The new in the world of technology

Google has made quite a few VR and AR related announcements today at  Mobile World Congress . First, the company said that it has shipped more than 10 million Cardboard viewers worldwide since its launch in 2014. Combined,  Cardboard apps have been downloaded 160 million times on Google Play, and 30 of these apps have more than one million downloads. Google  also shared a few stats about the  Daydream headset . On average, people are using it for about 40 minutes per day. The headset is currently compatible with six smartphones, and there are about 100 different Daydream apps available, with  more coming soon . It looks like Daydream users particularly love video in VR, as it is the top category of entertainment on Daydream. YouTube is the most popular app in terms of time spent and number of users, as it offers a bunch of 360 videos people can enjoy watching. If you’re a Daydream user, you’ll be happy to hear that you can now watch even more pre...

The  Google Home  connected speaker is going to make its way across the pond in the near future. Rick Osterloh, the head of Google’s hardware division, has confirmed the company will begin selling the speaker in the UK sometime in the second quarter of 2017 Osterloh confirmed the company’s UK launch plans for Google Home in a chat with the BBC during the  2017 Mobile World Congress  trade show in Barcelona, Spain. He added that Google had a “huge lead in artificial intelligence”. He said that gives Google Home an advantage in being able to better interpret the questions that will be asked by its owner, compared to rival products like the  Amazon Echo , which is already on sale in the UK. Osterloh did not reveal a price point for Google Home for its launch, nor did he give a specific release date. Google Home launched in November 2016 in the US for the price of $129. Since then, the company has been aggressive in trying to promote the speaker t...

Every smartphone maker is trying its best to take battery technology to the next level, including Meizu. At  Mobile World Congress , Meizu introduced the Super mCharge battery tech that can fully charge your smartphone in just 20 minutes. The company demonstrated this on a smartphone with a 3,000 mAh battery. The battery got up to 30 percent in five minutes, 60 percent in ten minutes, 85 percent in 15 minutes, and was fully charged in 20 minutes. Meizu claims that Super mCharge is safer and more secure when compared to its rivals and has a charging power of 55W, which is delivered through a redesigned data cable that can support up to 160W. Super mCharge uses optimized charge pump technology that exports half of the voltage after transformation and yields 98 percent efficiency. The highest temperature the battery reaches during charging is 39°C, which means that you won’t have any trouble using the device while it is plugged in. Meizu’s  solution looks very promisi...

Not wanting to be left of out this week’s announcements,  Xiaomi  has just launched two new smartphones for the Chinese market. The new Redmi 4X is looking to bring premium build quality to the low cost market, while the  Mi 5c  is the company’s chance to show off what its newly unveiled in-house octa-core  Surge S1 processor  can do. Starting with the Mi 5c, this launch marks a major milestone for Xiaomi, as this is the first smartphone to launch featuring the company’s in house mobile application processor – the Surge S1. Although not the highest end chip on the market, the Surge S1 shows that Xiaomi is looking to compete with Samsung and Huawei with the development of its own in-house SoCs, and sets up some exciting prospects going forward. Other hardware inside the Mi 5c breaks down to a 5.15 - inch 1080p display , 3GB of LPDDR3 RAM , 64GB of eMMC 5.0 internal storage, and a 12MP rear camera that boasts larger than a...

Khronos , the group behind the OpenGL and Vulkan graphics APIs, has unveiled a name for its fledgling open standard virtual reality initiative at GDC 2017. Known as OpenXR, the working group is comprised of a selection of industry leaders, which are working on a royalty-free graphics standard for augmented and virtual reality applications and devices. You will find AMD, ARM, Google, LG, MediaTek, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Samsung, and many others, among the names involved in the OpenXR project. The group believes that standardization is necessary due to the increasing number of virtual reality software engines and hardware products, which is making it increasingly difficult and expensive for content developers to support numerous platforms. Not only that, but the solution is pegged as a boon for consumers too, as we should see greater compatibility and cross platform support for our favourite applications and VR platforms. The OpenXR standard will be split into two par...

Xiaomi  has announced the Surge S1, the company’s first ever processor, at an event in China. The company has been working on the chip for the past 28 months with  Pinecone , a subsidiary Xiaomi launched to research and develop the processor, and it will launch with the upcoming Xiaomi Mi 5c (release date still to be confirmed). Find out all of the details below. The Surge S1 is an octa-core SoC with four high-performance ARM Cortex A53 cores running at 2.2 GHz and four power-efficient ARM Cortex A53 at 1.4 GHz. These are optimized with ARM’s  big.LITTLE processing tech  to help deliver “peak-performance capacity, higher sustained performance, and increased parallel processing performance, at significantly lower average power.” The Surge S1 uses TSMC’s 28nm HPc process technology, and implements a Mali T860 GPU (said to be 40% more power efficient than the previous-gen Mali-T760), and a 32-bit DSP, supporting VoLTE and 16 kHz sampling. Xiaomi ...

Samsung Vice Chairman and current boss Lee Jae-yong will be indicted on charges of bribery, embezzlement and hiding assets overseas, according to a report from  Bloomberg . Lee was arrested  earlier in February  after being accused of bribing South Korean President Park Geun-hye to help him assume control of the Samsung Group. Lee had been the acting chief since 2014 when his father, Samsung’s previous owner, was hospitalized following a heart attack. A controversial merger between Samsung affiliates that Park allegedly aided was key to solidifying his position. (President Park was impeached in December amid corruption allegations and may be removed from office soon.) Following these developments, Samsung reportedly announced that it would dissolve its Corporate Strategy Office, the unit responsible for the company’s most important decisions, which had been linked to the corruption. Four Samsung executives have also been charged, including Corporat...

Ensuring Mobile cybersecurity is no easy task. Protecting against sophisticated hackers, unsophisticated hackers, corporate espionage, organized crime, and state-sponsored attacks is a full-time job. And that’s not to mention the hundreds of cybersecurity threats smartphone users encounter every day. One in five Android users experienced a mobile threat in 2014, according to Kaspersky, and there was a 262 percent increase in the number of iOS vulnerabilities in 2015 compared to 2011. Those who store sensitive information on their smartphone run the risk of data theft … and sometimes worse. But mobile security firm  DarkMatter  says it has developed a solution. It’s called Katim, which means “silence” in Arabic, and it’s an end-to-end security platform with ultra-secure encryption, two-factor authentication, and more than half a dozen other security measures designed to deter even the most determined hackers. “Data is today’s currency,” DarkMatter CE...

Elliptic Labs, the company that helped  Xiaomi’s Mi Mix  enjoy a nearly bezel-less display, is taking a stab at presence detection — technology it calls Inner Peace. It’s a direct follow-up to last year’s Inner Beauty technology, which lets smartphone manufacturers remove the proximity sensor. The technology uses the smartphone’s speaker and microphone, as well as ultrasound, to identify the gesture of moving your phone up to your face. Removal of the sensor means more space inside the device — allowing for different designs like the Xiaomi Mi Mix. Inner Peace is based off the same technology, and Elliptic Labs is aiming it primarily at Amazon’s Echo and the Google Home ecosystem. The software can be programmed to detect if a home’s occupants aren’t moving, or it can be set up notify users of possible intruders in their home. What’s key is that smart home devices can switch off when they do not detect someone nearby — potentially sa...

Xiaomi’s  Mi Mix  might not have been the perfect smartphone, but its near bezel-less screen that took up almost all of the front of the device gave us a small and satisfying glimpse into the future of what is possible with smartphone design. Fellow Chinese manufacturer Ulefone hopes to make that same impression with the  F1 , which was announced just as Mobile World Congress began getting off the ground. At first blush, the F1 looks strikingly similar to the Mi Mix in that the top and side bezels have been reduced to almost nothing. Because of this, the front camera needed to be moved to the bottom bezel, so pictures taken with the F1 might look up your nose a bit more than you would like. That does not mean the fingerprint sensor was shifted to the back, though, as is the case with the Mi Mix. Instead, you will find the F1’s fingerprint sensor below the display, and as an added bonus, it doubles as the phone’s home button. Furthermore, whereas the Mi...

AMD’s new Ryzen desktop processor family is about to arrive in an over-packed station wagon in a matter of days, threatening to put a dent in Intel’s current performance desktop processor market share. AMD has already baited customers with an option to pre-purchase its three top-of-the-line chips, with the most expensive model costing $500 and performing on a par with a similar Intel processor costing over $1,000. That has  pushed Intel to lower its prices  before the Ryzen family arrives with a bang. The price cuts have already shown up on Microcenter, revealing reductions ranging from $15 to $300. For instance, the Intel Core i7-6950X chip originally sold for $1,900, but is now $300 less, representing the biggest price reduction so far. This is a ten-core processor launched in the second quarter of 2016 with a base clock speed of 3.0GHz and a boost clock speed of 4.0GHz. Here are the price reductions seen on Microcenter so far: Core i7 Core i7-69...