Mobile Devices - Page 8

ASUS has introduced its new ROG Phone 9 Pro and ROG Phone 9 gaming smartphones, featuring up to an incredible 185Hz refresh rate and an amazingly awesome 648 programmable mini-LEDs on the back... that you can play games on. Check it out:

The new ASUS ROG Phone 9 Pro and ROG Phone 9 gaming smartphones both feature a 6.78-inch AMOLED panel with an FHD+ resolution and up to 2500 nits of brightness. ASUS is ushering in a blistering 185Hz refresh rate on its new ROG Phone 9 handsets, but with games that are enabled by ASUS Game Genie will you get 185Hz.

On the back, there's 648 programmable mini-LEDs that can be tweaked, with the AniME Vision display giving a totally custom look to your new ASUS ROG Phone 9 gaming smartphone, and the back of the phone can even be used to play games.

As technology has become more adopted into our everyday lives, concerns about privacy and how invasive technology can be have grown, and for good reasons, as there have been numerous cases of companies behind popular pieces of technology abusing and violating consumer trust.

Given the heightened state of concentration on privacy in today's current climate, users are quick to make their concerns public, whether they are valid or not. The latest in these concerns comes from reports citing a few Reddit users querying the public about whether or not they have heard voices coming from their iPhones at random times.

The users both reported having heard unfamiliar voices coming from their smartphones, and when they checked if the voice could have come from a background application, such as a YouTube video, app, or web browser, they couldn't find any normal source for the audio.

Apple has rolled out a new security feature within iOS 18.1 that automatically reboots an iPhone if it is left inactive for a period of time, and the new feature is a real concern to law enforcement.

Reports indicate that law enforcement officials believed Apple rolled out a new update that enables iPhones to communicate between devices and switch each other off. However, that certainly isn't the case, and the reports of randomly rebooting iPhones can be traced back to an addition Apple made in iOS 18.1. According to security researcher Jiska Classen, iOS 18.1 added a security feature called "Inactivity Reboot," which automatically reboots the device after four days of inactivity.

Law enforcement has found this new feature particularly annoying as many iPhones are stored for evidence for extended periods of time before they are broken into for evidence. After an iPhone performs a reboot, it enters into what is called the Before First Unlock (BFU) state, which, according to reports, is a state that makes it much more difficult to unlock the device than After First Unlock.

Apple is poised to unveil an ultra-slim iPhone 17 Air in 2025, and now it looks like smartphone competitor Samsung will join with its rumored Galaxy S25 Slim smartphone.

We're hearing about the new Samsung Galaxy S25 Slim smartphone from Korean leaker "yeux1122" said in a recent blog post that the South Korean giant might launch the new ultra-slim Galaxy S25 Slim in April 2025. We're also being teased about the Galaxy Z Flip SE and Galaxy Z Fold 7 smartphones being unveiled at about the same time.

TheElec also reported a couple of weeks ago now that Samsung was considering making a slim Galxay S25 smartphone, so the Galaxy S25 Slim feels like the best name for it. Samsung beating Apple to the punch with an ultra-slim smartphone ahead of the iPhone 17 Air will be another move like the company did with its foldable smartphone range starting with the Galaxy Fold, and then into the Galaxy Z Flip family of foldables.

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has sat down for a lengthy discussion on "The Joe Rogan Experience" podcast, where he touched on the rumors that Tesla is developing a smartphone behind closed doors.

It has been long rumored that Tesla is developing a smartphone that will separate itself from the duopoly of operating systems, Android and iOS. However, these rumors have been just that, rumors, and have mostly been unfounded or simply murmurings. In fact, Musk has brought up the topic before as the Tesla CEO said in November 2022 that if Apple and Google decided to "boot" then-Twitter, and now X, from its respective app stores, Musk said there would be no other choice but to "make an alternative phone.

Now, on a recent episode of the JRE podcast, Musk was asked if there is any credibility to these rumors, or if he has ever considered making a smartphone. Musk responded quickly by saying, "No, we aren't doing a phone". When asked if he had ever thought about making one, Musk said, "We could do a phone. The operating system of a Tesla is Linux-based, but we have written a massive of software on top of that."

Apple has been blocked from selling its bread and butter product, the iPhone, and its multiple variations, according to the Indonesian Ministry of Industry.

According to reports, Apple has been officially blocked from selling iPhones domestically following its failure to abide by the 40% local content requirement for smartphones, which requires at least 40% of all parts within a product to be manufactured locally. The iPhone 16 has unfortunately fallen short of this requirement, meaning Apple Indonesia hasn't fulfilled the requirement of obtaining a local content certification and now, therefore, cannot sell the latest generation of iPhone.

At the moment, Apple has no manufacturing facilities in Indonesia, but since 2018, the company has been establishing developer academies throughout the country, in which they have invested approximately $101.8 million. Indonesia isn't a small region for Apple either, as the country has more than 350 million active mobile phones among its 270 million residents, meaning there could be quite a lot of potential iPhone customers waiting for the latest generation iPhone.

Apple has finally rolled out an iOS update that contains the first set of Apple Intelligence features, and here's how you can access them.

Apple has been criticized over its marketing of its latest iPhone generation, as the company touted the latest generation of devices as the vehicles for Apple Intelligence. However, when the iPhone 16 was released, there weren't any Apple Intelligence features available. Apple stated it was planning on rolling out Apple Intelligence features in stages, and we have just received the first stage with iOS 18.1.

If you are interested in trying out some of the new Apple Intelligence features, you will need to make sure you have a compatible device that is updated to the latest version of iOS. Firstly, you will need to have an iPhone 15 Pro or above, which means an iPhone 15 Pro Max, iPhone 16, iPhone 16 Pro, and iPhone 16 Pro Max. Any devices below those models won't be eligible as they don't have the required hardware to run Apple Intelligence.

Apple's all-new, ultra-thin iPhone 17 Air is rumored with a single 48MP rear camera, 8GB of RAM for Apple Intelligence, its in-house A17 chip made on TSMC's new 2nm process node, and more.

In a new report from MacRumors, several credible sources over the last few months have claimed Apple is working on a redesigned, significantly thinner iPhone 17 smartphone for 2025. It's not yet known as the iPhone 17 Air, but I'm really digging the iPhone 17 Air name, so it'll be called that from now on out until Apple confirms the official name of its new ultra-thin iPhone 17.

We should expect the iPhone 17 Air to sport a 6.6-inch display, an Apple A19 processor made on TSMC's current 3nm process (the same used for the A18 Pro chip) according to a new research note from investment bank Haitong International, and analyst Jeff Pu. He also expects the iPhone 17 Air to feature an aluminum frame, FaceID, a single 48-megapixel rear camera, 24-megapixel front camera, and 8GB of RAM for Apple Intelligence.

Color e-ink displays have existed for a while. Still, this week, Amazon announced its very first e-reader with a color display - the new Kindle Colorsoft (priced at $279.99 USD), available for preorder today.

As part of the announcement, Amazon noted that creating a colorized Kindle required more than simply swapping out the traditional black-and-white display for a color one. "It uses an oxide backplane with custom waveforms for fast performance and a higher contrast on both color and black-and-white content," Amazon writes in the announcement.

The display includes custom nitride LEDs that enhance color and brightness without affecting image quality. Amazon adds that you can zoom in on images without "worrying about pixelation." The new technology also means that Amazon's new Kindle Paperwhite is the fastest yet, with 25% faster page turns.

Apple just revealed a new iPad mini in one of its lowkey launches (by which we mean - let's just bung a press release out there and have done with it).

This isn't the first time we've seen such an affair, and it won't be the last, no doubt. Of course, as you might guess, this one's being slipped out for a reason, namely because the new iPad mini - powered by an A17 Pro SoC - is more of a spec bump than anything else (which was what the rumor mill was saying all along, to be fair).

You get that new A17 Pro chip, and storage starts at 128GB (twice as much as its predecessor), plus the refreshed compact 8.3-inch tablet also comes with Apple Intelligence support on board, which means that the RAM for the entry-level model is now 8GB.