Today, The International Data Corporation (IDC) releases preliminary data that shows smartphone OEMs have shipped a total of 342 million units during Q2 of this year. This calculates to a 1.8% decrease from Q2 of 2017, where OEMs shipped a higher total of 348.2 million handsets. During the same quarter, Huawei has surpassed Apple in the number of overall shipments. The Chinese OEM shipped 54.2 million units with a record high of 15.8% of global market share and a whopping (also record breaking for Huawei) 27% market share in China. This puts Huawei at the No. 2 spot globally while Apple...

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Today, a huge leak comes from XDA-Developers thanks to firmware files obtained by @FunkyHuawei that were shared with the development site. The firmware files are able to say a lot about the unannounced Huawei flagship, or flagships, rather, since it looks like there will be three variants of the next Mate device: Mate 20 Lite, Mate 20, and Mate 20 Pro. The firmware file obtained was specifically for the Mate 20, here's what was uncovered. The Mate 20 is said to be the first Huawei flagship to have HiSilicon's Kirin 980 CPU (expected to be announced at IFA next month) built on a 7nm...

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This afternoon, Apple held an earnings call where CEO Tim Cook announced that Apple Pay made over 1 billion transactions this quarter alone. In fact, Apple Pay made more transactions than its competitors Square and PayPal. Cook also announced that Apple Pay will finally be supported at 7 Eleven and CVS Pharmacy stores sometime in the fall. If you have been following the story with CVS from almost four years ago, the store began to accept NFC payments until it disabled its NFC readers in favor of another QR-code mobile wallet called "CurrentC". Well, it wasn't CVS' fault, this was due to...

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Today, Google made a blog post about Spotify integration with alarms in the Google Clock app. Starting today, you can set an alarm clock to wake you up with a Spotify playlist, or you can choose from Spotify's curated morning playlists. After you shut off your alarm, the Clock app will even give you the option to continue listening to the music that just woke up you so you can get ready with your jams. What's interesting is that Google decided to release Spotify integration before its own Google Play or YouTube Music streaming services. Perhaps Google wanted to test it with Spotify...

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A new report from Samsung's home of South Korea confirms the previously outed release date for the upcoming Galaxy Note9: August 24. As you can see from the image below, it's clearly written on a promotional poster made for the device by KT, one of the Korean carriers. Since the date was first leaked by a Polish Samsung employee, and now the same date is said to apply to the Korean market, we're assuming that's when the global launch will happen. Of course things might still change, but this is probably the best estimation of when the phone will be in stores - until August 9 comes, of...

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Apple might be adding a much-requested feature to at least one of the three iPhones it's gearing up to launch this fall. We're talking about dual-SIM support, something that's very popular in certain markets, but not so much in the US where the company is based. This has been rumored before, but now we get a sort of confirmation from Apple itself, through some code included in iOS 12 developer beta 5. As you can see from the screenshot below, a component of the system that generates diagnostic reports includes new references to "second SIM status" and "second SIM tray...

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The flexible smartphone race has started. After Samsung revealed its plans to deliver the first ever foldable smartphone with flexible display, Huawei committed to beating it to the punch. Now a new report claims that two more major Chinese manufacturers are joining. Xiaomi and Oppo are reportedly looking for display manufacturers to supply their foldable handsets. The options, for now, are rather limited - BOE, Visionox and LG Display. But instead of following, Xiaomi is planning on leading in the segment by being the first manufacturer to bring a working flexible device by kicking...

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Earlier this month, HTC pushed an OTA update in Taiwan to the U12+ adding new features and a much-needed update to the pressure-sensitive buttons. The patch weighs 437MB and the build number is 1.21.617.3. Тhe changelog outlines the very same update we saw with the Taiwanese version of the device. The most important fix is for the pressure-sensitive buttons that should now be more responsive and won't get in the way of the Edge Sense gestures. The double tapping on the edge should work better now too. The update also brings the so-called Auto Zoom feature for video recording....

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Canon has launched a new pocket sized PowerShot SX740 HS camera. The camera is meant for casual users as well as vloggers who want something compact and easy to use for taking quick photos and videos that look a little better than what you get from your smartphones. The SX740 HS has a 20.3MP sensor and 24-960mm equivalent lens that gives it 40x optical zoom capability, more than enough for most users and especially impressive for a compact camera. The camera can also record 4K video, which makes it the first in the PowerShot series to do so. The SX740 HS includes Canon's newest...

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Samsung continues to expand the selection of AR emojis based on Disney properties - the latest addition are the main characters from Frozen. Anna, Elsa, Olaf and Kristoff can be downloaded from the Galaxy App Store for the Galaxy S9 and Galaxy S9+. This leaves Zootopia from the official list of movies to be turned into AR emoji. Samsung has already covered The Incredibles, Mickey and Minnie, Goody and Daisy, along with a pack of 18 generic AR emoji (there are 18 more on the way). Source

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Oppo released the Realme 1 as an online-exclusive smartphone that sold out in two minutes after its launch in India back in May. Eyeing a huge potential in the new subsidiary, the Oppo Vice President Sky Li announced he is stepping down and is moving to become the CEO of the Realme brand. Sky Li, pictured in 2016 at the Oppo F1 launch In a press release, Realme listed plenty of markets that the company is planning to join. Quoting Gartner, growth in smartphone sales has been observed in Central and Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa and emerging Asian countries and sales are...

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OnePlus derives almost a third of its global revenue from India and it's a sign that the company is doing well when it posts shipments. Not only that, but Counterpoint reports that during the second quarter of this year OnePlus shipped more premium phones than Samsung for the first time in its history. Counterpoint defines the premium segment as phones costing INR 30,000 and above ($440/€370). That may seem a bit low for a premium segment, but it's partly because OnePlus and others are aggressively pushing high-end phones below the INR 40,000 mark and are skewing the market. The OnePlus...

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Sony just published its Q2 financial report and unfortunately it holds little good news for its struggling mobile business. The Japanese firm shipped just 2 million phones in Q2 this year compared to the 3.4 million in Q2 2017. That's just $1.18 billion revenue and a 27% decline year-over-year. The main reason lies in the weak Japanese and European sales, but interestingly, Sony remains stable in the rest of the world. It has also forced Sony to re-calculate its projected sales and revenue for 2018. Initially, the OEM forecasted 10 million sales accounting for $5.74 billion until...

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The Xiaomi Mi 8 Explorer is the premium phone in the series. Besides its attractive translucent back, it also comes with a 3D face scanner and an under display fingerprint reader. Naturally, this drives up the price, but TENAA reveals that there may be a more affordable version in the works. We've seen this device before, though TENAA hadn't posted the photos at that point and they certainly add a new dimension to the rumors. The design looks similar, including the back, but the notch on the front is noticeably narrower. Sure, the TENAA photo is quite dark, but the selfie camera is right...

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Samsung has just posted its financial report for the second quarter of 2018. The Korean conglomerate reached KRW58.48 trillion (around $52.2 billion) in sales, its lowest result for the past 12 months. Samsung stated the decline in revenue, hinted earlier in the earnings guidance was due to lower sales of smartphones and display panels, while demand for memory chips remained strong, just like analysts predicted. Тhe IT & Mobile Communications division, responsible for the Galaxy smartphones saw its sales fall 20% from KRW30 trillion to KRW24 trillion on a yearly basis....

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When Huawei announced GPU Turbo there was plenty of misunderstanding of what it does. So, now the company announced CPU Turbo with the Kirin 970-powered Honor Note 10 and there seems to be a similar confusion. The official announcement is very vague, but here's what we have so far - enabling CPU Turbo mode will raise the clock speeds (by an unspecified amount) and will free up RAM. Let's break it down. The Honor Note 10 features a cooling system dubbed "The Nine" - a heat pipe that keeps the chipset running cool. This should help it stay cool and enable the higher clock. That might...

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The Huawei Honor Note 10 was teased for such a long time, it almost feels like a relief to finally see it go official. Many of the rumored specs turned out to be true, but the company managed to surprise us with some fresh and unexpected features. The Honor Note 10 is built around a 6.95-inch Full HD+ (1080 x 2220 pixels) AMOLED display with thin side bezels and no notch. The display supports the HDR10 standard and has 115% NTSC color gamut coverage. The Honor Note 10 comes with Huawei's in-house Kirin 970 chipset paired with 6GB or 8GB of RAM. The internal storage variants of...

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Lenovo is looking to launch a new selfie-centric smartphone and it has stopped by TENAA for a quick certification. The handset carries the model name L38031 and the main selling point is the dual front camera. The phone has four cameras in total, but unfortunately the listing only mentions the resolution of one of them - 13MP. In all likeliness the front and back setups consist of a primary high-res module and a secondary depth-sensing unit of low resolution (in the 2MP-5MP range). It's unclear though if the 13MP module is the main one on the front or the back. As we go down the...

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Sony's newest top of the line smartphone has just become available in the US, and right on time. The Xperia XZ2 Premium went on pre-order in the States at the beginning of the month, and around three weeks later it's now in stock at both Amazon and Best Buy (see the Sources linked below). It packs a 4K HDR touchscreen, being the first handset ever to don that setup, but living on the cutting edge of technology will cost you dearly. $999.99, to be precise. That's for an unlocked unit that will work on GSM-based carriers such as AT&T, T-Mobile, Straight Talk, MetroPCS, and Cricket....

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Today Asus has started sending out an update to Android 8.1 Oreo to the Zenfone 3 Max ZC553KL. This particular model launched in November of 2016, so it's good to see that the Taiwanese company hasn't forgotten about it, software-wise. The Zenfone 3 Max initially ran Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow, then got updated to Nougat, and now it's time for it to jump straight to 8.1. It might in fact be the first Asus smartphone to receive this specific version of the OS. Other members of the Zenfone 3 line have gotten 8.0. The new version is 15.0200.1807.406. Aside from packing all the goodies that...

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