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Qualcomm Makes the Snapdragon 845 Official, Talks 5G It’s finally official: At the 2017 Snapdragon Developer Conference in Maui, Hawaii, Qualcomm took the wraps off the Snapdragon 845 , the newest flagship in its 10-year-old Snapdragon system-on-chip series. The San Jose, California-based company wasn’t willing to spill  all  of the beans just yet — it’s hosting a talk exclusively about the Snapdragon 845 on Wednesday — but it gave a tantalizing glimpse of its latest and greatest chip on Tuesday. Here’s everything you need to know. Snapdragon 845 Qualcomm’s the largest fabless semiconductor company in the world, and its chips power billions of devices. But it has its eyes on the estimated 8.6 billion smartphones that are expected to ship between 2017 and 2021. The Snapdragon 845 was three years in the making, Qualcomm said, and the development team honed in on five core features: Content creation, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, wirel...

Google Flights and Google Trips Gain Price Tracking, Deal Alerts Just ahead of the holiday season, Google’s rolling out updates to Google Flights and Google Trips that’ll make nabbing last-minute deals on airline tickets, hotel rooms, and local goings-on easier. Starting Thursday, Google Flights, Google’s Search -powered airfare search tool, will start to analyze historical pricing data in order to predict when fares might rise or fall. Using some of the same machine learning techniques employed by Kayak, Hipmunk, Hopper, and other price-predicting travel planners, Flights will notify you when airline prices reach certain predefined thresholds. You’ll see a tip at the top of your Google Flights results if prices to a destination “won’t drop further”, for example, or “are less than normal”. Source: Google The artificial intelligence-powered predictions are heading to Google’s hotel-searching tools, too. When you’re search...

Snap’s Lens Studio Lets Anyone Design Custom Snapchat Lenses Snapchat Lenses come in all shapes and sizes. Dancing hot dogs, rainbows, and rabbit ears are just a sampling of the augmented reality (AR) camera filters you’ll find in the application’s growing gallery, and starting Thursday, anyone will be able to contribute new ones. Snap, Snapchat’s parent company, took the wraps off Lens Studio, a design program for Windows and Mac that lets users fine-tune, render, and publish the Lenses of their dreams. Studio — which resembles the internal tool that Snap uses to build Snapchat Lenses, according to The Verge — is chock full of templates and guides for three-dimensional and two-dimensional lens designs, and has a application programming interface (API) that lets budding Lens designers add animations and touch interations. Right now, users are limited to creating World Lenses, or AR layered on Snapchat’s rear camera feed. But in the future, th...

T-Mobile Will Launch its Own TV Service in 2018 AT&T has DirecTV. Verizon has Go90. And starting next year, T-Mobile will begin offering an over-the-air, direct-to-consumer premium video service of its own. In an announcement published to YouTube on Monday, T-Mobile CEO John Legere said that the carrier had finalized the acquisition of TV tech company Layer3 TV, and that it’d begin to secure the necessary content deals, contracts, and services for a competitive TV service launch in 2018. It’ll be one without “long-term contracts” or “complex bundles and billing,” Legere said, and one that’s priced disruptively. “We’re going to build TV for people who love TV — TV you’ll be able to watch on every connected device you have wherever you are,” Mr. Legere said. “[We’re] about to ‘un-carrier’ your TV. [We want] to take the fight to big cable and satellite TV on behalf of consumers everywhere....

Qualcomm’s QCC5100 Bluetooth Chip Hones in On Power Efficiency If you own a pair of Bluetooth headphones, there’s a pretty good chance you’ve had to put up with subpar battery life. But you might not have to for much longer. At the Consumer Electronics Show on Monday, Qualcomm announced the QCC5100, a low-power Bluetooth system-on-chip that’s designed to deliver best-in-class features without compromising on power efficiency. The QCC5100 supports data transfers up to 2Mbps and a Bluetooth 5 dual-mode radio that lets you stream audio to multiple devices at once. There’s also proprietary technologies like Qualcomm’s TrueWireless Stereo which eliminates the need for wires between left and right earbuds, Qualcomm’s high-quality aptX HD audio codec , and enhanced Qualcomm cVc and Fluence active noise cancellation (ANC) technologies. All the more impressive is the claim that the QCC5100 is up to 65 percent more efficient at handling voice calls and...

Google Home Sales Top 6 Million, Over 400 Million Google Assistant-Enabled Devices Shipped Amazon’s Echo may be the smart speaker market’s top dog , but Google Home is nipping at its tail. Lifetime sales of Google’s AI-powered speakers — which include the Google Home , Home Mini , Home Max — topped six million this holiday, according to the search giant. “All told, Google Home usage increased 9X this holiday season over last year’s,” Google wrote in a blog post. “And in fact, we sold more than one […] device every second since Google Home Mini started shipping in October.” Google’s accomplishments don’t stop there. It also shipped tens of millions of “Google devices for the home” in 2017, a category that comprises speakers, appliances, and peripherals with the Google Assistant , Google’s voice assistant, built in. And it’s enabled the Assistant support on more than 400 million devices, including App...

Honor View 10 arriving internationally January 8th, Honor 7X Red Model coming to U.S. At a press conference during the 2018 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Honor , an offshoot of smartphone maker Huawei , announced that the Honor View 10 will head to new territories starting January 8. It’ll precede the launch of a limited-edition Honor 7X Red, which will hit U.S., U.K., and international shores in the coming weeks. Honor View 10 Source: Honor Starting January 8, the Honor View 10 will go on sale in India, U.K., France, Germany, Italy, and Spain from HiHonor . It’ll be available in Malaysia and Russia in late January, Huawei said. The View 10’s specs are nothing to scoff at. It has a metal unibody and a 5.99-inch FullView Full HD+ resolution (2160×1080) 18:9 display. Under the hood, the handset packs an octa-core HiSilicon Kirin 970 system-on-chip (four ARM Cortex-A73 cores paired with four ARM Cortex-A53 cores) with an i7 co-processor and a dedicated ...