MediaTek announces the new Helio X23 and X27 deca-core mobile processors

The name MediaTek is usually associated with lower-end Chinese smartphones and tablets, since their SoCs are rather inexpensive. In the last year or so, the chip manufacturer has been working to push past that reputation. When it introduced the Helio X20, a few people took notice. Innovation is not usually the game with MediaTek, but it does try some interesting CPU designs. Today, it revealed the new Helio X23 and Helio X27 mobile processors.

These upgrades to the Helio line come with some nice improvements. They both have better support for dual cameras and even better power management. The "Tri-Cluster" architecture remains the same with two ARM Cortex-A72 and eight Cortex A-53 clusters (though, four of those eight are clocked at a different frequency than the other four). Also, the scheduling algorithm called CorePilot has been updated to version 3.0 for these SoCs.

In addition to showing off the odd CPU designs, MediaTek has added full support for multiple cameras with the upgraded Imagiq signal-processing solution. The claim is that Imagiq is the first ISP to integrate color and mono cameras, as well as depth-of-field applications, into one single solution. All of this is to mean that, in theory, the Helio X23 and X27 will be better equipped to provide high quality and functionality to mobile photography.

Finally, the chipsets include new screen power-saving technology. The CPUs will modify the "smart" display parameters using contexts like on-screen content and ambient lighting. This is supposed to provide a 25% reduction in how much power the screen consumes. The X23 and X27 should be hitting new devices soon. 

Meizu Officially Announces the Pro 6 Plus and M3X running on Flyme 6

The company just announced two new smartphones, a big update to their OEM skin, and their plans for which devices will be getting the Flyme 6 update. We’ve heard whispers about the existence of the following two smartphones for quite some time, but Meizu has finally made it official. The Meizu Pro 6 Plus and the Meizu M3X will be joining the Meizu line-up as the first two devices running on Flyme OS version 6.

The Meizu Pro 6 Plus has a metal unibody build with the Samsung Exynos 8890 SoC. For reference, this is the same chip found in the Exynos variant of the Samsung Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge. The Pro 6 Plus will ship in two variants – a 64GB storage model with an underclocked CPU and a 128GB storage model clocked a little higher. Both variants will sport 4GBs of RAM, a 5.7″ Super AMOLED 1440p display, a 5MP, f/2.0 front camera, a 12MP 1/2.9” Sony IMX386 Exmor RS sensor with 1.25µm f/2.0 rear camera, and a 3,400mAh capacity battery.

The Meizu M3X is a mid-range device with its MediaTek Helio P20 SoC, a 5.5″ 1080p Sharp TDDI LCD display with “2.5D” curved glass, a 5MP front-facing camera, a 12MP 1.25 μm f/2.0 Sony camera on the rear, 3GBs of RAM, 32GBs of internal storage, and a 3,200mAh capacity battery.

Both the Pro 6 Plus and the M3X will feature the company’s updated mTouch 2.1 fingerprint scanner along with their mCharge fast charging technology that promises to charge 40% in 30 minutes thanks to its 18W charger. In addition, both of these new smartphones will be running on Meizu’s latest Flyme OS version 6 OEM skin that is built on top of Android 6.0 Marshmallow. Meizu has also announced their plans for which devices will receive the Flyme 6 update. So if you have any of the following, you should look forward to an OTA update over the coming months.

• Meizu Pro 6
• Meizu MX6
• Meizu Pro 5
• Meizu MX5
• Meizu MX4 
• ProMeizu MX4
• Meizu M3 Max
• Meizu M3 Note
• Meizu M3E
• Meizu M3s
• Meizu M2 Note
• Meizu M2
• Meizu M1 Note
• Meizu U20
• Meizu U10

Spotify to ramp up its original content with new weekly series

Spotify appears to be following Netflix in the direction of original content with a weekly series of programming consisting of two programs. The first, Singles, will feature big name acts recording a pair of songs exclusively for the service. One of these tracks will be one of the artist’s own songs, but the recording itself will be Spotify exclusive. The other track will be a cover. 

Spotify is promising that each Singles release will be accompanied by exclusive artwork, and some will feature video content. 

The second program, Live, is a live series of recordings with fans in attendance. Spotify has already been producing similar content under its fan-free ‘Sessions’ banner which Live will be replacing.

It’s been a big year for Spotify, which has recently announced the top five acts streamed through the service in the UK which featured Drake, Justin Bieber, Kanye West, Coldplay and Twenty One Pilots. However with Spotify’s top lists still being dominated by non-exclusive artists such as these, it appears the service is looking to bolster its exclusive offering after the aggressive moves by Tidal and Apple Music to secure exclusives of their own. 

In the past Spotify has spoken out against the practice of streaming exclusives, so it’s interesting to see the company go down this route with exclusive versions of songs, rather than exclusive studio albums.  Need some cans to listen to your streamed music? Check out our guide to the best headphones.

Huawei Fit review

The Huawei Fit tries to answer the call for those looking for a simplistic, traditional-looking fitness tracker. There are even a few surprise features included, but the interface isn’t as intuitive as it claims, and slightly pricier competing wearables offer a much better value overall. Last year’s Android Wear-powered Huawei Watch didn't offer much in the way of fitness smarts, but it acts as the perfect segue to the Huawei Fit, marking the company’s first full step into the fitness tracker space. 

Or, is it more of a half-step?

Buy Huawei Fit at Amazon for $99.99

The Huawei Fit looks and feels enough like a proper effort, with a minimalistic design and sought-after features along for the ride, like waterproofing, continuous heart rate monitoring, up to six days of battery life, and training plan, which helps to prep you for a marathon. 

At $129 (awaiting global pricing and availability details), it sits in an awkward place in the fitness tracker market. It might look a lot like the Pebble Time Round, but it lacks the little things that work so well in setting that wearable apart, like its soulful interface, music playback and native app support. 

Sure, it’s cheaper than the Samsung Gear Fit 2, but we’d much rather pay $50 more to have built-in GPS functionality, and more importantly, the vibrant AMOLED display with the responsive Tizen operating system. The Huawei Fit doesn’t stand out from the crowd, but that’s not its fatal flaw. Huawei’s fitness tracker just doesn’t feel all that smart. 

If the aforementioned features cover your needs, Huawei’s wearable will probably satisfy you. But for everyone else, here are the candidates for best fitness tracker in 2016.

Design : 

Slick, traditional look

Very comfortable to wear on a 24/7 basis

18mm band support offers broad customization

Huawei’s fitness tracker rocks a circular face, which is no doubt a desirable design trait for those looking to replace their watch with something a little smarter, but no less traditional.

It’s clad in an aluminum enclosure, and is capped on its top with a plastic-covered LCD touchscreen, which supports simple gestures, like tapping and multi-directional swiping. 

Surrounding the 208 x 208 monochromatic ambient-lit display, Huawei added a handy ring that shows the minute markers, which works in tandem with a few of the built-in watch faces to give you an analog-esque look at the time. Flipped over, its heart rate sensor comes into view along along with the pogo pins used to charge the Fit on its included micro USB charging dock. Like other fitness trackers, Huawei’s uses photoplethysmography to track your heart rate. If you’re curious how it works in-depth, you can read more about that right here.

Lastly, the Fit supports any 18mm watch strap you may already have laying around. The default orange strap is pretty eye-opening and comfortable, though we take every possible opportunity to swap in Google’s-own Modebands that we use on the Huawei Watch and LG Watch Urbane. Although the fit wasn’t perfect, it made for a more unique-looking wearable. This fitness tracker would also look great with a NATO strap.

Android key mobile competition Security

Google has dismissed the European commission’s charges that it abuses the market dominance of its Android operating system to prevent rivals from competing with alternative software and services.

The EC filed charges in April that could carry a fine for Google of up to $7.4bn (£5.9bn), or 10% of its global revenue, and centre on what the commission saw as “unjustified restrictions and conditions” placed on smartphone and tablet makers, preventing them from choosing other, non-Google default search engines and browsers.

Kent Walker, senior vice president and general counsel for Google, said: “Android hasn’t hurt competition, it’s expanded it. Android is the most flexible mobile platform out there, balancing the needs of thousands of manufacturers and operators, millions of app developers and more than a billion consumers. Upsetting this balance would raise prices, hamper innovation, reduce choice and limit competition.”

In its response to the EC today, Google objects to several of the commission’s premises, including the view that Google’s Android does not compete with Apple’s iOS operating system that runs iPhones and iPads.

Walker said: “The commission’s case is based on the idea that Android doesn’t compete with Apple’s iOS. We don’t see it that way. We don’t think Apple does either. Or phone makers. Or developers. Or users.

“To ignore competition with Apple is to miss the defining feature of today’s competitive smartphone landscape.”

The company claims that its agreements with smartphone makers, which insist that a suite of Google apps be pre-installed on devices with some positioned on the homescreen when a device is first started, allow Google to distribute Android for free and continue investing in the development of the platform.

Industry watchers said Google’s prospects of making money from advertising could diminish if its apps were not pre-loaded on devices, despite users being free to delete many of them and replace all of them apps of their choosing.

It also insists that its agreements are crucial to allow anyone to take Android and modify it to suit their requirements, but maintain a level of control on compatibility to help prevent so-called fragmentation, where one version is incompatible with another.

Walker said: “Our voluntary compatibility agreements enable variety while giving developers confidence to create apps that run seamlessly across thousands of different phones and tablets. This balance stimulates competition between Android devices as well as between Android and Apple’s iPhone.”

Google’s Play Store has more than 2.2m third-party apps available for download across 1,000s of devices, including apps from the search company’s chief rivals, Apple, Microsoft and Facebook, of which Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp have been downloaded more than 1bn times.

Commenting on the EC’s case, Daniel Castro, vice president of tech policy think tank ITIF said: “If Google instead only sold Google-made devices, it would … control all aspects of the operating system plus the apps it includes on Android devices.

“This is exactly what companies like Apple and Blackberry have long done with their respective mobile operating systems, yet the practice is not considered anti-competitive for them.”

The case against Android comes at a time when Google is also embroiled in a battle with the EC over its Shopping search engine feature and its AdSense text advertising service. Last week, Google dismissed the commission’s Shopping case with similar rhetoric, saying that its competition with Amazon should be taken into account.

Galaxy S7s Are Not Exploding

Isolated reports of Samsung's flagship Galaxy S7 smartphone exploding have not been confirmed, according to the Korean tech giant. As it continues to deal with the aftermath to end production of the Galaxy Note 7 some Galaxy S7 have seemingly exploded as well.

There have been several recent reports in Asia and Canada, according to VentureBeat, raising the possibility that the same issues that plagued the Samsung Galaxy Note7 are also cropping up in the Samsung Galaxy S7. In the US, a construction worker in Ohio and an employee at a smartphone store both claimed that they had seen fire-damaged on the slightly dated flagships, PhoneArena reported.

In a statement, Samsung said there are 10 million Samsung Galaxy S7 devices in the US, and none of them have had internal battery failures, but it has confirmed "a number of instances" caused that are known to have severe external damage.

"Until Samsung is able to obtain and examine any device, it is impossible to determine the true cause of any incident," the statement said. It is certainly unclear if the company had sought out the devices in the reported explosions to examine them. A spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Samsung's reputation as a maker of high-end smartphones took a big hit two months back when it recalled and ultimately discontinued the Note 7 following multiple confirmed reports of fires and explosions. The US Department of Transportation classified the next-gen flagship smartphone as dangerous goods and banned passengers from carrying them on commercial flights.

Samsung apologised to consumers and even offered incentives, all of which come in zone-specific variants, to get owners to switch to another Samsung flagship device. At press time, it has so not yet announced the cause of the fires and explosions.

Amazon Alexa Offers Hands-Free Access to 60,000 Recipes Cooking

Amazon Alexa wears many hats—fitness tracker, mood setter, life scheduler, trip planner, and now, sous chef. In partnership with Allrecipes, the digital assistant helps you plan breakfast, lunch, and dinner via hands-free access to 60,000 recipes.

"There is no need to tap, swipe, type, or squint to get the five-star results your family craves," Allrecipes said in a YouTube video description (watch below).

To enable the feature, simply open the Alexa mobile app, navigate to Menu > Skills > Allrecipes; created a new account or link to an existing one before asking Alexa to search and save favorite meals from the website.

Use just your voice to find step-by-step instructions by title, ingredients, or cooking time. Say "Alexa, ask Allrecipes for the Recipe of the Day," for instance. Or "Alexa, ask Allrecipes for an easy lasagna recipe."

Need ideas for how to create a meal using the three ingredients left in your fridge? Kids hungry for something other than meatloaf? Ask Alexa. She even broadcasts online ratings and reacts to personal needs like time limit.

Home chefs, meanwhile, can also tap into the artificial intelligence to control connected General Electric kitchen appliances—refrigerators, dishwashers, wall ovens, ranges, laundry machines—thanks to a recent partnership between GE and Amazon.

As of September 2016, Alexa boasted more than 3,000 skills—triple the amount it had just three months earlier.