Kang Gosol

Over the last 1-2 years we’ve seen a new type of smartphone category start carving itself a niche in the market: the gaming smartphone. Last year, the original Black Shark was amongst the first devices to try to cater to a gaming audience, offering characteristic “gaming designs” as well as promising to offer software features to differentiate itself from the more usual smartphone offerings. This year, Xiaomi has updated its Black Shark line and brand with the new Black Shark 2. The phone is very much a continuation of what we saw last year with the Black Shark, but offering the newest hardware innards and iterative improvements to the design and features.

We’ve had a few requests as of late for giveaways that are open to readers other than US residents, so today we’re doing just that. Our benevolent corporate overlords in the Future UK office are running a survey about smartphone usage, and they’ve asked to get feedback specifically from AnandTech UK readers. In return, everyone who completes the survey will be entered to win a £250 Amazon gift card. Overall, the survey covers several facets of smartphone usage, ranging from brands and upgrade frequency to familiarity with 5G. Our corporate offices are particularly interested in impressions and usage of 5G – how our UK readers are using it so far, and what (if anything) they see it as significantly improving the experience for. This survey should take no more than five minutes to complete. And as a thank you for taking part, you’ll be automatically entered into a prize draw to win a £250 Amazon voucher. If you want to be in with a shot of winning the prize as well as sharing

Having launched a variety of curved ultrawide displays for gamers in the recent years, HP is rolling out similar monitors for business and professional users from many industries who want to boost their productivity. This week along with its flagship S430c curved LCD, HP introduced its more mainstream E344c Curved Monitor, which brings numerous contemporary features to the table and is aimed at a much broader commercial audience. Offering a 21:9 ultrawide aspect ratio, the HP E344c Curved Monitor relies on a 34-inch SVA panel with a 3440×1440 resolution, 300 nits brightness, a 1000:1 contrast ratio, a 16 ms GtG response time, a 60 Hz refresh rate, and 178°/178° viewing angles. HP has designed this price-friendly monitor as a day-to-day work horse, so there is no factory calibration to speak of or support for wide color gamuts; in fact the company doesn't even officially disclose the monitor's sRGB gamut coverage. In which case, it's not unreasonable to guess that i

As the world’s second largest smartphone manufacturer, the growth of Huawei over the last decade has been immense. Last year the company overtook Apple with smartphone unit sales, despite not being in the US market, by offering some of the best hardware and user experiences in a very competitive market. However, being placed on the US Entity List earlier this year has put a dent in that momentum, especially when it comes to talking about flagship smartphones. Huawei launched its new Mate 30 and Mate 30 Pro smartphones this week, without Google Play Store apps, with CEO Richard Yu committing over $1B to enhance the Huawei app ecosystem. After the launch event, Richard sat down with a group of press and took some questions.

Western Digital this week has introduced its first family of embedded eMMC storage devices for industrial and IoT applications. Based on the company's 64-layer BiCS3 3D TLC NAND memory, the new iNAND IX EM132 drives offer up to 310 MB/s read speeds as well as enhanced endurance and reliability by supporting various features designed specifically for embedded, commercial, industrial, and similar environments. Western Digital’s iNAND IX EM132 embedded flash drives are based around an in-house controller that supports an eMMC 5.1 HS400 interface along with an advanced ECC, wear leveling, bad block management, and RPMB (replay protect memory block). The eMMC drives also support smart partitioning (multiple partitions with different features and purposes to provide device makers some additional flexibility), auto/manual data refresh (automatically rewrites all the information to ensure that even rarely accessed data is available when needed), as well as all the usual management and

The Oppo Reno 10x Zoom is another Snapdragon 855-based phone that was released earlier in the year, and while we did a quick hands-on test of the device back in May, we never really got to fully reviewing the unit until now. Beyond putting the Reno 10x through our usual testing suite, what’s interesting is that in this time Oppo has had the opportunity to refine the software, and we’ve seen particular improvements on the side of the camera with the introduction of a new low-light photography mode. The device has two key characteristics: A full-screen minimal bezel display which is enabled by housing the front-camera in a mechanical motorised slide-out mechanism, and a triple-camera setup amongst which we find a “periscope” zoom camera module. Both of these features separately aren’t unique to the Reno 10x, however their combination is unique to Oppo.

Western Digital this week announced that it has made a strategic decision to leave the market for dedicated storage systems, as further development of its IntelliFlash and ActiveScale businesses would require additional investments and management focus. The company will sell off its IntelliFlash business to DDN (a specialist in storage systems, AI, and big data) and will explore various strategic options for ActiveScale. The storage systems market is rather lucrative, but extremely competitive. Over the years, both Western Digital (as well as its HGST division) and SanDisk acquired numerous companies that specialized on hardware and software for datacenter storage, as well as on all-flash storage arrays in order to build highly-competitive storage systems (more details in our coverage of the Western Digital - SanDisk acquisition). Because many product families overlapped each other when Western Digital took over SanDisk in 2016, numerous lineups were divested. At present, West

It’s been a few years since machine learning and neural networks first started to be the hot new news topic. Ever since then, the market has transformed a lot and a lot of companies and the industry as a whole has shifted from a notion of “what can we do with this” to rather a narrative of “this is useful, we should really have it”. Although the market is very much far from being mature, it’s no longer in the early wild-west stages that we saw a few years ago. A notable development in the industry is that there’s been a whole lot of silicon vendors who have chosen to develop their own IP instead of licensing things out – in a sense IP vendors were a bit behind the curve in terms of actually offering solutions, forcing in-house developments in order for their product not to fall behind in competitiveness. Today, CEVA announces the new second generation of NeuPro neural networks accelerators, the new NeuPro-S. The new offering improves and advances the capabilities seen in the fi

Over four years ago, Intel started to develop what is now known as Compute Express Link (CXL), an interface to coherently connect CPUs to all types of other compute resources. Over time, Intel collaborated with other industry behemoths, and early this year nine companies organized the CXL Consortium to jointly develop the technology as a new open standard. Over the past few months, dozens of additional companies have joined the consortium, and now the consortium itself has been formally incorporated this week, marking a major step in the development of CXL as an industry standard. While incorporation itself doesn't change matters for CXL from a technical perspective, incorporating a group like the CXL Consortium is a fairly big deal, because this typically only happens with an industry standards group gets large enough and gains enough traction that its members are very confident the technology is soon to go into widespread use. This means that the CXL Consortium has been elev

Today we are taking a look at a wireless mechanical keyboard from Corsair, the K63. Designed with living room gaming in mind, the K63 seeks to combine the benefits for mechanical keyboards with the convenience of wireless communication, with a battery life lengthy enough for long gaming sessions.

Sony this month started to offer its Micro LED-based displays to well-funded consumers. Officially branded as Crystal LED direct view display systems (aka CLEDIS), these ultra high-end products were previously only available for commercial installations. Designed to offer superior contrasts, brightness levels, and viewing angles, Sony’s Crystal LED TVs are designed to replace projector-enabled home theaters and will be available in 2K, 4K, 8K, and 16K versions with sizes of up to 790 inches. Sony’s Crystal LED display systems rely on bezel-less Micro LED modules that are built using 0.003-mm² individually-controlled LEDs. The modules offer up to 1000 nits peak brightness, around 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio, up to a 120 Hz refresh rate, as well as nearly 180° viewing angles. According to Sony, such a display can cover 140% of the sRGB color space or around 100% of the DCI-P3 color gamut. Since the micro LED modules are rather large – even though they're the fraction of the s

As part of today’s fall keynote presentation for mobile devices, Apple took the wraps off of the latest iteration of their entry-level iPad. Now entering its 7 th generation, the new iPad continues to retain most of the classic tablet’s design elements and features, however strictly speaking, Apple has finally moved past the tablet’s classic 9.7-inch size. As part of an effort to align the entry-level iPad with Apple’s higher-end iPad Air, the company has ever so slightly enlarged the tablet, with the latest model filling out to 10.2 inches diagonal. Size increases aside, however, the latest iPad still takes up the same spot within Apple’s lineup as the previous iPad model. With Apple holding to the $329 retail price for the base 32 GB model ($299 education), this is Apple’s entry-level iPad, optimized for content consumption and some very light content creation. The latter, in turn, actually gets a small boost in this generation, with the addition of Apple’s Smart Connector, allo

Apple’s new iPhone Special Event just finished up at the Steve Jobs theatre in Cupertino – and as expected we saw the launch of a new generation of iPhones – the new iPhone 11 series. The new iPhone 11 is the successor to the iPhone XR of last year and is projected to again be Apple’s most successful device for the year, upgrading the camera system with new photography experiences as well as introducing the new A13 chipset. The new iPhone 11 Pro and 11 Pro Max are Apple’s first iPhones with the “Pro” designation, and are the successors to last year’s XS and XS Max. They also bring the new back glass design, but this time include three camera modules, and this year Apple also upgrades the display panel to make it much brighter and much more efficient.

Patriot’s Viper Gaming division this week officially introduced its first PCIe 4.0 SSDs, several weeks ahead of schedule. The Viper VP4100 drives use Phison’s PS5016-E16 controller and generally resembles competing products. However, because of a custom firmware, the SSDs may differ a bit as compared to other E16 drives. Available in 1 TB as well as 2 TB configurations and equipped with Phison’s PS5016-E16 controller as well as 3D TLC NAND memory, the Patriot Viper VP4100 is rated for up to 5000 MB/s sequential read speeds, up to 4400 MB/s sequential write speeds, as well an 800K peak read/write random IOPS. While the rated sequential write speed of the VP4100 is 100 MB/s lower than other drives based on the same controller, its rated random read/write performance is 50K IOPS higher, which looks like a reasonable tradeoff because random speeds usually have a more significant impact on end user experience. Patriot's Viper VP4100 SSDs Capaci

Yangtze Memory Technologies Co. (YMTC) this week said that it had started volume production of its 64-layer 3D NAND memory that uses its proprietary Xtacking architecture. The bhips were developed entirely in China and will be used for SSDs as well as UFS storage. YMTC’s 64-layer 3D TLC NAND device features a 256 Gb capacity, yet its interface speed is unknown. YMTC said that it would launch its own SSDs as well as UFS cards for embedded and mobile applications based on the new memory chips, but did not disclose any details about the said products or their availability timeframe. YMTC’s 3D NAND uses the company’s proprietary Xtacking architecture that is designed to enable very high I/O speeds and to some degree minimize die size. Traditionally, manufacturers of 3D NAND make memory array as well as NAND logic (address decoding, page buffers, etc.) on one wafer using the same process technology. By contrast, YMTC produces 3D NAND array and NAND logic on two separate wafers u

In the recent years, leading makers of gaming PCs have been experimenting with unorthodox form-factors in an attempt to maximize performance and improve overall experience. Having learnt from its Predator Triton laptops, Acer applied its expertise to mobile workstations and this week introduced one of the industry’s first convertible notebooks featuring Intel’s Core i9 CPU and NVIDIA’s Quadro RTX 5000 GPU. The Acer ConceptD 900 Pro is a 17.3-inch convertible PC that uses the chassis originally developed for the Predator Triton 900 gaming PC. The chassis features Acer’s CNC-machined Ezel Aero Hinge that can flip, extend, or recline the display in a bid to offer the most optimal position for creativity. The notebook also places its mechanical keyboard to its front side to improve cooling for high-TDP components while retaining a relatively low z-height. Speaking of cooling, it is necessary to note that the PC uses Acer’s 4 th Generation cooling system featuring metallic Aeroblad

Lenovo has unveiled two new consumer displays featuring ultra-thin bezels, AMD’s FreeSync variable refresh rate technology, and certified to minimize eye fatigue by TÜV Rhineland Eye Comfort standards. The LCDs will be available already this month and will not be too expensive. The new monitors carrying the TÜV Rhineland Eye Comfort badge are Lenovo’s Q24i and Q27q that come in an ultra-thin/ultra-compact chassis that blends in with any surroundings — whether this is home or office — and features ultra-thin ‘near edgeless’ bezels on three sides. Both monitors feature AMD’s FreeSync variable refresh rate technology, built-in stereo speakers, as well as DisplayPort and HDMI inputs. The smaller Lenovo Q24i has a 23.8-inch Full-HD panel, whereas the larger Lenovo Q27q comes with a 27-inch QHD IPS panel. Other specifications are yet to be disclosed, yet expect them to be in-line with other mainstream monitors available today. Besides design, the key selling feature of th

We’re edging towards to latter half of 2019 and the next and last upcoming wave of device releases, however among the many device releases of the year one device we missed to review was the new Xiaomi Mi9. The phone was amongst the earliest releases of the year, being actually representing one of the first Snapdragon 855 devices announced back in February. Xiaomi’s always been an interesting vendor that stood out alongside Huawei as one of the bigger Chinese vendors that have a larger presence in the west. Particularly last year and especially this year Xiaomi has made a lot of progress in terms of their push in European markets by officially releasing and offering their flagship devices in different market. The Mi9, as opposed to past iterations, thus no longer represents being a special case or import device, but rather a simple official Amazon purchase. Today the Mi9 can be had for even less than its original 445€ launch price, being available for less than 400€, whilst still of

This opinion piece is reactionary to recent announcements. Having just attended the Huawei keynote here at the IFA trade show, there were a couple of new features enabled through AI that were presented on stage that made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end. Part of it is just an impression on how quickly AI in hand-held devices is progressing, but the other part of it makes me think to how it can be misused. Let me cover the two features.   "Real-Time Multi-Instance Segmentation" Firstly, AI detection in photos is not new. Identifying objects isn’t new. But Huawei showed a use case where several people were playing musical instruments, and the smartphone camera could detect both the people from the background, and the people from each other. This allowed the software to change the background, from an indoor scene to an outdoor scene and such. What this also enabled was that individuals could be deleted, moved, or resized. Compare the title image t