Announced last month in China, the all-metal Mi Pad 2 tablet from Xiaomi comes in both 16GB and 64GB memory configurations. While the former has been available for purchase, the latter was launched in the country this week, only to be sold out in just 60 seconds.

That’s right. According to a report out of China, the device was out of stock within a minute of going on sale. Not only the 64GB variant, but the standard 16GB model was also sold out on that day, the report notes.

It isn’t, however, clear whether the sell out was due to a strong demand of the tablet or limited stock. For those who aren’t already aware, the 16GB Mi Pad 2 costs RMB 999 ($155), while the 64GB variant carries a price tag of RMB 1,299…

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While virtual reality is still somewhat of a novelty, it hasn’t stopped companies like FiresVR from making new VR hardware. The headset is going to be called the JiDome-1 and is among the first VR products directly comparable to Samsung’s Gear VR. The company calls itself “the Xiaomi of China’s VR industry”.

While other products like the Samsung Gear VR, Holo Lens, or the Oculus Rift are manufactured in China, they don’t have many “official” Google Cardboard-type of VR accessories. This is the first company making a real VR product for China.

The headset was demonstrated with a Xiaomi Note flagship phone but the company still has to work on compatibility with more phones on the market. Due to hardware and software limitations with the technology used, as of right now, the JiDome-1 is only compatible with 30% of the phones on the market.

The JiDome-1 is said to be available to developers in the first quarter of 2016. It uses an optical structure that is able to adapt to different screen sizes. The headset features a 9-axis gyroscope and proximity sensor, cooling fans, and will hold a price tag for developers who wish to purchase it of ¥199 which converts to around 30 dollars.

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VoLTE is such a great way to hear callers with crystal-clear quality. While this feature is such a great advancement in the telecommunications industry, the problem with it is that they haven’t enabled this feature for calls made between callers of different service providers.

As of right now, if an AT&T caller dials a Verizon subscriber, both the recipient and the caller will only be hearing each other in standard audio quality. The only way for callers to take advantage of higher quality VoLTE is if the recipient happens to also be on the same cellular network as the caller.

Well, also as of now, AT&T has announced that in very few markets, they have already begun testing VoLTE calls between AT&T and other carriers. It isn’t explicitly mentioned which carriers they are testing, but there has been a previous mention of Verizon being such carrier.

AT&T also mentions that it is also working with “other” carriers to bring the same cross-compatibility for VoLTE, acknowledging the previous announcements with Verizon in mind.

The purpose of AT&Ts post was to announce the company’s milestone of 27 million VoLTE subscribers in the US with reach to over 295 million Americans.

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The Vibe series often breathes fresh air into the stale smartphone design segment and the Lenovo Vibe Shot wants to serve double duty by trying to break into the difficult high-end smartphone photography market as well.

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We’ve already heard that one of the defining features of the upcoming iPhone 7 is set to be its waterproofing. This has been ‘confirmed’ today by a new rumor out of China.

Both sizes of the iPhone 7 are expected to be waterproof. They will also apparently employ some “new compound materials” which will be used to hide their antennas and do away with those plastic stripes once and for all. This would let Apple streamline the iPhone design even more than before.

Around 30-35% of the iPhone 7 chassis will be made by Catcher Technology, which will remain the largest supplier of this component for Apple. The information above reportedly comes from a research firm analyzing Catcher’s future sales.

As always with such things, don’t forget to take everything you’ve just read with a solid dose of salt. Do however keep in mind that this is already the second rumor talking about waterproofing for the iPhone 7, so there may be some truth to that.

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As 2015 draws to a close, Microsoft’s latest operating system is reaching a new milestone in terms of device installations. Windows 10 has now been installed over 200 million times. That’s up from 14 million in the first day since it became available, 50 million in less than three weeks after that, and 110 million at the beginning of October.

200 million is certainly an impressive number, and even more so when you consider that it’s been reached in only five months. So we’ve got an average of 40 million installs of Windows 10 per month.

Then again, this evolution is hardly surprising given how Microsoft has been pushing users of Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 to update to Windows 10 (which, let’s not forget, is a free process). Microsoft’s goal is to reach 1 billion installs in three years, and that could very well happen, at least based on these first five months of availability.

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Microsoft’s upcoming upper-midrange smartphone, the Lumia 850, has been leaking quite a lot lately. So far we’ve seen it portrayed in leaked press renders, and we even had a couple live images to look at.

This time around we’re treated to some shots depicting the Lumia 850 inside some protective cases. And while these pictures obviously don’t show us the entirety of the phone, they do seem to confirm the design of the Lumia 850 in those leaked renders.

Microsoft Lumia 850

The handset will allegedly feature a metal frame, and according to a spec leak from back in July, it will also sport a 5-inch 1,280×768 touchscreen, a 10 MP main camera with Zeiss optics and LED flash, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 410 SoC powering things, 1GB of RAM, 16GB of expandable storage, and a 2,650 mAh battery. It will obviously run Windows 10 Mobile.

If these shots of it inside the cases are accurate, then you should expect one of the Lumia 850’s colors to be blue. While it was initially thought to arrive in 2015, it’s now very likely that this smartphone will only get official next…

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It seems that the next arena for wearables will be rings. Patents reveal Samsung’s ideas about what a smart ring can do. Essentially, it can be used as a controller for smartphones, tablets, smart TVs and even smart home devices.

The main method of operation is rotation – rotating the ring left or right can trigger predefined functions and if you have a screen on hand (e.g. your smartphone), the ring can be used to navigate more complex menus offering more functions.

Samsung sees the ring changing channels, turning off the lights and raising the blinds, even some unique (but unspecified) functionality for social networks like Facebook. The Samsung Gear S2 has a rotating bezel, the smart ring will have functionality based on that.

Other tech companies have smart ring patents too, but they are all very different. Microsoft is thinking of a ring that recognizes gestures (e.g. sliding your finger over some surface) instead of rotation. Google sees the ring as a controller for Glass (what the Wiimote is to the Wii). Apple just wants a smaller…

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Intel just completed the biggest acquisition in its corporate history – a $16.7 billion deal to buy the US-based Altera. Тhe company is largely unknown in the end-user realm and understandably so, as it specializes in delivering programmable logic devices (PLDs) and mostly what is knowns as field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs).

We won’t be going into too much technical detail, but a simple introduction to the technology in question and why it is important is necessary. Most of the processors we have grown accustomed to in our lives are versatile, general purpose units that can perform many tasks. This goes for Intel’s chips as well as the silicon found inside our smartphones. However, in some cases, you don’t really need an all-encompassing solution, but rather a more efficient custom one designed for one purpose. This is where application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) come in. Right in the middle ground there are FPGAs, which allow some logical reconfiguring at the client side depending on current needs.

Intel hopes that it can leverage this technology to better meet the needs of its corporate clients like Facebook, Google and Microsoft, specifically to improve complex tasks like facial and other pattern recognition. Said companies already use Intel’s Xeon server processors, so it makes a lot of sense to strive for complete end-to-end solutions. In fact, the company’s long-term vision is to actually combine both tech in a single chip solution, but as CEO Brian Krzanich explains, that is still a little way off. In the meantime, starting 2016, Intel will be offering Altera chips alongside its own lineup.

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Samsung delivered more info on the Bio-Processor it unveiled a while back. The chip aims to make health-tracking wearables both more capable and smaller.

The Samsung Bio-Processor integrates analog front ends, a digital signal processor, a power management circuit, a microcontroller and eFlash. This means it can do all the necessary processing itself, without external components (other than the sensors). If discrete components are used for the same functionality, they will take up four times as much space.

The chip can measure skeletal muscle mass, body fat, heart rate and rhythm, skin temperature and stress level. Combining these individual measurements can enable new use cases for health tracking apps.

Samsung has prepared a wrist band, board and patch reference designs and says that the chip will hit mass production soon. You can expect wearables with the Bio-Processor to be available in the first half of 2016.

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