Huawei is set to unveil its next phablet on September 2 at IFA in Berlin. And although there’s still some confusion as to what it will be called (Mate 7S or just Mate S), it’s clear that it’s going to be a very important device for the Chinese company.

Today Huawei head honcho Richard Yu has started a countdown of sorts on his official Weibo account, alongside which he posted what we can only assume is the first of a series of teaser images.

So since at this point we’re five days away from the event, we’re told that the Mate 7S will come with a five-function fingerprint scanner. All of these things will fit in its 1 square cm footprint.

One of those is obvious (unlocking the phone), but for the other features we’re left guessing. Mobile payments could be one function, while using the sensor to lock certain content (such as images, videos, even contacts and messages) might be another. We’ll find out for sure next week.

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Samsung has been teasing the Gear S2 smartwatch for weeks now. The company is clearly very proud of its first wearable with a round touchscreen, so much so that one of its executives has already shown us what it looks like on his wrist.

As we get closer to September 3, which is when the big announcement will take place at IFA in Berlin, we’re now seeing two models of the Gear S2 passing through the FCC.

The US regulatory agency has certified both the Samsung SM-R720 and the SM-R732. According to past leaks and rumors, the former of those will be sold as the Gear S2, while the latter is due to get the Gear S2 Classic moniker.

The FCC process has revealed that both of these will come with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi built-in, but neither will also sport mobile data connectivity. That’s apparently going to be reserved for a third variation of Samsung’s first round smartwatch.

Previous leaks have suggested that the Gear S2 will come with a 360×360 AMOLED touchscreen, an Exynos 3472 chipset, 768MB of RAM, 4GB of internal storage, NFC, as well as a bunch of sensors including a heart rate monitor.

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The Apple iPhone 6s and 6s Plus will be unveiled on September 9 and pre-orders may start as early as September 11. The Netherlands will skip that process by the looks of it, new info suggests that the iPhone duo will go directly to stores no September 25 (perhaps a week after other Euro markets like Germany and France).

Techtastic.nl has gotten hold of pricing information for Dutch carriers (KPN, T-Mobile and Vodafone). It suggests that the rumored Rose Gold version of the 6s generation won’t pan out, leaving the standard Silver, Space Gray and Gold options.

Here’s the pricing, which is the same as the current pricing for the outgoing iPhone 6 duo. The only real surprise is that the cheapest models still come with 16GB of storage (that’s what, a minute of 4K video?).

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iPhone 6s iPhone 6s Plus
16GB €699 €799
64GB 7699 €899
128GB €899 €999

Source (in…

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Remember how most of the Apple events were streamed live, but only on Mac OS X and iOS? Well, this is about to change.

Yesterday Apple announced it will be holding a press conference on September 9, where it will be announcing the next generation iPhones – the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus. As tradition goes, the event will happen in San Francisco on September 9 at 10AM local time.

Digging a bit into the Apple’s official website reveals the event’s placeholder for the live streaming. And there we can find this text:

“Requirements: Live streaming uses Apple’s HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) technology. HLS requires an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch with Safari on iOS 7.0 or later, a Mac with Safari 6.0.5 or later on OS X v10.8.5 or later, or a PC with Edge on Windows 10. Streaming via Apple TV requires a second- or third-generation Apple TV with software 6.2 or later.”

It seems Apple will be streaming the event on Windows as well. There are some limitation – it requires Windows 10 and Edge browser, but it’s still much better than the Apple-only offer we had so far.

This means no more digging through third-party streams with awful quality, bad sound and huge lag. The official stream will be available to everyone. About time!

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AMD has announced the new R9 Radeon R9 Nano, a compact graphics card designed for mini-ITX motherboards and cases. But despite its diminutive size, the card packs the same internals as AMD’s current flagship, the R9 Fury X.

The R9 Nano has the same Fiji GPU from the Fury X based on the GCN 1.2 architecture with 4096 stream processors, 256 texture units, and 64 ROPs with a 4096-bit memory bus width, thanks to AMD’s new 4GB HBM RAM. Compared to the R9 Fury X, the R9 Nano is clocked slightly lower at 1000MHz instead of 1050MHz, but has a considerably lower TDP of 175W compared to Fury X’s 275W. The reference card has three DisplayPorts and one HDMI and requires a single 6-pin power socket.

Due to the lower clock speed and lower TDP, it’s unlikely the R9 Nano will be just as powerful as Fury X in actual gaming, but it should be close, which is still great considering the Fury X is a powerful card and the R9 Nano is positively tiny in comparison. The card uses an open air cooler that not only blows inside the case but due to the horizontal heat sink fins can spit air out the back of the card outside the case, which is important as mini-ITX cases tend to have much poorer ventilation.

The Radeon R9 Nano is priced at $649, which is the same as the R9 Fury X. The Nano is aimed at a different market and is one of its kind for now for being able to offer so much power in such a small form-factor, and possibly the only card of this size that can do 4K, although don’t expect 60fps PC Master Race framerates. If you were planning on building a high-end gaming HTPC for your living room, then the R9 Nano doesn’t have much competition for…

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Ever since its inception, Instagram has always allowed clicking and uploading images (and later videos) in the 1:1 square aspect ratio. Like Twitter’s 140 character limit, it was a part of the platform’s appeal, or a drawback, depending upon how you chose to look at it.

Off late, a lot of people had begun uploading non-square images to Instagram using image editing tools to add whitespace to the sides. Clearly people don’t seem fond of Instagram’s aspect ratio limitation anymore and are willing to use odd hacks to upload a non-square image, even if it made their images look terrible. So Instagram finally caved in and decided to add support for landscape and portrait aspect ratios.

Once you update to the new version 7.5 build on iOS and Android, you will get a button while choosing the image to switch to the original aspect ratio of the image instead of cropping it to 1:1, after which you can then proceed to edit the image as usual. This also works for videos, so you can now have full width widescreen videos on Instagram as well. There doesn’t seem to be a limitation on the aspect ratio in landscape mode but in portrait mode you are limited to 4:3, so if you upload a 16:9 vertical image or video it gets its top and bottom cropped off to fit into 4:3. This is done to prevent images and videos from overflowing out of the viewing area within the app and that the image or video still remains entirely within the app’s UI. If you click on the profile, you still see square thumbnails of images and videos to preserve the square grid layout of profiles.

It’s a somewhat controversial decision for sure, as some might bemoan the lack of uniformity now on their timeline, with images in oddball aspect ratios already popping up everywhere. It will also make for lazier photographers, as earlier you’d have to work harder to make the shot look good in the 1:1 aspect ratio while now you can just upload your standard 4:3 or 16:9 images from your gallery and be done with it (note the Instagram camera app still allows shooting only in 1:1). Others, however, will appreciate the flexibility of uploading non-square images as sometimes it is hard to get everything within that aspect ratio. It does show that Instagram is willing to listen to its uses. The question is, whether they should…

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Rumors agree that with the iPhone 6s generation Apple will upgrade the camera that hasn’t seen a major improvement since the iPhone 4S in 2011. The new shooter will have a 12MP sensor (or perhaps 13MP with the extra used for digital stabilization) and will record 2160p video.

The new Apple A9 chipset will feature improved ISP for better image processing with hints of a top-notch HDR mode.

The selfie camera, which may get a 5MP sensor, will reportedly use a white screen in lieu of LED flash on the front (a trick LG did with the LG G Pro 2, some apps do it too). The new camera will enable slow-mo selfies at 720p apparently and better video recording overall (current iPhones are stuck at 1.2MP/720p).

The iPhone 6s and 6s Plus will be unveiled on September 9 and we have our fingers crossed for more base storage (thinking about 4K video in 16GB storage makes us…

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Your Chrome browsing experience is about to get a lot better and far less annoying thanks to these two new features that are coming soon.

The first is deferred playback of autoplay media for background tabs. Right now, if you open a tab in the background that has autoplay media, it will start playing in the background when the page finishes loading, and you then have to hunt for the tab and silence whatever is playing. With this feature, Chrome will wait until the tab is in the foreground to start playing autoplay media, thus causing less annoyance and also using fewer resources for background tabs.

The second feature is where Chrome will automatically pause Flash ads and other non-essential Flash content on the page. Soon, Flash ads will have a gray box asking the user explicit permission to play them. Google advises ad partners to switch to using HTML5 ads, as they use fewer resources to run than Flash content.

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The LG Nexus 5 (2015) – alleged live photo (see below) of which made the rounds online early last week – will be released on September 29, according to a South Korean media outlet which cited a credible source.

There was, however, no word on the release date of the Nexus device being manufactured by Huawei. If you aren’t already aware, two Nexus handsets are expected this year – the one from LG is said to sport a 5.2″ screen, while that from Huawei is said to be a 5.7″ phablet.

Apart from screen size, both are rumoured to have mostly the same specs. A recently-leaked 3D render of the LG’s handset showed a fingerprint scanner on a plastic back with beveled edges, fitted on a metal frame.

Needless to say, none of this has been officially confirmed yet, so take it with a pinch of…

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The third-generation Motorola Moto G smartphone – which was officially launched last month – is now available for purchase from US Cellular. You can grab the black color model for $130 up front, or $9 a month for 20 months, or one cent on a regular two-year contract.

Specs-wise, the device is powered by a Snapdragon 410 SoC with quad-core 1.4 GHz Cortex-A53 CPU and Adreno 306 GPU, and sports a 5-inch 720p display. It packs in a 2470 mAh battery, and comes with 1/2GB RAM and 8/16GB internal memory options – US Cellular is selling the lower end variant.

In terms of camera, the Moto G 2015 features a 13MP rear unit and a 5MP front shooter. It runs Android 5.1.1 Lollipop and comes with IPX7 certification, which means it is water resistant up to 1m for up to 30 minutes.

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