News & Reviews:   iOS

After their purchase of the company SurfEasy that provides easy-to-use VPN apps, Opera has finally released Opera VPN for Android for free as a standalone app.

You know Android is the king of smartphone when you get numbers like this – a report online shared that the OS from Google is currently holding about 86.2% of the world smartphone market share for the first half of 2016. Trailing way behind is iOS with under 12%.  

While we are getting new processors, screen and even housing design – the humble battery is still essentially the same tech that the ancient civilizations in Mesopotamia used way back. Now MIT may have just cracked the code to make current battery more efficient – up to two times if the report is correct.

If you are the type that sends Whatsapp messages to many people at once, the new update on the world’s most popular chat app may interest you. They now have enabled multi-message sending and a ‘frequent chats’ module.

After many problems and bumps along the way, Putrajaya has finally said yes to legalising both Uber and Grab in Malaysia. The government has tasked the Land and Public Transport Commission (SPAD) to iron out the terms and conditions.

Japan Display Inc, (JDI), one of the major smartphone display supplier in the world, just announced their new display technology called “Full Active” panel. The new design boasts it can reduce the width of the bottom bezel down to as narrow as the other three sides, potentially reducing the size of smartphones using this display type.

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.

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+”.

The Apple Pencil is currently an iPad Pro-only device, so the desktop Apple products can’t take advantage of the flexibility and creative options that is available with the Pencil. Now however we may just see something for the desktop in the near future, as Apple as just patented a Pencil-like device, but for the desktop.