility to attach the dedicated X50 5G modem.

Lenovo is planning on launching its Z5s smartphone in China on December 6, and it could end up being the first smartphone on the market to have a punch-hole design for the selfie camera. The Z5s is expected to feature a rear-facing triple camera setup while the front-facing camera is located in the top center. Both Samsung and Huawei are expected to release products with similar design features very soon.

Huawei has posted a promotional image on the company’s Weibo page to announce the release date in China for the Nova 4 smartphone: December 17. The successor of the Nova 3 device comes with the latest alternative to the notch/teardrop solutions. The Huawei Nova 4 will feature a punch-hole cut-out, with the selfie camera located in the top left-hand corner.

Reported specifications for the rumored Sony Xperia XZ4 have been leaked on a Chinese blogging site. Prolific leaker Ice universe has posted details about the possible flagship device that include mention of a Snapdragon 855 processor, a 6.55-inch FHD+ screen, 3,900 mAh battery, 6 GB RAM and up to 256 GB storage. However, the Japanese company has only just released its XZ3 smartphone.

Epic has announced plans to create its own game platform, which will be known as the Epic Games Store. Fueled by the incredible success of Fortnite, Epic is hoping to take on big names in the video-game digital distribution world such as Steam and Google Play. The company is offering 88% of store revenue to developers, with no tier system being incorporated.

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.

To say the Vivo Nex was a unique device would be an understatement. It was the first smartphone to include a motorized front camera module, thus saving screen real estate. Nevertheless, the OEM has announced that 2 million units of the Nex have been sold since its release in June 2018.

A new report on the wearables market shows that Xiaomi was the single biggest company in this space in the third quarter of 2018, keeping Apple as the runner-up in terms of market share. The market also grew by 21.7% in general compared to last year. This was attributed to the release of new products and increased uptake in the Asia-Pacific region.

New details about the Vivo NEX 2 have emerged online. Vivo has now updated its website with marketing material hinting at what features the device may have. The company will supposedly unveil its latest NEX smartphone on December 11.

The upcoming flagship SoC from Qualcomm was believed to be called Snapdragon 8150 due to its SM8150 denomination found in early benchmarks, but the official name will be Snapdragon 855. Details on the modem, NPU, GPU, CPU clusters and imaging features were also leaked ahead of the official announcement that is scheduled to take place later today at Qualcomm's Technology Summit.

The most affordable slate by Barnes & Noble has just received a refresh without jumping over the US$50 sweet spot. Its specs now include 16 GB of storage space, a "vivid and bright" 7-inch IPS display, as well as up to 7 hours of battery life while reading, watching videos, and browsing the web.

Months after getting caught using DSLR shots as camera samples for the Galaxy A8, Samsung has been nabbed doing the exact same thing with the Galaxy A8 Star. Companies like Huawei and Xiaomi have also been caught in similar acts of crookery in the past.

The Moto G7 Plus will be the most powerful and expensive of the upcoming Moto G7 phones, and its specifications sheet says as much, as it's set to feature a Snapdragon 660, and maybe, just maybe, wireless charging support.

Huawei ambassador Gal Gadot was revealed to have been tweeting with an iPhone a long while ago and if you thought that was bad, you'd be shocked, as an official Samsung account was caught parading the streets of Twitter with an iPhone in tow.

Honor's current-gen mainstream premium phones are the Honor V10 and Honor 10. The successors to the duo are expected to be the Honor V20 and Honor 11, but while the former should be out by now, it would appear that it is still in development.

New data from market research company Gartner depicts a strong third quarter 2018 for Chinese manufacturers Huawei and Xiaomi. Both companies managed to increase their global smartphone market share from 3Q17, whilst the big hitters Apple and Samsung have experienced flat growth and considerably diminished market share, respectively. Overall worldwide smartphone sales have risen by 1.4%.

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.

OnLeaks and 91Mobile have compiled a new image and video series purported to show CAD renders for the Galaxy S10. It shows a virtually bezel-less phone that, in fairness, closely resembles the Note 9. However, the Note does not have a dual camera integrated into the screen, a clear lack of a hardware fingerprint scanner, or triple rear cameras.

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.

The well-regarded leaker IceUniverse has posted an image showing a phone with Samsung flagship-like design hallmarks. The tipster asserts that it is a Galaxy S10 clone. If so, it suggests that the makers of fake phones think that the device will strongly resemble the Note 9.

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.