The controversial Chinese smartphone manufacturer Huawei is quickly climbing to the top of the smartphone market share worldwide, but they are hardly done.
In 2016, Huawei introduced their MateBook laptop. Last year they redesigned the device, and released the highly acclaimed Matebook X Pro.
Now they have decided to diversify their portfolio further by expanding to television manufacturing. According to Nikkei Asia Review, Huawei is developing a 5G-enabled TV with 8K resolution.
The first ever 5G TV is said to be unveiled later this year, and according to the sources it would enter the market this year as well. However, even if the reports are correct, it is not clear at all that the TV would be sold in the U.S. or even Europe.
Many of the Chinese manufacturers never enter the western markets, and some of them only bring selected products to the U.S. and Europe. This combined with current government's distrust of Huawei's devices could be detrimental to the TV's chances in the U.S., especially considering it's equipped with 5G.
Apple has revealed latest quarterly results, and as expected revenue went down from last year. However, figures weren't as bad as expected and the stock shot up slightly.
Last fiscal years second quarter ended with revenue of $61 billion and this year the figure dropped to $58. The revenue from iPhones took a fairly steep dive, although Services as well as wearable technology, like the Apple Watch and especially AirPods, mostly plugged the hole.
Services generated $11.5 billion in revenue, which is an all-time high for Apple. One service that is certainly responsible for much of that is Apple Music, which has gained fast inside the U.S. even though trailing Spotify by a hefty margin worldwide.
Apple also managed to grow iPad business once more, from $4 billion to just $4.9 billion, likely thanks to the new iPad Pro. Unfortunately Apple no longer reports unit sales.
The company also revealed that there are more than 1.4 billion Apple devices currently in use worldwide. According to CEO Tim Cook, the trade war between Chine and the U.S. calmed down, and the relationships have been improved greatly since last year.
Apple took a significant hit from complication with the trade policies between the two countries. Now at least Cook believes that the tides are turning, and it's already evident in their operations in China, although tariffs are still in place.
Facebook owns some of the world's most popular social media and communication channels, but haven't done much to improve their interoperability. This is about to change soon, as the company plans to allow sending private messages between its main messaging platforms: Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp.
The feature was already rumored earlier this year, but it was finally confirmed at yesterday's f8 developer event. It is unclear how the interoperability would exactly work, as WhatsApp relies solely on phone numbers, while Instagram and Messenger require users to create their own accounts. Thus, to what "phone number" would WhatsApp user send a message to when wanting to contact a person who is only in Messenger.
Company didn't give a clear timeline for the change, but it wont happen soon - it seems that the next year is most likely timeline for the roll out.
Facebook has been tipping its toes with the massive dating app market recently with its Facebook Dating feature, available in handful of countries. Now, company is expanding that business by launching a feature called Secret Crush.
With Secret Crush, one can tag up to 9 of his/her friends as the ones who the user is interested in. To limit the scope, the people added to the Secret Crush list must be either user's friends or friends of the user's friends.
People added to the list wont know about the addition ever, unless they also add the user to their own list. If so, both users will receive a notification from Facebook about the match. According to Facebook, the feature, announced yesterday at the f8 event, wont change the way Facebook newsfeed works, i.e. the people you've added to the lis wont appear more frequently in your newsfeed than without the list.
Secret Crush is part of the Facebook Dating feature, which has been available only in select few countries, including Colombia and Canada. Now the service is expanding to 14 new countries, but yet to the U.S. or any of the Western European countries.
Feature itself is simply a "power to the user" feature - it could be automated, as studies have shown that Facebook actually knows about your love interests before you do.
Google's Chrome is considered to be among the safest browsers for a good reason. Google has spent copious amount of time providing users with the most secure browser they can make, and largely they've succeeded.
However, there are always going to be problems that haven't been taken care of and exploits that could happen at any given time. One of these is, what a software developer Jim Fisher calls the inception bar.
He has figured out a way to fool users with a fake address bar on Chrome for Android. People can usually rely on their address bar showing valid information, but with this exploit Fisher has managed to replace it fairly convincingly with a fake URL bar.
When you scroll down on Chrome for Android, the address bar slowly slides away, normally when you go back up it's waiting for you again at the top. With the exploit Fisher's bar appears at the top and won't be replaced with the actual one even when scrolled up.
There are, fortunately, a few ways to determine that you are indeed seeing a fake bar and not a real one. First, at least with this iteration of the code, it appears in the middle of scrolling down, which should raise some concerns.
If you aren't sure if this is indeed a fake bar still, you can lock and unlock the device to reveal the actual bar, after which the fake bar is shown below (pictured above).
Streaming music pioneer Spotify has grown with a stable and fairly rapid pace for years now, and there seems to be no stopping it. Not even Apple Music, with its massive investments, has even come close to pass Spotify's global leadership.
Alongside the newest fiscal figures from Spotify, the company has revealed that they've surpassed the 100 million paid subscriber milestone. In December Spotify announced that they first went past 200 million total subscribers.
At this point there are more than 117 million users that are using the ad-supported tier.
Last quarter Spotify managed to also first time pull them up to a nice operating profit, but that wasn't meant to last. In the latest quarter they posted a 142 million euros ($158 million) loss. Even though it was backtracking by quite a bit, it still was an improvement to year ago.
While Apple hasn't given us official subscriber numbers for Apple Music in a while, they still have ways to catch up with Spotify globally. In the U.S., however, Apple Music has managed to overpass Spotify, thanks to its extensive investments and continuously running TV ads.
You know the feeling when you're at the office, working with your PC and your phone beeps about some incoming notification and you couldn't be bothered to find and open the phone? No worries, Microsoft has a solution for you!
Latest version of Windows 10, accompanied with the Microsoft's Your Phone app installed on your Android, can now bring all your Android notifications to Windows 10 notification area. This will help, especially with those mobile apps that don't have a web or Windows counterpart at all - SnapChat for example.
The feature relates to Your Phone concept the Microsoft launched last year. At first, installing a Your Phone app and connecting it to your Windows PC would allow one to browse through images and text messages stored in the phone via PC. Since then, the concept has evolved and nowadays, if your phone is in the supported devices list, you can actually mirror your entire phone to your desktop, in its own window.
Now, the latest version of Your Phone now also brings the Android notifications to Windows 10 and ties them into Windows 10's own notification area. The feature is already available to Windows Insider users, but should roll out to all of us in next couple of days. In order to get the notification mirroring, you need to have Android phone with Android 7.0 or newer and Windows 10 with at least version 1803 update available (released in Spring, 2018). More about the Your Phone and its notification mirroring can be found in Microsoft's blog entry. You can download the Your Phone app for Android here.
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Tesla CEO Elon Musk have come to a settlement in a case of Musk's Twitter use.
Last August, Musk ruffled the feathers of the SEC when he tweeted that he had secured funding to take Tesla private at $420 per share. The tweet pushed Tesla share prices up 13.3 percent, and the SEC accused Musk of violating secutiries laws.
Musk settled the lawsuit, stepping down as chairman of Tesla. He also said he would Tesla lawyers vet written communications with material information about the company.
However, in February, the SEC asked a federal judge to hold Musk in contempt after he tweeted about Tesla's production numbers. U.S. District Judge Alison Nathan declined to rule on the contempt motion and directed the SEC and Musk to settle it between themselves.
Musk and his lawyers deny that he had violated the original settlement, arguing that the settlement was too ambiguous for Musk to be held in contempt and that the tweet in question did not contain new information that was material to investors.
Now, the SEC and Musk have reached another settlement. If it is approved by the judge, certain tweets made by Musk will have to be submitted to lawyers to be vetted. This time the settlement is more specific on what kinds of statements will need to be approved by lawyers. Additionally, Tesla's board can seek preapproval about additional topics if they feel it is in the interest of the company's shareholders.
Sony's next generation PlayStation will not launch during the next 12 months, Sony has told the media.
Takashi Mochizuki, a Wall Street Journal reporter, revealed on Twitte that Sony will not ship the next gen PlayStation console any time in the next twelve months. This comes after the first details of the new console's hardware were revealed last week, and kills any speculation that Sony was aiming to put the new console on the market late this year.
It was also revealed that Sony's PS Now service has reached 700,000 users, averaging 40 percent annual growth.
Sony: -No next-gen PlayStation launch over next 12 months -PS Now has been ave. 40% annual growth since launch, now 700,000 users -Much of Y31.1 billion (difference between past fy op vs this fy op outlook) to be invested to develop next PlayStation console
The next generation PS5 has some significant hardware upgrades over the PS4 Pro. Capable of 8K graphics output, it also packs a GPU from the AMD Redeon Navi family that supports ray-tracing. It will also support 3D audio and pack a speedy SSD drive to reduce game loading times significantly.
Women using dating apps are more than familiar with the concept of receiving unsolicited pictures of male genitalia. To the point that one of the biggest dating app developers, a company behind Bumble, Badoo, Chappy and Lumen is developing a technology to block those.
Bumble, the parent company, is developing an AI-based solution that detects such pictures when users send them to other users. If detected, the picture will be blurred and the recipient will be alerted about the image. Recipient will have the ability to show the image, if he/she wants to, but also an ability to report the sender automatically to the company's moderators.
"The safety of our users is without question the number one priority in everything we do and the development of Private Detector is another undeniable example of that commitment," founder of the company said in a statement emailed to Mashable.
Feature, dubbed as "Private Detector", will roll out in June, 2018 to all Bumble's dating apps.
During the past year, the Pc gaming giants have been fighting to dominate the gaming marketplace sector. The war started when Epic Games' got tired of paying an industry-standard 30 percent cut for various platforms, including those of Steam, Google Play and others.
Epic, who has the most cuccessful game of 2018 in its portfolio, Fortnite, has declared an open war against all major app stores and marketplaces. First of all, company has refused to add the Android version of Fortnite to Google Play store and instead, encourages users to download the game from it own servers. By doing this, Epic avoids handing out 30 percent cut of all subsequent in-game purchases to Google.
More importantly, Epic has expanded its own PC gaming store, Epic Store, to host other developers' games, too. And to infuriate gamers - and Valve, who owns Steam . Epic has managed to get several big brand games to be exclusive to its Epic Store. Epic's store takes only 12 pecent cut from developers, which is an extremely lucrative deal for most developers, despite missing out Steam's enormous existing audience.
To put the fight into context: Fortnite has been dubbed as the game with most revenue in a single year, ever. It generated a whopping 2 billion dollar revenue in year 2018. IF Epic would deliver the game only through Steam, Google Play and Apple App Store, it would mean the company would hand out a cool 600 million dollars to marketplaces. Now, other developers with potentially massive hits, understand this and they've been happy to use Epic Store rather than Steam. But the thing that has caused most annoyance among gamers has been the exclusive titles available only through Epic Store.
Google has today announced the new Chrome 74. The updated version of Google's web browser is available for most platforms, including Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and iOS.
This time around Chrome update doesn't have any flashy new features, or even much of anything that regular users would easily distinguish. However, there's plenty of improvements even in this version.
One of the new features version 74 does include is the new reduced motion experience, which will remove effects and transitions. This includes things like parallax scrolling and zooming, which have been reported to give motion sickness to some individuals.
You can find the option under Settings and Accessibility.
Other improvements include support for private class fields and CSS transition events.
Google has also addressed issues with the mobile browsers stability and performance, both of which have been improved. Other lighter changes in the mobile Chrome include changing Data Saver Mode to Lite Mode.
You can get the new Chrome from app stores and from google.com/chrome.
Intel has finally revealed their new 9th generation Core processors for laptops. The H-Series includes six 45-watt mobile processors built with 14 nm process.
The top of the line H-Series processor is the new Core i9-9980HK, which has eight cores, 16 threads, support Hyper-Threading, 16 MB L3 cache, and up to 4.9 GHz Turbo Boost with 2.4 GHz base frequency. It also has the Intel Thermal Velocity Boost, included in i9 chips, which adds 100 MHz to Turbo clock.
The K comes from overclockable, of course, and you'll probably be able to push it well past the 5GHz mark. It is also the only K chip in the lineup, although according to Anandtech you might be able to overclock the i7-9850H.
The i9-9980H is fairly identical except for the lower Turbo Boost of 4.7 GHz, base clock of 2.3 GHz, and no overclocking support.
The six-core and 12 thread i7 chips (i7-9850H and i7-9750H) have 12 MB L3 cache and base clock of 2.6 GHz. They will Turbo up to 4.6 and 4.5 GHz respectively.
The cheapest new H-Series chips are i5-9300H and i5-9400H, and you'll only get four cores with 8 threads and more modest 8 MB L3 cache. Clock speeds are 2.4 GHz/4.1 GHz and 2.4 GHz/4.3 GHz respectively.
Google's parent company Alphabet has all kinds of project, many of them formerly part of the infamous Google X, running alongside the hugely profitable subsidiary Google. One of them is drone delivery company known as Wing.
Wing happens to be now the first and only drone company to have received official certification from the United States Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).
The air carrier certification essentially means that they are certified to start drone deliveries in the US to customers. Pilot program will begin later this year in Virginia before expanding further.
If you live or work in Blacksburg or Christiansburg areas, you or your company might be soon contacted by Wing.
To gain the unprecedented licence, Wing demonstrated to FAA that deliveries made by drones will be less hazardous than those made by car. FAA agreed that the danger posed to pedestrians is lesser than that of traditional delivery methods.
FAA is notoriously hard to convince, which makes it impressive that Wing has managed to get certification. This will likely open doors to other drone companies too.
Previously Wing has been approved to operate in Canberra, Australia.
OnePlus has today officially announced that they'll be revealing their next generation of smartphones in New York next month. On May 14, the company is going to reveal for the first time a series of smartphones.
This OnePlus 7 Series includes of course the regular OnePlus 7 but also a first ever Pro version as well as a 5G variant for the OnePlus 7 Pro.
Unfortunately they didn't want to give us any specs or details of any of these devices. However, a new leak seems to provide us with quite a few interesting facts, especially about the Pro version.
According to a Twitter leaker @Samsung_News_, OnePlus 7 Pro has a new 90 Hz display with improved resolution. The 6.7 inch display increases the resolution from 1080p to 3120x1440p, and is likely to be another OnePlus' trademark Optic AMOLEDs.
Another big difference to its predecessor, the OnePlus 6T, is a new triple camera setup with a 48 MP f/1.6 default camera, 3x zoom camera as well as a 117° wide-angle camera. It's a very similar setup to Android flagships from the likes of Samsung and Huawei.
As expected, OnePlus will stick with Qualcomm and will use their highest end chip, Snadpragon 855. RAM options include 6, 8 and 12 GB but storage options only go to from 128 to 256 GB. Somewhat surprisingly there is no 512 GB option, according to the leaks.
The controversial Chinese smartphone manufacturer Huawei is quickly climbing to the top of the smartphone market share worldwide, but they are hardly done.
Apple has revealed latest quarterly results, and as expected revenue went down from last year. However, figures weren't as bad as expected and the stock shot up slightly.
Facebook owns some of the world's most popular social media and communication channels, but haven't done much to improve their interoperability. This is about to change soon, as the company plans to allow sending private messages between its main messaging platforms: Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp.
