Mobile Devices - Page 119

Microsoft has just unveiled the Lumia 650, a mid-range sibling to the beefier Lumia 950 and 950XL flagship. According to Redmond, the $199 handset is built for productivity and brings "first class to business class".

The Lumia 650 is powered by Windows 10 and aimed at the enterprise sector. The phone runs the latest Microsoft Office apps and services like Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and OneNote right out of the box, all of which are fully optimized for mobile touch-screen interfaces. As such, the Lumia 650 is touted to "work seamlessly with your company's Microsoft IT platforms". The sleek handset also features targeted security measures like full encryption and one-click memory wiping.

As the new Lumia is a mid-range device, specs are rather light. The phone's 5-inch OLED screen isn't even full HD, clocking in at 1280x720 resolution, and is set in a metal frame embodied in the device's 6.9mm thin design. It rocks a meager 16GB of onboard memory that's expandable to up to 200GB via MicroSD, a Quad-core 1.3 GHz Snapdragon 212 processor, and just 1GB of RAM.

In somewhat of an anti-Easter Egg finding, recent reports have shown that setting the date on your iPhone 5s (or newer) to Janurary 1, 1970 will ensure the device becomes quite useless.

There have recently been some images circulating on the internet saying that setting your phone to this date will ensure a fresh old school Apple logo will be displayed. This is a lie and setting your iPhone's date to 1970 will make sure that your device is unusable - being bricked without repair.

There's currently no fix for this issue, the easiest way to keep your iPhone working is by simply not changing the date.

We only have a week until we get to meet the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 edge smartphones from Samsung, but leaked photos of Samsung's latest flagship handsets are here, and they're looking great.

The latest photos of the Galaxy S7 show that it has a thin body, with only minimal camera protrusion - which is a big upgrade to the Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 edge from last year. Samsung has put it all into design by the looks of things, on both the front and back of the S7 and S7 edge, and it pays off - they look great.

Inside, we should expect some grunt with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 and Samsung Exynos 8890 powering the Galaxy S7, while a 12-megapixel rear-facing camera will be snapping those gorgeous photos for you. It's a drop down from the 16-megapixel snapper on the Galaxy S6, but considering Samsung's previous Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 edge had some of the best cameras of 2016, I'm excited to see what the South Korean giant can pull off with the Galaxy S7.

Qualcomm doesn't want to rest with its continued dominance of the mobile world, unveiling its new Snapdragon X16 modem. What makes the new Snapdragon X16 modem newsworthy? Well, it can push up to 1Gbps over LTE... which is just insane.

The new Snapdragon X16 modem, together with the WTR5975 transceiver is capable of up to 1Gbps over Category 16 LTE. Right now, we have a ceiling of 300Mbps to 450Mbps, with the upcoming Snapdragon 820 the only one capable of hitting 600Mbps. The Snapdragon X16 from Qualcomm will also support upload speeds of 150Mbps, too.

Qualcomm said in its press release: "The Snapdragon X16 LTE modem is designed to reach Gigabit Class LTE speeds using the same amount of spectrum as Category 9 LTE devices. By using carrier aggregation and 4x4 MIMO, the Snapdragon X16 LTE modem can receive 10 unique streams of data using only three 20 MHz carriers. Its support for 256-QAM boosts the peak throughput of each stream from ~75 Mbps to ~100 Mbps, with additional gains possible with modem data compression".

We still don't know what the G5 smartphone will arrive as, but LG has just taken the wraps off of the touch-enabled Quick Cover for its forthcoming flagship smartphone.

LG announced the touch-enabled Quick Cover for the unreleased and unannounced G5 smartphone, teasing the G5 as a "smartphone that does not officially exist". LG continued, saying that the cover is wrapped in "a unique film with a glossy metallic finish" for a premium feel. The G5's touch-enabled Quick Cover will also allow owners to take calls and control alarm settings through its semitransparent mesh material, without having to open the case and reveal the G5.

We should expect the always-on display from the G5 to be front and center, literally, when the G5 is announced on February 21 during Mobile World Congress.

We all know the pain of crappy battery life on our smartphones, as it doesn't matter if you own an Android smartphone or an iPhone, the battery barely lasts a day (100% brightness, heavy use). But, this could soon change thanks to fuel cell technology.

British fuel cell developer Intelligent Energy Holdings has pumped $7.6 million into developing a fuel cell small enough to be crammed into a smartphone. How does fuel cell technology work? Well, it converts hydrogen into electricity, with the only byproduct remaining being water vapor. This leads fuel cell to be environmentally friendly, too.

Julian Hughes, the acting Managing Director for Intelligent Energy's Consumer Electronics team, said: "Embedding fuel-cell technology into portable devices provides a solution to the current dilemma of battery life. With consumers demanding more and more from their phones, battery innovation has not kept up".

A few days after learning Samsung's Galaxy S7 Edge (concept picture below) would feature a 3,500mAh battery comes an FCC filing confirming the original rumor was close but not quite on. Rather than 3,500mAh, the Edge will feature a 3,600mAh battery, according to a screenshot included in the filing.

Unfortunately, the Galaxy S7 doesn't feature such a screenshot, so we can't confirm the previous 3,000 mAh battery rumor.

If you are looking forward to the S7 or S7 Edge, be sure to mark your calendar for February 21, when Samsung will reveal both phones officially.

iPhone bricked with the 'Error 53' problem going around? Don't worry about it - Apple has your back. No really, they do.

If you haven't already heard, thousands upon thousands of iPhone 6 users have lost their devices to 'Error 53', which is bricking expensive smartphones. Why? Error 53 has something to do with the Touch ID-powered Home button on the iPhone, which can be used as a fingerprint sensor to unlock your smartphone, compared to the four-digit code that's usually required.

But, if your iPhone has been damaged and you've had it fixed by a non-Apple approved repairer, then you're... well, screwed. A new update to iOS now detects non-standard components and shuts down your iPhone - bricking it - aka, your expensive iPhone is now useless. This is all because you didn't go to an Apple Store, and have your phone fixed. Apple has released a statement to The Guardian, where they said: "We take customer security very seriously and Error 53 is the result of security checks designed to protect our customers. iOS checks that the Touch ID sensor in your iPhone or iPad correctly matches your device's other components".

AMD's technology initiative GPUOpen is primarily intended for PC development, but because of its open source nature, it's already appeared in console games -- Rise of the Tomb Raider being one of them. AMD's Head of Global Technical Marketing Robert Hallock says an interview with XDA Developers it's "very easy for developers to port and scale them" to this end.

Hallock also states GPUOpen could possibly be used for smartphone and tablet graphics purposes should a developer be willing to do the work.

The project isn't going to rake in huge wads of cash for AMD as far as we can tell, but gamers everywhere are already enjoying the benefits, and statements like these encourage that further.

Russian blogger Eldar Murtazin claims the upcoming Samsung Galaxy S7 lasts 17 hours on a single charge. You might be thinking that's nothing with light use, but Murtazin was playing video and had screen brightness at 100%. He also tested a dual-SIM version with 75% brightness and LTE always-on. With this test environment, the phone lasted a full two days.

The S7 is expected to include a 3,000 mAh battery and feature a more efficient CPU and GPU. More about it will be known at its unveiling later this month. The S7 Edge, meanwhile, is expected to feature a 3,500 mAh battery.

USB Type-C is the new connectivity standard that aims to do it all--video, sound, and data--and even allows mobile devices to be charged super fast. Given the format's capabilities, a Google engineer proves that you can't get away with cheap third-party USB Type-C cables lest you fry your precious new gadgets.

Google engineer Benson Leung has been reviewing various brands of USB Type-C cables to ensure and check performance. His findings are actually quite surprising: only three out of the ten USB Type-C cables he's reviewed are spec compliant to charge his Chromebook Pixel. If that wasn't enough, one of the cheap third-party cables actually fried the $1,000 laptop's ports.

Surjtech's 3M USB A-to-C cable is the culprit, and Leung says that the cord was so badly wired that it burnt out both of the Pixel C's USB Type-C ports and fried two separate USB PD Sniffer devices. "I directly analyzed the Surjtech cable using a Type-C breakout board and a multimeter, and it appears that they completely miswired the cable. The GND pin on the Type-A plug is tied to the Vbus pins on the Type-C plug. The Vbus pin on the Type-A plug is tied to GND on the Type-C plug," the Google engineer said in his review.

We know that the Galaxy S7 will be unveiled in just a couple of weeks time, but now we have confirmation that LG will be launching its G5 smartphone on February 21.

The news comes directly from LG, which posted a huge tease on their Twitter page with a picture of a person pretending to hold a smartphone with the number '5' in the middle. LG also said: "#LGG5, February 21st. #MWC16". When it comes to the G5 itself, we should expect a totally new design - that has me super excited.

I reached out to my good friend Anshel Sag of Moor Insights & Strategy, who had the following to say when it comes to the mysterious slot on the G5: "The purported expansion slot is a very interesting idea that will very likely harness the power and flexibility if USB Type-C which allows for more power and data than ever before. It also should give the LG G5 something to differentiate with and I think one of those accessories will be a VR headset of some sort. Expect to see LOTs of VR at MWC this year. LG has tried it in the past, but put almost no effort behind it. However, I expect it to be Google Cardboard-based rather than like GearVR".

Today's chemically-charged lithium ion batteries can be quite disastrous when they overheat, and even lead to explosions. While hardware-makers have pushed to make mobile batteries more powerful, we don't always hear about making them safer--but it looks like a new prototype from Stanford could do just that.

Stanford University has created a new lithium ion battery that won't overheat, potentially opening up the doors for everlasting Stanford's new battery has a safety function not unlike thermal trips in CPU hardware that automatically shuts itself off when it gets too hot. "People have tried different strategies to solve the problem of accidental fires in lithium-ion batteries," said Stanford professor of chemical engineering Zhenan Bao. "We've designed the first battery that can be shut down and revived over repeated heating and cooling cycles without compromising performance."

The science behind the new tech depends on a combination of thermally-responsive polymer, which acts as a conduit for the electricity, and graphene-coated nanoscale nickel particles to carry the charge. The polyethylene film expands when heated up, separating the nickel particles from the electrodes and thus cutting off the flow of electricity. Once the temperature drops back to a stable point, the film will shrink and enable a steady flow of electric current--and the process can be repeated many, many times without losing efficiency.

It's been a hard road for the adoption of the latest version of Android, but 4 months later we're now looking at 1.2% of reported Android devices running Android 6.0, Marshmallow.

The update process used to be far more complicated and lengthy as carrier testing sometimes prohibited devices from receiving the newest updates and then sometimes even becoming abandoned. There are still issues with manufacturers' ability to quickly roll-out updates, and with KitKat (4.4) being the most prevalent version installed, it doesn't seem like the roll-out process is becoming any more streamlined.

The meager 1.2% is likely attributed to the numbers of Nexus 6P and 5X phones sold, and not because of older devices being updated. This points to their new phones not really selling very well, or even to a market dilution with so many Android phones available.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai is said to have told "colleagues and outsiders" that his company wants greater control over its Nexus program. Speculation says this means Google will adopt the Apple model, controlling its Nexus line from top to bottom and not relying on partners as much (and not at all publicly). In fact, Google is supposedly going down this road specifically to better compete with Apple at the high-end.

One might hope Google elects to give control of the program over to Pixel, who made the wonderful Chromebook Pixel and Pixel C.

Allegedly, HTC -- possibly still building this year's Nexus -- isn't too happy about the news, as you can imagine.

Adding to the lower-end of the smartphone market is LG Electronics with its new announcement of the K4 and K10 devices, aiming to offer "affordable mass-tier phones with advanced features" to the wider market, as claimed by President and CEO Juno Cho in a recent press release.

The K10 smartphone comes packed with LG's new 2.5D Arc Glass, a 5.3-inch HD touch display, an 8MP front camera, a 2,300mAh internal battery, a front camera that is claimed to be "up to 13MP" and finally a "woven back cover [that] provides optimal grip."

The K4 is a lower model and is marketed by LG to be a widely affordable and completely entry-level product. Brandishing a 4.5-inch FWVGA display, 8GB of memory and LTE connectivity, this device comes further packed with a 1,940mAh battery and cameras which offer 5MP on the rear-facing and 2MP on the front. Both devices come packed with quad-core-processors, however, the K10 offers up the ability for users to purchase an Octa-Core processor device with the LTE-enabled version. As for processor speeds, the K4 offers a 1.0GHz Quad-Core only, whereas the K10 can be optioned with either a 1.3GHz Quad-Core in the 3G phone, a 1.2GHz or 1.3GHz Quad-Core in the LTE or the previously-mentioned Octa-Core LTE which runs at 1.14GHz.

We aren't far from the launch of the Samsung Galaxy S7 smartphones, with the latest rumor surrounding the 'new generation' battery Samsung is preparing for its new handset.

According to blogger Eldar Murtazin, the Galaxy S7 requires 100 minutes of charge to go from 0-100%, thanks to its 'new generation' battery. We don't know what the 'new generation' battery is just yet, so we could be looking at Samsung increasing the capacity of the battery without requiring too much room inside of the body - or, Samsung is using new technology that will charge the Galaxy S7 much faster.

The Galaxy S6 edge+ and Galaxy Note 5 already charge quick, taking around 110 minutes to get to full charge, so the 100 minutes on the Galaxy S7 would be pretty impressive to see. We should also expect the Galaxy S7 to rock wireless charging, so I'd like to see just how fast the new smartphones from Samsung charge over wireless charging. Give me 100 minutes of 0-100% on wireless charging, and I'll be very, very impressed.

Samsung seems to be updating its budget line of phones, the Galaxy J series with the J1 already available in some parts of the world, and the J5 and J7 waiting somewhere in the sidelines. And the kernel source code for the Galaxy A9 even sort-of confirms the specs that the flagship budget device (is that a thing?) will be rocking.

Avid readers and source code investigators over at GSM Arena seem to have found some startlingly solid evidence of what just might be the specifications. Inside that kernel there're references to a device that goes by the codename "j7xlte," which by rights, is the Galaxy J7.

Delving even deeper seems to reveal another tidbit that says a bit more about the specs of the mysterious device with a line hidden that seems to be a model number; ss_dsi_panel_S6E3FA3_AMS549JR01_FHD. Thus far this seems to point towards a Qualcomm Snapdragon 650 with around 3GB of RAM attached to a 5.5-inch FHD SAMOLED screen. Not terrible specs considering the budget status of the device.

The Surface family is doing fantastically well for Microsoft, who reported $1.35 billion in revenue from it between late September and late December. The launch of the Surface Pro 4 and Surface Book boosted sales 29%, double the previous quarter's $672 million.

Total non-GAAP revenue for the same fiscal quarter was $25.7 billion, which Microsoft chief operating officer Kevin Turner is happy about, saying, "It was a strong holiday season for Microsoft highlighted by Surface and Xbox. Our commercial business executed well as our sales teams and partners helped customers realize the value of Microsoft's cloud technologies across Azure, Office 365 and CRM Online."

Apple always has a tight product release cycle, usually having a new or improved version of the last announced and released every year. And this March will mark the month that a new iPad Air (3) is expected to show up. And this time with some vastly improved specs than last year, though of course these are only unsubstantiated rumors.

The Retina displays already had enough pixel density to have incredibly sharp looking screens, but rumors from sources inside the supply-chain of Apple's devices seem to point towards an upgrade to a 9.7" screen with a 4K (or equivalent 3:2) resolution combined with up to 4GB RAM, presumably DDR4L as well.

Again according to some of those companies in the supply-chain, 3D Touch is coming to the iPad Air 3, which isn't surprising given how it's slowly invading the entire product lineup. But the current primary maker of panels for Apple is expecting an increase in demand due to more, and larger, 3D Touch equipped panels.