Making your smartphone smarter

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I still live with a 16gb phone. It isn’t impossible, but it’s difficult. The world isn’t moving towards adapting to low storage, it’s increasing it. So what do you do when you run low on storage? Delete photos and apps? NO! Back everything to the cloud? You could, but you’d need constant access to it to retrieve data. What else can you do? Transfer it to your laptop via cable? Sure, but who’s got the time for that. You could maybe use an OTG pen-drive… but not many people have those.

With Type-C USB ports becoming increasingly popular, there’s one more solution. The Hyperdrive Type-C connection kit. It easily fits in your pocket, and expands your phone’s possibilities. Plug it in, and you’ve got a regular USB port, and two card-readers for SD and MicroSD cards. You can now literally plug any USB drive into your phone and either transfer data to it, or retrieve data from it. Or you could use the SD card reader to pull photos off your DSLR. What’s better is that the Hyperdrive’s Type-C works with laptops too. With most new laptops having a Type-C port for fast transfers and faster charging, the Hyperdrive plugs into your laptop too, not just expanding the number of ports on it, but even allowing you to easily transfer data between your laptop and phone. Without a cable!

Designer: Sanho

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Symetium Smartphone Packs Enough Computing Power for a PC

Symetium Smartphone PC

What if you could plug your smartphone into a dock, and along with a monitor, you used it as a PC? The Symetium smartphone was developed precisely with that idea in mind.

Symetium rised from Sweden, so it’s no wonder that it has Scandinavian design written all over it. Besides the minimalistic design that seems to characterize everything made in Sweden, Norway or Denmark, Symetium focuses on symmetry and quality, things that you don’t get to see in many smartphones with flagship claims.

According to Jonathan Gustafsson, the young Swedish entrepreneur behind Symetium, this smartphone may look like others, but it’s nothing like them. In fact, the goal was “to create a device that removes the line between mobile and desktop devices.”

Sure, smartphones can already be compared to desktop PCs, performance-wise, but many a times users need a larger display, and phablets or tablets simply won’t do. By plugging it into a dock that connects to displays via a USB Type-C to HDMI adapter, Symetium becomes the brains of your desktop PC. Even though it’s supposed to be running Android 6.0 Marshmallow, the user interface is adequate for both mobile and desktop use. In the absence of a mouse and keyboard, the touchscreen display can be used for such purposes.

“With Symetium, I want to go past mobile operating systems and join the two together. It is time for phones to stop being phones as they are much more than that and have been for years,” explained Gustaffson.

Specs-wise, Symetium is nothing short of impressive. It is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 SoC that is paired with 6GB of RAM and up to 256GB in storage. Some might argue that the 1080p OLED display could’ve had a higher resolution, but since this is a 5-inch smartphone with a 440ppi pixel density, more than that wouldn’t have made any sense. For audio files (and audiophiles), the phone packs stereo speakers. Photography fans weren’t let down, either, as the device includes a 24MP rear camera.

“In my eyes Symetium will always be a 5 inch portable computer that can make calls and that’s how it was built. This means that there will be no limitation when it’s used without a simcard,” concluded Gustafsson.

In the last three years, since Gustaffson begam working on Symetium, the project has made quite a few waves on social networks, but it remains to be seen if it will ever be commercially available.

Jonathan Gustafsson turned to Indiegogo to get his project funded. To enter mass production, he needs to hit the funding goal of $1,250,000 within the next 29 days. That is quite a lot, but then again, the Symetium smartphone PC is a very ambitious project. Assuming that the campaign will be successful, anyone who has pledged $549 as an early bird or $699 as a regular backer can expect to receive their Symetium in August 2016. I sincerely doubt it that any other company will be able to exceed Symetium’s specs by then, but on the other hand, with such a high funding goal, this looks like Ubuntu Edge all over again.

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LeTV X600 Juggernaut Marks the Debut of MediaTek helio X10

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Internet company turned phone maker Leshi is about to launch one of the first devices powered by Mediatek’s high-end 64-bit chipset.

About three weeks ago, LeTV started making some waves in China when it released pictures and some specs of its flagships (that’s right, plural), which are not only bezel-less, but also the first smartphones to sport a USB Type-C. Called by some China’s Netflix, about in the same way Xiaomi is (wrongfully, I might add) referred to as China’s Apple (whereas it’s more of China’s Amazon), LeTV is about to set the phone making industry on fire with its high-end, yet affordable LeTV One, One Pro, and LeTV Max. Whereas the last two are powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 810, the first one, which is also known as LeTV X600, is going to be the first smartphone to run on Mediatek’s helio X10, a SoC that’s supposed to blow the competition out of the water, besides offering support for 120Hz displays.

The X600 will come with a 5.5″ 1920×1080 IPS display with a pixel density of 403ppi, so there’s nothing otherworldly in that department. Things take a turn for the better when it comes to the included CPU, an octa-core beast running at 2.0Ghz, which is paired with a Imagination PowerVR G6200, 3GB of RAM and 16GB of ROM. The latest aspect could’ve been better, especially since this phablet doesn’t come with a microSD slot. Two other versions with 32, respectively 64GB of on-board memory have been created, but those will surely cost more than the basic model.

If OnePlus One was yesteryear’s flagship killer, this year the title belongs to the X600, and deservedly so. To make sure that no performance is sacrificed because of incompatibilities, LeTV offers Android 5.0 on this phablet, and not as an OTA update, but straight out of the box.

As for the cameras, LeTV opted for a 13MP camera on the back with AF and dual-LED flash, while selfies will be the duty of the 5MP 90-degree wide-angle camera found in the front. Connectivity is yet another aspect that abounds in options, since the phablet has (almost) everything you could possibly need: GPS, A-GPS, GLONASS, Bluetooth 4.0, Wi-Fi, an infrared emitter for remote control functionality, and LTE 1800/2100/2600MHz.

As mentioned before, this is the first smartphone to feature USB Type-C instead of the typical microUSB port. That means that not only will data transfers happen at much higher speeds, but also that that the X600 will charge much faster than its microUSB counterparts. The only thing that leaves a bit to be desired is the 3000mAh battery, but provided that the software is optimized, there shouldn’t be any problems in that department, either.

See below how the LeTV X600 compares in size to the iPhone.

Not at last, the AnTuTu Benchmark scores of LeTV X600 indicate that this phablet could go anyday of the week against its more expensive competitors.

GearBest has started today the pre-sale for LeTV X600, and has it at $364.39. However, this reseller is willing to offer it for about $45 less (or more precisely, for $319) if you apply the coupon code LETVX600 during the checkout procedure.

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USB-C is also coming to Android devices

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USB-C is coming to stay, and the next group to embrace it might be the creators of Android devices around the globe.

The new standard for USB, USB-C has been just announced and is already featured in two upcoming devices (namely, the new MacBook and Google’s next Chromebook Pixel), but that is only the beginning. The new standard, turns out, might end up showing up in many more devices all along 2015, with Android OS running phones being chief among them.

USB-C has many advantages over traditional USB, the main one being multi-device charging and high speed data transfer with just one cable. It is small enough so it can be featured in the latest smartphones, but powerful enough so it will be able to charge a plethora of devices, even computers, all featuring a symmetrical port so users don’t have to go around flipping their cables. The perks are pretty obvious, and now based on the video Google created to explain the standard, we can sort of expect to see it in the next Nexus device Google creates – check around the end of the video.

Source: Droid Life

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