A Canadian version of the upcoming Samsung Galaxy S7 (one with Exynos 8890) was tested on Geekbench 3. A Kirin 950-powered Huawei Mate 8 also put in a score.

The Galaxy S7 score wasn’t in “crazy high” territory, but both the hardware and the software are under development so expect the final score to go up.

The Kirin 950 chipset, on the other hand, shows a massive improvement over the Kirin 935 and pulls ahead of the Exynos by a hair.

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GeekBench 3
Higher is better

Huawei Mate 8 (Kirin 950)
6088

Samsung Galaxy S7 (Exynos 8890)
5946

Samsung Galaxy S6 (Exynos 7420)
5215

Huawei Nexus 6P (Snapdragon 810)
4539

Huawei Mate S (Kirin 935)
3475

Source 1 2 |…

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Sharp has been struggling for years and now chatter from Japan indicates that there’s a bidding war going on for the ailing company.

Interestingly, Foxconn is said to have made a $5.1 billion bid. Sharp is one of Apple’s main display suppliers and, of course, Foxconn is Apple’s one of primary manufacturers. Foxconn chairman Terry Gou bought 38% of Sharp’s LCD business back in 2012.

The Chinese company isn’t alone though, the Innovation Network Corporation of Japan (a state-controlled fund) has also made an offer.

The dollar amount isn’t clear and it may turn out not to matter – the INCJ is interested in keeping Sharp ownership inside Japan (Sharp lenders allegedly want the same thing). The fund has already invested in Japan Display Inc – a joint operation of former Sony, Toshiba and Hitachi businesses.

Speaking of, INCJ may also be interested in buying the electric appliances division of Toshiba. This could be part of a larger plan to pull another JDI and combine the electric appliances of Sharp and Toshiba.

Back in 2013 Samsung made a $111 investment in Sharp (buying 3%) as it too sources parts from the Japanese company but so far Samsung’s name isn’t mentioned in the bidding…

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The ZUK Z1 definitely stands out from the ever-growing crowd of Chinese devices for a few good reasons. First, unlike many of its competitors, it has a strong brand backing by non-other that Lenovo, but perhaps more importantly, the handset struck an official partnership with Cyanogen from the very beginning. In an essence, the OEM tried to pick up where OnePlus left off with the OnePlus One, before the OS scandal and the strategy seems to be generating results.

The ZUK Z1 was posed to receive a Cyanogen 13 build sooner or later, given this arrangement, but we were a little surprised to see working ROMs before the end of January. Now, there is a catch, the Android 6.0 builds in question are nightlies (read not retail-ready) and come from the development branch. This means that they are prone to bugs in this early stage, as evident by the fact that two packages cm-13.0-20160120-NIGHTLY and cm-13.0-20160121-NIGHTLY were published only a few hours apart. Plus, they are marked as Cyanogen Mod and not Cyanogen OS, like the official release will be.

An official build is imminent and once it becomes available, it will start seeding to devices as a stable OTA. If you rely heavily on the ZUK Z1 and want it to function properly, we would advise you to wait on the official update, but eager developers and tinkerers can head over to the download page in the source link and manually flash the firmware today.

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