HTC’s next smartphone following the recently unveiled One A9 will be the One X9, as countless leaks and rumors have told us over the past few weeks. We’ve already seen the upcoming device in several sets of renders, but now it’s time for a few live images.

Someone in China has somehow managed to get his or her hands on the handset, and promptly decided to make it the star of a photo shoot of sorts. You can see the resulting images below (make sure you click on the thumbnails for the full-size pictures).

HTC One X9

The design of the One X9 is thus once again confirmed, with its front-facing speakers, capacitive Android buttons, and its metal construction. On the right side we can find the SIM card slot, as well as the power and volume buttons, while the 3.5mm headset jack is at the top and the USB connector on the bottom side.

The HTC One X9 should sport a 5.5-inch 1080p touchscreen, a 13 MP main camera with OIS, an UltraPixel front camera, the MediaTek MT6795 SoC (which has a 2.2 GHz octa-core CPU), 2 or 3GB of RAM, 16GB of storage, and a 3,000 mAh battery, according to the source of the photos.

Source (in Chinese) |…

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In yet another testament to the fabled loyalty Apple enjoys from its customers, British recycling comparison site CompareMyMobile.com has concluded that 77.4% of all phones traded in for this year’s iPhone 6s/6s Plus have been older iPhones. The analysis is based on data collected over a period of 2 months, ending on November 30.

About 9.8% of trade-ins for iPhone 6s/6s Plus were from Samsung camp, while 5.1% were parting with an HTC device and 4.3% abandoned their Sony’s in favor of an Apple smartphone. The most traded in specific model is the two-year-old iPhone 5s (61%) followed by an iPhone 5 (21%), and a Galaxy S4. Only 6% of all devices meant to be replaced with an iPhone 6s were the previous generation.

Meanwhile, users upgrading to the Galaxy S6/S6 edge were a bit more evenly spread bunch. Again, most are recurrent Samsung owners, 48.5% of them. Apple defectors have been quoted at 16.9%, while HTC and Sony stand at 11.8% and 10.3%, respectively. As with the iPhone, the most often replaced Samsung model is the two-generations-old Galaxy S4 – people don’t seem to be rushing to replace last year’s models.

The analysis concludes with a roundup of trade-ins by brand, and Apple leads the pack here with 42% of the total number. Samsung is second with 32% and Sony is a distant third at 7.2%. These numbers however span a a longer period starting January 1 and ending on December…

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HTC may have hit a six-month high revenue in November helped by the latest HTC One A9, but it seems has lost a legal battle in Germany, which may cost the company a lot. Later this month HTC will have to cease all smartphone sales through Deutsche Telekom AG.

Apparently HTC was sued over patent infringement and lost the battle. The Texas-based Acacia Research Group, a patent licensing company, was granted an injunction against HTC smartphones sold through Deutsche Telekom (T-Mobile) in Germany. The infringed patent concerns voice coding technology.

The ban will be applied later this month so the HTC phones are still available through Deutsche Telekom. Meanwhile HTC is working on a solution in order to avoid actual sales halt.

Deutsche Telekom is a German Telecommunications company, which owns many carriers around the globe and the German government is its biggest shareholder. If HTC doesn’t succeed into resolving the issues (paying for the patents), there is a good chance Acacia pursuits the same injunctions over other Deutsche Telekom-related carriers, which will be a huge blow for the struggling HTC.

Source |…

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Samsung Pay is widening its reach, and now a total of 19 new card issuers have been added to the list of supported ones in the US. Eleven issuers working with Visa, and 8 under MasterCard’s wing have joined Samsung’s mobile payment service. A week ago it was revealed that Samsung pay would also support gift cards.

Launched in the States on September 28, Samsung Pay was adopted by all major carriers within a month. Samsung did all sorts of incentives to promote its use like offering a free wireless charger and later a $50 rebate upon activation.

Samsung likes to point out the ease of use of the service and its three-tier security. But really, the service’s headline feature is that it can be used almost everywhere that you can pay with a regular card, with no requirement from the merchant to update its terminals. Too bad that the list of participating countries is limited to South Korea and the US, with only China, UK, and Spain expected to follow suit early next year.

Source |…

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Mozilla has released a 64-bit version of Firefox for Windows. Mozilla claims this will improve performance over the 32-bit version for applications and games but lacks support for certain plugins. As reported previously, Mozilla is dropping support for most plugins by late 2016, anyway.

Other changes include choice of blocking additional trackers in Private Browsing mode, improved API support for m4v video playback, search suggestions in the address bar, and more.

The Android version has also been updated, and includes support for marking items as read/unread in reading list panel, tab audio indicator in tab list, new split pane styling for History panel on tablets in landscape mode, include URL when sharing selected text from web page, and more.

You can download either from the link…

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Now here’s a surprise for you – Meizu just posted about a last minute “major event” that will be held on the 19th (this Saturday). It was tagged with “Something big happens” but little else about the event has been unveiled.

There are three numbers on the teaser image – 900, 8,000 and 35,000. There’s a T-shirt behind the 900 so maybe attendees will score some Meizu merchandise, but the other two numbers are above question marks.

Teaser image for the December 19 event

Anyway, Meizu’s Vice President has already ruled out the Meizu PRO 5 Mini, saying the handset will be unveiled early next year. What then? Perhaps the Meizu metal mini, which passed through GFXBench yesterday. There’s also Flyme 5, but the recently scheduled rollout will be before February 8, the Chinese New Year.

Source (in Chinese) |…

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Microsoft is finding a hard time keeping a lid on its future Lumias, and an alleged mid-tier Lumia 850 showed up not once, but twice a few days ago. Well, today is the Lumia 650’s turn to make the rounds.

Another Lumia with a white facade, this potential 650 looks a lot like the 850, and then it doesn’t. The speaker slit at the top edge of the front panel comes straight from the existing Lumia 640, while a larger but similar one on the bottom is a design accent new to the lineup.

Both are in contrast to the earpiece cutout used extensively in the higher-end models and the mic pinhole that’s been a feature across the model range. Are we to expect a stereo speaker setup, perhaps?

The Lumia 650 is reported to come with a 5-inch 720p display, so no changes from the current model. No Lumia 650 XL has been pictured, but a larger model isn’t out of the question given how Microsoft recently embraced the two-sizes-per-model concept.

Source |…

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LG is already teasing its upcoming product announcements for CES 2016 in January. We’re in for a bunch of 4K monitors with USB Type-C ports as well as a trio of sound bars equipped with Bluetooth and Google Cast compatibility.

While details aren’t as inclusive as we’d like, LG has spilled out that it will announce a 27″ and 32″ 4K monitors with USB Type-C ports. Joining them will be three new ultrawide, 21:9 aspect ratio monitors of QHD resolutions, two of which flat and one with a curved display. All of the latter three will have ThunderBolt 2 connections.

As for the audio tech, expect three new sound bars with Bluetooth and Google Cast compatibility. The large red speakers you see below are X-Boom audio systems, which will also make their debut at CES 2016.

Expect more specs and pricing information as CES 2016 draws…

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Motorola is working on the fourth generation Moto X and a photo of its effort has leaked. The photo shows a metal unibody design, which is quite different from the current generation Moto X Style.

We especially like the camera design

There’s no information on specifications just yet. Looking at the photo, the upcoming Moto X (4th Gen) has a redesigned camera housing, protected with a large glass. On it, you can spot the Moto logo as well as a dual-tone flash. Below the camera, there’s the usual Motorola logo, which look to sit flush with the back this time around.

We assume the top and bottom of the back is made of plastic in order for the antennas to work. The speaker grille is also at the bottom, but we don’t know if it’s stereo or not.

Source |…

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Google has released an update to the Play Books app on Android that adds a setting called Night Light.

What Night Light does is that it automatically changes the color temperature of the display to a warmer setting according to the time of the day, getting progressively warmer towards the night. The warmer light is more eye-friendly, which is important if you read for a long time on your phone or tablet.

The update also includes another new feature, that notifies you when your favorite author has published their new book on the Play Store.

The update is rolling out but you can grab the APK now from…

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