While we already know that Xiaomi’s Mi 4c – which is set to be unveiled next week – will support USB Type-C, it has now been revealed that the device will also be compatible with Micro USB cables.

In fact, the handset will come with a Micro USB cable out-of-the-box. However, there will be a USB Type-C adapter that will convert the Micro USB plug into a Type-C connector (see image above).

Specs-wise – from what is known till now – the Mi 4c will be powered by a Snapdragon 808 SoC with hexa-core CPU, and sport a 5-inch 1080p touchscreen. It will come with 2GB/16GB, 3GB/32GB, and 3GB/64GB memory options, and pack in a 3,120 mAh battery.

In terms of camera, the handset will feature a 13MP rear unit and a 5MP front shooter. It will ship running Android 5.1.1 Lollipop underneath Xiaomi’s own MIUI 7…

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Just a week after Facebook opened its Mentions feature to journalists, the company has launched a new tool, dubbed Signal, that’s exclusively aimed at them.

Facebook describes Signal as a free discovery and curation tool for journalists, claiming that it is designed to help them source, gather, and embed newsworthy content from both the social networking website as well as Instagram.

The tool not only lets you monitor trending topics, but also displays related content for deeper context on those trends. You can also use it to see which public figure is being mentioned the most on Facebook in real-time.

Signal also allows you to search Instagram for “public posts related to specific hashtags, associated with specific public accounts, or tagged with locations using an interactive global map.”

While anything you find using Signal can be saved into custom collections for later use, the posts you find can also be easily embedded in your coverage. The tool – as already mentioned in the beginning – is free, and if you are a journalist you can request access to it by clicking on the Source 2 link below.

Source 1 | Source…

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Corning’s Gorilla Glass is everywhere these days, sitting on top of most smartphone and tablet display panels, protecting them while being quite sturdy in the process. There’s also the less used Dragontrail Glass by Asahi, also boasting impressive toughness.

Soon though these two may be joined by a similar offering from none other than Samsung. The company has filed for a trademark for Turtle Glass with the relevant authority in its home country of South Korea.

The application for the trademark apparently states that it will be used for a protective tempered glass designed for phones, tablets, music players, cameras, and so on.

Samsung’s been one of Corning’s biggest customers so far, so if it is indeed going to start using its own solution in the future, it will be interesting to see in what position that will put the maker of Gorilla Glass.

As for the name itself, a turtle’s shell is very tough, so that’s where the inspiration came from. The world of protective glass for mobile devices is thus filled with animals, real or imaginary – gorillas, dragons, and now turtles.

While Samsung could of course be planning to use Turtle Glass on the Galaxy S7, it’s also possible that this type of glass will be employed in the production of those foldable smartphones the company has recently patented. The first one of those is apparently codenamed Project Valley and we may see it hitting the streets next year.

Source | Via 1 (in Dutch) • Via…

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Huawei is now finally in the process of bringing its first smartwatch to Europe. The Chinese company has started taking pre-orders for the Huawei Watch through its official European online store.

Oddly enough, although the store itself is available for the UK, the Huawei Watch isn’t yet on offer in that market. But you can pre-order it if you live in Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Portugal, Spain, Italy, or Switzerland.

The starting price for Eurozone countries is €399, while if you’re in Switzerland you’ll need to pay CHF 399. This nets you a silver Huawei Watch with a genuine leather strap.

In some countries (but not all for whatever reason) there are some additional choices, all priced at €449 or CHF 449. You can pick a black model with leather strap, or get one of two stainless steel band options, with link or mesh design. Regardless of which model you pick, you’ll have to wait between two and three weeks for your order to actually ship.

The Huawei Watch runs Android Wear, is compatible with both Android and iOS devices, and comes with a 1.4-inch 400×400 AMOLED touchscreen, sapphire crystal protection, Bluetooth 4.1 LE, Wi-Fi, a six-axis motion sensor, a heart rate monitor, a barometer, 512MB of RAM, 4GB of storage, and a 300 mAh battery.

Source | Via (in…

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The HTC One A9 has been rumored for many weeks now, first under the codename Hima Aero, then just Aero, and then from one point on using its commercial name. Just recently we found out that it will be a mid-range smartphone, using Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 617 chipset, which itself only got official this week.

The Snapdragon 617 comes with an octa-core Cortex-A53 CPU clocked at up to 1.5 GHz, the Adreno 405 GPU, Hexagon 546 DSP, and Qualcomm’s X8 LTE modem, capable of Cat.7 speeds, meaning theoretical peak downloads of 300Mbps, and 100Mbps uploads (with carrier aggregation supported both on the downlink and the uplink).

Mid-range as it may be, it looks like the One A9 won’t be cheap. At least that’s if we go by one listing by one Dutch retailer, which is boasting that it’s already taking pre-orders for the device. It’s priced at €706.64 including VAT, which is a whopping $800. The phone is offered in four color versions: Topaz Gold, Deep Garnet, Opal Silver, and Carbon Grey.

Before you decide whether the One A9’s rumored specs (listed below) are worth this incredibly steep asking price, do keep in mind that various retailers like to put up such pre-order pages for upcoming smartphones without actually knowing what their pricing will be – just basically guessing. They get traffic and notoriety by announcing that they’re the first to have a device for pre-order, so the usual grain of salt near you should be a pretty big one in this case.

The HTC One A9 will reportedly pair the Snapdragon 617 SoC with a 5-inch 1080p touchscreen, 2GB of RAM, 16GB of expandable storage, a 13 MP rear camera with OIS, a 4 MP UltraPixel selfie snapper, and a 2,150 mAh battery. The handset will have a fingerprint sensor, and it might run Android 6.0 Marshmallow. It could become official at an event that’s taking place on September 29.

Source (in Dutch) | Via (in…

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Next Monday, on September 21, LG will unveil a mid-range smartphone with a metal body. It will be called LG Class, as we found out yesterday, and it will pair LG’s signature back-mounted buttons with a blockier design than what we’ve seen from the Korean company recently.

Since the Class will not be a flagship, but will have a metal shell, it’s probably best thought of as a competitor to at least one of the members of Samsung’s Galaxy A series.

After the teaser image LG released yesterday, now a set of live images showing the Class has been leaked in the company’s native South Korea. You can see the full pictures by clicking on the thumbnails below.

LG Class

Interestingly, the LG Class is now said to feature a 5-inch touchscreen, which, if true, means that it can’t possibly be the mysterious handset with the model number H740 that was benchmarked recently. Although that too is clearly mid-range spec-wise, it does come with a bigger, 5.7-inch display.

Yet if the LG Class isn’t the H740, then we actually don’t know a lot about it – except for the aforementioned screen size. What is clear is that the model in these images is manufactured for LG U+, one of the three carriers in South Korea.

Over there, it’s rumored to cost around KRW 400,000, which right now means $342 or €302. It’s unclear whether the LG Class will be sold globally or not.

Source (in Korean) | Via (in…

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You may have noticed Apple mentioned during the last keynote support for 4K editing on the iPad Pro and the iPhone 6s. That app was iMovie and it has now been updated to support the higher 4K resolution.

The new iMovie supports up to 3840×2160 editing on the new iPad Pro, iPhone 6s and the iPhone 6s Plus. On the iPad Pro you can edit three 4K streams at the same time. You can also export videos in 1080p60 now. The 6s and 6s Plus also get 3D Touch shortcut to start video a new film from the homescreen. On the iPad Pro, you get a full height media browser and 1:1 viewer for 1080p videos.

Other features include shortcuts for physical keyboard (such as the iPad Pro Smart Keyboard), option to hide Media Browser while editing, option to disable Ken Burns animation on photo, redesigned Project Details view to watch files before opening them, redesigned Video view, improved inspector on iPad, support for Slide Over and Split View in iOS 9 on the iPad, redesigned Audio browser, performance and stability improvements, and support for additional languages such as Canadian French, Hindi, and Traditional Chinese.

iMovie is a free download and update on…

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Sony finally brought a completely revamped camera for its flagship Xperia Z series. The new cam features a next-generation 23MP sensor with Hybrid autofocus (which gets an accurate lock in just 0.03s), but optical image stabilization wasn’t in the cards.

Instead the company imbued the Xperia Z5 family with the SteadyShot Intelligent Active Mode – a lot of words to say digital image stabilization. Here’s an official video that shows the Xperia Z5 camera put in a tough, dynamic environment.

The front-facing camera also supports SteadyShot to eliminate handshake from your selfie shots.

Here’s a 1-minute look at the new camera…

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Hammering nails with a smartphone – the less popular “Will it blend?”, perhaps because few phones can actually make through it. The Oukitel K4000, a phone with a 4,000mAh battery and apparently a rock-hard forehead, drove several nails – some of them really thick! – into a piece of wood.

All with no visible damage to the phone too, the touchscreen keeps working after colliding face first with all the nails. The screen isn’t covered in anything outlandish, it uses Corning Gorilla Glass 3. Still, it can take on the second half of the hammer-and-nail pair – the hammer!

Oukitel also says the K400 can crack 600 walnuts, no problem. Not that you should try that, but you don’t need to be gentle with the handset either.

PS. the Oukitel isn’t the first phone to hammer in nails – here’s the 6.65mm thick Oppo Finder doing it, we’ve also seen HTCs and (naturally) Nokias do it…

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Okay, Samsung, what did Europe do to you? First no more laptops, then no Note5 and now no Samsung Gear S2 3G… That’s right, the 3G-enabled version of the Tizen-powered smartwatch will be launching only in the US and South Korea, Europe and other markets are only getting the versions without mobile data.

Samsung points to the e-SIM – an “embedded SIM” format that’s available in the US but hasn’t been adopted by EU carriers. It can’t be removed from the device, instead carriers can reprogram it to make it their own.

Apple has a similar feature, Apple SIM used in US iPads, and UK carrier EE even supports it. But not the GSMA-standardized e-SIM. The original Gear S used a tiny nanoSIM and avoided such problems.

VP of Samsung Mobile for Samsung UK says that fitness is the driving factor behind smartwatch adoption and for that you need GPS.

GPS is available only on the Gear S2 3G, the plain S2 and Gear S2 classic don’t have a receiver. They still have fitness tracking functionality, but runners and bikers will be missing out.

Launch details for the Samsung Gear S2 will be unveiled next week. The VP hinted at a price around £320 for the models to be available in the UK.

Source |…

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