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Instagram is working on letting you save drafts of your Story
Instagram will soon allow you to save your Instagram Stories so you can finish making them or posting them at a later time.
While Snapchat pioneered the concept of stories, Instagram came up with their own version later and actually managed to beat Snapchat at their own game. Nowadays, 500 million people use Instagram Stories every day, and that number is only set to go up. Instagram has added many features to stories, including GIFs, stickers, background music, and much more. But here's the thing about stories: if you want to make one and publish it at a later time, you actually have to tap on the "Save" button, which saves the whole story as a plain image, losing things such as mentions, stickers, music, and more. Now, though, a proper drafting function is coming to Instagram stories.
HMD starts rolling out the Android 11 update for the Nokia 3.2
The official Android 11 update for the Nokia 3.2 is here, bringing the latest version of Android to a key device in Nokia's budget lineup.
The software has always been a contentious issue on Android phones since the day they were first conceived. Some companies can nail the software experience just right but can fail to provide updates promptly. Other times, the software experience can be slow and bloated, but updates will actually come fairly frequently. HMD, more often than not, has been a mixture of both. Their software is very close to stock Android, while they also manage to provide timely updates to all devices in their lineup, including their lower-end devices, like the Nokia 3-series, 2-series, and even 1-series. The Nokia 3.2 is one of the devices in this latter club, and we have good news for whoever owns one: the latest Android 11 update is rolling out now as announced in their forums, right within their previously announced schedule!
LG may shut down its smartphone business since it can't find a buyer
LG has reportedly not been able to sell off their money-losing smartphone business, which may lead to them just shutting it down altogether.
The history of LG's smartphone division has been one of constant failure and tragedy in the last few years. Despite their constant attempts to innovate and shake things up, they have failed to really make a profit off their smartphone business. While they often make headlines and do their best at keeping things fresh with weird concepts like the LG Wing, the reality is that their smartphone division is still constantly losing money, and their efforts to turn that tide around are not working that well. LG was previously reported to be in talks for selling off their smartphone division, but their search for a buyer is reportedly not going very well, and they might be forced to throw the towel and shut down their smartphone business.
Samsung may be making a new Galaxy Fold that folds twice
Samsung might be making a new Galaxy Fold that has a double hinge, according to a new Nikkei report. Read on to know more!
The introduction of the Samsung Galaxy Fold served as both the culmination of Samsung's years-long efforts to develop a mass-market foldable phone and the start of a new trend in premium smartphones, with multiple companies releasing their own takes on a foldable phone. Whether foldable phones are here to stay, though, is a debate for another day. Still, for now, we know one thing: Samsung's recent foldable phones, the Galaxy Z Flip and the Galaxy Z Fold 2, show that Samsung's foldable technology has started to mature. Now, there might be a new member in the Z-series: a foldable smartphone that folds twice.
Xiaomi's POCO F3 and POCO X3 Pro offer sub-flagship specs at an affordable price
Xiaomi has just taken the wraps off the POCO F3 and POCO X3 Pro, two new members of their lineup touting Snapdragon 800-series chipsets.
We’re all old enough to remember POCO’s very first device, the POCO F1, in 2018. The POCO F1 made a lot of headlines back in the day, featuring a flagship-grade SoC, the Snapdragon 845, at a price tag that challenged mid-range devices with much slower internals. That phone was considered a one-off until POCO's brand relaunch in 2020, this time with a lot more phones with different specifications and pricing.
The Qualcomm Snapdragon 860 is an overclocked version of the Snapdragon 855 from 2019
The Snapdragon 860 has been quietly launched by Qualcomm, improving over the older Snapdragon 855's design. Check it out!
Qualcomm's Snapdragon naming has become somewhat convoluted in recent years. While the company tends to release multiple chipsets under the 400-series, 600-series, and 700-series every year, they have so far stuck to one golden rule: the 800-series only sees one flagship-grade release per year, with maybe a minor revision towards the second part of the year. 2021 saw a minor change to this strategy: while their 2021 flagship SoC is the Snapdragon 888, they also introduced a Snapdragon 870, a refreshed, higher-clocked version of the Snapdragon 865/865+, meant for cheaper devices. Qualcomm is further continuing this new strategy with a new member of the family: the Snapdragon 860.
Xiaomi's POCO X3 Pro leaks in full with a brand new Qualcomm chip
The POCO X3 Pro is coming and thanks to an early Shopee listing, we know pretty much everything about Xiaomi's upcoming mid-range smartphone.
POCO's current lineup of cheap yet performant smartphones loosely resembles the brand's first smartphone dubbed the POCO F1. While the brand's first device was an aggressively cheap "flagship killer" equipped with the Snapdragon 845, their later devices have mostly been cheaper mid-range phones that are respectable on their own rights. The POCO X3, though, was one of the best mid-range phones of 2020, offering a 120Hz display, Qualcomm's Snapdragon 732G, and an overall amazing bang for the buck considering its price tag. The upcoming POCO X3 Pro seems like it'll offer a similar value proposition, and thanks to an online retailer, we now know basically everything about the new smartphone.
YouTube adds copyright checks during upload to stop you from getting your channel banned
YouTube is adding a new feature that will check if videos contain any copyrighted content before uploading. Read on to know more!
If you want to be able to upload your own content to YouTube and maybe even making money off that content, you need to abide by copyright laws. And that's enforced. Copyright owners and YouTube themselves actively police videos looking for copyright infringements, and if they find something, even the smallest thing, consequences can range from having the copyright owner make money off your video or even having your video taken down, or your channel banned. This is an issue as sometimes some content creators will break copyright laws by accident. It's a very imperfect system, and YouTube knows this, which is why they are testing copyright checks during upload.
Samsung's next Galaxy Note may be delayed until next year due to a chip shortage
We might not see a Galaxy Note smartphone launch this year as chip shortages have started to severely impact Samsung's chip supply.
So, have you noticed how there's a distinct lack of graphics cards in stock virtually everywhere? It's not just the current cryptocurrency mining boom that's making them fly off the shelves. There's also a currently ongoing shortage of chips that affects pretty much everything in the tech industry. We've covered it in more detail before. Still, the premise here is that supply is so tight right now that it has started to affect the smartphone industry, particularly chip supply from Qualcomm, with increased demand for chips worsening things overall. While the effects of this shortage may not be apparent right now, they may become more and more of an issue throughout 2021. One possible effect of this? The next Galaxy Note device, which may or may not be called the Galaxy Note 21, may not launch until 2022.
Even Discord is working on its own version of Clubhouse
Discord is working on their own alternative to the rapidly growing Clubhouse app, joining an ever-expanding list of companies doing so.
Clubhouse and the concept behind it have taken the world by storm. In a world that's currently enduring a harsh pandemic with no end in sight, Internet-based services have taken even more prevalence, and the public chatroom concept Clubhouse has pioneered has managed to attract a lot of users, lured by the concept of public, audio-only rooms that are more engaging and dynamic than simple live streams. Twitter is launching their own alternative to Clubhouse called Twitter Spaces, while it was reported that Facebook and Telegram also had their own alternatives in the works. A new player might be joining these other two companies, though, and it's none other but Discord.
Google Earth is preparing a neat Time Machine feature that shows you the past
Google Earth seems to be preparing a feature called Time Machine which will turn back time and show you places as they were before.
If you've ever used the desktop version of Google Earth (not the web version but rather the computer program, currently known as Google Earth Pro), you would know it has a whole lot of features that the web and mobile counterparts still lack. After all, it did get simplified while being adapted to both web browsers and Android/iOS devices. You could dismiss most of those "lost" features as just gimmicks, but one gimmick I really miss on the modern versions of Google Earth was how you could actually wind back in time and check out old satellite imagery from years past. That feature might be coming soon, at least to the Android version of the app.
Verizon's faster 5G speeds will be reserved for "premium" customers
Verizon is rolling out faster 5G speeds, but unless you have one of their "premium" plans, then tough luck: you won't have them.
It has happened: 5G has become mainstream. Or at least, sort of. While 5G is technically mainstream in the sense that the technology is available in most of the U.S. territory and the technology has already started trickling down from just flagships to mid-range and even budget devices, the technology still needs some maturing before we can say it's truly, completely mainstream like 4G currently is. Speeds, for one, can still be a crapshoot, sometimes even to the point where it might be better to just use LTE. Verizon is guilty of this with their "nationwide" 5G network, and they're about to offer faster 5G speeds, but this comes with a big if. Particularly, the fact that these faster speeds, brought over by C-band frequencies, will be limited to Verizon's "premium" users, as reported by The Verge.
Twitter is rolling out its Clubhouse-like "Spaces" feature to Android beta users
Twitter is seemingly test driving Spaces, their Clubhouse-like audio chatroom feature, on the Android version of the app. Check it out!
Clubhouse has earned a decent amount of popularity in the last few weeks because it helped popularize a fresh new concept: live "drop-in" audio chats where anyone can drop in and talk. Clubhouse, in particular, started to become popular through the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, where the internet and social media became even more prevalent in our lives than they already were in previous times. That growth accelerated exponentially since the start of 2021. It has now popularized the concept of "audio chatrooms", and big technology companies are running to get a piece of the cake, with companies like Facebook reportedly rushing to make their own competitor. Twitter also made one of their own, which is called Twitter Spaces, and they might be testing it on Android now.
New Motorola-branded smartwatches spotted with Qualcomm's Snapdragon Wear 4100
New Moto-branded smartwatches are coming to the market, but they're not actually made by Motorola. Still, they're very exciting products!
Motorola has undergone several transitions to its smartphone lineup, which has inadvertently resulted in a more complicated branding and naming scheme (which is never good). But its smartwatch division has taken an interesting turn. The last time we saw a Motorola smartwatch, it wasn't actually made by Motorola. Rather, it was made by a company called eBuyNow, and Motorola only licensed its brand name. Now, a new generation of Motorola-branded smartwatches is coming, but they're quite different offerings compared to what we've seen before. Maybe that's for the better or maybe that's for the worse, but it's different nonetheless.
OxygenOS Open Beta 7 rolls out for the OnePlus 8 series with February security patch, general bug fixes
The new OxygenOS Open Beta 7 for the OnePlus 8 series, while modest in size, brings the February security patches and some bug fixes.
OnePlus' new OxygenOS 11 skin represented a change of direction in many ways for the company. From a UI perspective, they got rid of the close-to-stock Android look that was a signature feature of OxygenOS for so many years, and instead adopted a completely new look and design guidelines more in line with what we saw with Samsung's One UI interface. But OnePlus has had several problems rolling out the update, particularly to some of their older smartphones such as the OnePlus 7 series. While the OnePlus 8 series have already received a stable update, the Open Beta program is still ongoing, and now OnePlus is rolling out a new Open Beta build -- Open Beta 7 -- to both the OnePlus 8 and the OnePlus 8 Pro.
YouTube's TikTok-like Shorts feature is rolling out in beta in the United States
Google's TikTok competitor, YouTube Shorts, is starting to roll out as a beta to users in the United States. Read on to know more!
TikTok has caused a massive ripple in the social media space. It managed to popularize the concept of short videos, similarly to what Vine made several years ago, and made it global, with the Android app having over 1 billion installs. And while companies like Facebook have already come out with their own alternatives, such as Instagram Reels, TikTok still manages to hold the crown for itself, despite tensions with other companies and even country bans and attempted bans from countries like India (where the app is completely banned) and the United States (where a ban was attempted). It has also spawned plenty of alternatives, with one of them being YouTube Shorts. YouTube Shorts were announced last year, and they are now rolling out in a beta stage to consumers in the United States.
Latest unc0ver release can jailbreak the iPhone 12 series and iOS 14.3
The latest unc0ver release is out, and it's able to jailbreak iOS 14.3 and the latest iPhone 12 and 12 Pro devices. Check it out!
Compared to Android, where rooting is a straightforward process on many devices, iOS users don't have it that easy. The iOS ecosystem is very locked down, and Apple puts a lot of effort into making sure it stays that way. But there's a way out of Apple's walled garden, and it's called jailbreaking. Unfortunately, jailbreaking is generally much more difficult than rooting is on Android because there's no easy way to modify the OS without finding an exploit. Still, last year, we developers released unc0ver, a new iOS jailbreak that was a huge deal at the time because it used a zero-day exploit to jailbreak iPhones running the just-released iOS 13.5.
Microsoft testing new Xbox Game Streaming Windows app and 1080p streaming for xCloud
Xbox is currently testing internally a new version of the Xbox Game Streaming Windows app and 1080p streaming for xCloud. Check it out!
Game streaming went from something that could only be imagined as a far-fetched futuristic concept to something that's actually a thing and has even gained some steam among users (although some companies aren't really doing so well). And everyone wants a piece of the game streaming game, from companies like Nvidia to even Microsoft, which also has their own game streaming service called Xbox Cloud Gaming and formerly called xCloud (we'll still call it xCloud for simplicity sake). Given how you can't buy an Xbox Series X right now (or maybe you can), this is probably the next best thing, but it has some limitations. The good news is that most of those limitations are going away with new features and improvements in the works.
[Update: Working now] It's not just you, Xbox Live is down and you can't play games
Xbox Live is down right now, and it affects everything from signing in to even playing your online-bought games. Read on to know more!
Did you just try to sign in to Xbox Live or fire up a game on your Xbox and found that you can't? Nope, you're not crazy, and no, it's not something on your end. Xbox Live is down right now. Microsoft's online service is currently facing a major outage for players on the Xbox Series X, the Xbox Series S, the Xbox One, and even Windows, and this outage affects everything from sign-in, online multiplayer, and even the ability to even start locally downloaded games. And it has actually dragged on for a surprisingly long amount of time.
Android 12 might add support for iOS-esque widget stacks
Android 12 is seemingly bringing widget stacks, a hallmark feature of iOS 14 widgets, to the Android side. Read on to know more!
Widgets have been around on Android since... well, forever, since it was basically one of Android's very first features. And iOS was constantly scorned for lacking support for widgets until iOS 14 came around, and that was just last year. But iOS widgets work a tad bit differently than how Android widgets work. In iOS, you can actually create what's called "widget stacks", which allows you to stack a lot of widgets in the same place to save space, and swiping between them. In Android, on the other hand, every widget will take up its own space, and while Android launchers are way more customizable, it's still been pretty much the same for several years. Apparently, with Android 12, we might be seeing that sweet iOS feature jump ship too.