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Pretty good, fairly decent, and not bad are all phrases that can be used to describe the LG G Flex 2. The younger, more curvaceous cousin of the LG G3 has respectable specs and a body curved like a banana that you either think is awesome or pointless and stupid. Speaking of stupid, the price when it launched was an insane $709 on AT$T (that ain't no typo) and apparently everyone agreed that price was obscene because they keep popping up brand new on ebay for a whole lot less.
We got our best look yet at the Huawei Nexus phone (codename Angler) earlier today, and now we've got a few more pics from the same source. This time the phone is in a protective case that obscures many of the features, but there's one thing we can see plain as day—a USB Type-C port. It's happening.
You are probably familiar with the issues surrounding the Snapdragon 810 by now, but a new chip is right around the corner that could get Qualcomm back on track. I speak of course of the fabled Snapdragon 820 (MSM8996). Details of this chip have allegedly been leaked in China, and while we can't know for sure that they're accurate, the slides sure look legit.
A combination of pre-announcements and leaks have given us a good idea what the OnePlus 2 will be like, and it looks like those leaks were accurate. The device OnePlus just announced is the one we saw leaked. We've got a full hands-on you can check out to get a better idea of the aesthetics, and of course we've got the full specs and details right below.
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It's not easy being a chip and component maker in the smartphone industry and trying to turn a profit when competitors are driving the prices down to a point where an entire phone can cost somewhere around $50. It's even harder when the high-end market is being governed by a few players, the major one of whom decides to "dump" your chips and use their own for its flagship. That's Qualcomm's conundrum right now. The company, which has been a mainstay on the spec sheet of a grand majority of the Android phones we talk about here on Android Police, is hitting a rough patch — not enough to sound the alarm sirens, but enough to jeopardize the employment of thousands of its workforce.
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Remember how exciting incredibly annoying it was when OnePlus revealed the OnePlus One a single spec at a time? Well, that's happening again this year. The company has just posted on the official forums to let everyone know what processor the OnePlus 2 will be using—it's the Snapdragon 810. Get your overheating jokes ready.
Sony's de facto flagship right now is the Xperia Z3+ (AKA the Xperia Z4 in some regions). It runs a Snapdragon 810 processor, which has gained a reputation for running hot. Sony's camera software isn't doing anything to prove that assumption wrong. Watch in the video below as the camera app crashes in a few seconds because of high temperatures.
Okay, Sony. Can you just decide what you want to call this phone? Is it the Z4 like in Japan, or the Z3+ as in most other markets? I say this because the phone is coming to the US as the Xperia Z4v on Verizon. It will be out this summer with obnoxious Verizon branding and yes, a Snapdragon 810. It's not clear if Verizon will be posting warnings in its stores.
Sony is in a strange place these days. It has been on a 6-8 month flagship update schedule for several years, which is surely hard to maintain. Now the Z4 is out in Japan and the Snapdragon 810 at its heart is reportedly getting very, very toasty. So much so that carrier NTT Docomo has warning signs in retail stores. Ouch.
Google recently dropped the price of the Project Tango developer tablet to $512, but there was no new hardware announced at I/O. Qualcomm just can't contain itself any longer, apparently. The chip maker has announced a new piece of Tango hardware is on the way, and it's powered by the Snapdragon 810 [insert overheating joke].
Sony has just announced the follow-up to its flagship device, the... why does it feel like I've written this story before? Oh, because I have. So a month after making its Xperia Z4 official in Japan, Sony is taking that device and releasing it with a more appropriate name for the global market: Xperia Z3+. Let's face it, the changes compared to the Z3 are minimal enough not to warrant a full number increase, so the switch back to the Z3+ is more honest on the company's behalf.
Back at MWC, while everyone was waiting for Sony to announce its follow-up flagship, the Xperia Z4, the company decided to keep it under wraps and instead unveiled the mid-range Xperia M4 Aqua and the Xperia Z4 Tablet. Today, the phone has finally been made official in Sony's home turf of Japan during a press conference that made all of the Z4's details public but left out any information regarding its global release or price.
Remember those rumblings of overheating problems with Qualcomm's Snapdragon 810 mobile processor? I think it's safe to say that they've been confirmed. Dutch enthusiast site Tweakers used a thermal camera to test the temperature of various high-end phones while running the intense GFXBench benchmark application. They found that the new HTC One M9, powered by the top-of-the-line Snapdragon 810, could reach temperatures as high as 55.4 degrees Celsius (131.7 degrees Fahrenheit).
It almost goes without saying, but benchmarks are not everything. These numbers don't always tell you how a device will perform, but they do tell you something. Right now the Galaxy S6 is telling us that Samsung's new Exynos chip is very, very fast. It's putting up AnTuTu scores of nearly 70,000, well above the values produced by devices like the LG G3, Nexus 6, LG G Flex 2, and even the new HTC One M9.
We've heard a lot of back and forth about the Snapdragon 810, the first high-end 64-bit ARM processor from Qualcomm. First there were rumors that overheating caused Samsung to drop the chip from its Galaxy S6, then LG said the 810 was fine in the G Flex 2. Now, however, Qualcomm says the 810 will not be powering "a large customer's flagship device" this year. That almost certainly means Samsung.
There have been rumors in recent weeks that Qualcomm's new 64-bit Snapdragon 810 was running so hot that OEMs were considering different chips. There was even a report from Bloomberg yesterday that claimed Samsung had decided not to use the 810 in any of the Galaxy S6 variants. Now LG is chiming in to pour some cold water on such speculation. LG's vice president for mobile product planning says there's no problem with the 810.
Samsung and Qualcomm have been reliable partners since the rise of Android, to the mutual benefit of both the phone maker and the OEM chip supplier. But according to this report from Bloomberg, that relationship has hit a rocky patch as Samsung prepares its next flagship phone, presumably the Galaxy S6. An anonymous tipster told Bloomberg that Samsung will decline to use a Qualcomm chipset for the phone after poor testing of the Snapdragon 810, the OEM's top-of-the-line processor.
In comparison with just a few years ago, Wi-Fi is pretty fast, especially if you've upgraded to a 5GHz router. But there's no reason that it can't be faster. To that end, electronics OEM supplier Qualcomm has purchased Wilocity, a California startup specializing in 60GHz 802.11ad Wi-Fi, also known as WiGig. This standard is still in the latter stages of development, but when it starts appearing in devices sometime next year, it should be able to sustain wireless data speeds of up to seven gigabits per second.