Huawei made the Mate S official at the beginning of the month during its IFA press conference, and now the phablet has gone up for pre-order in Europe.

Huawei itself is offering the device straight to consumers through its official online store for the continent. You can currently pre-order the Mate S if you live in Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, or the UK.

The handset can be bought in two color versions, Titanium Silver or Mystic Champagne. Pricing is as follows: £469 in the UK, €649 in the Eurozone, and CHF 649 in Switzerland. Pre-orders are only set to ship in about four to five weeks, so unfortunately you still have a lot of waiting to do if you’re craving the Mate S.

The smartphone comes with a 5.5-inch 1080p AMOLED touchscreen, a 13 MP rear camera with OIS and dual-LED flash, an 8 MP selfie snapper with a LED flash of its own, 3GB of RAM, 32GB of expandable storage, a fingerprint scanner on the back, and a 2,700 mAh battery. It’s powered by Huawei’s own Kirin 935 chipset, with an octa-core CPU clocked at up to 2.2 GHz. It runs Android 5.1.1 Lollipop with Emotion UI 3.1 on top.

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Just days after Marco Arment – the brain behind the popular read-it-later app Instapaper and podcast app Overcast – pulled his ad-blocker app Peace from the App Store, Apple has started issuing automatic refunds to all those who purchased the app.

“Apple notified me this afternoon that they’ll be proactively refunding all purchases of Peace. It will probably take a few days to process,” Arment said in a blog post. It’s worth mentioning that before being pulled, Peace was the number one paid app in the US.

Up until now, users had to ask for a refund – more than 13,000 people were granted refunds through the regular system ever since the app was pulled, Arment revealed. However, the developer says he’s happy that Apple has now decided to refund all purchases of…

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The Lenovo Vibe X3 still isn’t official, and it just keeps on leaking. Last week we even saw a purported leaked render showcasing it, and earlier this month it got certified for sale in China by TENAA.

The Vibe X3 was already spotted in the database of GFXBench, and now someone with a prototype has used another benchmarking app for Android. This time around it’s Geekbench, and through its device information listing it helpfully confirms certain major specs.

Thus, the Lenovo Vibe X3 is going to sport Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 808 chipset, complete with hexa-core CPU. It has two Cortex-A57 high-performance cores paired with four low-power Cortex-A53 cores.

The handset will feature 3GB of RAM, and prototypes currently run Android 5.1.1 Lollipop. This is probably going to be the OS version the Vibe X3 will launch with, whenever that eventually happens.

Hopefully Lenovo plans on unveiling the Vibe X3 soon, since we first heard about it back in February. It’s also expected to have a 5-inch 1080p touchscreen, a 21 MP rear camera, and an 8 MP selfie snapper in tow.

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Next year, Samsung’s stylus-centric Galaxy Note5 may get a real competitor. This device will apparently be made by Huawei. The Chinese company is said to be working on developing a stylus-toting phablet of its own, according to a rumor that originated at parts suppliers in China.

Huawei has reportedly searched a lot for a stylus maker that can provide it with a capacitive pen that can compete with the S Pen in the Note series. Such a company has allegedly been identified recently. Huawei’s phablet will also incorporate ‘palm rejection’ technology. This basically lets the touchscreen ignore your palm if you hold the phone with one hand while touching the display with the stylus or your other hand.

The phablet market keeps on growing, which is probably why Huawei is interested in offering such a solution for those who see the devices in this category as more than just blown-up versions of smaller flagships. In the near future, it’s estimated that phablets will reach around 35% of yearly smartphone sales.

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