Apple is reportedly developing its own cellular modem chip

Apple will soon start offering its own in-house 5G modems for future devices including iPhones and iPads. The company is said to be working on their own cellular chips, which seems like a move to be less reliant on its current modem supplier, Qualcomm. The information was reportedly disclosed by Apple senior vice president of hardware technologies, Mr. Johny Srouji, in a town hall meeting with Apple employees. “This year, we kicked off the development of our first internal cellular modem which will enable another key strategic transition. Long-term strategic investments like these are a critical part of enabling our products and making sure we have a rich pipeline of innovative technologies for our future,” said Srouji.

We have been hearing about Apple focusing on its own modem for a while now. While it currently uses Qualcomm’s 5G components on its latest iPhone 12 lineup, Apple had taken Qualcomm to court over patent licensing fees in 2017, which was settled later on. Prior to Qualcomm, Apple worked with Intel from 2016 to 2018, but had to change its supplier as it wasn’t able to deliver working 5G technology for its 2020 devices. Intel eventually halted the development of its 5G modem tech and had sold the entire patent portfolio to Apple for $1 billion.

There’s no confirmation as to when we could see the first Apple-made 5G cellular chips in action. However, Bloomberg’s report suggests that a 2019 patent agreement between Apple and Qualcomm includes a six-year licensing pact where it will charge license fees based on the wireless patents it owns, even if Apple uses the chips or not. With that said, the company is already focusing on expanding its Apple Silicon chipsets to more Mac products. We recently saw a report suggesting that the company is testing powerful versions of its M1 chip with up to 16 power-cores and four high-efficiency cores, most likely for its upcoming iMacs and larger sized MacBook Pro refresh. There is also one that is rumored to have 32-performance cores that might power the next-gen Mac Pro expected to arrive by 2022.

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Save £50 on the Honor Watch GS Pro, just in time for the holidays

If you want a smartwatch, you can’t really go wrong with Honor. Although the brand was recently sold off, you can still be assured that Honor makes quality products for a price that won’t empty your wallet. Better yet, they also go on sale a lot! Right now, at Amazon UK, you can save £50 on the Honor Watch GS Pro.

Just how good is this watch? In his review of a variety of Honor and Huawei watches, Adam stated that the Honor Watch GS Pro is one rugged watch. This is a smartwatch built for those that enjoy outdoor activities a lot, such as camping or climbing. The watch has been tested and proven to survive harsh elements, so wherever you go, the GS Pro won’t quit.

This smartwatch also has a long battery life. It will last up to 25 days, or 100 hours if you leave the GPS tracking on. If you’re planning a multi-day hike, then you don’t need to worry about the Honor Watch GS Pro giving out on you in the middle of it.

Of course, the sports-style watch also has the other functions you come to expect from a smartwatch. The watch can track your heart rate and blood oxygen, and even your sleep (although the GS Pro is a bit big, so it may not be the best sleep tracker). You can set a variety of workout modes to keep you active, as well.

So how much is the GS Pro? Just £199! Normally £249, you can use the voucher on the store page to save £50 and still get it in time before Christmas.

Honor Watch GS Pro

With GPS tracking, workout modes, and up to 25 days of battery life, this is the smartwatch for the adventurer in your life. Use the voucher on the store page to save £50 and bring the GS Pro down to £199!

Buy at Amazon UK

If you’re looking for more Honor products, you can see what other items are on sale at Honor’s sale page!

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Share Your Best Memories of 2020 with ColorOS 11 and Win an OPPO F17 Pro [open to all countries]

2020 is coming to an end, and it’s time to reflect on some of your favorite moments of the year. To help celebrate the conclusion of 2020, OPPO ColorOS is giving away an OPPO F17 Pro. While 2020 has certainly been a wild year, we did get to see some great new launches in tech. One of these things is the launch of ColorOS 11, which has been one of the best software updates we have seen for OPPO phones.

The OPPO F17 Pro runs Color OS 11 which is designed to make life flow. This simple, but feature-rich update, is based on Android 11. Now you can use the latest Android features to make your quarantine or social distancing a better experience. One lucky XDA user will be able to win this smartphone by filling out the form below.

Contest rules: Share your best memories with ColorOS in 2020

Win an OPPO F17 Pro!

We thank OPPO ColorOS for sponsoring this post. Our sponsors help us pay for the many costs associated with running XDA, including server costs, full time developers, news writers, and much more. While you might see sponsored content (which will always be labeled as such) alongside Portal content, the Portal team is in no way responsible for these posts. Sponsored content, advertising and XDA Depot are managed by a separate team entirely. XDA will never compromise its journalistic integrity by accepting money to write favorably about a company, or alter our opinions or views in any way. Our opinion cannot be bought.

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Instagram now lets you shop from Reels, its TikTok-alike

Instagram, Facebook’s photo-led social network has announced the arrival of shopping to Reels, its version of TikTok. The feature begins rolling out today and will allow users, businesses and influencers to tag their posts with links to buy products featured, for users to click-through and buy, or save for later. Influencers can even add their own-branded tags to paid posts. Instagram first announced the addition of shopping on IGTV back in October, with a promise that testing in Reels would be followed by a launch in the coming months.

As first spotted at Techcrunch, the launch means that Instagram users can now shop across their news feed, stories, IGTV and Live, as well as Streams. This represents an extremely important income stream for parent company Facebook. Because Instagram is such a visual medium, the ability to impulse-buy things as soon as you see them can be a huge money-spinner for both the seller and for Facebook which takes a commission on each sale. Instagram uses Facebook Pay and includes e-commerce features such as basket and checkout pages, meaning that users are not taken off-site when they make purchases.

The arrival of shopping within Reels is part of an aggressive program of upgraded functionality over the past few months, which includes the long-awaited interoperability with Facebook Messenger, as well as a revamp of the user interface.  The changes have had a mixed, sometimes hostile reception from users who have objected to the increased visibility of Reels, and to the new ‘shopping’ tag on the home page.

It comes at a difficult time for Instagram. Yesterday, its parent company, Facebook, was served with a lawsuit sponsored by 48 US states, questioning its market dominance, its use of power, and proposing that the company be broken up. Under the proposals, this would mean the disposal of both Instagram and mobile messaging service WhatsApp, as the US attempts to reign in the dominance of its technology mega-corps.

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Adobe Flash receives its final update before it goes bang

Adobe Flash has received its final updates, ahead of a complete shutdown at the end of the year. The stalwart runtime has been instrumental to the growth of the world wide web, and the wider internet, but as technology has moved on, the Adobe runtime has become bloated and slow by today’s standards. It has also been increasingly unstable from a security point of view with a myriad of security patches being released for it every month, as more and more exploits are uncovered.

Adobe Flash hasn’t been supported for mobile devices since 2011 and has been gradually removed from desktop browsers over the past several years, following an agreement between the big tech companies and Adobe. All, that is, except Apple, which has never supported Flash – in fact, Steve Jobs’ hostility towards it was legendary. For those too young to remember – Adobe Flash changed everything. The internet of the 1990s was one of static pages made up of text and the odd low-end photo. The Flash player and runtime brought users animation, sound, video, games – all in a package that rendered perfectly in the browser, without interfering with the surrounding HTML.

It was clunky. It was unreliable at times. But its part in driving forward the look, and the progress of our online lives should never be underestimated. Back at the start of the dot.com bubble, companies like Moonfruit offered WYSIWYG websites, built entirely in Flash. Moonfruit migrated to HTML5 in 2016, reflecting the direction of travel. The web was, by this stage, so much faster than Adobe Flash had gone from being its enabler to being its millstone. Nevertheless, with hundreds of thousands of instances of Flash content still active and the number of zero-day vulnerabilities sky-rocketing, it was decided in 2017 that Adobe would have to be phased out slowly, rather than being shut off straight away. Since then, browsers have slowly begun to restrict access to Flash content. Even Google Chrome, which had skin in the game (Google’s ads business still relied heavily on Flash content at the time) began the process which finishes today.

In a note in the final release notes, Adobe said: “We want to take a moment to thank all of our customers and developers who have used and created amazing Flash Player content over the last two decades.  We are proud that Flash had a crucial role in evolving web content across animation, interactivity, audio, and video.  We are excited to help lead the next era of digital experiences.”

Adobe has confirmed that Flash reaches EoL (end-of-life) on the last day of 2020. From January 12th 2021, it will actively block the plug-in from running content at the server-side. It has been confirmed that failure to accept today’s update won’t make a difference – the self-destruct payload has been included in the code for months already. Adobe has recommended that Flash Player should be uninstalled from users’ systems. This is reinforced by stronger on-screen warnings in today’s release. Keeping it installed won’t harm your computer, but it could still leave some open security vulnerabilities that haven’t been discovered yet. The only exception is for users in China who will still receive updates to their localized version of Flash. Meanwhile, the company has confirmed that it will continue to concentrate on contributions to the development of the HTML5 standard, and the Adobe AIR platform which is unaffected by the closure.

And so farewell, Abobe Flash. Your time had come and gone – but without you, we wouldn’t be where we are now, and for that, we salute you.

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US Government sues Facebook for anticompetitive acquisition of WhatsApp and Instagram

In October this year, the US Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law published a report calling out Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google for their anti-competitive, monopolistic, and dominating practices. Shortly after that, the US Department of Justice filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google for its anti-competitive and monopolistic business practices. Now, the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and 48 State Attorneys General have filed similar lawsuits against Facebook, focusing on the anti-competitive nature of its acquisition of WhatsApp and Instagram.

In its lawsuit, the FTC alleges that Facebook identified Instagram and WhatsApp as threats to its monopoly power and acquired them instead of competing with them. This move not only neutralized the direct threat posed by the two platforms but also made it “more difficult for another personal social networking competitors to gain scale.” 

The lawsuit also alleges that Facebook has imposed anti-competitive conditions on third-party developers’ access to APIs that allow their apps to interact with the social media platform. This includes conditions that prevent developers from offering competitive functionalities or connecting with/promoting other social networking services. The lawsuit cites an episode with Twitter’s short video sharing service Vine as an example and states that following its launch in 2013, Facebook shut down the API that would have allowed Vine to access friends via Facebook.

Speaking about the lawsuit, Director of FTC’s Bureau of Competition, Ian Conner, said, “Personal social networking is central to the lives of millions of Americans. Facebook’s actions to entrench and maintain its monopoly deny consumers the benefits of competition. Our aim is to roll back Facebook’s anticompetitive conduct and restore competition so that innovation and free competition can thrive.”

Through this lawsuit, the FTC is seeking a permanent injunction in court that could force Facebook to spin Instagram and WhatsApp into independent companies. The lawsuit also seeks to prohibit Facebook from imposing anticompetitive conditions on developers and seek prior permission for future mergers and acquisitions.

The State Attorneys General antitrust lawsuit is based on similar grounds, but it focuses primarily on Facebook’s $1 billion acquisition of Instagram in 2011. The suit not only questions Facebook’s acquisition strategy but also alleges that Facebook misused its power and reach to stifle the growth of competing services. Furthermore, the states’ antitrust lawsuit alleges that Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp and its decision to utilize WhatsApp user data may have harmed consumers and stifled competition from rivals that have better privacy practices.

In response to the lawsuits, Facebook’s VP and General Counsel, Jennifer Newstead, wrote:

“The Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general today attack two acquisitions that we made: Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014. These transactions were intended to provide better products for the people who use them, and they unquestionably did. Both of these acquisitions were reviewed by relevant antitrust regulators at the time…Now, many years later, with seemingly no regard for settled law or the consequences to innovation and investment, the agency is saying it got it wrong and wants a do-over.”

Talking about the alleged anti-competitive conditions imposed on third-party developers, Newstead wrote that such conditions were imposed on certain apps that tried to “unfairly duplicated services Facebook already provided, like sharing photos or messaging with Facebook connections.” She further added that such restrictions were “standard in the industry.” 

It will be a while before these lawsuits reach their conclusion, with both sides using all lawful means available to them for a decision in their favor. For now, it seems that the US Subcommittee report did indeed spur some entities into action.

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Xbox Cloud Gaming will be available to PC and iOS users in Spring 2021

Microsoft has announced that its cloud-based gaming service, Xbox Cloud Gaming, will be expanding to the PC and iOS platforms in Spring 2021. The service will be offered as a part of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate for Windows PCs via the Xbox app and web browsers while iOS only gets access via web browsers. Currently, the service is available on Android devices which costs $15 per month allowing you to stream Xbox and PC games from the cloud on your smartphone or tablet.

“By adding over a billion devices as a path to playing in the Xbox ecosystem, we envision a seamless experience for all types of players; whether it’s playing Minecraft Dungeons with your Xbox friends using touch controls on an iPhone, or jumping into a Destiny 2: Beyond Light strike on a Surface Pro when you have a break between meetings,” said Jerret West, CVP, Microsoft Gaming in a blog post on the topic of Xbox Cloud Gaming.

Microsoft also announced that the Xbox Game Pass Ultimate would be introduced to Australia, Brazil, Japan, and Mexico. During the launch of the service for Android back in September, the company had announced a list of 22 countries where Xbox Cloud Gaming would be available. With the addition of these four regions, this is how the new list stands:

• Austria
• Australia
• Belgium
• Brazil
• Canada
• Czech Republic
• Denmark
• Finland
• France
• Germany
• Hungary
• Ireland
• Italy
• Japan
• Korea
• Mexico
• Netherlands
• Norway
• Poland
• Portugal
• Slovakia
• Spain
• Sweden
• Switzerland
• United Kingdom
• United States

In August, Apple had blocked Microsoft’s Xbox Cloud Gaming service (previously known as xCloud) along with Google’s Stadia app as they were in violation of the iOS guidelines. In a statement, Apple had said that cloud streaming services like xCloud in a way allows Microsoft to launch games on iOS bypassing the normal checks that Apple performs for other apps. With the recent announcement, it seems that Microsoft has found a new way to offer its service through web browsers. Of course, we are yet to see how well it would perform compared to the performance of a dedicated app.

Xbox Series S Review: A compact console for the budget conscious

Microsoft also shared, that the Xbox Game Pass monthly engagement has doubled since last year as well as some numbers around its new gaming consoles, the Xbox Series X and the Xbox Series S. About 40% of customers joining the Xbox for the first time were playing on the Xbox Series S which suggests that the strategy of offering a low-cost console worked in favor of the company. There were also over 1.6 million seamless upgrades delivered to the Series X and Series S owners with Smart Delivery and record sales of the two consoles around the globe with markets like the UK, France, and Germany running out of stocks within hours.

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