Earlier today, we saw Qualcomm announcing its latest Snapdragon 865 and 765 chipsets. At the same time, many brands have confirmed that they will be offering smartphones equipped with the new chipsets. Looks like 2020 will be a year filled with Qualcomm 5G-powered phones.

In an apparent U-Turn from US President Donald Trump’s earlier supposed intervention, the US administration has released an early publication of a rule that will ban all new contracts or buying of equipment from Huawei, ZTE and a number of other Chinese companies starting from 13 August 2019. The rule further states that these companies are still allowed to service previous infrastructure (the old US networks in various rural towns) as long as they provide full disclosure but only until August 2021, so it’s not a complete ban, but just one that benefits the US government (how surprising, lol).

So far, in the quest for 100% screen ratio, smartphone brands have gone for pop-up cameras and top sliders, but a new ZTE design indicates that we could soon see a ZTE smartphone with 100% screen ratio AND a side slider with triple front cameras and a Xenon flash. Other rumoured tech specs includes dual rear cameras and 5x optical zoom, support for 5G and since there's no fingerprint sensor anywhere else, it is also assumed that it will have an in-display fingerprint sensor.

Are you excited for CES 2017? We know we are, for those who aren't familiar with it, CES stands for Consumer Electronics Show and this year marks the 50th anniversary for all tech geeks and nerds alike. As one of the largest shows on the planet, this year will be held in Las Vegas and several key players are set to present something awesome.

We just saw the ZTE Axon 7 launched in Malaysia, which you can read all about it right here. At the same time of the launch, ZTE also announced the smaller sibling of the flagship – the Axon 7 Mini – at IFA 2016.

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%.  

We have talked about a newly discovered vulnerability that affects Android smartphones that is powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processors named QuadRooter. Thankfully, the majority of the smartphones are safe thanks to Google’s Verify Apps function.

With over a billion devices running Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processor right now, the scale of a newly discovered vulnerability is staggering. Called Quadrooter, it can essentially take over the data on your smartphone.

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.

TENAA is a great place to find upcoming smartphones and the ZTE Q7 mid-range phablet has been seen on this Chinese certification agency's website. From the design shown on the website it looks like the Q7 has taken inspiration from the Apple iPhone 6 Plus. This 5.5inch phablet features a 1.5GHz Mediatek octa-core CPU with 2GB RAM onboard and 16GB ROM. You can further expand this built-in storage via MicroSD expansion slot. Unfortunately, the 5.5inch screen will come with only a 720p resolution which translates into a pixel density of just 267PPI. On the back, there's an 8MP rear camera with dual LED flash. It will run Android 4.4 Kitkat out of the box. The TENAA website reveals that the phone measures 157×78×7.9mm which is around the same size as the iPhone 6 Plus. However, at 7.1mm, the iPhone is much thinner than the Q7. Also, this ZTE model weighs just 160 grams making it much lighter than the iPhone 6 Plus. Unfortunately, ZTE has not yet announced any official details about the device like its pricing and availability, but we don't expect the company to launch the device out of China anytime soon.