News archive (7 / 2018)

Samsung has today released their second quarter results, and the fallout is fairly pessimistic for their smartphone division. The Korean electronics giant's Galaxy phones kept them at the top of the sales figures for years, but this year's flagship's sales figures might spell an unforeseen dive.

While the overall results of Samsung Electronics were good as expected, racking a 58.48 trillion won or around $53 billion in revenue, albeit being slightly less than in Q1 or last years Q2, and increasing the operating profit by 6% to around $13 billion, the top-of-the-line Galaxy smartphone has been suffering from disappointing sales numbers.

Samsung acknowledges that the sales of Galaxy S9 have been slow, and the iterative upgrade has obviously not been exciting enough. Apple and especially competing Android manufacturers are having a field day, but we'll see if that changes once Samsung releases the upcoming Galaxy Note9 smartphone expected in early August.

Fortunately for Samsung the smartphone slump has been filled by extraordinarily good memory sales. Both DRAM and NAND memory chips have been chipping in in record numbers.

WhatsApp has updated their mobile messaging platform with a major new feature. Facebook-owned, world's largest, instant messaging app first unveiled group calling in May, now it's finally available.

Group calls were introduced at Facebook's F8 conference in May and now the company has managed to finish the feature and released it in their mobile app. Both iOS and Android versions of WhatsApp got the feature.

Group calls offer both video and audio only calls between multiple people. There are limitations, though, and most importantly the group calls are limited to four concurrent connections.

Other platforms offer even up to 32 people chatting all at once. However, four people calls is a good start for WhatsApp, and it wouldn't be a complete surprise if the company will expand the support.

What is nice about the WhatsApp calls is that they are entirely end-to-end encrypted, a feature that has made WhatsApp's text messaging a huge success.

To make a group call you'll just make a regular call between two people and add the other recipients from the button on the top right.

This year's Google phone is soon just around the corner and we've been hearing a lot about the phones. Rumors have suggested that we get once again two phones in two distinct sizes.

Now we have also a new leak which offers a fresh look at the devices. A user of XDA Developers has released a few photos that are said to be depicting the upcoming Google Pixel 3 XL, the larger of the two phones.

While the backside hasn't changed an awful lot, although there is no dual tone colors, it is definitely clear from the display, and perhaps even more importantly the parts that lack a display (*ahem* notch *ahem*), that this is indeed not Pixel 2 XL.

The phone is an all white version that has a single camera in the back, as expected, and the front panel is dominated by a large display with a distinct notch. Google has not, however, gone as far as Apple and removed the tiny chin.

The notch seems to be even larger than on Apple's device or many competing Android phones, and it is likely because of the dual cameras that can be seen in one of the pictures below.

OnePlus, a Chinese smartphone company that became known by their Flagship Killer branding used in their early models, has now shared some amazing news to their users. The company has been among the best when it comes to updating their phones to new Android versions, and seemingly the company only is getting better at it.

Android's newest versio, dubbed Android P, is coming to not only the latest OnePlus models, namely the OnePlus 6, but even last years models (both OnePlus 5 and 5T) as well as two year. Those phones are of course the OnePlus 3 released in the summer of 2018 and OnePlus 3T released later that year.

Google is planning the final release of Android P later this fall alongside new Pixel smartphones. Currently the beta version is available for a few Android phones, one of which happens to be OnePlus 6.

The company has previously informed that it will support future devices at least two years regarding Android version updates after the phones release, but seems like it has been more generous to users of past devices, which is admirable. OnePlus also includes a third year of support in which it promises Android security updates.

Reliable and quick updates is one of the better ways smaller manufacturers can challenge big boys like Samsung, especially since most Android manufacturers have been utterly disappointing when it comes to software updates, and new versions of Android. Currently OnePlus stands as one of the better manufacturers in this respect alongside HMD Global, a Finnish company that creates the new Nokia Android phones.

Google has banned apps from the Play Store that are used to mine cryptocurrencies.

Having previously banned Chrome extensions that mine cryptocurrency, Google has banned apps from the Play Store that mine cryptocurrency using devices they are installed on. "We don't allow apps that mine crypto-currency on devices," an updated developer policy reads.

Apps that manage mining on remote systems like cloud computing platforms will still be allowed on the Play Store, however.

Mining cryptocurrency is a process-intensive task that can max out computing hardware. On portable devices like smartphones, this can cause overheating and drain the battery very quickly.

Cryptocurrency mining has also been adopted by malware distributors, using computing resources of infected devices to carry out mining operations out of sight. This tends to have a debilitating effect on overall system performance.

Source: BBC News

There are now 83 million Spotify customers paying for premium service as the Swedish streaming firm holds its lead in face of competition.

Spotify had previously reported crossing 70 million paid subscribers globally in January. Having jumped now to over 83 million paid subscribers, Spotify is continuing its impressive growth even though it faces increasing competition in the streaming marketplace.

In April, Apple announced that its own Apple Music streaming service had crossed over 40 million paying subscribers. Some analysts have predicted that Apple will catch up to and surpass its Swedish rival, having reportedly passed Spotify's U.S.-based subscriber tally by July of this year. At the end of this year, Apple may have around 3 million more U.S. subscribers than Spotify.

A lot of eyes are on Spotify's revenue as the streaming giant filed to go public in January of this year. The service has yet to make a profit.

via: The Verge

In several European countries, Google has recently raised its minimum age limit to 16 years. This means that minors under 16 cannot create new Google accounts at all, if their country of residence is one of those in Google's list.

The change is happening because of the European Union privacy legislation called GDPR that came into force in May, 2018. Legislation sets 16 as the minimum age when a child is capable to sign a contract that allows companies to handle their personal details.

GDPR gives EU member countries freedom to set lower age limit, but most EU countries are currently just in process of adjusting their own country-specific laws, thus, the universal age limit of 16 applies to such countries.

The list of countries that now require the age of 16 or more in order to create a new Google account include Finland, France, Spain, Germany, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia.

Some countries, such as the United Kingdom, have already amended their own country-specific legislation and have different age limit than the GDPR standard is.

According to the Washington Post, Twitter purged more than 70 million accounts from the service since May.

The purge is part of Twitter's effort to fight against bots operating on its network, and also against "trolls" who abuse the company's terms of service. According to the report, many of the suspicious and fake accounts are remotely controlled bots that present all kinds of problems and threats.

A Twitter spokesperson told the Post that the purge was nothing new and was part of work to improve the health of the public conservation on Twitter.

He added that Twitter also took action against 142,000 applications responsible for spammy tweets on the social network.

As services like Twitter and Facebook take action against fake accounts, those responsible for them tend to change their ways to avoid detection. As new technologies including conversational AI become more widespread, it will be a much more difficult task to determine if an account represents a real individual or not.

Apple has pushed the latest iOS update, including USB restrictions aimed at countering accessories that can crack passcodes.

Such USB accessories are sometimes used by law enforcement and others to allow for infinite guesses at a device's passcode, then cracking it by using brute force techniques. In order to counter this method, Apple said it would change settings in an update that disables USB accessories entirely after an hour without the phone being unlocked.

Previously, this time frame was set to a week. With the release of iOS 11.4.1, the USB restriction change is the default. However, you can also disable it. Under Touch ID, or Face ID, settings you will see a new option you can toggle on or off for "USB Accessories."

The description reads: "Unlock iPhone to allow USB accessories to connect when it has been more than an house since your iPhone was locked."

A second Erase Data option will erase all data on a device if ten attempts to guess the passcode result in failure.

Other things included in the iOS update are stability fixes and an improved Find My AirPod feature.

via: Engadget