Unidentified HTC smartphone passes through the FCC with support for Verizon’s carrier bands
Earlier today, an unannounced HTC-branded smartphone carrying the model number 0PM9310 passed through the United States of America’s official certification authority — the FCC. Information included in the brief filing documentation reveals that we’re looking a mid-range handset with a removable backplate that’s heading to Verizon.
Unfortunately, the paperwork doesn’t disclose anything about the internals of the device, but we do know that the slate is set to pack a variety of different connectivity options, including support for Big Red’s 4G carrier bands (5, 7, 2, 4, and 13), GSM, WCDMA, Bluetooth Class 1 (Version 4.0, LE+EDR), 802.11b/802.11g/802.11n Wi-Fi, NFC and GPS.
That’s pretty much all the information we have about the HTC 0PM9310 at this point.
If you wish to view the full FCC filing – just click the source link below.
Source: FCC
Come comment on this article: Unidentified HTC smartphone passes through the FCC with support for Verizon’s carrier bands
Pebble kicks off pre-orders for the Time Steel
Pebble has today launched the pre-order page for the high-end variant of its second-generation smartwatch, the Time Steel. The wearable can be yours for $299 ($50 more than the leather band model) and is expected to start shipping in six-to-eight weeks.
If you’re undecided as to whether to pick up the Pebble Time, why not check out our full revie? It highlights the good, the bad and the ugly Although, there’s not really much ugly about this device. It’s proven to be quite solid all-round timepiece.
Will you be pre-ordering the Pebble Time Steel? Be sure to let us know down in the comments section down below.
Source: Pebble
Come comment on this article: Pebble kicks off pre-orders for the Time Steel
Xiaomi may unveil Redmi Note 2 alongside MIUI 7 next week
Xiaomi just regained its top spot in the Chinese market, edging out Huawei and displacing Apple to the third place. Research firm Counterpoint estimates that Xiaomi now owns around 15.8 percent of the massive Chinese market, with cheap mid-range and entry-level devices making up the bulk of Xiaomi’s sales. The fast growing company is expected to reinforce its leadership in this segment with the release of the Redmi Note 2 on August 13.
Xiaomi has already confirmed that it would introduce a new version of its custom Android operating system, MIUI, on August 13. Given its predilection towards launching new OS versions alongside new devices, there’s been a lot of talk about Xiaomi launching a new phone next week.
Chinese website MyDrivers obtained what’s claimed to be a screenshot from an internal Xiaomi system showing the price of the Redmi Note 2 32GB – 799 yuan ($128), making it likely that the 16GB version will be available from 699 yuan ($112).
A separate leak originating from Chinese retailer JD.com suggests the Redmi Note 2 will be available from August 16.
With this considered, there’s a solid chance Xiaomi will unveil the Redmi Note 2 on August 13 (the same day Samsung is expected to show its own, higher-end Note device, and the S6 Edge Plus). The original Redmi Note was announced in March 2014.
Specs floating around the Chinese web point to a 5.5-inch Full HD display, a MediaTek MT6795 processor, 2GB of RAM, and a 13MP rear camera. These are all fantastic specs for a device costing a little more than $100, and we’re curious to see if Xiaomi can really pull it off. The company has made its name with affordable devices that don’t compromise on specs, but a slew of competitors have adopted similar tactics over the past year – can Xiaomi pull ahead once again?
Nvidia revenue jumps after strong gaming and automotive chip demand
Nvidia has reported an unexpected rise in its second quarter revenue due to strong demand for its graphics chips and for mobile SoCs from the automotive industry.
Total revenue for the company rose by 4.5 percent to $1.15 billion in the latest quarter. Nvidia is also forecasting revenue of $1.16 to $1.20 billion for Q3 2015, which is higher than the $1.10 billion that it had anticipated for the quarter.
The decline of PC sales had been expected to hurt Nvidia’s revenue, as the company remains heavily reliant on desktop graphics card and laptop sales, and these still make up the majority of the company’s revenue. However, Nvidia has seen an uptick in GPU sales, along with strong demand from the automotive industry.
Revenue from the company’s gaming business rose by 9 percent in the previous quarter, which includes Android hardware and GRID streaming business. The desktop graphics unit also appears particularly strong lately, with a 51 percent increase in revenue. Nvidia remains a small player in the mobile SoC space, with only a handful of modern products powered by its Tegra SoCs. Its new Shield Android TV is rather good and Nvidia is also betting big on its GRID game streaming service, which has seen its user base triple over the last year.
See also: Tegra X1 – a closer look at Nvidia’s “superchip”
Nvidia’s mobile chips are proving most popular in the automotive industry, powering car dashboard displays and entertainment systems. The company is also in talks with more than 50 companies that are exploring its Drive chip for self-driving cars. Nvidia’s Drive chip is based on the company’s latest Tegra X1 processor and offers powerful image processing capabilities for driver assistance systems, along with a fully featured infotainment experience.
It seems that diversification away from its core GPU business is working out quite well for Nvidia.
Android app tells you if you have ‘Stagefright’ vulnerability
Got Stagefright? Not the fear of an audience, but an Android vulnerability that could hijack your smartphone via a garden-variety MMS. The company that discovered the flaw, Zimperium, has now released a tool, the Stagefright Detector App, to at least let you know if you’re patched against it. Google issued a fix a while ago, and you’re protected if you have a Nexus device. But if you own nearly any other smartphone — even a brand new one like Samsung’s Galaxy S6 — you’re probably still at risk.
In fact, I checked my own Galaxy S6 Edge, and yep! If you send me an infected MMS and I’m silly enough to open the video attachment, then my phone is your phone. In fact, if I used Google’s Hangouts for SMS (I don’t), the app may pre-process the attachment and infect me regardless. Some devices other than Nexus aren’t vulnerable — a colleague who owns a OnePlus One with a CyanogenMod nightly is already protected. However, devices from manufacturers like Samsung, HTC and LG are still at risk, even if you paid top dollar for the latest and greatest flagship (ahem).
If you receive a video MMS from somebody you don’t know, then of course, don’t open it.
The Stagefright Detector app lets you know if you’re vulnerable, though it’s no cure. The app told me I wasn’t patched against CVE-2015-3827 and -1538 flaws, but didn’t point me to any advice on how to fix the problem. Instead, it directed me to contact Zimperium, which appeared to want to market me its products. Nevertheless, the company does have a blog post on how to handle the vulnerability — in a nutshell, if you’re using Hangouts as your SMS app, you’ll need to disable “Auto Retrieve SMS.” And if you receive a video MMS from somebody you don’t know, then of course, don’t open it.
It’s still not clear how many people this has affected, and Zimperium is clearly milking some publicity out of the flaw. Still, it highlights how Android’s fragmentation problem leaves the platform much more vulnerable to attacks than iOS — when Apple issues a patch, every iPhone owner gets it, period.
Filed under:
Cellphones, Tablets
Source:
Zimperum
Tags: Android, flaw, stagefright, video, vulnerability
In the wake of Stagefright, LG plans monthly security patches too
The Stagefright exploit, reported last month, seems to have the Android OEMs a little shaken, and LG is the next big OEM to announce that it will be providing monthly security updates to its smartphones from now on.
In an email to Wired, LG states that it will be proving updates each month and will be making them available to carriers right away. Hopefully, carriers will also participate in providing timely security updates, as they can often be the cause of major update delays.
“LG will be providing security updates on a monthly basis which carriers will then be able to make available to customers immediately. We believe these important steps will demonstrate to LG customers that security is our highest priority.”
In the past couple of days, Google and Samsung have also announced that they will be providing fast track rollouts for security updates. Typically, companies lump a ton of security patches in with their next big update for a smartphone, but many handsets quickly drop off the update radar all together. Little and often updates should really help to keep handsets secure.
See also: How is Google fixing the Stagefright vulnerability that affects 95% of all Android phones?
Although security exploits are never a good thing, it looks like Stagefright has finally jump scared OEMs into taking customer security more seriously. Although we will have to wait and see how long companies are willing to provide support for and how many older handset users will still be left in the dark.
We can probably expect similar announcements from other major OEMs in the next few days.
HTC is in trouble and it’s going to cut jobs and products to get back in the black
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The trials and tribulations of Taiwanese smartphone manufacturer, HTC, are well documented by the media, and after their latest poor financial performance – yet another quarter of losses and predictions for another to follow – it looks like HTC has hit rock bottom: HTC is in trouble. As a result, HTC Chief Financial Officer Chialin Chang has told reporters that jobs will be cut: “The cuts will be across the board. They will be significant,” Chang said.
That’s not the only thing that will be cut; HTC is said to cut its product line-up down to a bare minimum, saying it will focus on high-end devices. While that’s what I thought they said 6 months ago, HTC says they have great market share in places like India, where they command a 20% share in the $250-$400 USD segment. Analysts aren’t buying it (and frankly neither are we) – analysts expect HTC to struggle for at least the next four quarters. “We believe HTC will keep losing share in the smartphone market and will keep losing money,” says Calvin Huang, analyst at SinoPac Securities. it really can’t be helped by the perception that HTC has become unoriginal and confused in the market – this year’s HTC One M9 is pretty much the embodiment of that. We’ll see what the next year or so has in store for the “quietly brilliant” manufacturer.
What do you think about HTC’s situation? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.
Source: Reuters via Droid-life
The post HTC is in trouble and it’s going to cut jobs and products to get back in the black appeared first on AndroidSPIN.
This is how you’ll customize the Xbox One ‘Elite’ controller
We got up close and personal with the Xbox One’s incredibly expensive Elite controller at E3, but how do all those modular bits and bobs work? A new video from Microsoft out of Gamescom sheds some light on just that. The Elite’s customization goes much deeper than just swapping out different lengths of thumbsticks: you can adjust trigger deadzone, download custom button-binding profiles for certain games, tweak haptic feedback intensity on a motor-by-motor basis and even completely remap button functions. Long story short: if standard gamepads regularly fall short for your high-level needs, this is the paddle for you.
The key to all this is an app that grants the aforementioned customizations, and a Redmond spokesperson breaks it al down in nitty-gritty detail around the 30 minutes mark in the video below. If this is enough to prep your bank account for a sudden $150 departure, let us know in the comments.
We’re live all week from Cologne, Germany for Gamescom 2015. Click here to catch up on all the news from the show.
Filed under:
Gaming, Home Entertainment, HD, Microsoft
Source:
Major Nelson (YouTube)
Tags: elite, elitecontroller, gamescom-2015, gaming, hd, hdpostcross, microsoft, video, xbox, xboxone
BitTorrent makes offline messages on Bleep more secure
The biggest thing BitTorrent’s Bleep messaging app can offer users is privacy, so it’s rightly beefing up that feature even more. In BT’s latest engineering blog post, senior software engineer Steven Siloti explains how his team has improved the security of asynchronous offline messages. The feature, which made its way to the app in December 2014, allows a recipient to receive offline messages even if the sender hasn’t connected to the internet yet. Previously, both users had to be online for messages to be exchanged — remember that Bleep doesn’t have servers, so that update was a big deal. Anyway, BT’s engineers were apparently not content with the security level of offline messages, because if someone manages to steal a user’s “offline key,” he could unlock every offline message he intercepted from the same user in the past.
Note that this isn’t a problem for online messages, because Bleep uses an encrypted tunnel protocol to protect those. In order to solve that issue with offline messages, they tweaked the system to generate new ephemeral keys for user pairs (first produced when two users add each other) each time the older one is used. Here’s how BT explains it (we highlighted the important bits):
…the same DHT facility we use to exchange offline messages can also be used to exchange ephemeral keys. When Alice and Bob first add each other as contacts they generate ephemeral keypairs and publish the keys’ public components in the DHT, just as they would an offline message. Alice and Bob save each other’s offline ephemeral keys for future use. When Alice wants to send an offline message to Bob she uses their saved ephemeral keys to encrypt the message. When Bob receives the message he uses his copy of the ephemeral keys to decrypt it. After decrypting the message, Bob discards his ephemeral key and publishes a new one in the DHT. Once Alice sees Bob’s new ephemeral key she replaces the one she has stored for him.
Simply put, BT promises that nobody without the appropriate key can access offline PMs. Plus, it’ll be very hard to steal those keys, because Bleep will now replace them with new ones after they’re used. If you’d like to give the privacy-focused messaging app a shot, check out its website with links to its iTunes, Google Play, Windows and Mac downloads.
Filed under:
Misc
Source:
BitTorrent, Bleep
Tags: Bittorrent, bleep, messaging, offlinemessaging
Best Buy Begins Selling Apple Watch
In late July, Best Buy announced plans to begin Apple Watch sales online and in its retail stores beginning on August 7, and as promised, Apple Watch sales have now kicked off, with the device available for purchase on Best Buy’s website.
Best Buy plans to offer 16 models from the aluminum Apple Watch Sport and stainless Steel Apple Watch collections. Models available online include all 38 and 42mm Apple Watch Sport models, and 38 and 42mm stainless steel Apple Watch models with Black Sport Band, White Sport Band, and Milanese Loop.
Apple Watch purchases placed online ship immediately, and in-store pickup is also available. Best Buy will likely begin in-store sales of the Apple Watch when participating retail stores open in the morning across the United States. The Apple Watch is available in 100 Best Buy stores, with Best Buy planning to expand retail availability to more than 300 stores over the next few months.
Best Buy is also selling a selection of Apple Watch Sport Bands and the Milanese Loop, plus the company is offering a wide range of Apple Watch accessories from third-party manufacturers, including charging stands, screen protectors, protective cases, and bands.
Best Buy is the first major national retailer aside from Apple to sell the Apple Watch. Since the device’s launch in April, it’s been limited to the online Apple Store, Apple retail stores, and select boutiques around the world due to constrained supplies.
Apple has managed to ramp up production and catch up with demand rapidly over the past few months, with the expansion to Best Buy coming less than two months after the Apple Watch became available for purchase in Apple’s own retail stores.
AIVAnet 