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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Tomorrow, Xiaomi is set to finally take the wraps off the much talked about Mi 4c. This will basically be China’s version of the Mi 4i which debuted in India a few months back. That said, the Mi 4c does feature a couple of upgraded specs compared to the phone it’s based on.

Now that we’re less than 24 hours from the announcement, some images showing three color variants for the Mi 4c have been leaked.

At this point it’s not clear whether these three are the only hues the Mi 4c will be offered in. Chances are there will be more, however – if not initially then in time.

As you can see, the outer shell of the Mi 4c is identical to that of the Mi 4i, including the plastic it’s made from. On the inside, the Mi 4c will sport Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 808 SoC with hexa-core CPU, a step up from the Snapdragon 615 in the original. While the cheapest version will have 2GB of RAM and 16GB of storage just like the Mi 4i, there will also be a more expensive Mi 4c with 3GB of RAM and 32GB of space. A 64GB model could be in the works too.

The Xiaomi Mi 4c will have a 5-inch 1080p touchscreen, a 13 MP rear camera with dual-LED flash, a 5 MP selfie shooter, LTE, as well as a 3,120 mAh battery. It’s been rumored to run Android 5.1.1 Lollipop underneath the Chinese company’s own MIUI 7…

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Microsoft will soon announce its first smartphones running Windows 10 Mobile from day one. The company has already scheduled an event on October 6 for this purpose, and as we get closer to that date we’re expecting to see more and more leaks relating to such devices.

Take today, for example. A set of four pictures has been leaked, and they reportedly show the upcoming Microsoft Lumia 550 in four color versions – white, red, blue, and black. Make sure to click on the thumbnails in order to see the full size images.

Microsoft Lumia 550

While the high-end Lumia 950 and Lumia 950 XL pair have been talked about a lot in past rumors, we’ve only started hearing about the Lumia 550 in July. Earlier this month, some of its specs were seemingly confirmed by a Swiss retailer, and now the shots above have also thankfully arrived complemented by hardware details.

Hence, we find out that the Microsoft Lumia 550 will have a 4.7-inch 720p AMOLED touchscreen, 8GB of internal storage, and at the helm shall be Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 210 SoC, boasting a 1.1 GHz quad-core Cortex-A7 CPU. Given the chipset, we expect the Lumia 550 to feature Cat.4 LTE support, for download speeds of up to 150Mbps, as well as 50Mbps uploads.

A previous leak talked about the Lumia 550 getting a 5-inch touchscreen though. That same leak went on to claim the phone will have a 5 MP main camera, a 2 MP front cam, 1GB of RAM, and a 1,905 mAh…

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The second major version of Apple’s operating system for its first wearable was supposed to come out alongside iOS 9 five days ago, but an unnamed bug delayed the release.

Until today, that is. watchOS 2 for the Apple Watch has now started rolling out. The new release comes with a lot of new things built-in, perhaps the most important being that apps can run natively, which means they are able to load faster and come with more features. Apps are now able to use the Taptic engine, the digital crown, accelerometer, heart rate sensor, speaker, and microphone too.

watchOS 2 also brings with it a handful of new watch faces, more ways to customize complications (those little tidbits of information that show up on a watch face), the new Nightstand mode for when the Apple Watch isn’t on your wrist, and the ability to reply to emails.

You can have multiple Friends screens, you get transit information on your wrist, use more cards with Apple Pay, and you’re also able to ask Siri for more complex things. Activation Lock helps if your Apple Watch gets stolen, and turning the digital crown puts you in Time Travel mode.

To get the new software check for it in the Watch app on your iPhone.

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iOS 9 was only released by Apple last week, on September 16. Just two days later, over 20% of Apple mobile devices in the wild were running the newest version of the OS.

That was impressive enough, but here’s something even more so. Today, iOS adoption is already past 50%. And we’re just five days removed from the new version’s debut.

Apple says this is the fastest adoption rate it’s ever seen for a new OS iteration. According to Apple senior VP of worldwide marketing Phil Schiller, iOS 9 is on track to become the most downloaded software release in Apple’s history.

Apple always likes to brag about such numbers (even when they’re not record-breaking like they are in this case) because over in the Android camp a new version usually takes many months before it’s seen on anything but Google’s Nexus devices. For comparison’s sake, note that Android Lollipop only crossed the 20% installs threshold recently, around ten months after it was launched by Google.

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The latest update for the OnePlus 2 is now rolling out. OnePlus has announced the release of Oxygen OS 2.1 today. Oxygen OS is the Chinese company’s interpretation of Android, which ships on the OnePlus 2.

If you are one of the few lucky people to actually own a OnePlus 2, you’ll be happy to know that this update brings with it goodies such as a manual camera mode and Raw support for third party apps (though the latter may not be working with all apps yet).

The new release also adds a color balance slider in the Display settings menu, which allows you to adjust the color tone of the screen to make it as warm or as cool as you want. Turning Airplane Mode on and off should be smoother now, since certain improvements have been made to the telephony service. Exchange support is now a reality, and “some issues that were causing problems with popular 3rd party apps” have been fixed.

That’s the changelog. “A small percentage of users” will receive over-the-air update notifications today, and if everything goes well a wider rollout is planned for…

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Just as previously teased, today LG made a new smartphone official in South Korea. It’s called LG Class, and for a while we thought it would be a mid-range phablet. Mid-range it is, but size-wise it’s just a 5-incher.

The Class features a unibody metal construction, which, when paired with its specs, reminds us a little bit of Samsung’s Galaxy A series of handsets.

The LG Class comes in three colors – gold, silver, and black. It has a 5-inch 720p IPS touchscreen with 2.5D curved glass, a 13 MP rear camera with LED flash, an 8 MP selfie snapper, 2GB of RAM, 16GB of expandable storage, 4G LTE support, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, NFC, and a 2,050 mAh battery.

It’s powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 410 chipset, boasting a 1.2 GHz quad-core Cortex-A53 CPU. The phone runs Android 5.1 Lollipop. Its dimensions are 142 x 71.8 x 7.4 mm, and it weighs 147g.

The price in South Korea has been set at KRW 399,300, which amounts to approximately $338 or €301 at the current exchange rates. It’s still unclear if LG plans on bringing the Class to other markets in the future.

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