Qualcomm has introduced a new breakthrough in the fingerprint scanning technology called Snapdragon Sense ID.

Unlike the competitive solutions, the new tech relies on ultrasonic 3D scanning and works through all kind of surfaces such as glass, sapphire, metal, aluminum and plastic. Read more »

Samsung introduced a new version of the Oculus-powered Gear VR Innovator Edition headset. The new Gear VR is compatible with the newly announced Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 edge and is 15% smaller.

The Galaxy VR Innovator Edition with Oculus technology is already available for purchase globally for $199. The headset is compatible only with the Samsung Galaxy Note 4 phablet, but Samsung and Oculus will be launching a Galaxy S6-compatible edition as well. Read more »

Acer’s MWC press event is already under way in Barcelona and a few new phones have been announced. Among these are two entry-level Android phones which are meant to extend the Liquid line, as well as a Windows Phone handset. The manufacturer has already released promotional videos for the pair of phones, which can be found on YouTube.

Despite their modest appearance Acer markets the devices as “all-rounder” phones and accents on the full-featured Android experience they deliver. All three phones spout a rather small, by today’s standards 4-inch 233ppi WVGA screen. The two Android models are powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 SoC, clocked at 1.2 GHz with only 1 GB of RAM. The Z220 spouts a 5MP main shooter, while its bigger brother, the Z520 has an 8MP camera and a small 2MP camera sits on the front of both devices. Read more »

Intel is trying to make its Atom line of processors more user-friendly naming scheme than the current four digit (plus maybe letters) arrangement. From now on Atoms will follow the same three-fold division that the premium Core i processors have, but with a different letter.

The good, better and best of the Intel Atoms will be labeled x3, x5 and x7 respectively. And that’s not all, as Intel’s PR blogpost suggests that the change is not in the names only, but there is actually new silicone ready to be announced. Read more »

Samsung announced the industry’s first 128GB UFS 2.0 flash memory for smartphones. The Korean giant’s ultra-fast memory has already entered mass production.

UFS memory features “Command Queue” tech used in SSDs for accelerating the speed of command execution. Read more »

The MediaTek MT6795 chipset has been in the works for quite a while now, but early benchmarks show it will have Samsung’s Exynos 7420 to compete with, while Snapdragon 810 lags behind. All three of these chipsets have the same basic CPU setup – a big.LITTLE combo with four Cortex-A57 and four Cortex-A53.

The leaked result comes from Geekbench 3.0, a developer board by the looks of it. This is a CPU benchmark so we can’t compare GPUs – the PowerVR G6200 in the MediaTek, the Mali-T760 in the Exynos and the Adreno 430 in the Snapdragon. Read more »

Samsung has definitely been on a streak lately. And this does not refer only to the ever-growing mobile market or the TV segment with the new UHD niche. The Korean tech giant is hitting big in terms of technology innovations. Recent developments in 14nm production methods as well as improving market positions and stable supply contracts have turned the Koreans in a key industry manufacturer.

Amidst all of this success Samsung Electronics president Kinam Kim sounded naturally excited about the company’s future at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC). In his speech he went into detail about the relatively new concept of Internet of Things (IoT). According to Cisco Systems estimates there are currently about 14.4 billion devices connected to the internet, which is quite a lot considering that there are half as much people worldwide. He believes that by 2020 this number will grow to the whopping 50 billion. Read more »

Samsung scooped Intel and demoed the first 10nm FinFET chip in the world. The company had previously made eMMC storage and D-RAM chips at that node, but FinFET is the first step towards a 10nm Exynos chipset.

Samsung is already at 14nm and will be making the Galaxy S6-generation Exynos chipsets at that node, along with Apple’s new chipset. Qualcomm meanwhile is building the Snapdragon 810 on the older 20nm process. Read more »

Intel has been working on the 14nm node for years, but it’s now sorted out and shipping – both as the mobile Broadwell processors in laptops and the Cherry Trail chipsets for phones and tablets. The next stop will be at 10nm, but Intel has plotted the future to 7nm as well.

These nanometers reflect the size of a silicon chip’s components. The smaller they are, the smaller the chip is. Also, shrinking the process node is the leading way to improve power efficiency and reduce the amount of produced heat. Read more »

JDI is one of the big players in the mobile display space, and the Japanese company has now announced a new smartwatch screen. It’s of the round variety, as you can see, and it’s the reflective type. According to its maker, this means it will enable some significant advancements in smartwatch battery life.

That’s because its power consumption can be as low as 0.5% or less when compared to a traditional LCD module. JDI says that its reflective design can achieve this because it’s different than a normal LCD panel, where 80% of the power requirements go to the backlight. Read more »

A 4K slate with the freshly announced NVIDIA Tegra X1 chipset scored a whopping 74,977 points on AnTuTu. The score is the highest we’ve seen on the popular benchmark to date – the currently available top-tier mobile devices hover around the 50,000 mark.

NVIDIA Tegra X1 features octa-core CPU cluster, consisting of four Cortex A57 and four Cortex A53 cores with a custom CPU interconnect and cluster migration. On the GPU side, NVIDIA has turned to using its latest generation Maxwell architecture in a GPU with 256 CUDA cores. Read more »

Samsung has created the first memory chip based on the new eMMC 5.1 standard and is getting ready to ship it to smartphone and tablet manufacturers. The new chips come in 16GB, 32GB and 64GB capacities and offer better speed and other enhancements over the older standard.

The eMMC 5.1 chips support “Secure Write Protection,” which allows only select users to access secure areas of the storage. Another extra is the command queue that promises to improve multitasking and UHD video playback. Read more »

Project Ara is an odd beast – it’s the IBM PC of the smartphone world, a common platform for which different manufacturers can build components. Toshiba unveiled several camera modules for the customizable smartphone platform and this is just Phase 1, Phase 2 includes a wider selection of modules and finally Phase 3 will bring “unique modules” (that’s still under planning).

Anyway, there are three camera modules – one selfie camera and two main cameras for the back. Read more »

Samsung Display has plans to spend $3.6 billion on a new OLED display production line. A Samsung spokesman told Reuters about about the Korean giant’s future plans.

Most of the new production capacity will focus on small and medium-sized OLED panels for consumer devices. Read more »

MWC 2015 is just a few weeks away now and all eyes are on the major mobile players. Everybody seems to be preparing to bring their A material to the venue. Everybody with one notable exception as it appears. Despite imminent fan disappointment, Sony might just skip on formalities and not do a major press conference in Barcelona.

According to industry sources the Japanese tech giant will most likely keep a low profile this year and avoid the big stage and live streams of previous years. This is somewhat understandable considering that Sony might not have much new hardware to show at the venue. Read more »