News & Reviews:   Apple

While we Malaysians are still waiting for the arrival of the Apple iPhone 7 series, Apple has decided to drop their latest iOS 10 globally yesterday morning. iOS 10 is indeed a huge upgrade as there were no less than 5 changes according to their changelog. Without further ado, here's our first impression hands-on on the latest iOS (also, I'm an iPhone 5 user, so some extra features will be missing here).

Nintendo has long been a stranger in the mobile gaming space, even though their games are generally suited to be played on small screens such as on smartphones. Not anymore – during the launch of the iPhone 7 event, Nintendo announced that Super Mario Run will be heading to iOS.

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%.  

During the weekend, The Washington Post took an opportunity to have an interview with Apple CEO, Tim Cook about his fifth year in that position, as well as the future of the company's work on augmented reality products. Here are some thoughts from Tim Cook, from a series of question by The Washington Post:

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.

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.

A few hours ago, Apple CEO Tim Cook has told investors that Apple is interested in investing augmented reality (AR) and they have already been in developing and is "high on AR in the long run". This happened after he was asked about his thoughts on Pokémon Go that has stormed the world as the most downloaded app in history.

The smartphone business is always a tough war to compete with each brand offers their best of the best flagship and budget devices. Yesterday, a Market research firm TrendForce has released market numbers for Q2 2016. Surprisingly, Huawei took a the lead in China with nearly 21% share. Do note that, China is the world's largest smartphone market.

Taking a short break from smartphone news, we now bring you some news from the laptop world. It has come to our attention that according to a source from a Chinese media, a new Lenovo 4G laptop is planned to be released in the next two months or so featuring an integrated cellular network antenna, this means that it will allow internet connection to be available everywhere.

July 27 seems to be a date to look out for, especially for Mi fans. One of the devices that will be launched is apparently the Mi Laptop, and we have leaked specs of the upcoming machine from Xiaomi.