Qualcomm’s proposed $44 billion takeover of Dutch chipmaker NXP has become a casualty of the US trade war with China. Qualcomm on Wednesday didn’t extend its deadline for closing the deal, opting instead to buy back up to $30 billion in shares from investors. The deal had been on hold for nearly two years as …

Qualcomm has solved a big problem for a certain variation of 5G: getting the chips small enough to fit in handheld devices. On Monday, Qualcomm unveiled its new QTM052 millimeter wave and QPM56xx sub-6GHz radio frequency antenna module families. They work alongside the company’s Snapdragon X50 5G to bring superfast network speeds to smartphones. The modules will let phone makers …

Fingerprint-smudged smartphones may soon be a thing of the past, thanks to new technology from glass maker Corning.  Handset vendors like Apple and Samsung have been incorporating more and more glass in their phone designs over the past couple of years. While devices originally had glass just over the front touchscreen, designs now contain glass that curves around the edges …

Klutzes, rejoice. Your next smartphone should be able to survive multiple drops. On Wednesday, glass maker Corning unveiled its newest technology, Gorilla Glass 6, which it says should survive repeated drops from heights of 1 meter (3.28 feet). In its tests, the glass lasted through 15 drops, twice as many as Gorilla Glass 5. Normal glass failed on the first …

Without Apple’s App Store, your iPhone may well have just stayed a phone. The App Store has been around so long, it’s easy to forget that it wasn’t always a core part of the iPhone concept. The store came a year after the introduction of original iPhone, arriving with the iPhone 3G. It debuted with 500 apps from developers like MLB …

Streets that led to nowhere. Bridges that looked like roller coasters. Cities that ceased to exist.   That was the state of Apple Maps nearly six years ago. Not anymore. And Apple Maps is about to get even better. For the past four years, Apple has been working on rebuilding its mapping technology from the ground up. Instead of relying …

The long-running patent battle between Apple and Samsung is finally over. The two phone giants on Wednesday notified a district court in San Jose, California, that “they have agreed to drop and settle their remaining claims and counterclaims in this matter.” Judge Lucy Koh, of the Northern District of California, signed the order dismissing all suits with prejudice, which means …

Qualcomm is betting more kids will soon be sporting smartwatches. The San Diego chipmaker on Tuesday in Shanghai (Wednesday, China time) unveiled its new Snapdragon Wear 2500 Platform to help make watches geared toward kids. Yes, that’s right. Smartwatches for children. Qualcomm makes chips for everything from smartphones to Windows 10 tablet-laptop hybrids. While it already provides processors for wearables, …

Apple’s always believed in curation — and that’s even true when it comes to news, Apple CEO Tim Cook said Monday.  Earlier in the day, Apple unveiled a 2018 midterm elections section in its News app, promising US readers curated content through November. It will offer coverage from Fox News, Vox and other selected outlets, along with exclusives like The …

If you’ve been dying to turn yourself into an animated cartoon, you’re in luck. Apple’s public beta version of iOS 12, with its new Memoji feature, is now available for download.  The software, which runs on iPhones and iPads, won’t be finalized and officially released until the fall. Those of you who can’t wait until then can enroll in Apple’s …