Tablet

The Universal Stylus Initiative (USI) and NFC Forum have announced that they will collaborate on a project to develop a new kind of charging for those mobile devices that come equipped with their own digital pens. Doing so via NFC might mean that the stylus in question could share data with its paired phone or tablet and power up at the same time.

Oppo has unveiled its Oppo X 2021 rollable OLED display smartphone. The concept device takes a different approach to the smartphone-tablet hybrid foldable OLED designs we have seen from Huawei and Samsung. The end result, however, is similar as it delivers a device that is both a smartphone and tablet in one.

Eve Devices has already invited feedback on the keyboard and chassis of its second-generation "crowd-designed" convertible, the V 2020. Now, it's the turn of its chipset, RAM, wireless connectivity and other specs. The company seems to want to assess the popularity of more expensive options with their new poll.

With its "organic glass" body and in-built candle-effect lighting, the LSPX-S2 speaker has been designed to be enjoyed for its looks at as much as its sound. Then again, Sony claims its audio is also effective thanks to its "Advanced Vertical Drive Technology". It is now available on Amazon.com or select retailers throughout the US.

Canalys is reporting a second quarter of growth in the international personal computing category during the third quarter of 2020. This growth was likely driven by an increase in people working or schooling from home with overall growth up 23% compared to the same period last year.

Microsoft has issued a document outlining the dates on which its own-brand convertibles or laptops run out of software updates. It shows that the Surface Pro 3, despite launching in 2014, will get them until November 2021. Oddly, the Pro 4 will also see the end of its service on the same day.

Samsung’s Vice Chairman Lee Jae-yong has been spotted with a previously unseen Samsung smartphone. It is speculated that the device is a prototype of the Korean giant’s forthcoming rollable smartphone. Its appearance suggests an official launch for sometime in 2021.

Brydge has announced that its 12.3 Pro+ keyboard is now exclusively available at Best Buy. This accessory is rated to turn a Surface Pro tablet into a laptop-like device. It is compatible with the 4 to 7 generations of this Microsoft device.

Given that consumers may be gearing up for their 2020 holiday shopping, Mozilla has expanded its Privacy Not Included initiative by ranking various popular devices and/or gift ideas by how "creepy" they are. It is based on the organization's research into how they or their OEMs handle and respect user personal data, and has thrown up what may be unpleasant surprises in some cases.

HarmonyOS will be available for up to 48 devices, Huawei Central believes. The 48-strong list includes current and recent flagship series, including those from Honor. Only 90% of devices will be eligible to try HarmonyOS, though.

The first details about the iPad mini 6 are here, and it is shaping up to be a smaller iPad Air 4. Apparently, Apple is prototyping the iPad mini 6 with an 8.5-inch display, an A14 Bionic chipset and 4 GB of RAM. A USB Type-C port has been included too, as has support for the Apple Pencil 2.

Huawei has started rolling out EMUI 11 to 10 devices, including to the Mate 30 Pro, P40 Pro and MatePad Pro. The Mate 30 Pro 5G is seemingly the first device to receive EMUI 11 outside of China, but Huawei also plans to have HarmonyOS beta builds ready for next month.

A well-known Weibo leaker now claims that OPPO - an OEM mostly known for its smartphones and wearables - is planning to also move into the tablet space. Similarly, it is also now said to start making its own laptops, much as Xiaomi and Huawei do now. Examples of these new product categories for the company might emerge as soon as 2021.

MediaTek's new MT8195 and MT8192 chipsets are the company's newest Chromebook-centric chipsets. The former is powered by ARM's latest Cortex-A78 cores, while the latter uses previous-generation Cortex-A76 cores. Both chipsets use the same ARM Mali-G77 GPU, though. They are expected to hit the market in Q2 2021.

Following a previous leak a month earlier, a new Surface Pro 8 prototype leak seemingly confirms that Microsoft's latest tablet will feature an unchanged design but will likely leverage the power of Tiger Lake and Xe graphics.

Huawei might be doing it tough with a shortage of components due to US sanctions, but it is still pushing ahead with the last of its major 2020 releases. Fresh certification for the Mate X2 66 W charging system in China suggests that it continues to be on track for release.

A list of devices that will receive One UI 3.0 has appeared online, suggesting that Samsung may bring Android 11 to up to 90 smartphones and tablets over the next few months. The list includes representatives from Samsung Galaxy A, M, Note, S and Tab series, among others.

The 9.7-inch display variant of the Samsung Galaxy Tab S2 hails from all of five years ago. Nevertheless, its units served by the carrier Verizon have been issued with October 2020 security patches. Therefore, even though it remains on an older version of Android, it is up to date in one respect, at least.

LG Display has been contracted to supply mini-LED LCDs to Apple for its fifth-generation iPad Pros, according to ETNews. Mass-production of these next-generation displays will commence before the end of the year, allowing Apple to release new iPad Pros in Q1 2021.

ARM unveiled the Cortex-A78, a new core likely to form part of flagship mobile SoCs in 2021, recently. Now, the company has revealed that it is in fact part of a family of such products. One of them is the A78C, which has been modified for specific, demanding applications that may include mixed reality (MR).

Huawei's mobile division may be on the verge of receiving chipsets from the likes of MediaTek and Qualcomm, according to the Financial Times. The Chinese company is ploughing on with buildings its own chip fabrication plants. It will be years before Huawei reaches parity with mobile chipsets from MediaTek, Samsung and Qualcomm, though.

The Lenovo Legion 5 powered by AMD Ryzen 7 4800H and NVIDIA RTX 2060 will be available in Germany on Black Friday, according to a Lenovo customer rep. This information comes in the wake of an ongoing patent dispute between Nokia and Lenovo wherein the former sought an injunction against Lenovo resulting in a nationwide sales ban. Lenovo has since challenged the injunction and has resumed laptop and tablet sales in the region.

An engineering sample of the upcoming Microsoft Surface Pro 8 has been put up for sale on eBay with bids starting from US$1,300. According to the seller's description, the Surface Pro 8 is powered by an Intel Tiger Lake Core i7-1165G7 CPU, 32 GB RAM, and a 1 TB SSD. Though still a prototype, this listing indicates that the Surface Pro 8 will sport the same chassis as the Surface Pro 7 with no design changes.

Shortly after taking down Xiaomi to become India's biggest smartphone brand, Samsung has also managed to leave Amazon behind in the global tablet market. With an impressive year-over-year growth of almost 90 percent, Samsung managed to ship 9.4 million tablets in the third quarter, which accounted for a market share of 20 nearly percent.

Introduced as a new part of the SmartThings app, SmartThings Find is now available for all Samsung users worldwide. This is a new way to locate a range of select Galaxy smartphones, tablets, smartwatches, and earbuds at once thanks to the Bluetooth Low Energy and ultra-wideband technologies.

The display-maker TCL held a 2020 Display Technology Conference earlier in October 2020. This Chinese event reportedly showcased this OEM's rollable phone prototype. Now, a video purporting to contain the footage has been posted to YouTube. It appears to show the groundbreaking device with a fully-functional extendible screen.

Huawei's place on the US administration's Entity List had cut it off from supplies of high-end OLED smartphone panels from Samsung and LG. However, new reports indicated that the former has obtained a license to sell these components to the Chinese OEM again. Then again, it still can't use them to make new flagship devices.

Mesh networking is based on a set of repeaters that can be placed strategically around a building (usually a home) to ensure a good Wi-Fi signal in every room. Qualcomm has just announced its latest series of chipsets for this use-case, which, as it claims, can greatly improve on speeds while reducing the size of each new mesh point based on it.

A new development in OLED technology could result in ultra-high-resolution displays, thanks to the latest developments in increasingly thin, effective solar panels. It involves cutting-edge physics that could be relevant to both fields, which feature in a new paper co-written by R&D scientists at Samsung.

LG's display division has just released its financial performance figures for the third quarter of 2020 (3Q2020). It has posted a net profit of about US$9.7 million, whereas it reported losses in 2Q2020 and in 3Q2019. There are also year-on-year (YoY) and quarter-on-quarter (QoQ) gains in revenue and operating profits in this new report.

Microsoft’s Surface Duo is already starting to see some relatively steep price cuts of up to US$200. Naturally, early adopters aren’t happy and Microsoft isn’t doing a lot to appease customers other than pointing then to the 60-day return policy.

Samsung could be finally bringing S-Pen support to its Galaxy Z Fold line with next year’s model. According to a new report, the Galaxy Z Fold3 will add the long awaited feature thanks to the introduction of thicker foldable glass and some other tweaks.

Lenovo has had to remove almost all its products from its German website, because of a patent dispute with Nokia. The Chinese company has supposedly been violating H.264 patents that Nokia holds, resulting in the Finnish company taking out an injunction to freeze Lenovo's online sales.

The current US administration put Huawei on its Entity List, which ultimately led to the OEM being cut off from vital suppliers such as TSMC. However, that company has now obtained a license to once again sell to the Chinese electronics giant. Then again, the terms of this new allowance may render it considerably less of a reprieve for Huawei than it sounds.

The PIPO W11 is a budget alternative to the Microsoft Surface lineup, specifically the Surface Go 2. The W11 is still relatively cheap though, thanks to its Gemini Lake processor and 8 GB of RAM.

Finally, the Windows 10 fall update is here, better known as the October 2020 update or Windows 10 20H2. The new update remains a free one for all existing Windows 10 licenses and features a host of changes, including a new start menu, settings improvements and better Microsoft Edge integration.

The new Travelmate models come in slimmer yet sturdier chassis made of an aluminum-magnesium mix. Upgrades include the latest Tiger Lake CPUs with Xe iGPUs, up to 32 GB of DDR4 RAM, up to 1 TB NVMe SSD storage, a Thunderbolt 4 connector and a larger battery that can last up to 15 hours.

If you're looking for a mobile game to bring your fancy $1000 smartphone to its knees, then Genshin Impact would be it. The game is practically unplayable on budget Android devices with unsteady frame rates and visual bugs galore.

Apple has begun its push for sustainability well before Greta Thunberg by reducing the carbon footprint of its products and not using toxic materials for its devices. Since climate change became a major political issue, Apple started to highlight its contribution to the protection of the environment.

DxOMark is practically a household name for independent groups that release scores for smartphone prowess in areas such as their screens and cameras. It has announced that its system to test the former has been re-designed to reflect user experience in real-world and laboratory settings. Its procedures for cameras are also now more rigorous than ever.

After the Lenovo Tab P11 Pro comes the Tab P11, a slimmed-down version of its Pro sibling. Leaked details have confirmed not only the design of the Tab P11, but also the specifications of Lenovo's upcoming tablet.

Previously known as DG1, Intel's Xe discrete GPUs may first launch with select Tiger Lake laptops. One of these could be the Asus VivoBook Flip 14 TP470EZ convertible that is advertised to be featuring the first Xe dGPU named Iris Xe Max. No official specs for this model as of yet besides the 4 GB GDDR5 VRAM, but we are hearing that it may feature a 96 EU G7 chip with higher clocks.

BOE is the largest supplier of display panels (AMOLED included) in China. A new report indicates that it now intends to compete even further with the likes of Samsung by making its own ultra-thin glass (UTG) as well. This material is the most effective existing solution to protect foldable displays, and as such may become more and more important in the future.