News & Reviews:   Android

Apart from selling devices, Samsung is also involved in other businesses, which includes shipping, construction and even white goods. One of the features that they have introduced previously is Samsung Pay – a payment system that allows Samsung phones to be used as payment instead of cash. It seems that Malaysia is next on the list of countries to have this payment system as Samsung users have been prompted with an invitation to join the Open Beta trial locally.

While the Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge and the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 shows what curved displays can be like to own, we are still plagued with the limitation of smartphones – both phones still have bezels around the display, albeit a very tiny one. Sharp, one of the premier manufacturers of displays, has reveal a display that is without bezels, and spans from corner to corner.

A name more associated to film and photography, Kodak is in the midst of launching a new smartphone at the end of this month. Even though their earlier launch the IM5 wasn’t received as good as they hoped, it doesn’t stop them to go ahead with a second model.

The next time you are busy lining up at your local Maybank, check if they have WiFi on offer. Selected branches around Malaysia now gives out free WiFi access to their customer while waiting in line.

Antutu is one of the big names for benchmark usage out there. Currently the highest scoring smartphone on the list is the Apple iPhone 7 Plus, with 172,644. Now however a mystery prototype smartphone had scored almost 20% more when compared to Apple’s newest phablet.

While the company may be facing some tough times, Samsung is still a large multinational company, and they have many facets of business to rely on. Case in point – chip fabrication. They are fabricating their own processor – the Exynos - and we will be seeing another customer using Samsung’s fabrication facilities. Qualcomm is said to engage with Samsung for their Snapdragon 830 fabrication.

The top messaging-app has been updated to make it a bit more, well, fun. With the latest version of WhatsApp, users will be able to customize and improve the photos and video they want to share with friends and family. There's a set of new camera features that have been implemented in the Android version of WhatsApp, which enable users to write or draw on photos and videos.

While the new Apple iPhone 7 may have a new virtual home button (i.e. it is not a real physical button), a new patent from the company may reveal what we can expect in next year’s Apple iPhone 8. It seems that they will be borrowing the idea from Qualcomm and Android, and have an edge-to-edge OLED display that covers the handset's entire front, eliminating the well familiar home button in favor of a virtual touch-sensitive key.

Companies are slowly moving away from including the humble 3.5mm jack on their smartphones. We have a few companies already coming out with devices sans the jack - LeEco, Motorola and the most famous of all, Apple. Now the organization behind the USB standard has come up with a new guideline for a spec called USB Audio Class 3.0, which eliminates the need of having an audio jack in the smartphone altogether.  

While Facebook is a great platform to connect with your friends and family, the queen to have two different apps on your smartphone to be on that social network can be infuriating. Facebook is trying to lessen the burden of the users by deploying a lighter version of their Messenger app, aptly named Messenger Lite – and Malaysia is one of the first countries in the list.