Tablet

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.

Intel has launched the Pentium Gold 7505 processor, which, unlike its immediate predecessor, has a 10 nanometer (nm) architecture thanks to its place in the Tiger Lake series. It also now has double the cache and supports faster integrated graphics compared to its closest 2019 counterpart - with Thunderbolt 4 on top of that.

Apple decided to release the new iPad Air and the iPhone 12 practically simultaneously, a first for the company. The fourth-generation tablet features the same 5 nm chipset as likes of the iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 Pro, so it was inevitable that people would draw performance comparisons. As AnTuTu has demonstrated, it seems that the iPhone 12, at least, is holding back the A14 Bionic somewhat.

Nokia has secured a contract from NASA to provide it with a 4G/LTE network - for a lunar base. The US' space administration has plans to have such a structure on the moon and operational by 2028, and the Finnish brand is the one to supply the astronauts who will work there with a telecommunications infrastructure based on a common terrestrial mobile data standard.

Huawei has a good mid-range tablet on offer: the MatePad 10.4. The 10.4-inch Android tablet did a good job during our review and we were particularly impressed by its good price-to-performance ratio and connectivity. The MatePad 10.4 lacks access to Google services, however. Find out whether we can still recommend this tablet in our review highlights.

Samsung has launched two new lines of memory cards with compelling speeds and specs. They are the new EVO Plus and PRO Plus series, which both have the full SD form-factor and come in sizes of 32 to 256GB. They are rated for high speeds and for advanced 'sevenfold' durability.

Samsung has announced that the Galaxy Tab S7 and Galaxy Tab S7+ will soon be able to run Fortnite at 90 FPS. The functionality will arrive via a Galaxy Store update and will be available to all players soon. We can expect Samsung and Epic to bring the feature to other compatible devices soon.

An eagle-eyed Redditor has spotted that Intel just introduced the Core i3-10100F with minimal fanfare. This direct successor to the i3-9100F still has no integrated graphics - although it does have hyper-threading, which is a first for its nascent series. It also has the same recommended price range as its preceding generation.

A new research report has concluded that the market for wireless headphones worldwide will accrue a value of approximately US$42.1 billion over the next 6 years. This growth may be based on the demand for products that connect users to their smartphones, tablets or TVs, as well as using them while working out or consuming content.

The US State of California's legislative body has passed a resolution that makes today (October 10, 2020) Blue Light Awareness Day in the jurisdiction. The device certification group Eyesafe has welcomed the motion, particularly in light of the trend towards remote working and learning and, thus, the ever-growing rate of screen use in the region.

TCL launched its 8-inch 10 TABMID slate during IFA 2020 Special Edition. Now, a variant of this device has launched in the US through the carrier Verizon. It has 3GB of RAM and 32GB of onboard storage, but also has 4G connectivity and its OEM's NXTVISION screen technology. It has been priced at just under US$200 and is available from now.

Priced at US$229.99, the new Samsung Galaxy Tab A7 comes with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 662 processor, 3 GB of memory and up to 64 GB of internal storage space, four Dolby Atmos speakers, as well as a generous 7,040 mAh battery. This slate goes on sale today and buyers can get a 50 percent price cut on the Book Cover Case until October 25.

Samsung has joined Apple in beating analyst expectations as well as bucking the global downturn with a 58 percent jump in profit for the September quarter. The result was driven by various factors including an unusual number of parts orders for Huawei as well as the strong performance of its mid-range mobile devices.

The Samsung Galaxy Tab S7+ is currently the largest tablet in the Android space. Our review reveals that Samsung has made a couple of missteps with its slate with the 12.4-inch Super AMOLED display. Read our review to find out what those missteps are and what makes this tablet especially good.

Apple's newest A14 Bionic mobile SoC has made its first appearance on Geekbench alongside an iPad Air 4. It nets a single-core score of 1,538 and a multi-core score of 4,198. Like always, Apple's flagship silicon convincingly outperforms everything Qualcomm/Samsung has to offer.

A South Korean news outlet says that Samsung will reportedly make the Galaxy S21 series compatible with an S Pen. The report suggests that an S Pen-ready Galaxy S phone will help Galaxy Note users transition to Samsung's mainstream flagships. That is essential as the Galaxy Note 21 is billed to be the last of its kind.

The Galaxy W20 is a variation of Samsung's Galaxy Fold released as a Chinese-market exclusive with 5G. Now, it seems it is getting a successor in the coming months. The OEM has certified a new device with a model number likely to match such a device with the regulator 3C.

Tipster Dusk Golem recently spoke about the upcoming Nintendo Switch Pro, claiming that unlocked framerates on a number of recently released Nintendo Switch titles are to allow for an "easy performance boost" on more capable Switch Pro hardware.

The Huawei MatePad T8 is a solid entry-level tablet, which sells for less than 100 Euros (~$118). The hardware of the T8 proves to be very competitive in our review. However, this is not enough, due to the Google situation.

LG has previously teased or showcased devices with rollable displays. Now, its latest patent, approved by the US Patents and Trademarks Office (USPTO) in September 2020, may show the OEM's latest take on the technology. It is a box housing a display that can be unfurled horizontally and be used as a drawing device.

Chinese company Royole has officially launched the Flexpai 2, its foldable smartphone competitor to the likes of the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 2 and the Huawei Mate X. The new device boasts powerful performance and unique display characteristics.

Microsoft has announced that the new Xbox App is available as a beta on the Google Play Store. It has been designed so that users can stream downloaded titles from their consoles onto their Android devices. The app is also rated for easy sharing, invites and notification management across this gaming ecosystem.

Another Xiaomi patent has surfaced and this latest one is for a multiple fold flexible smartphone/tablet hybrid. The Chinese OEM has chosen to grace this concept device with two folds, leading it to be dubbed the Xiaomi Mi Z Fold by some sites. The foldable smartphone has some issues though, including its obvious thickness when folded.