Standalone VR headsets like Oculus Go have shown up to middling reviews, and smart glasses are still a mess. If AR and VR headsets don’t get smoother and cheaper, they may never catch on. Qualcomm’s trying to help with a new chip, the Snapdragon XR1, intended to get more affordable AR and VR wearables off …
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The Trump administration told lawmakers it reached a deal to keep Chinese phone maker ZTE in business, according to a report Friday in The New York Times. The deal, arranged by the Commerce Department, requires ZTE to pay a substantial fine, hire American compliance officers and change its management team, says the Times report, which cites an unnamed source familiar …
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By the end of June, a new wave of phones with trendy AI features will start to sell for less. That’s when the first handsets to use Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 710 processor will be ready for business. Mobile processors, or chipsets, are the brains behind everything from photo processing to device security and data speeds. The nuts and bolts of chipsets …
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“The bad: Two-hour battery life.” That’s from our review of the $199 Oculus Go, one of the first compelling VR headsets cheap enough to throw in a bag and carry around. But short battery life may not plague portable headsets for long: Bloomberg reports that a new, unannounced Qualcomm Snapdragon XR1 processor will make it easier to build cheap VR and …
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Facebook and Qualcomm are teaming up to bring super-fast Wi-Fi to built-up urban areas, the two companies announced Monday. Qualcomm said it will integrate Facebook’s Terragraph technology, which uses high-frequency radio waves to speed up networks where populations are dense, into its upcoming chipsets. Terragraph is a millimeter-wavelength, 60GHz wireless system that serves as an alternative when laying fiber becomes …
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The BlackBerry Key2 will be unveiled on June 7, and we may now be getting an idea of how fast the phone could be. Two listings for an unannounced BlackBerry phone appeared on benchmarking site Geekbench (here and here). The listings tell us the BlackBerry phone runs Android 8.1 and comes with a Snapdragon 660 processor. Since no current BlackBerry phone …
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A project codenamed Google A65 is thought to be a standalone AR headset, and now we may have more details about it. German news site Winfuture.de says it has documents that indicate Google’s working with Taiwanese manufacturer Quanta on the augmented reality headset. Google’s previously worked with Quanta on the Pixel C tablet. The headset is expected to include camera sensors and …
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If you’re into Android phones, the newly announced OnePlus 6 is exciting. If you’re one of the approximately 7.6 billion people who’ve seen Avengers: Infinity War, here’s something extra to get excited about. OnePlus unveiled the Avengers edition of its OnePlus 6 at the phone’s launch in Beijing, China. It’s the same as the regular model, but with a Kevlar-patterned …
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President Donald Trump is doubling down on his defense of Chinese telecommunications giant ZTE. Trump said on Twitter on Monday that ZTE, the fourth-largest smartphone maker in the US by market share, “buys a big percentage of individual parts from U.S. companies.” HE also said ZTE was “reflective of the larger trade deal we are negotiating with China and my …
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Count President Donald Trump as one of Chinese phone maker ZTE’s new allies. ZTE, the fourth-largest smartphone maker in the US, has been dealing with a US Commerce Department denial order that prevents US businesses from selling hardware or services to the company — a seven-year ban that forced ZTE to shut down its “major operating activities.” It looks, though, like ZTE …
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