Razer has finally unveiled its first smartphone, simply called Razer Phone, which is built for high-performance games and streaming high resolution TV and movie content.

Inside, the new Razer Phone features a remarkable 120Hz UltraMotion display, and powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon 835 processor. Razer has provided high-end technologies like Dolby ATMOS and THX certified audio, mixing it with 8GB of RAM, 12-megapixel dual cameras, and a 4000mAh battery.

Razer has taken a leaf out of Apple's book, with Razer Phone not including a 3.5mm headphone jack. Instead, Razer Phone has a USB-C to 3.5mm adapter in the box, but this hasn't been confirmed.

Samsung is ramping up its DRAM production, with the company setting itself up to expand two of its DRAM manufacturing plants in Hwasung and Pyeongtaek, both in South Korea.

Samsung will be re-purposing some of its 2D NAND flash at its Hwasung plant, which will then be used to boost DRAM production, which should start in Q1 2018. The Pyeongtaek-based plant is also being refitted, with DRAM manufacturing clean rooms that will be built on the plant's second floor.

But we all want to know when cheaper DDR4 will be here, which is what Samsung is going to be able to offer once DRAM production is up, but don't expect anything until the second half of 2018. The PC industry isn't the only place where increased DRAM production will alleviate shortages, as smartphones and tablets also use lots of DRAM these days. DRAM stock has been depleted over the last 9 months or so, with RAM prices skyrocketing up by to 100%.

Samsung Electronics today announced its third quarter earnings results, affirming that the supply situation for key NAND products will tighten into Q4 and possibly beyond.

The financials note that Samsung will continue focusing its memory business more towards higher-end performance chips such as VNAND storage and LPDDR4X memory to serve the increasingly demanding needs of the mobile and datacenter markets. As a result of this shift away from traditional 2D NAND, supply will remain constrained for key products such as Nintendo's new Switch handheld-console hybrid, which uses traditional storage memory.

"Looking ahead to the fourth quarter, the company anticipates tight supply and demand conditions to continue for the Memory Business due to strong demand for servers and mobile devices. For the Memory Business, demand for high-density, high-performance NAND will increase, as the need for larger data capacity in servers and mobile devices grows," the report states.

Armed with the might of Microsoft's new $499 Xbox One X console, CD Projekt RED has breathed new visual life into one of the best video games ever made. Here's what the Polish developer had to say about the console, and the incoming enhancements.

With a number of high-profile updates, tweaks, and visual enhancements,The Witcher 3 on the Xbox One X looks to be the definitive way to experience the landmark RPG. Gamers will be able to experience Geralt's adventures in 4K resolution with vibrant HDR imaging, along with other updates that harness the power of the console's 6TFLOP AMD Polaris GPU, the highly customized 2.3GHz 8-core Jaguar CPU, and the 12GB of GDDR5 system memory.

"With the additional power of the Xbox One X, we are able to deliver The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt in 4K, while providing numerous visual tweaks such as higher-quality shadows, ambient occlusion & texture filtering, as well as higher resolution textures, and an all-around performance boost," The Witcher 3's development Jakub Kutrzuba lead told Xbox Wire.

Players who redeem lootboxes in the Call of Duty WII "Headquarters" online social space will essentially broadcast the contents of their loot to nearby users, highlighting a very real marketing tactic to incentivize microtransaction purchases.

Activision recently caught flak with its microtransaction patent that essentially pushes new players towards lootboxes and/or paid in-game items. Now we're seeing an extension of this with the latest Call of Duty: WWII iteration, which, according to Redditors who received advanced copies, will allow players to inspect the contents of another user's opened supply drop.

This is an ingenious tactic for incentivizing organic monetization within the game's social space. Opening supply drops calls lots of attention in the social space as it is--players can trigger an animation that has a supply crate dropping from the sky into the Headquarters zone, and interested players can apparently approach and see the contents of the drop. The trick here is that gamers can essentially spectate lootboxes openings, thus simulating one of the more powerful "hooks" that popular streamers and content creators use to advertise the game (or their own illegal sites, as in the case of CS: GO Lotto).

Battlefield 1 launched in 2016 and continues serving as a cash crop for EA. But come next fiscal year it's time for a brand new Battlefield shooter, strongly hinting DICE has been crafting a fresh experience for the last few years.

The new Battlefield game will release during EA's fiscal year 2019 timeline, which runs from April 1, 2018 through March 31, 2019, the publisher today announced in its fiscal Q2'18 financial documents. The company also confirmed that the new Battlefield game will launch in the same fiscal slate as BioWare's big new shared-world shooter Anthem, which is believed to be EA's unique answer to Destiny. Anthem is explicitly referred to as an action game, and EA has previously affirmed the game will have "genre-melding" while strongly hinting microtransactions and other live services will be included.

"The core of our fiscal 2019 is a full slate of sports titles and their associated live services, plus new live services from Star Wars Battlefront II," Electronic Arts CFO Blake Jorgensen said in the report. "We will add the next Battlefield game, and move into the action genre with Anthem. We expect our subscriber base to continue to grow, and for our new mobile titles to benefit from players looking for deeper experiences with higher production values."

Seagate have introduced the first HDD created specifically for artificial intelligence enabled video surveillance, the Seagate SkyHawk AI hard disk drive. Building on Seagate's 10-year track record of optimized surveillance performance, The SkyHawk AI provides unparalleled bandwidth and processing power for data-intensive workloads, with the ability to simultaneously analyze and record footage from multiple HD cameras.

"The use of AI technology in surveillance is steadily increasing - both in the edge and backend installations such as retail fronts and large city traffic management. Seagate has led the surveillance storage market since its early days, a decade ago, by delivering industry leading HDD products that have enabled more than 5X increase in exabytes during this time period," said Sai Varanasi, vice president product line management at Seagate Technology. "We are excited to introduce smart, purpose-built SkyHawk AI solutions that expand the design space for our customers and partners, allowing them to implement next-generation deep learning and video analytics applications."

With forecasted growth from 27.6 million shipments in 2016 for video surveillance hardware, to 126 million in 2021, Seagate are providing the ideal solution for computational workloads that typically accompany AI work streams. SkyHawk AI can provide high throughput and enhanced caching to deliver low latency and excellent random read performance.

The first Major of the Dota 2 season has completed, ESL One Hamburg saw 8 teams from 6 regions battle it out for a share of the $1,000,000 total prize money and the newly introduced Pro Circuit points that are used to determine invites for next year's TI8. ESL One Hamburg saw TI7 grand finalist Team Liquid and Newbee both receive direct invites, with Team Secret, Virtus.Pro, Keen Gaming, Fnatic (HappyFeet had to withdraw due to VISA issues), Evil Geniuses and SG e-sports all representing their regions via winning their associated qualifying tournaments.

The group stage saw strong performances from both Team Secret and Virtus.Pro, both teams took unbeaten series wins into the playoff stage that also saw the end of the tournament for Fnatic, Keen Gaming, SG e-sports and a surprising exit from NA heavyweights EG. All teams failing to qualify for the next stage of the tournament.

The Playoffs saw some impressive Dota, with Team Secret advancing to the grand final after defeating red-hot Team Liquid. Dropping game 1, the TI7 champs looked in control, but Team Secret were able to rally and convincingly defeating the Team Liquid in the final two games of the series. The other spot in the grand final was up for grabs, VP took on Newbee that again saw the series come down to the deciding game 3. In the end, VP were able to book their place against Team Secret in the grand final and a guaranteed $200,000 for 2nd place, or $500,000 for being crowned champions of ESL One Hamburg.

Games titan EA just posted its financial earnings for fiscal Q2'18, which show strong growth in a critical area that ties its games together: live services. In fact, EA executives highlight just how important these services are compared to unit sales.

It should be no surprise that EA, a company that makes billions a year from monetized digital content such as microtransactions, DLC, add-ons, subscriptions, values live services so highly. After all we've seen the publisher's games change considerably over time to align into more digital online-based ecosystems such as FIFA Ultimate Team and Battlefield 1 that keep players coming back months after release--and more importantly, continually spending money in the games they play. With this in mind unit sales have become less and less important to the publisher.

When asked if Battlefront II sales are still forecast to hit 14 million copies, EA CFO Blake Jorgensen said: "We give out unit forecasts at the beginning of the year to help people size things. But we're finding units are becoming less and less meaningful to us because obviously there's a difference between a digital unit and a physical unit--and we've been surprised on the growth of digital units. It's all about the live services at the end of the day as well," Blake Jorgensen, Chief Financial Officer of EA, said in the latest fiscal Q2'18 earnings call.

The highly anticipated update for Dota 2 is here. Dueling Fates patch 7.07 update was first announced at The International 7 and is live! This update is HUGE- two new heroes, numerous gameplay,hero and item reworks, removal and addition of new items, Ancient Apparition remodel and much more.

Dueling Fates update introduces Pangolier and Dark Willow heroes to the Dota 2 universe. Panagolier is a melee-carry that boasts many evasive abilities that are sure to cause havoc, while Dark Willow is a ranged-support that features root and stun abilities to priorities crowd control.

Also included in patch 7.07 is ranked seasons that allows re-calibration of MMR, turbo mode that is aimed at casual players, changes to ability draft, Ancient Apparition remodel, improvements to ping wheel, a massive amount of changes to gameplay and items that includes my personal favorite "Flying Courier upgrade can no longer be purchased. Courier now upgrades automatically at 3 minutes", rework of heroes (Beastmaster, Broodmother, Morphling, Tiny, Viper and Wraith King), removed items (PMS and Iron Talon) and the introduction of 5 new items.