News & Reviews:   Android

As one of the few System on a Chip (SoC) manufacturer in the world, Samsung has spend considerable amount of R&D money and time to develop the best processor optimised for the mobile space. With the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 sporting an Exynos 8990, the next Samsung phone (which we expect will be the Samsung Galaxy S8) will probably use the Exynos 8895 SoC. Reports are saying that Samsung is hard at work testing the new chip, running at 4GHz.

We have talked about a newly discovered vulnerability that affects Android smartphones that is powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processors named QuadRooter. Thankfully, the majority of the smartphones are safe thanks to Google’s Verify Apps function.

With over a billion devices running Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processor right now, the scale of a newly discovered vulnerability is staggering. Called Quadrooter, it can essentially take over the data on your smartphone.

Even with big power banks being toted around these days – the drawback for those devices is that it can either charge one device at a time, or only limited power output for more than one that is hooked in. What if you need more juice? HP has just the thing for you – the HP Powerup Backpack.

Not wanting to rest on its laurels, ZTE is now hard at work in designing their next smartphone to be released worldwide. What makes it special however is the way they are getting the ideas. Project CSX is ZTE’s latest initiative for smartphone design, and they are asking help from the public to pitch in ideas on what they should build next.

Walking around in a Virtual Reality (VR) environment is a fun thing to do. Which is why more companies are creating VR products to tap into this budding market. Xiaomi is one of the companies who are doing just that, and we have a first look on how their implementation should look like

Fans of the latest versions of Android, start saving your money – the upcoming LG V20 will be the first OEM device to be shipped with Android 7.0 Nougat out of the box when it is launched in September.

Standard smartphones today are built around the 16:9 screen ratio when rotated to the side (apart from the LG Optimus Vu that had a 4:3 screen ratio). Right now however LG may want to buck the trend, as they just patented a new screen form factor for mobile, dubbed “UltraWide Mobile+”.

While the Android marketshare continues to rise – Apple with their iOS ecosystem (iPhone and iPad) devices has been there all along as a great counterbalance to the market. They have just recently reached a milestone – they have sold over one billion iPhone devices as of today.

IFA 2016 Berlin is upon us, and we are expecting many manufacturers to announce new products during the week-long event. Traditionally manufacturers have their events before the IFA trade show itself, and Sony is following the trend as they are geared to announce new stuff on September 1st , just before IFA.