News & Reviews:   smartphone

Google’s parent company Alphabet has suspended Project Ara, the ambitious project to build a modular smartphone for the masses. Instead, they will look for manufacturing partners who can licence the product instead.

With news saying they are returning, Nokia is again becoming a hot topic among tech enthusiasts online. Now we have seen a photo that may share how the next smartphone from Nokia looks like.

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.

There were rumours about two new Nokia smartphones coming soon earlier this year. The news is apparently correct, as a report stated that Nokia is readying an announcement by the end of the year, with a return to markets by early 2017.

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.

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.