News & Reviews:   Smartphones

Nowadays, it looks like Huawei is becoming more self-reliant especially after the ban took place. Although the company has been restricted to access resources from the U.S. for their technology products, they are still constantly coming up with new ideas to wow the crowd. Recently, it is suggested that all of the Huawei products might ditch Android OS and replaced by the HarmonyOS in the future.

Back at the end of April, Facebook introduced Messenger Rooms where people are allowed to have a video call up to 50 people. That's pretty cool and all considering that most people have Messenger already so they don't need to register at all, and it seems that WhatsApp users will be able to access into that soon!

It doesn't take a genius to realise that industries all over the world are being affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. But it isn't until we see actual reports that we know the extent of the effects. A new research report has tallied the global shipment for smartphones in Q1 2020 and found a significant decline compared to the first quarter of 2019.

If you think you might not see smartphones with cameras that have higher megapixels than 108MP in a while, you are wrong! Today, a tipster has announced on Weibo revealing a smartphone that features a 192MP camera sensor that is going to be dropped soon. Whether it’s true or not, we guess the war of high megapixels between smartphones is once heated again.

Based on a report on fd.nl, it seems that the European Union is working on a proposal which requires smartphones to have user-replaceable batteries. This is due to the fact that old and worn out batteries are usually the main reason why users swap out their old smartphone for a newer device.

Today, WhatsApp has stopped working on Windows phone and here’s something you need to get your attention on if you are still using an old Android or iOS smartphone. The popular Facebook-owned messaging platform, WhatsApp has just updated that it will stop providing any support on Android 4.0.3 or iOS 9 and above. 

A leaked image has recently surfaced on Geekbench, showing benchmarks for a chipset from Qualcomm called Kona. We suspect that this could be the Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 chipset, which is expected to be installed in most flagship smartphones in the year 2020.

The parent company of Harman-Kardon, JBL and AKG will be purchased by Samsung for a staggering USD 8 billion (~RM 35 billion) in a deal that give Samsung a significant presence in the large and rapidly growing market for connected technologies.

We have just seen the launch of the Xiaomi Mi Note 2 and the incredible Xiaomi Mi Mix – but sources at TENAA just shared that there will be two new models coming our way from Xiaomi. It looks like a mid-ranger from the specs, and we do not have any information on how it looks so far.

Sci-fi is fast becoming science fact. The smartphone was inconceivable at the turn of the century, and yet we now bring supercomputers in our pockets. Now Samsung has just filed for two patents in the United States, the patents are for flexible smartphones that can bend using ‘artificial muscle’.