Items tagged with Mobile
You can probably stop hoping for a Super Mario Run 2, because barring a sudden change in fortune and/or strategy, it does not look like Nintendo is super interested in mobile gaming. Sure, at one point it was, with hopes of cashing in on a lucrative market. But following the launch of the Switch console and recent events, mobile gaming just does not appear to be high on Nintendo's radar. It is an interesting pivot for Nintendo. Three and a half years ago, we wrote about Super Mario Run being downloaded over 40 million times during its first four days of availability. Not too shabby, especially since all of those downloads came exclusively from Apple's App Store, as Super Mario Run launched to...
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AMD announced its Zen 2-based Ryzen 4000 series mobile processors a couple of months back at CES 2020. The information disseminated at AMD’s press conference, however, was relatively high-level, and as it turns out, wasn’t quite complete. Since the show, we’ve been made privy to much more information regarding the Ryzen 4000 series mobile line-up, including a couple of new processor models that haven’t been officially disclosed just yet. Though the Ryzen 4000 series mobile processors won’t be widely available for a few more weeks, some of AMD’s partners are going to begin taking pre-orders for notebooks powered by these new processors. As such, AMD is...
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The concept of a purpose-built gaming phone is still somewhat in its infancy, though we are starting to see generational upgrades, such as the ASUS ROG Phone II. As the name implies, this is the second generation of ASUS' gaming handset. Like the original ROG Phone released last year, the ROG Phone II combines bleeding edge hardware with gaming-centric software optimizations. ASUS sprinkles in some nifty features (like Air Triggers) and then surrounds it all with optional accessories to amp up the experience. What ASUS has essentially created is not just a gaming phone, but a smartphone gaming ecosystem. For this second act, ASUS sets the stage with some notable upgrades. One that perhaps stands...
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Over that last few years, OnePlus has earned a reputation for offering well-appointed, high-performance mobile devices that compete with other contemporary flagships, but with highly aggressive pricing. When we looked at the OnePlus 7 Pro back in June, or the OnePlus 6T before that, we declared both handsets leaders, in terms of value and performance. With the upcoming OnePlus 7T, which is due to start shipping in just a few days, OnePlus is trying to capture that status again. Looking at the OnePlus 7T’s list of features and hardware specifications, it appears to be a premium Android phone in every sense of the word. The device is built upon Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon 855+ mobile...
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The first batch of Navi cards are solid efforts by AMD—both the Radeon RX 5700 XT and Radeon RX 5700 do a good job of competing with comparatively priced graphics cards from NVIDIA. That said, the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti is still the king of the hill. AMD does not have a card to compete with that beast, but company CEO Dr. Lisa Su confirmed that high-end Navi cards are coming. We already had more than an inkling of that, of course—it is widely expected that a separate round of Navi cards will bolster performance and introduce ray tracing support. The latter has already been confirmed by Sony, with regards to the custom Navi GPU that will be inside its PlayStation 5 next year, and the...
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Generally speaking, pricing on flagship smartphones has continued to climb, because all of those fancy bells and whistles found on the top-end models do not come cheap. Not everyone has or is willing to spend a grand or more on a top-shelf handset, though, and some of the cheaper alternatives make too many sacrifices to hit a lower price point. That is not the case with Samsung's Galaxy S10e. The Samsung Galaxy S10e is the least expensive model in the Galaxy S10 family, the others consisting of the regular Galaxy S10, the larger Galaxy S10+, and the decked out Galaxy S10 5G. Make no mistake, however, even though the Galaxy S10e is positioned at the rear of the pack, it is not a budget or entry-level...
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The OnePlus 7 Pro is one of the most highly anticipated Android phones to hit the market this year for a number of reasons. At first blush, it was about a few stand-out specs. The phone's 6.7-inch display supports a speedy 90Hz refresh rate and a super-tight 3120x1440 QHD+ resolution in punchy, HDR10+ certified OLED technology. The new OnePlus phone is also powered by the fastest Qualcomm chip on the market currently, the Snapdragon 855, but it's also backed up but up to 12GB of RAM as well as up to 256GB of snappy new UFS 3.0 based Flash storage. Oh, and the aforementioned display is not marred by either a notch, nor a bullet-hole punch-out for its front facing camera -- nothing, nada, just...
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Intel has officially unveiled its new line-up of 9th Generation Core Mobile processors today, along with an array of adjacent products and technologies. In addition, Intel's 9th Generation Core Desktop processor line-up is been refreshed today as well, with a wide array of SKUs that cover the gamut from a new Core i9-9900 all the way on down to low-power dual-core Celeron and Pentium Gold processors. The new flagship of the 9th Generation Core Mobile processor family is the Core i9-9980HK, designed for what Intel is calling “Musclebooks” – we’ll call them powerful desktop replacement and gaming notebooks. The Core i9-9980HK is a 45 watt, 8-core / 16-thread processor,...
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Before the advent of smartphones and tablets, using the bathroom meant getting cozy with a paper magazine, newspaper, or heck even a shampoo bottle to pass the time. Now it's Angry Birds and scrolling through Facebook. It should come as no surprise, then, that your smartphone may be contaminated with fecal matter. As gross as that sounds, a new study for Global Handwashing Day (which is apparently thing) found that one in six smartphones are contaminated in such a manner. "This study provides more evidence that some people still don't wash their hands properly, especially after going to the toilet. I hope the thought of having E. coli on their hands and phones encourages them to take more care...
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A new patent uncovered by LetsGoDigital has given us our first look at an experimental smartphone designed by Intel that will have a folding display. This design, which will likely be followed by many similar designs from other major developers in the mobile world, essentially gives you the advantage of having an all in one device that is both a phone and a tablet. Intel's tri-fold phone design picks up where the company's dual-display phone projects left off. In its most compact mode, the smartphone will look just like that: a smartphone. Opening the phone up to reveal the second display extends the device's function in several ways. The second display can be used as a dedicated on-screen...
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Every major wireless company likes to thump its chest and proclaim it is home to the best network, in terms of speed and coverage, but is there a clear winner? According to the latest USA Mobile Network Experience Report by OpenSignal, Verizon leads the way more often than not, though the results are a bit more surprising when you dig into the individual tests. OpenSignal tested wireless performance in five different categories—4G Availability, Video Experience, Download Speed Experience, Upload Speed Experience, and Latency Experience. Verizon won three of the five categories, those being 4G availability, videos, and uploads. Click to Enlarge (Source: OpenSignal) What's interesting, though,...
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AMD announced that its second-gen Ryzen 3000 mobile processors are ready to take on Intel in 2019. These new processors build on the success of the company's first-generation Ryzen Mobile CPUs by extending the product stack and pushing the performance envelope a little further. The bulk of AMD's mobile Ryzen 3000 processors use AMD's Zen+ core. This is significant because it utilizes an improved 12nm manufacturing process, which has higher efficiency and generally is able to hit slightly higher clock speeds than the original Zen core. This transition is likely responsible for the improvements that AMD was able to bring to its second-gen mobile Ryzen processors. At the high-end of the product...
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HTC Corporation recently reported that its sales fell by more than 61% this past year. The company was plagued by acquisitions, layoffs, and resignations throughout 2018. Many analysts blame intensified global smartphone competition for HTC’s dismal numbers. This is the seventh consecutive year that HTC’s sales have decreased. The company’s total sales rang in at NT$23.74 billion ($768 million USD) or 61.78% less than last year. Their consolidated sales have consistently declined throughout 2018. December sales were 8.24% less than November sales, while their third quarter worth per shares were NT$0.65 billion ($21.1 million USD) less than quarter two. HTC was founded in 1997...
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There's no shortage of places to run into spam. It seems like nowadays, all you need to do is open a new email account, and there will already be spam in there waiting for you. Alright, that may be a slight exaggeration, but the problem was bad a decade or even twenty years ago, and it hasn't slowed down. Many companies push out spam protection for this very reason, but its effectiveness is largely hit-or-miss. Google is likely one of the top guardians against spam out there, but even Gmail is prone to filtering out legitimate messages (which is why you should make it a habit to check your spam folder periodically). The lowly SMS chat isn't even safe. It's actually almost too easy to send an...
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Have you been holding off buying a new gaming laptop in anticipation of NVIDIA's Turing GPU architecture being ported over to mobile? Well, good news—it appears NVIDIA and its OEM partners are getting ready to introduce laptop models featuring mobile versions of the GPU maker's GeForce RTX series in the near future. There has already been (unofficial) chatter of NVIDIA prepping its mobile GeForce RTX series for a launch right before the Consumer Electronics Shows (CES) in Las Vegas next month. While that is not for certain of course, the latest round of leaks suggest it's at least plausible. As spotted by Twitter user and notorious leaker TUM APISAK, there are several mobile GeForce RTX...
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Huawei, a major smartphone player in China that has had a tough time cracking the US market, posted a teaser image of an upcoming smartphone model that completely ditches the bezel, and that doesn't have a notch. Instead, Huawei appears to be taking a page from Samsung by implementing a punch-hole design for the front-facing camera. Click to Enlarge (Source: Weibo via Huawei) The image appears on Weibo, a popular microblogging site in China. It's basically just an outline of a smartphone that blends into the background, which itself is a picture of outer space. The translated text accompanying the photo reads, "Make a heavy 'point' and see you in December." That's probably not a totally accurate...
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Intel has already refreshed its desktop processor family with a 9th generation Core CPU series culminating in its first-ever 8-core/16-thread chip (Core i9-9900K) for the mainstream market, and pretty soon, the 9th gen moniker will port over to mobile, too. Among them is a new flagship part, the Core i7-9550U. We don't know all of the fine grain details yet, and really only know the model names, from which we can extrapolate what 8th generation processors (Whiskey Lake-U) each of the upcoming 9th gen ones are meant to replace. Here's what we're looking at: Core i7-9550U (replaces Core i7-8565U) Core i5-9250U (replaces Core i5-8265U) Core i3-9130U (replaces Core i3-8145U) None of the new 9th gen...
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In an effort to expand its footprint in emerging markets, Netflix is rolling out a $3 monthly subscription plan that is for mobile devices only. This may or may not be a permanent thing—as of right now, the ultra-cheap mobile plan is part of a wider test as Netflix looks to gain ground in the streaming space with cheaper packages. The $3 per month plan shouldn't come as a surprise, not after Netflix CEO Reed Hastings recently indicated plans to test cheaper packages. Netflix is testing a mobile-only subscription for around $3 per month in a handful of countries worldwide, including Malaysia — just days after CEO Reed Hastings said it would experiment with cheaper packages in Asia...
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At this point, it sure seems like the folks at Cloudflare know how this whole "internet" thing works, as the company is trying very hard to keep the web fast and more secure. That includes websites that are cached using its services, helping to deliver faster page loads to the reader, or even routing your own internet connection through its servers for better privacy. Earlier this year, Cloudflare released its 1.1.1.1 service, which like Google's 8.8.8.8 DNS, routes all of your internet connections through the company's own servers, in effect obfuscating your true origin (except to Cloudflare). At home, using a specific DNS might not be too important, since speed is (likely) already at its best,...
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Samsung is a master at marketing, as is almost required these days to compete in the high-end smartphone space. From snarky ads making fun of the competition to social media posts teasing new products, Samsung 'gets' it. In regards to the latter, Samsung on Sunday posted a teaser of its rumored folding Galaxy phone on Facebook under its 'Samsung Mobile' account. Just as it sounds, Samsung Mobile is the account Samsung uses to promote a variety of mobile products, like the Galaxy Note 9, Notebook Flash, and Odyssey mixed reality headset. Presumably soon, the growing list will include the Galaxy F or Galaxy X, or whatever Samsung ends up calling its upcoming folding smartphone. Short of an...
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It used to be that nothing was certain but death and taxes, to quote Benjamin Franklin (who wasn't actually the first to point this out, but is probably best known for the phrase). Well, we can add to that short list. In today's landscape, certainties include death, taxes, and display notches on a growing number of smartphones. Some people don't mind them, others vehemently hate them. Either way, display notches aren't going anywhere, but they might look a little different in the next generation of smartphones. How did we get here? Is Apple truly to blame for the display notch craze because of its iPhone X? The origin of the display notch actually traces back to the original Essential Phone,...
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The dust hasn't even had to time to settle on NVIDIA's desktop GeForce RTX series graphics cards, but as we're still exploring the full capabilities of these new parts, there is already chatter of mobile variants laying in the wings. It's not a matter of if, but when, and we could see mobile GeForce RTX GPUs unveiled within the next few months. Why does this matter if, for the most part, Pascal is still getting the job done? Better performance is welcome, even if it's not earth-shattering. More importantly, however, porting the GeForce RTX family over to mobile opens the door to real-time ray tracing in games on laptops, as that is really the signature feature of NVIDIA's Turing architecture....
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