Mobile Devices - Page 71

Apple designer Jony Ive has announced he's leaving the company to form his own, with LoveFrom's first client being Apple... of course. Ive has been the design lead behind most of Apple's iconic products, even down to its huge 'spaceship' Apple Park campus.

Ive designed the iPod, Mac, iPhone -- pretty much everything we know from Apple, and was put into a higher role once Steve Jobs returned to Apple back in 1997. He's also infamous for his slow-and-seductive voiceovers talking about Apple devices, something I could only half take seriously. In an interview with the Financial Times, Ive explained: "After nearly 30 years and countless projects, I am most proud of the lasting work we have done to create a design team, process and culture at Apple that is without peer. Today it is stronger, more vibrant and more talented than at any point in Apple's history".

He continued: "The team will certainly thrive under the excellent leadership of Evans, Alan and Jeff, who have been among my closest collaborators. I have the utmost confidence in my designer colleagues at Apple, who remain my closest friends, and I look forward to working with them for many years to come".

Nokia's exciting Bell Labs division has possibly solved one of the largest issues of smartphones today... battery life. Bell Labs has solved the issues surrounding limited recharge cycles on lithium ion and lithium polymer technology, using something exciting and new that could provide up to 2.5x the battery life we have today.

According to Paul King who is one of the lead investigators on the new battery project as well as being a Member of the Technical Staff of Nokia Bell Labs: "By packing more energy into a smaller space, this new battery technology will have a profound impact on 5G and the entire networked world. The combination of Nokia Bell Labs industry and device knowledge and AMBER's materials science expertise allowed us to tackle an extremely difficult problem involving multiple disciplines. Our results were achieved through the deeply collaborative mode in which we work, underscoring the value of engaging with AMBER as part of our global research strategy".

Nokia Bell Labs has created a lithium nanotube-aided battery that boasts up to 2.5x the battery life of the best batteries on the market now, while staying as thin as smartphones are now. We don't want more battery life with much thicker phones, which is where the researchers at Trinity College Dublin's AMBER center have hopefully created something that could well and truly change the battery game for smartphones.

If there is one thing we need right now it's either super long-lasting mobile batteries, or incredibly fast-charging batteries -- something that Vivo is set to rock the boat with at MWC Shanghai next week.

Vivo will be unveiling its crazy new 120W Super FlashCharge technology which will fast-charge a 4000mAh battery from 0-100% in just 13 minutes, which is freaking incredible, while a 0-50% charge will take just 5 minutes. Right now Vivo has 44W of charging speed on its iQOO gaming phone, so the upgrade from 44W to 120W is absolutely gigantic.

The main issue for Vivo and its exciting new 120W Super FlashCharge technology is battery degradation, something I'm hoping Vivo talks about at MWC Shanghai next week. I wouldn't expect to see a 120W Super FlashCharge-powered phone in the near future, but more so of 'this is what is coming in the near future, prepare your minds to be blown' type of technology demonstration from Vivo.

Samsung is still weeks away from revealing the next-gen Galaxy Note 10 smartphone, but did you know you can already buy cases for the unreleased, unannounced smartphone? Samsung will officially unveil its next-gen Galaxy Note 10 smartphone on August 7 in New York City.

The new cases for the Galaxy Note 10 are available for pre-order on MobileFun, with the new cases made by Olixar. Now that we have the cases on display, we get some more official-style details on the new flagship, with a punch-hole front-facing camera that is in the middle of the display, versus in the corner like the current Galaxy S10 smartphone.

Bixby seems to be absent from the Galaxy Note 10 (yay) but we're also looking at a world where the 3.5mm headphone jack could be removed. The only physical buttons on these renders are for the power button and volume rocker, and being this close to the August 7 reveal. We have a vertical triple-lens camera which looks slick, and no rear-facing fingerprint sensor which means we can expect an in-display fingerprint sensor like the Galaxy S10.

Samsung will have the world watching when it launches the Galaxy Note 10 later this year, with the latest news on the next-gen flagship seeing it rolling out with Sound on Display technology which will replace the traditional speaker.

The new Galaxy Note 10 will do something LG did with its V8 ThinQ from earlier this year which was the first with SoD technology, which turns the entire screen into a speaker will be a big deal for a larger-than-life phone, now with a larger-than-life audio experience. The new speaker on the Note 10 will be "almost invisible" but will still be noticeable.

The reduction in the top of the bezel will be useful for a larger OLED display on the Galaxy Note 10, so we should expect a larger-than-normal display on the new flagship Galaxy Note. The big battle for smartphone flagship supremacy will take place between the Galaxy Note 10, Google Pixel 4 XL, and iPhone 11 later this year.

It looks like we can expect a next-gen NVIDIA Shield TV to be announced soon, as a new version of the popular Android-powered TV box has appeared on the Google Play Developer console.

NVIDIA's purported next-gen Shield TV has a codename of 'mdarcy' which will be powered by Android 9 'Pie' and in order to continue things in the right direction with hardware codenames, the current Shield TV codename is 'darcy'. The new Shield TV in its current state has the same hardware, meaning it'll be powered by the Tegra X1 T210 SoC but I'm sure that's a placeholder right now and will be changed.

Personally, I'd like to see a new SUPER Shield TV as NVIDIA is pushing its new GeForce RTX SUPER graphics cards in the coming weeks. A new SUPER-powered Shield TV would be great to see, especially with Android 9 Pie and some new features that I'm sure NVIDIA has up its sleeve for the future of Shield TV going into 2020, and beyond.

All of the hype of foldable smartphones has really folded into its own black hole, with Samsung retracting its Galaxy Fold and pushing the launch... while now competitor Huawei has folded up its Mate X launch plans, too.

The news of the Mate X delay comes directly from a Huawei spokesperson who talked with CNBC who said: "We don't want to launch a product to destroy our reputation". Huawei will now launch its Mate X foldable smartphone in September, so it can test the design more and not roll into the issues that Samsung faced with its retail-facing Galaxy Fold fiasco.

Huawei unveiled the Mate X back in February with major hype mode enabled, and it did -- and still does, look awesome. But the Huawei spokesperson confirmed with CNBC that the company will be officially launching the Mate X in September as it will be doing "extra testing with mobile carriers around the world and developers to make sure their apps work when the device is fully unfolded".

It all started with an official tease from Google of the Pixel 4, and then there was a next-gen Pixel 4 spotted in the wild and posted up by 9to5Google.

The tipster sent the photo into 9to5Google, which looks identical to the official tease my Google. The company is ramping up the cameras on Pixel 4, with an interesting square camera array on the back of the Pixel 4 in both the official tease, and the tipster-submitted photo.

The rear of the Pixel 4 rocks two side-by-side camera lenses, with a flash underneath and then in the bottom right it looks like we can expect the microphone. The tease from Google is a surprise as the company doesn't usually reveal its Pixel smartphones until October... but as an owner and a huge fan of a Pixel 3 XL, I can definitely say it excites me.

If you've got a Google Pixel 3 or 3 XL and have been wondering why it stutters and feels laggy some (most of the time for some people) then you need to disable Digital Wellbeing right now.

I took the weekend off from work (for once) and then came back to my PC ready to write this story when I noticed other tech media talking about it, so I thought it was an even more perfect time to share my story. While the current stories are sharing a post from Reddit about disabling Digital Wellbeing, that post was made 24 hours ago. The one that I read and took the advice to disable Digital Wellbeing on the Pixel 3 XL was from 9 days ago, and I've been without Digital Wellbeing since and it has absolutely changed my phone.

I've also been running the very latest versions of the Android Q beta since they began with beta 1, beta 2 and now beta 3 running on my Pixel 3 XL 128GB. Android Q is slick as hell, but the phone does feel slow so much of the time -- that is, until I stumbled across this post on Reddit recommending disabling Digital Wellbeing in Android to speed up the phone, and holy crap did it work.

HTC has unveiled its new Exodus 1s smartphone which will be capable of running a full bitcoin node according to HTC, with the new Exodus 1s launching in Q4 2019 for just $250-300.

The new Exodus 1s will also have improved support for decentralized browsing, messaging, and social media apps. With the full bitcoin node sitting on the Exodus 1s you'll be able to have the entire bitcoin blockchain chilling on your phone, verifying transactions at the snap of its digital fingers. The original Exodus debuted at $699 and didn't make a dent in the market, but with a new $250-$300 price tag the Exodus 1s will get much more attention.

HTC has been making inroads into the blockchain-on-your-phone market for a while now, with a renewed focus since the original Exodus smartphone. But now the company is doubling down with the new Exodus 1s with Phil Chen, HTC's Chief Decentralized Officer explaining: "We think that's foundational to the whole decentralized internet and just the whole fundamental premise. If you don't own your keys, you don't own your bitcoin, you don't own your crypto".

Some great news has come out for app developers at the recent Google I/O 2019 event. Google will be debuting a new API that allows for apps to be updated in real-time.

This new API that Google is soon releasing to beta members has been titled 'In-app Updates API' and will give developers two options to choose from. The first "is a full-screen experience for critical updates when you expect the user to wait for the update to be applied immediately". While the second is a "flexible update, which means the user can keep using the app while the update is downloaded. You can completely customize the update flow so it feels like part of your app."

At the moment this new Android API has been handed down to select developers for testing, and will soon be rolled out to a much larger audience of developers. I would expect that the social media giants such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat etc will already be implementing this software into their apps. So once the API becomes widely available to all developers I would expect an update to be rolled by these companies shortly afterward. If you would like to see a GIF of what the updates look like on a phone, visit this link here.

Google has unveiled their next-generation Google Assistant technology that is expected to arrive on the new Pixel phones which is slated for release later this year.

Google Assistant has truly become an amazing asset for Android devices, with it now being located in over 1 billion devices and available in over 30 different languages spreading over 80 different countries. The personal helper has become widely accepted by its users, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't need an upgrade. Later this year Google will be introducing that upgraded 'next-gen Google Assistant' to the new line of Pixel 4 phones.

According to Google, advancements in neural networks has allowed for the company to shrink the 100GB of data that was required for Google Assistant to process speech requests down to just 0.5GB (500MB). Google has said that this "breakthrough" in technology has allowed for the company to install the entire data model of Google Assistant on users smartphones which enables some new levels of functionality. Google has said that with these new models, Google Assistant will be able to "processes speech on-device at nearly zero latency, with transcription that happens in real-time, even when you have no network connection."

Samsung is rumored to be lifting up its game in a big way when it comes to the upcoming Galaxy Note 10 which is rumored to have not just a larger battery, but an ultra-fast-charging battery.

The current-gen Galaxy Note 9 has 15W of charging whilst the new Galaxy S10 also rolls out with a 15W charger, the larger 5G-enabled Galaxy S10 5G has a snazzy 25W fast charger that will get you up and running quicker than ever before on a Galaxy smartphone. But Samsung should be knocking things up on the new Galaxy Note 10 in the coming months with rumors of an ultra-fast charger.

A new mysterious tease of either crazy battery life, ultra-fast charging speeds or a radically new battery technology for the Galaxy Note 10 has people, myself included, excited. Battery life is the one area of a smartphone that needs massive improvement, especially in a post-5G world with crazy camera setups on flagship smartphones, foldable screens and so much more.

Huawei could be the first to market with a 5G-connected next-gen 8K television according to the latest news from Nikkei Asian Review that says the company is working on the first 5G 8K TV.

The new TV would reportedly download 8K content over the ultra-fast 5G connection which by my benchmarks takes over 120Mbps on YouTube for starters. I use an 8K panel and 250Mbps fiber connection, and I can run 8K 60FPS video in real-time but couldn't on my previous 100Mbps connection. Better yet, Huawei's purported 5G 8K TV will reportedly act as a wireless hub for other devices like phones and tablets throughout the house.

8K might not sound like it's here right now but Sony, Samsung and LG have been making a big, big push into the world of 8K TVs. Japan itself is a hub of 8K potential and hype with Sony being a Japanese company, the 2020 Tokyo Olympics take place in Japan next year with a huge focus on 8K content. NHK has been working on 8K broadcasts since 1995, with the Japan's national public broadcasting organization putting its weight behind 8K broadcasts in Japan for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

The gaming smartphone market isn't that big but there are players like ASUS and Razer that have deployed some damn impressive gaming smartphones, but now Chinese manufacturer Nubia has unveiled its new Red Magic 3 gaming smartphone.

Nubia's new Red Magic 3 gaming smartphone is a helluva beast with Qualcomm's impressively-equipped Snapdragon 855 chipset, 6/8/12GB of RAM options and 128/256GB storage options.

The display is also shaping up to match the internal specs with a 6.65-inch FHD+ AMOLED display at 90Hz refresh rate, bringing it closer to the 120Hz display on the Razer Phone 2, except it is much cheaper.

Samsung officially delaying the global launch of its Galaxy Fold smartphone might not be a good look for the foldable smartphone world, but competitor Huawei isn't stopping and has announced it will be debuting the Mate X in July 2019.

Huawei teased its foldable smartphone not too long ago now and it seemed to have a better design than Samsung's own Galaxy Fold, but Huawei were hush-hush with a release window until now. Now being the right time to strike, the Chinese manufacturing giant said at its own global analyst conference that the Mate X will be launching in July 2019, within 48 hours of Samsung delaying the Galaxy Fold release.

I would be very weary of the July window release as all eyes are on Huawei to launch the Mate X without any issues, because if it launches with any issues with its foldable screen at all, it will be blasted into the ground. On the other hand, if Huawei gets the Mate X out the door and into consumers' hands before Samsung can re-work its Galaxy Fold, then Huawei might be onto a winner with the first foldable smartphone hitting the market.

Samsung has given the first wave of its new foldable smartphone, the Galaxy Fold, to some influencers and reviewers ahead of its April 26 launch in the US. Some of those units were breaking in their first day which caused a ton of controversy that has now resulted in Samsung officially delaying the entire launch of the world's first foldable smartphone.

It started with Samsung announcing it has delayed the launch of the Galaxy Fold in Hong Kong and Shanghai, with no new dates provided for the launch event in the country. Hours later the global launch for Galaxy Fold was canceled. Samsung hasn't provided any ETA on the release of the Galaxy Fold other than saying a new release date would be revealed in the "coming weeks". By that commetn alone, we're at least another month away from it launching.

Samsung explained in its full statement:

Samsung's new Galaxy Fold isn't quite available yet but the company has worked closely with reviewers and influencers hooking them up with some of the first handsets to the public. Well, it didn't go so good, and by 'not going so good' we mean some of them had their screens break on the first day.

The first Galaxy Fold review units that were sent out broke in the first day of use in the hands of people like Steve Kovach from CNBC, popular YouTuber MKBHD, Bloomberg, and The Verge. So you can see a blend of YouTubers, mainstream media, and big tech sites. There is reportedly a layer on top of the Galaxy Fold's display that is not a screen protector, and users are warned not to remove it. Well, some have tried and in MKBHD's own words he got only a little way of peeling it off before the "display spazzed and blacked out".

The thing is that Samsung actually has a 'wrap' over the screen on the Galaxy Fold that warns: "The main screen includes a special protective layer. Peeling off the protective layer or using any adhesives on the main screen, such as screen protectors or stickers, may cause damage". Ouch.

Huawei has just announced its new Matebook E 2019, a new 2-in-1 laptop that joins Qualcomm's growing Always Connected PC family of devices.

Inside, the new Matebook E 2019 packs Qualcomm's own Snapdragon 850 SoC, options for 4GB or 8GB of LPDDR4X RAM, and a 128GB or 256GB SSD. You'll get a 12-inch 2560x1440 display that has a kickstand that turns it into a Surface-style device, with an attachable keyboard that will turn it into a laptop for those on-the-go. The big seller here is the up to 20 hours of battery life, something the ACPC is a game changer for, with Huawei using a 36.3 WHr battery.

The big difference with the ACPC (Always Connected PC) part of this is that the Snapdragon 850 chip packs a Snapdragon X20 Category 18 LTE modem that has up to 1.2Gbps down, and up to 150Mbps up. Because it's using a Snapdragon 850 SoC you won't be running normal x86-based software, but a helluva lot of software works on the ARM-based laptop. Firefox has a Snapdragon on Windows specific beta that is much better on the ARM-based processor than the likes of Chrome and Opera, for now.

Apple might be a little screwed this year and going into 2020 and beyond, as it won't have a 5G-capable iPhone to fight against the mountain of Android smartphones that are launching this year with 5G connectivity.

According to a new investor note from UBS analyst Timothy Arcuri, it might be supply problems that Intel is facing with making 5G chips at the scale that Apple would need it to, for a new iPhone. Apple is already tied up in court with Qualcomm over legal issues so it won't be using a Snapdragon X55 or any Snapdragon 5G chip inside of the new iPhone, so what's next?

The other players in the 5G chip making game are Huawei, which would be a no for Apple, MediaTek which won't have a viable option for a 5G-capable iPhone for a quite a while, leaving the last option as Apple's main competitor: Samsung. Cowen recently told its clients that Apple could "source a 5G modem from chief competitor Samsung" but that would only happen on "tough commercial terms". The use of a 5G chip from Huawei according to Cowen is "off the table as an option" while "MediaTek's stack is too far behind in terms of timeline".