News archive (7 / 2021)

Ever since Valve started embracing Linux as a gaming platform back in 2012 when company added Linux support for its Steam platform, the Linux gaming has seen a dramatic increase. But now the time of the native Linux game ports is seemingly coming to an end.

And that is, actually, a quite good thing. Why?

Instead of manually porting their games from Windows / Xbox platform to Linux, several big name developers have recently announced that Valve's Proton emulation layer is now so good that there is no need to make separate Linux ports of the games.

Valve launched the Proton platform baci in 2018 and apparently it has gotten so good at running Windows games on Linux that several big name development companies have decided to cherish it. According to the developers, by using Proton, there is virtually no performance loss when running Windows games on Linux - and obviously, dropping native Linux ports completely frees up development resources for other tasks.

Proton itself is based on open-source Wine Windows emulator that allows running Windows software on Linux. But Valve has improved the Wine with its Proton, focusing solely on gaming experience and to ensure that games run on Linux - and that they actually run smoothly.

Ever since United States set up its trade ban against Chinese tech giant Huawei, company's phone business has been shrinking - rapidly. Recent figures show that Huawei's phone business is almost gone by now.

Few years ago Huawei managed to become the largest phone manufacturer in the world, but only very briefly. Ever since that, Huawei has been in deep trouble with its phone business. With no access to Google's services for its Android and lack of access to Western chip patents and manufacturing, it hasn't been properly able to build even phones for its own home market where Google's services aren't used.

According to the latest market share figures by IDC, Huawei has dropped out of top 5 even in China during the Q2/2021. Huawei's market share losses have been mostly taken by other Chinese manufactuers - both in China and abroad, too. According to IDC's stats, Vivo is now the biggest phone manufacturer in China, in terms of domestic unit sales. Vivo grabbed 23.6 percent market share in Chinese market, followed by Oppo which had 21.1 percent market share.

Sony's latest product manual for Sony Playstation 5 Digital Edition shows that the device has been revamped recently. The changes seem to be miniscule, but this marks the first hardware change to the PS5 launched in 2020.

According to the Sony's official manual, available on PlayStation's official Japanese website, the revamped model is about 0.7lbs / 300g lighter than the original model. Furthermore, the device seems to have subtle design changes for its exterior, too.

New model, dubbed as CFI-1100B isn't out there in the wild yet, so we don't know whether there are any other changes to the device. Sony has officially stated earlier this year that company is considering some changed to the inner hardware, too, in order to tackle the issues caused by global semiconductor shortage.

Sony's Playstation 5 as well as Microsoft's new Xbox line have been extremely hard to get, all over the world. In many countries, there are now official lottery systems where wannabe-console-owners can sign up for a chance to buy the new device when next shipment arrives. The slightly redesigned console was originally spotted by a Twitter user called @Renka_schedule.

Valve's handheld gaming device has been in works for years and rumors have surrounded the project. But finally Valve has announced the final product: Steam Deck is a handheld gaming device that is able to play Steam games - and should be available just before holiday season of 2021.

Steam Deck is a Linux powered device running mostly on AMD chips. Device has a 7-inch display with 1280x800 resolution (60Hz refresh rate) and 400 nit brightness. According to Valve, Steam Deck is powerful enough to run latest so-called AAA games.

Steam Deck is powered by a quad-core Zen 2 CPU with eight threads and eight AMD RDNA 2 compute units and 16GB of LPDDR5 RAM.

Steam Deck will ship in three storage configurations:

• Basic versionhas 64 GB of eMMC storage
• Mid-range version has 256GB of NVMe SSD storage
• High-end version has 512GB of NVMe SSD storage

The lower spec version of the Steam Deck is priced at $399 in the United States and €419 in Europe, Steam Deck is expected to hit the store shelves just before the holiday season of 2021. The other versions are priced at $529 / €549 and $649 / €679, respectively.

According to rumors, Netflix is serious about expnading to new areas. Company has hired former EA exec to oversee its video game development department, paving way to Netflix's upcoming subscription gaming service.

Details are somewhat murky, but according to Bloomberg, Netflix is developing its own in-house game studio that is set to develop games for year 2022. The games would appear in Netflix lists, just like movies and TV shows do.

Big questions, like "what device you use to play the games?" are still completely open. But one thing seems to be clear: Netflix - for now - doesn't plan to charge extra for the games, as they'd be part of all Netflix subscriptions. But obviously, if the game part of Netflix becomes popular, it would help Netflix justify its future price increases.

Games would be streamed, which is the current trend set out by likes of Microsoft, Sony and Google's Stadia service. But as far as the controllers, etc go, nobody knows whether you're supposed to play with your TV remote or do the games need a computer and a browser in order to run them.

Android 11 was released in September, 2020. Only handful of phones in fall of 2020 were actually released with Android 11 operating system, but the list of phones announced that will get the update has grown significantly over the months.

In this list, we try to keep track of all promised, rumored and confirmed Android 11 updates to all major manufacturer phones. Some of the list is based on -Google's own list, some of the list is based on manufacturer's own announcements.

It should be remembered that even when specific phone model is promised to have an Android 11 update, it doesn't necessarily mean that your phone will get it. The models promised to get the update include typically only unlocked phones, not those customized to specific operator - it is up to operators to decide whether their custom models will get the said update or not.

Android 11 has already arrived or has been promised to arrive to these phone models:

• Google phones
• Samsung phones
• OnePlus phones
• Xiaomi phones
• Nokia phones
• Oppo phones
• Realme phones
• Sony phones
• Motorola phones
• Asus phones

Owners of OnePlus year 2018 models have been waiting quite some time these news. Company finally released the first official beta version of Android 11 for its OnePlus 6 and OnePlus 6T models.

OnePlus 6 was originally released back in May, 2018 with Android Oreo. Since then, the phone has received updates to Android P and Android 10 - and now, finally, the first beta version for Android 11.

According to OnePlus Android update policy, the Android 11 will also be the last major update for OnePlus 6 series phones.

OnePlus has been traditionally exceptionally good providing timely updates for its phones, but after the release of Android 11, company has failed to deliver. Currently, several OnePlus phones are still waiting for the official Android 11 update and to make matters worse, many OnePlus 7 series users have been very unhappy with the Android 11 they've received.