Mobile Devices - Page 113

Apple's new iPhone is causing a massive stir and it's not even here yet, with our latest report that the new iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus smartphones will ship with 'AirPods' in the box: wireless earphones because the new iPhone will not have a 3.5mm connector.

Another rumor has surfaced on the new iPhone, that is teasing that Apple's next big thing will shoot 4K video at 60FPS. This might not sound like much, but there are no smartphones on the market right now that shoot 4K 60FPS video, but there are plenty that shoot 4K video, just at a much lower 30FPS.

The new iPhone will also reportedly ship with a dual-camera, and it won't just be on the larger 5.5-inch iPhone 7 Plus, but the smaller 4.7-inch iPhone 7, too.

IFA - Selfies are becoming a big part of our daily lives and Alcatel knows it. That's why they introduced a new phone that doesn't have the best specifications but they swear your selfies will be close to perfection.

The Shine Lite aims for Alcatel's target audience which are so-called millennials. And therefore the price has to be attractive which Alcatel achieved by setting it to $225. This device comes with a metal frame with glass on the front and back which makes the design pretty clean. The Shine Lite comes in three colors - gold, white and black.

The camera, which Alcatel points out as the biggest advantage of this phone, is 13 megapixels and 5 MP for front camera. The selfie camera also has a flash. All selfies are stored in a Selfie Album and you can create videos with an app called Face Show.

Apple's new iPhone announcement is right around the corner, but ahead of the big unveiling, a new rumor has surface that could see the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus including wireless, Lightning-based 'AirPods' in the box.

AirPods is a product Apple hasn't talked about before, and while this is a very hot rumor, they are the purported wireless earphones that Apple will include with the new iPhone. A large reason behind this would be because the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus will reportedly not include a 3.5mm headphone jack, and will instead have a single Lightning connector that will disrupt the market, because of the near infinite market of 3.5mm headphones, speakers and other audio-based products.

If we do see the new iPhone feature wireless earphones in the box, Apple could alleviate many of the issues people have with the new iPhone not including a 3.5mm jack. Apple will reportedly include a 3.5mm to Lightning adapter in the box, so you can still connect your 3.5mm-based speakers or headphones - which would be another great addition.

Samsung has officially recalled the Galaxy Note 7 smartphone worldwide, but what happens now? In the US, Samsung has provided some details on what consumers can expect.

Samsung will exchange your Galaxy Note 7 with a new one in the US, but you can also swap it with the Galaxy S7 or Galaxy S7 edge smartphones. Samsung will also replace any Note accessories, and a refund of the price difference if you hand in your Note 7.

The company is also providing $25 gift cards or bill credit with "select carriers" when swapping your Galaxy Note 7 for a new one, with owners needing to contact the retailer they purchased the Note 7 from, or they can call 1-800-SAMSUNG for more information.

Sony has teased its wireless earpiece before, but now the Japanese electronics giant has teased at IFA 2016 that it will be launching its new Xperia Ear wireless earpiece in November.

Sony's upcoming Xperia Ear is a wireless earpiece that the company will be launching in November "starting in select markets", with the company keeping the price of Xperia Ear under wraps, for now.

The company says that Xperia Ear will use something that Sony calls an "Agent", that will be your personal, in-ear assistant that is also a window into the super-connected world of Google Now. Sony claims that Xperia Ear should have all-day battery life, and that it is light enough that you can wear it for most of the day without it becoming uncomfortable.

With news that Google is moving away from the Nexus branding on its upcoming smartphones and into the warm arms of its new Pixel branding, the reports that Google has "suspended" work on its modular smartphone are beyond disappointing.

According to sources of Reuters and Recode, Google has suspended work on Project Ara, and will reportedly license the technology to other partners, but it won't be releasing a modular smartphone. The decision against moving forward with Project Ara is so that Google's hardware development can be unified under former Motorola boss Rick Osterloh.

Disappointing: I can't be the only other one devastated with this news, as a modular smartphone would have been the new iPhone moment the market needs. We need a big leap in smartphone technology, and Project Ara was a moonshot-like project that could've really changed everything.

India's richest man Mukesh Ambani is about to launch Reliance Jio's mobile services, meaning 4G LTE internet for Earth's second most populous nation as well as free voice calls forever, and a ridiculously cheap data plan.

It's claimed the network is the largest anywhere in the world, and has the cheapest data rates anywhere in the world (1GB of data for 75 cents). Long-term, the plan is to upgrade to 5G and 6G network technology (support is already baked in), and to expand to 90 percent of India's citizens (at launch, 18,000 cities and 200,000 remote areas will be covered).

If you're thinking the deal is too good to be true, you're likely right. The expectation is upon crushing competition and acquiring a massive subscriber base, Reliance will worsen the deal some would describe as unsustainable so as to achieve profitability (a somewhat common business plan). The crushing part has already begun: competitor Airtel (which relies on voice calls for most of its revenue) saw its stock drop 9% today following Reliance's announcement.

With Google preparing to launch the purported next-gen Nexus smartphones rumored as being named Nexus M1 and Nexus S1 (M = Marlin and S = Sailfish), we were hit with a rumor in the last 24 hours that Google would drop the Nexus branding from its upcoming smartphones.

Now we have Android Police with an exclusive report from "two independent sources" that Google's upcoming Marlin and Starfish codenamed smartphones will be called Pixel and Pixel XL. Google's purported Pixel will be a 5-inch "Sailfish" smartphone, while the Pixel XL will be the 5.5-inch "Marlin" smartphone - both rocking Android 7.0 Nougat.

The report continues, that Google will market the upcoming Pixel and Pixel XL as the first smartphones built by Google, even though HTC will be manufacturing Marlin and Sailfish. Google will take care of the industrial design, while HTC builds it - an interesting twist on the Nexus branding, with Google wanting its marketing power thrown into the mix.

IFA 2016 - Huawei surprised everyone today at their press event at IFA by not announcing the new Mate 9 phone, as expected. Instead, they had something old, something new and something blue.

We'll start with the new part, as the Chinese giant introduced two new Android phones - the nova and nova plus. Both devices come with a Snapdragon 625 processor, 3GB of RAM and 32 GB of storage, expandable with microSD card. Users can choose between three colors - Prestige Gold, Mystic Silver and Titanium Grey.

The nova has 5-inch display, a 12 MP rear camera and a 3020 mAh battery. The nova plus is a bit bigger, with 5.5-inch display, a 16 MP main camera and 3340 mAh battery.

Here I am reporting that the next-gen Nexus smartphones from Google and HTC were just that, Nexus-branded smartphones in the form of the purported Nexus M1 and Nexus S1 - but new reports are hinting that Google might drop the Nexus branding altogether.

Google is poised to remove the Nexus branding from its upcoming smartphones and replace it with a "G" logo, but then the news gets even more interesting. Google will reportedly load special version of Android 7.0 onto the new "G" smartphones, or whatever the hell Google ends up calling them, instead of a vanilla ROM of Android 7.0 that we all expected.

What's going on: Google has differentiated its hardware and software products with the Nexus branding, as the hardware side of Google was in the form of Nexus smartphones and tablets. Google kept the Google branding for its own software services, so the change - if it turns out to be real - will be an interesting one.

Samsung could issue a global recall of its Galaxy Note 7 smartphone after reports surface that less than 0.1% of Galaxy Note 7 smartphones are affected with the possibility of a battery-related issue.

An official representative of Samsung has reportedly talked with Yonhap on the issue, with the Samsung rep saying it was the battery inside of that small 0.1% of Galaxy Note 7 shipments that were affected. Android Police points out that with "several millions sold, even this small a percentage can be a hazardous risk and one Samsung is not ready to gamble with. Since the Note7 doesn't have a removable battery, the official says that the company is about to issue a recall of all its new Galaxy Note7 devices sold at home and abroad".

Android Police says that the global recall announcement on the Galaxy Note 7 should happen within a week, with Samsung reportedly ironing out issues with US telcos like Verizon.

Samsung's new low-end Exynos mobile chip leverages the 14nm FinFET process, offering sizable performance boosts and power efficiency.

Samsung is currently mass producing its new lower-end Exynos 7570 SoC (System-on-Chip) optimized for affordable mobile and IoT devices. Built on the 14nm FinFET process, the new Exynos 7570 chip is 20% smaller than its predecessor's 28nm node making the new chip's transistor's more densely packed and now require less voltage. As such, the new 14nm Exynos chip's four ARM Cortex-153 cores are 30% more power efficient and enjoy a staggering 70% increase in CPU power compared to the earlier SoC.

Perhaps the most impressive feature of the Exynos 7570 is that Samsung has integrated specific components like an LTE and Wi-Fi modem, Bluetooth, and an FM radio directly into the chip. This will reduce the amount of extra components that need to be added to a device's motherboard, allowing phone-makers to shave off some space.

IFA 2016 - Huawei, the third biggest mobile phone manufacturer, launched a new phone today in Stockholm, Sweden. Honor 8 is the top of the line Honor series phone, tho we can't say it's a flagship cause that title still belongs to Huawei P9.

However, with the dual camera system, the Honor 8 is quite similar to P9. Our source from Huawei tells us they wanted to make a cheaper phone with all of the P9 characteristics and one difference - they fixed all the problems the P9 has. This is where Honor 8 comes in. At first glance, the Honor 8 looks and feels like a premium phone. Its glass back gives it a fancier look and you get to choose between four colors - white, black, gold and dark blue.

The Honor 8 has a 5.2-inch full HD display and two 12-megapixel rear-facing cameras, but you won't see the Leica logo which is the case with the P9. Inside, we have Huawei's own Kirin 950 octo-core processor, 4GB of RAM and a 3,000 mAh battery. For comparison, the P9 has the same battery capacity, 3GB of RAM and a faster Kirin 955 processor.

On the heels of the release of Samsung's awesome new Galaxy Note 7 smartphone, Chinese smartphone manufacturer Xiaomi have just unveiled their new Galaxy Note competitor, the Redmi Note 4.

Xiaomi's new Redmi Note 4 smartphone is the first to run MIUI 8 out of the box, and has a 5.5-inch 1080p display, with a metal unibody design and 2.5D glass on the front. Inside, we have a 10-core processor from MediaTek with the Helio X20 SoC. Redmi Note 4 includes dual SIM slots with a microSD card slot, a 13-megapixel f/2.0 rear-facing camera, and a huge 4100mAh battery.

Comparing it against the Galaxy Note 7 which has similar specs, and a smaller 3500mAh battery - the Redmi Note 4 is a formidable competitor. Where Xiaomi kills it though, is with the price - costing just $135 for the 16GB model, and $180 for 64GB of storage.

Samsung has been rocking the curved smartphone game for a while now, first introduced with its Galaxy S6 edge smartphone and continued right into the new Galaxy Note 7 smartphone which has a dual curved display that's simply gorgeous.

According to sources of Nikkei Asian Review that are "familiar with Apple's plans", the company will unveil a "4.7-inch model, another that will be 5.5-inches, and a premium handset that will be either 5.5-inches or larger equipped with a screen bent on the two sides". We could see a new iPhone that is similar to the S6 edge, or the new Note 7 smartphone with dual edges. The upcoming premium iPhone will use an OLED display, which has been rumored for a while, but a whopping 5.8-inch OLED is teased for the larger iPhone.

Nikkei expects that the "premium" 5.5-inch model will be released this year, and that the company will be making a regular 5.5-inch iPhone 7 Plus, joined with the 4.7-inch iPhone 7.

NVIDIA has unveiled its next-generation Tegra processor, known as Parker, with some advanced technology powering the new system-on-a-chip.

The new Parker SoC is made on TSMC's impressive 16nm FinFET process, where it has Pascal GPU cores and their new Denver 2 CPU cores. Parker features 256 CUDA cores from the Pascal architecture, while the ARM v8 CPU has two Denver 2 and four A57 cores. The CPU side of things has 2MB of L2 cache which are linked through the HMP (Heterogeneous Multi-Processor) architecture to deliver 4MB of L2 cache.

NVIDIA's new Denver 2 chips also feature 128K+64K sub-cache, while the A57 cores feature 48K+32K sub-cache system. There's also 128b LPDDR4 support with up to 50GB/sec bandwidth, while the display is a triple pipeline that can handle 4K60, with camera features including auto HDR on up to 12 cameras. CPU performance wise, the Denver CPU cores are pretty powerful - with NVIDIA claiming a 40% performance lead over Apple's A9X processor, and a nice bump on Samsung's Galaxy S7 smartphone.

Let's face it: we all hate the battery life on our connected devices, and this includes everything from smartphones, tablets and laptops. Well, it looks like SolidEnergy might have a fix for that.

SolidEnergy is a company that was formed by MIT researchers, which are teasing a new battery breakthrough that will increase the battery life of your smartphone, and they will have production of these new batteries in 2017. Whoa. SolidEnergy formed in 2012, while another MIT spinoff company - A123 Systems - went bankrupt, after working on lithium batteries.

SolidEnergy was working on a very tight budget, and as Android Police reports: "still operating on a tight budget in a market suddenly skeptical of battery technology improvements, snatched up A123's production facility. Initially a challenge, SolidEnergy had to make do with equipment designed to make battery components for consumer electronics". SmartEnergy knows how to make battery components with the same equipment that is needed to get their batteries to mass market.

Google's latest Android 7.0 (Android N) "Nougat" operating system will roll out to certain devices on Monday, August 22.

Huawei's Nexus 6P and Nexus 5X handsets will likely be updated to Android 7.0 Nougat in just three days time, if reports are correct. Canadian operator Telus posted an interesting timeline that clearly lists both Nexus phones for a "Android N Update" on August 22. Australian carrier Optus further corroborates the claims with its own listing that plots the Nexus 6P for a "new version Android 7.0 Nougat" at the "end of August."

But wait, there's more: August 22 is the exact date when Korean LG G5 owners get to preview Android 7.0. So this pretty much tells us that Android Nougat is coming soon, and if all goes according to plan, we'll likely see Google make an official announcement on Monday.

T-Mobile is making choosing a phone plan a lot simpler than what you're used to by removing the choice altogether and going all in on unlimited.

"I declare that the era of the data plan is over," says CEO John Legere. "We are completely destroying the whole concept of a data plan; it's gone. We have one single offer that banishes data buckets forever."

Its new and only plan -- apart from previous plans available to those already signed up for them -- is dubbed "T-Mobile One", costs $70 per month ($50 for a second line, and $20 for each line after that), and offers unlimited talk, text, and 4G LTE data. Also included: unlimited mobile hotspot data on the 2G network.

Google has the world excited for its next-gen Nexus smartphones, which until now we've known as the Nexus M1 and Nexus S1. The Nexus M1 is the faster of the two, and a new leak says that the new Nexus M1 will have high-end hardware, and will be just as good as any of the flagship smartphones on the market.

According to an Antutu benchmark for the "Google Nexus Marlin" found by a Weibo user 'The Malignant', the new Nexus M1 will feature the Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 processor and 4GB of RAM. Google's new Nexus M1 will also reportedly feature 32GB of storage, a 13-megapixel rear-facing camera backed up by an 8-megapixel selfie camera. We're also expecting a 2560x1440 native resolution.

We are still waiting for the official announcement and release date of the new Nexus smartphones, which shouldn't be too much longer away, hopefully somewhere in October.