Author: batteryforpc

The LineageOS custom ROM is best known for its wide range of device support. In the past month alone, the project has added the Razer Phone, Zenfone 6, and other phones to the official roster. It seems a bit strange that they weren’t already available, but ports for the OnePlus 6T and 7 Pro are now live.

LineageOS has now added support for the OnePlus 6T (code-named fajita) and 7 Pro (guacamole), thanks to the work of maintainers LuK1337, PeterCxy, and Tortel. Both devices are receiving daily builds based on LineageOS 16 (Android 9 Pie). Since these are officially-sanctioned releases, there shouldn’t be any breaking bugs.

It’s always great to see Lineage add more flagship phones to its roster, as the current selection is somewhat lacking if you don’t have access to Xiaomi devices. The more the merrier!

The design of the PlayStation 5 reportedly leaked through patent drawings, featuring a much different look compared to the console’s predecessors.

The patent, spotted by Dutch blog Let’s Go Digital, was submitted in Brazil in May and published on August 13 at the World Intellectual Property Office, where it falls under the category of electronic devices. It appears that Sony’s technical director, Yushiro Ootori, is the man behind the concept.

Let’s Go Digital later created renders for the drawings found in the patents, potentially showing the first look at the PlayStation 5.

There is little doubt that the render is a potential PlayStation 5 design, due to the classification of the patent which is also where the PlayStation 4 is categorized. However, without official confirmation from Sony, the leak looked too good to be true.

Matthew Stott, a game developer since 1992 and currently working as a senior artist in Codemasters, then confirmed that the leaked design was indeed for the PlayStation 5 — but not yet for the console that will ship to customers. In a tweet, Stott said that the device was the PlayStation 5 development kit, though there is a chance that it ends up as the final design for the console.

The post gained traction online, but Stott’s tweet has since been blocked from public view. It is unclear what happened, but it is plausible that Sony reached out to him to take down the post.

If Stott is indeed telling the truth, the PlayStation 5 development kit looks very different compared to the PlayStation 4. The cutout at the top stands out, possibly to provide additional ventilation, and the console also features five USB ports and several buttons at the front, plus two USB ports at the back.

It remains unclear if the final PlayStation 5 design will look like the development kit, but as with any rumor, everything is up in the air until official confirmation.

The PlayStation 5, which is expected to launch in 2020, will be powered by AMD chips that will be able to support 3D audio, 8K graphics, and ray tracing. A leaked benchmark test on the PlayStation 5 claimed that it will be four times more powerful than the PlayStation 4.

As we move closer and closer to the end of the year, Qualcomm will hold an announcement possibly announcing the Snapdragon 865, which we’re definitely excited for. However, it looks like before the latter is officially unveiled, a potential name of its successor, the Snapdragon 875 Mobile Platform has come forth and is expected to be made in partnership with TSMC.

TSMC Already Commenced Risk Production This Year, With Its 5nm+ Manufacturing Process Slated for Mass Production in 2021

According to a fresh report published on Sina, a few details surrounding the Snapdragon 865 Mobile Platform have come forth. As most of you know, the company’s latest Exynos 9825 is made on the Korean giant’s significantly improved 7nm EUV process, and it looks like for the Snapdragon 865, Qualcomm has partnered with Samsung to use the same technology to mass production the upcoming chipset. For 2021, the report states that Qualcomm might return to TSMC for its 5nm node when it’s gearing to release the Snapdragon 875.

That is rather strange as Samsung announced back in April that it has successfully developed 5nm EUV nodes, resulting in a 20 percent reduced power draw. Whether or not the manufacturer continues to run into yield problems, we’ll find out in the future. A separate source claims that TSMC’s 5nm+ process will be ready for mass production in 2021, which could give Qualcomm additional confidence in re-collaborating with the chip manufacturing giant.

Additionally, TSMC’s 5nm design infrastructure is reportedly completed, giving lucrative clients such as Apple to experience the node’s benefits when rolling out its advanced A14 silicon, and it’s possible Qualcomm would have carried out some test runs too behind closed doors. Sadly, there were no other details shared regarding the Snapdragon 875, but the report does mention a few tidbits for the upcoming Snapdragon 865. Firstly, the latter will reportedly arrive in two variants, codenamed ‘Kona’ and ‘Huracan’, providing support for both LPDDR5x memory and UFS 3.0 storage.

It can be assumed for now that one version of the Snapdragon 865 will feature an integrated 5G baseband modem, while the other one won’t. This little detail was talked about earlier as well, meaning that manufacturers will have a choice whether to give their devices 5G connectivity support or not, depending on which markets that model will release in. The first of many Snapdragon 865 benchmarks look promising, revealing the SoC to have made modest gains over the Snapdragon 855.

Then again, it’s too early to draw up conclusions, and like always, we’ll recommend that you treat this info with a pinch of salt. Qualcomm is expected to announce new products in December later this year. Hopefully, we’ll get some clue as to what the company plans on doing for the Snapdragon 875.

Nvidia recently announced that their beta game streaming service, GeForce Now, would get the upgrade from Pascal to Turing and with it, ray tracing – only it didn’t. Not only were users reporting that ray tracing options were absent, but the performance was up to 50% worse, leading the more inquisitive to investigate and discover their games were running on a new GeForce RTX T10-8 GPU — along with a variety of new and inadequate CPU and memory configurations.

Ten days ago we wouldn’t have been able to say what the T10-8 is, but last week’s AIDA64 update included a reference to it as a variant of Nvidia’s flagship TU102 die, the powerhouse behind the RTX 2080 Ti. Ears were perked and the conclusion that a 2080 Ti Super was coming was reached, yet it now appears that the T10-8 will exclusively power GeForce Now RTX.

However, it took Nvidia less than a day to pull the plug and return users to the older Tesla P40 GPUs, with no ray tracing capabilities. Quite the whirlwind indeed. So, what could have happened?

Shortly after Nvidia’s announcement users noticed the switch to the T10-8, either via playing games that list the hardware, noticing severe performance drops, or both. One user had Ghost Recon Wildlands detect a dual-core system with 7 GB of system memory and an RTX T10-8 GPU with 8 GB of memory, all running on Windows Server 2012. That last part may explain the issues with ray tracing: Windows 2012 doesn’t support Microsoft’s DXR ray tracing implementation, and Nvidia’s initial fix might’ve not been as good as it needed to be.

A few other things didn’t add up, like the GPU’s average usage during the Ghost Recon Wildlands 1080p benchmark at 81% on a dual core CPU and just 8 GB of memory, so it’s possible (and this is just speculation) each user was given half a T10-8 to game on. There’s some evidence for this: one user found a 48% reduction in Fire Strike score between the P40 (equivalent to the GTX 1080) with a regular CPU and RAM configuration, and their T10-8 system with slightly worse CPU and RAM numbers. A few users who apparently didn’t witness any performance drop report their T10-8 systems as having 16 GB of memory.

What may have occurred is that Nvidia’s marketing team outdid their engineering team, building up enough hype about ray tracing on GeForce Now that every user decided to log on and test it out simultaneously, exceeding the number of supported systems. As an automatic fix, the software could have divided each system into two virtual ones, doubling the number of possible players but halving the performance.

Since the initial release several days ago, however, the reports of poor performance and broken ray tracing have ceased, so it seems likely things are working as they should for most players.

The bottom line is there’s no RTX 2080 Ti Super coming to the mass market for now. This isn’t a huge surprise considering Nvidia can’t squeeze another configuration between the 2080 Ti (4352 cores) and the Titan RTX (4608 cores) without drastically sabotaging one. On the flip side, GeForce Now users should get a nice performance boost with the T10-8 once the bugs are ironed out.

Google’s gotten a lot of grief for its messaging strategy, and rightly so. While Facebook and Apple have seen their messaging platforms become indispensable to users and businesses alike, Google has launched a litany of apps whose pithy names (Buzz, Wave, Allo, Hangouts, and the list goes on) couldn’t save them from the dustbin of chat history.

But lately it seems like the search giant has got its messaging groove back.

Getting to RC-yes

By now you’re probably familiar with RCS, the new telecom standard that’s supposed to rescue old fashioned text messaging from the flip-phone era. RCS stands for Rich Communication Services and it comes with modern messaging features like read receipts, typing indicators, and verified business profiles. In other words, it looks and feels like iMessage or WhatsApp, but works over your cell phone network instead of the internet, à la SMS.

For the last year or two, Google has been spearheading a campaign to get global telcos and device carriers to support RCS and stymie its messaging competitors in the process. Now it’s finally taking matters into its own hands.

Android users in France and the UK (and soon elsewhere) are now able to opt in to RCS services provided directly by Google instead of waiting for their telco to flip the switch. While this may sound like a minor development in the decade-old RCS saga, it’s actually a “huge shift in strategy,” explains The Verge: it’s not quite the Google equivalent of an iMessage service for Android users, but it’s close.

Paranoid Android

Google’s gambit solves one of the major hurdles for RCS success, which is that up until now it depended on global carriers and device makers to play nicely with each other. The other hurdle is even bigger. Unlike WhatsApp, iMessage, and other internet-based (OTT) chat apps like Telegram and Signal, RCS does not boast end-to-end encryption — a fact Amnesty International raked Google over the coals for last year.

For privacy-conscious users, end-to-end encryption has become table stakes, as Mary Meeker showed in her latest internet trends report. The good news is that Google finally seems to get it. Sanaz Ahari, the product director responsible for Android Messages assured The Verge it’s committed to finding a solution.

Place your (Alpha)bets

As I’ve argued before, here on TNW, RCS is only half of Google’s two-pronged strategy to dominate B2C messaging. The other is Google business messaging, which the company is quietly integrating into Maps and search — two areas where it’s no laggard.

Meanwhile, as VentureBeat’s Khari Johnson observes, the company’s voice messaging strategy is “ubiquitous and comprehensive,” boasting both AI (Google Assistant, Google Duplex) and hardware (Google Home) that puts it at the top of the conversational class.

In Johnson’s view: All of this adds up to one fact: By some measure, Google may have already won the chat wars.

Bose has long been a huge player in the world of portable speakers – and its latest model, the Bose Portable Home Speaker, should serve to cement that reputation even further.

The new Bluetooth speaker packs wireless connectivity, a 12-hour battery life and 360-degree audio into a super compact form, coming in at just 2.3 pounds (around 1kg).

The best portable speakers of 2019

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Staying close to home? Check out the Bose Home Speaker 500

The Bose Portable Home Speaker, which will be available in black and silver from September 19, will cost $349 / £369.95 / AU$499.95 – ever so slightly less expensive than the pricey Bose Home Speaker 500.

No sweet-spot necessary

Measuring 7.5 inches tall, the portable speaker is wrapped in an anodized aluminum enclosure. Inside, there are three passive radiators, a high-excursion driver and a proprietary deflector that Bose says deflects “clear, lifelike sound evenly in every direction”.

Despite it’s small size, Bose says its latest speaker delivers powerful bass, and, “unlike conventional speakers, there’s no sweet-spot for placement or listening” – that means you can sit wherever you like in relation to the speaker, and it should still sound fantastic.

With 12 hours of battery and an IPX4 rating, it’s suitable for listening to outside and on-the-go (although you probably shouldn’t take it to the pool), and its rugged design means it should survive slight knocks and bumps.

If you like to listen with your hands full, you can use your voice to control the Bose Portable Home Speaker, with both Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa built-in to access “playlists, podcasts, news, weather, smart home devices, and more,” according to Bose.

iPhone and iPad owners will be able to stream their music via Apple AirPlay 2, while Spotify users can stream via Spotify Connect.

With all those features packed in to such a small package, Bose will surely be looking to fend off competition from the yet-to-be-released Sonos portable speaker – we’ll have to wait a little while to find out which brand will win in the next battle of the Bluetooth speakers, but we’re excited to find out.