Last year, a dramatic change came to Google’s Nexus offering. The upper-mid range phone that was the Nexus 5 was replaced by a premium and much more expensive model made by Motorola. Skip time ahead about a year to this fall and we are offered a true premium package with a significantly lower price tag. The Nexus 6P is beautifully designed by Huawei to please both power users and average users alike.

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You may not know this, but LG has been trying its hand at mobile chipset design for a while now. Following its initial Nuclun SoC, the Korean company is at the moment developing its next solution, called Nuclun 2. We first heard about it back in August, and up until now there have been no releases of devices powered by it.

But that could change next year. According to a new (and unconfirmed) rumor out of China, LG will use the Nuclun 2 in the successor to the V10 – a smartphone the company has launched not long ago. Hence, the V10’s successor will be out no sooner than the second half of 2016. That’s quite the wait for the Nuclun 2 to actually make it into a shipping product.

LG’s latest chip will not be powering the G5 (which should arrive in or around April), allegedly because it’s simply not fast enough for the flagship device. Even so, the Nuclun 2 is said to be able to outperform Huawei’s Kirin 950, if not by much. The Nuclun 2 will be manufactured using TSMC’s 16nm process, and it has a CPU which reportedly features Cortex-A72 and Cortex-A53 cores.

As for the Nuclun 3, this one will be aimed at competing head-on with Samsung’s Exynos 8890 (which will power one version of the Galaxy S7), but it’s unclear when the third-gen in-house chipset from LG will hit the streets in a shipping handset. At the rate things are going, it may come much later than the SoC it wants to compete with, however.

Source (in Chinese) |…

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While we wait for the Tegra X1-powered Nvidia Shield Tablet X1 to actually become reality, the company has started pushing out a nice gift for owners of its Shield Tablet K1.

We’re talking about the update to Android 6.0 Marshmallow, which is now in the process of rolling out to a Shield Tablet K1 unit near you. It’s a 665MB download, and as you may expect it features everything that Google’s baked into the 6.0 release of Android (including Now On Tap).

Alongside those goodies, however, you’re also getting a new Nvidia Shield Camera app, complete with Material Design, improved burst functionality, and new real-time HD image effects. And thanks to Adoptable Storage, you can integrate the space on your microSD card with the main internal storage of the tablet. Finally, some new wallpapers should be in…

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Microsoft’s next mid-range Windows 10 smartphone, following the already launched Lumia 550, will be the Lumia 650. We’ve first seen an image depicting the upcoming model last week, and today a few new renders have showed up.

These aren’t leaked renders, do keep that in mind – rather, they are said to be based “on internal Microsoft slides for the phone”. So, while not being official in any way, they are apparently “highly reflective of the final product”.

The Lumia 650 will allegedly become official in January or February. It will be marketed primarily towards companies, positioned as the affordable business phone (and will be ready for deployment in enterprise environments). It’s also obviously going to be the successor to the Lumia 640.

Microsoft Lumia 650

The Lumia 650 has a metal frame, and it will be offered in white and black. It will pack a 5-inch 720p touchscreen, an 8 MP rear camera with LED flash, a 5 MP selfie shooter, 1GB of RAM, and 8GB of expandable storage. At the helm will be Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 212 chipset, which has a 1.3 GHz quad-core Cortex-A7 CPU and Adreno 304 GPU.

In the US, Cricket is reportedly going to carry it from April. There’s no info yet on whether the Lumia 650 will be picked up by other carriers too, or when it might launch in other parts of the…

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Remember Live Photos? The feature made its debut in iOS 9 a few months ago, and it pairs an image with a video of the moments just before and after you captured it – with sound too.

If you love Live Photos, then you’ll be happy to know that Facebook is starting to support these. The latest update for the social network’s iOS app should become available in the iTunes App Store today, and it will introduce Live Photos support.

That said, you may need to be patient, because this is reportedly going to be a staged rollout. Only a “small percentage” of users will instantly have access to the new feature, while the wider rollout will come in 2016.

If you are one of the lucky ones, you’ll be able to share Live Photos onto the social network, and those using Facebook on a device running iOS 9 or later will see the full effect (while the rest of the world will presumably just get the still image you…

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Unveiled back in June this year, the Fairphone 2 – which features a modular design, with most components sourced from conflict-free mines – has started shipping to customers across Europe.

This was announced by Fairphone, the company behind the device, in a blog post today. “It’s been almost two years in the making, and some of the earliest buyers have been patiently waiting since July to receive their new phones,” said Fairphone community manager Douwe in a blog post. “As community manager, I want to personally welcome the new batch of Fairphone owners to our community.”

First 1,000 units are expected to be shipped this month, followed by rest of the pre-orders in January 2016.

Specs-wise, the handset is powered by a Snapdragon 801 chipset and sports a 5″ 1080p screen with Gorilla Glass 3 protection. It has 2GB RAM and an 8MP camera, and runs Android 5.1 Lollipop. The device offers support for 4G LTE and dual-SIM, and also has a microSD slot.

Carrying a price tag of around €525, the Fairphone 2 is currently only available for purchase in Europe.

Source |…

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If you’re in the UK, Motorola is now giving you the opportunity to purchase the 2nd generation Moto 360 smartwatch for quite a bit less than before.

This deal expires on December 27. From now and up until then, you can buy the 42mm men’s Moto 360 starting at just £200 (if you use the promo code UKXMASM42). The 46mm men’s model is £230 (promo code UKXMASM46), while the 42mm women’s smartwatch goes for £210 (with promo code UKXMASW42).

Of course, these prices are only for the base configurations. If you choose additional customizations through Moto Maker, then you will need to pay more. Still, you are saving £29, £39, or £49, depending on which exact model you pick up.

Source |…

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AdDuplex released its monthly report showing Windows Mobile distribution and a snapshot of the data from December 15 shows Windows 10 mobile is slowly but surely making progress.

The sales of Microsoft Lumia 950, Lumia 950XL and Lumia 550 last month have bumped the Windows 10 mobile usage by 1.8 percentage points bringing the overall share to 8.8%. Windows Phone 7.x and Windows Phone 8.0 are down 0.2 percentage points each, while Windows Phone 8.1 is down 1.3%.

Additionally, AdDuplex data for December shows some new devices that are yet to hit the smartphone market. One of them is the Lumia 650 (RM-115(x)) with a 5″ 720p display. The other new one is RM-1160/1162, which packs a 5.4″ 720p display, for which we anticipate more information in the near future.

The report suggests that LG and HP are preparing new devices. LG will have a LG V496 (LG G Pad 8.3 in the Android realm), but repurposed to run Windows 10 mobile. As for HP, the company is preparing the Falcon with a 5.4″ 1280×768 pixel resolution. We recently saw the device in a benchmark setting to pack a Snapdragon 820 and a QHD resolution on a 5.8″ display. Hopefully, we’ll have final specs for HP’s upcoming Windows flagship soon…

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Microsoft is now offering a bunch of deals for those who are interested in purchasing its Xbox One game console. In the US, you get $50 off the previous price of the Xbox One, along with a free game of your choice. There are many bundles available, for example the Xbox One 1TB Holiday Bundle is now priced at $349 (down from $399). The full list of deals can be found on this page.

Over in Germany, on the other hand, you can receive a discount of up to €150 on the Xbox One. Yet in this case there’s a catch: the level of the discount depends on your Xbox.com Gamerscore. The higher your score, the better discount you get. The minimum price cut for an Xbox One is €20. To take advantage of this offer, go to Xbox.com, log in, and ask for your own promo code (which will be sent to you via email). Then use that code when you purchase an Xbox One at Amazon. Do keep in mind however that this deal is only valid until December…

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The OnePlus 2 owners are getting a nice Christmas present right now, as OnePlus has started rolling out a new Oxygen OS update – version 2.2.0. It brings quite a few bug fixes and security patches, among some new features.

This is the complete change log:

Fixed dual SIM preference selection issues in settings.
Added NTFS and exFAT support for OTG
Fixed Google Camera photo-sphere and panorama bugs.
Screen temperature can now be adjusted from quick settings.
Added hide search bar option in launcher settings.
Security patches.
Holiday wallpapers.
General bug fixes and optimizations.

There is nothing mentioned on the Home key/fingerprint scanner issues some people are experiencing since launch though, so it seems those may take even more time before they are addressed.

As usual the rollout process is gradual so it may take a while before the update reaches every OnePlus 2 smartphone out…

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