An anonymous reader shares a report: You can add another big name to the list of phone makers found cheating on benchmarks. UL Benchmarks has delisted Oppo's Find X and F7 phones from its 3DMark charts after testing from itself and news outlet Tech2 revealed that both devices were artificially ramping up processor performance when they detected the test by name. Oppo acknowledged that it always stepped things up when it detected "games or 3D Benchmarks that required high performance," but claimed that any app would run full bore if you tapped on the screen every few seconds to signal your actions. UL, however, rejected the justifications. It was clear that Oppo was looking for the benchmark by name and not the extra processing load involved, according to the outfit. Moreover, tapping wouldn't be an effective solution if Oppo treated apps equally -- you couldn't get consistent results. Further reading: Huawei Caught Cheating Performance Test For New Phones.

Huawei's new Mate 20 Pro has a massive screen, three cameras on the back and a fingerprint scanner embedded in the display. From a report: The new top-end phone from the Chinese firm aims to secure its place at the top of the market alongside Samsung, having recently beaten Apple to become the second-largest smartphone manufacturer in August. The Mate 20 Pro follows Huawei's tried and trusted format for its Mate series: a huge 6.39in QHD+ OLED screen, big 4,200mAh battery and powerful new Huawei Kirin 980 processor -- Huawei's first to be produced at 7 nanometres, matching Apple's latest A12 chip in the 2018 iPhones.

New for this year is an infrared 3D facial recognition system, similar to that used by Apple for its Face ID in the iPhone XS, and one of the first fingerprint scanners embedded in the screen that is widely available in the UK, removing the need for a fingerprint scanner on the back or a chin on the front. The Mate 20 Pro is water resistant to IP68 standards and has a sleek new design reminiscent of Samsung's S-series phones, with curved glass on the front and back. The back also has an new pattern etched into the glass, which is smooth to the touch but ridged when running your nail over it.

On the back is a new version of Huawei's award-winning triple camera system using a 40-megapixel standard camera, an 8-megapixel telephoto camera with a 3x optical zoom and new for this year is a 20-megapixel ultra-wide angle camera, replacing the monochrome sensor used on the P20 Pro. The Mate 20 Pro runs EMUI 9, which is based on Android 9 Pie. The variant with 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage is available for 899 Euro starting today.

Two leading U.S. lawmakers, both sharp critics of China, urged Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Friday to consider dropping China's Huawei Technologies from helping to build next-generation 5G telecommunications networks. From a report: Senators Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat, and Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican, said they had "grave concern" about the prospects of Huawei equipment in Canada's 5G networks on the grounds that it would pose dangers for U.S. networks. "While Canada has strong telecommunications security safeguards in place, we have serious concerns that such safeguards are inadequate given what the United States and other allies know about Huawei," the lawmakers wrote in the letter to Trudeau. Warner and Rubio are on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: The Chinese government has been forming global partnerships with Western think tanks, recruiting key talent at networking events sponsored by the Chinese government and working with U.S. universities, says Michael Brown, managing director of the Pentagon's Defense Innovation Unit in Mountain View, Calif. The unit was set up in 2015 to help the U.S. military capitalize on emerging commercial technologies. And, he notes, there is serious concern in Washington that China could acquire too much sensitive U.S. technology and transfer it back home.

Adam Lysenko, a senior analyst at Rhodium Group, an economic research firm, says American entities represent the largest venture capital investment in startup technology companies, but Chinese investment accounts for about 15 percent of the deals. In the past eight years, there were more than 1,300 rounds of funding for U.S. startups with at least one Chinese investor, Lysenko says, totaling about $11 billion of Chinese investment. After a record 2017, Rhodium Group predicts 2018 will be another record year for Chinese venture capital into U.S. startups. Lysenko says this has become a concern in national security circles because the nature of emerging technology is inherently dual-use: The artificial intelligence algorithms that help speed up your smartphone could also be applied to weapons on the battlefield. China's quest for innovation and know-how can best be illustrated by the offices of Baidu -- China's largest internet provider and Google's rival -- which is located right next to a Google complex. "Baidu opened its innovation center, called the Institute of Deep Learning, four years ago, with a focus on a self-driving vehicle called Apollo," reports NPR. "Other Chinese tech powerhouses -- Alibaba, Tencent and Huawei -- also have Silicon Valley research and development centers. Instead of buying an existing U.S. business, these Chinese tech giants come to the U.S. and build new companies from the ground up, in what's known as 'greenfield' investments. [T]hese Chinese tech companies hire away a lot of U.S. employees who might otherwise work for American businesses."

Huawei, which recently surpassed Apple to become the world's second largest smartphone player, can't stop taking shots at the iPhone maker. From a report: After the iPhone XS was unveiled with little new, Huawei tweeted "Thank you for letting us be the real hero of the year," a tease for their upcoming Mate 20 Pro unveiling next month. Now Huawei's taking another shot -- by handing out battery packs to people waiting in line for the iPhone XS and XS Max in Singapore. The packaging says "You'll need it", which is actually a valid boast: Anandtech found that Huawei's P20 and P20 Pro had better battery life than the iPhone 8 and X.

According to "several real-world tests and synthetic benchmarks," the new iPhone XS and XS Max, equipped with the world's first 7-nanometer A12 Bionic processor, are the world's fastest smartphones, reports Tom's Guide. They even significantly outperform Qualcomm's Snapdragon 845 chip. From the report: Geekbench 4 is a benchmark that measures overall performance, and no other phone comes close to Apple's new handsets on this test. The iPhone Xs notched 11,420, and the iPhone Xs Max hit 11,515. The older iPhone X scored 10,357, so that's about an 11 percent improvement. There's a lot more distance between the new iPhones and Android flagships. The fastest Android phone around, the OnePlus 6, scored 9,088 on Geekbench 4 with its 8GB of RAM, while the Galaxy Note 9 reached 8,876.

To test real-world performance, we use the Adobe Premiere Clips app to transcode a 2-minute 4K video to 1080p. The iPhone X was miles ahead last year with a time of just 42 seconds. This time around, the iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max knocked it down further to 39 seconds. The Galaxy S9+ took 2 minutes and 32 seconds to complete the task, and that's the fastest we've seen from an Android phone. The OnePlus 6 finished in 3:45, and the LG G7 ThinQ took 3:16. One good way to measure real-world performance is to see how long it takes for a phone to load demanding apps. Because the phones have the same processor for this round, we just used the iPhone Xs Max and put it up against the iPhone X and the Galaxy Note 9. The iPhone XS Max was faster every time, including a 15-second victory in Fortnite over the Note 9 and 3-second win in Asphalt 9. The phones were closer in Pokemon Go but the iPhone XS Max still came out on top. The new iPhones did lag behind the competition in the 3DMark Slingshot Extreme test, which measures graphics performance by evaluating everything from rendering to volumetric lighting. The iPhone XS Max and iPhone X received scores of 4,244 and 4,339, respectively, while the OnePlus 6 received a score of 5,124.

As for the GFXBench 5 test, the iPhone XS Max achieved 1,604.7 frames on the Aztec Ruins portion of the test, and 1,744.44 frames in the Car Chase test," reports Tom's Guide. "The Note 9 was far behind at 851.7 and 1,103 frames, respectively. However, the Galaxy S9+ edged past the iPhone XS Max on this test."

Veteran journalist Om Malik writes: iPhoneXsMax -- When I heard the name and saw it up on the stage, I shuddered. Apple's name for its newest, biggest iPhone made one [Microsoft employee] quip on Twitter: "And I thought we sucked at naming. #AppleEvent iPhone Xs Max September Refresh CTP1"

Microsoft and other technology companies were mocked by Apple veterans for their naming conventions. But now Apple is doing the same -- fighting hard to come up with names that are fighting Samsung, Huawei, and many others when it comes to being tongue twisters. It is pretty sad to see that a company that took pride in its ability to communicate clearly and succinctly about its products, the company that was able to name them with such elan and made them memorable, has come. iPhoneX(s)Max.

When Apple unveiled the iPhone Xs and Xs Max earlier today, it said they will contain the A12 Bionic chip -- the first smartphone processor to be made using 7nm manufacturing technology. But, as IEEE Spectrum points out, Huawei made the same claim late last month when it unveiled the Kirin 980 system on a chip. From the report: Apple's new A12 Bionic is made up of four CPU cores, six GPU cores, and an 8-core "neural engine" to handle machine learning tasks. According to Apple, the neural engine can perform 5 trillion operations per second -- an eight-fold boost -- and consumes one-tenth the energy of its previous incarnation. Of the GPU cores, two are designed for performance and are 15 percent faster than their predecessors. The other four are built for efficiency, with a 50 percent improvement on that metric. The system can decide which combination of the three types of cores will run a task most efficiently.

Huawei's chip, the Kirin 980, was unveiled at the IFA 2018 in Berlin on 31 August. It packs 6.9 billion transistors onto a one-square-centimeter chip. The company says it's the first chip to use processors based on Arm's Cortex-A76, which is 75 percent more powerful and 58 percent more efficient compared to its predecessors the A73 and A75. It has 8 cores, two big, high-performance ones based on the A76, two middle-performance ones that are also A76s, and four smaller, high-efficiency cores based on a Cortex-A55 design. The system runs on a variation of Arm's big.LITTLE architecture, in which immediate, intensive workloads are handled by the big processors while sustained background tasks are the job of the little ones. Kirin 980's GPU component is called the Mali-G76, and it offers a 46 percent performance boost and a 178 percent efficiency improvement from the previous generation. The chip also has a dual-core neural processing unit that more than doubles the number of images it can recognize to 4,500 images per minute. Apple will be the first to bring the 7nm chip in volume to market, as Huawei is expected to to start shipping its Mate 20 series phone (with the 7nm chip) a month or two later. Qualcomm also announced late last month that it's begun sampling its 7nm next-gen Snapdragon SoC. As IEEE Spectrum notes, the real winner is TSMC, which is making all three processors.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: UL, the company behind the tablet and phone performance benchmark app 3DMark, has delisted new Huawei phones from its "Best Smartphone" leaderboard after AnandTech discovered the phone maker was boosting its performance to ace the app's test. The phones delisted were the P20, P20 Pro, Nova 3 and the Honor Play. "After testing the devices in our own lab and confirming that they breach our rules, we have decided to delist the affected models and remove them from our performance rankings," the company said in a statement.

For the Huawei case, the rules are actually a little fuzzy. Phones are permitted to adjust performance based on workload, which results in peaks or dips in performance for different apps, but they are not permitted to hard-code peaks in performance specifically for the benchmark app. Huawei reportedly claimed that the peak in performance seen during the run of the benchmark app was an intuitive jump determined by AI; however, when an unlabeled version of the benchmark test was run, the phones were unable to recognize it and, as a result, displayed lower performances. In other words, the phones aren't so smart after all.

According to research firm IDC, Apple sold 4.7 million Apple Watch units last quarter, capturing 17 percent of the global market. The only other company close on Apple's heels is Xiaomi, which "trailed Apple by two percentage points in market share and 500,000 unit shipments in the second quarter of the year," reports The Verge. From the report: Fitbit, Huawei, and Garmin are far behind, with IDC reporting that higher demand for more fully featured smartwatches is driving demand for Apple products and reducing the popularity of lower-cost fitness trackers. IDC stresses that this is a natural cycle for consumer electronics and that fitness-focused devices will still have a place in the market going forward. IDC says demand for its LTE-equipped Series 3 device largely drove Apple's wearable sales last quarter, and the device received a number of discounts at big-box retail stores that may have led to a surge in consumer purchases. Refurbished versions of the Apple Watch Series 3 also went up for sale on Apple's retail site starting in February.

A post on Irish technology news blog, which criticizes the recent works of the world's second largest smartphone maker Huawei, is being widely circulated across several Android communities, with most people agreeing with the concerns raised in the post. From the story: Huawei is the second largest smartphone manufacturer in the world, falling second only to Samsung having recently overtaken Apple. They're huge in Ireland and across the globe. As a company, they have done a number of great things for both the enthusiast and the general user alike, but amidst privacy concerns the company has started to lash out at the community which helped get it (and especially its sub-brand Honor) off of the ground. Not only have they begun to block users from unlocking the devices which they've paid for, they are now looking to make users return their already unlocked devices to their normal state, according to numerous reports on the forums of XDA-Developers and well known Magisk developer topjohnwu. "I am informed that a new Huawei OTA will render Magisk-installed devices from booting," the developer wrote. Magisk is a popular "root" solution used which gives a user access to their device's system files.

Huawei was huge with the development community for a number of reasons, no less because their devices were some of the easiest to unlock out of all of the major manufacturers. You simply applied for your key online and promptly received it. It was a rather painless system, which allowed you to then install what's known as a "custom ROM". A custom ROM is simply just a custom version of Android, free from all of the included pre-installed applications from Huawei. They often run better too, again because of the lack of bloat.

An anonymous reader writes: In massive and groundbreaking research, a team of eleven scientists from the University of Florida, Stony Brook University, and Samsung Research America, have looked into what types of AT commands, or the Hayes command set, are currently supported on modern Android devices.

The research team analyzed over 2,000 Android firmware images from eleven Android OEMs such as ASUS, Google, HTC, Huawei, Lenovo, LG, LineageOS, Motorola, Samsung, Sony, and ZTE. They say they discovered that these devices support over 3,500 different types of AT commands, some of which grant access to very dangerous functions. These AT commands are all exposed via the phone's USB interface, meaning an attacker would have to either gain access to a user's device, or hide a malicious component inside USB docks, chargers, or charging stations. Once an attacker is connected via the USB to a target's phone, s/he can use one of the phone's secret AT commands to rewrite device firmware, bypass Android security mechanisms, exfiltrate sensitive device information, perform screen unlocks, or even inject touch events solely through the use of AT commands.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Australia has blocked Huawei and ZTE from providing equipment for its 5G network, which is set to launch commercially next year. In a tweet, Huawei stated that the Australian government told the company that both it and ZTE are banned from supplying 5G technology to the country, despite Huawei's assurances that it does not pose a threat to national security. Earlier today, the Australian government issued new security guidelines for 5G carriers. Although it did not mention Huawei, ZTE or China specifically, it did strongly hint at them by stating "the Government considers that the involvement of vendors who are likely to be subject to extrajudicial directions from foreign government that conflict with Australian law, may risk failure by the carrier to adequately protect a 5G network from unauthorized access or interference." In its new security guidelines, the Australian government stated that differences in the way 5G operates compared to previous network generations introduces new risks to national security. In particular, it noted the diminishing distinctions between the core network, where more sensitive functions like access control and data routing occur, and the edge, or radios that connect customer equipment, like laptops and mobile phones, to the core. Huawei Australia said in a statement: "We have been informed by the Govt that Huawei & ZTE have been banned from providing 5G technology to Australia. This is a extremely disappointing result for consumers. Huawei is a world leader in 5G. Has safely & securely delivered wireless technology in Aust for close to 15 yrs."

Smartphone cameras are better than ever, but sometimes there's just no substitute for a full-sized DSLR. Unfortunately, it seems that Huawei thinks so, too. From a report: A shot in the company's latest commercial for its new Nova 3 smartphone has been revealed by a behind-the-scenes photo to be a DSLR, not the smartphone as the ad alleges. As you can see about halfway through the ad, a bickering couple takes a selfie together apparently to show off how Huawei's AI and camera tech make it so that the woman doesn't need to put on makeup. But a since-deleted Instagram picture posted by Sarah Elshamy (the actress in the scene) reveals that instead of a fun selfie from the Nova 3, the shot in question came from a DSLR, shot by a professional photographer. In fact, the Nova 3 doesn't seem in be in the frame at all.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNET: President Donald Trump on Monday signed a $716 billion defense policy bill that weakened efforts to punish Chinese telecom giant ZTE for violating trade laws. The bill, named for ailing Arizona Sen. John McCain, prohibits the U.S. government and its contractors from buying certain telecommunications and video surveillance equipment from ZTE, Huawei and a handful of other Chinese communications companies. The ban covers components and services deemed "essential" or "critical" to any government system. Some lawmakers had hoped to use the bill to reinstate tough penalties against ZTE, but the compromise bill removed a provision that would undo a deal the Commerce Department struck in June for ZTE to pay a $1 billion penalty to resume business with U.S. suppliers. But lawmakers agreed to abandon that effort in late July. Huawei called the inclusion of its products in the bill "ineffective, misguided and unconstitutional." They added: "It does nothing to identify real security risks or improve supply chain security, and will only serve to stifle innovation while increasing internet costs for U.S. consumers and businesses. We believe that the American people deserve equal access to the best possible connections and smart device options, and will keep working to make this happen."

A Slashdot reader writes: I've tried a lot of phones for extended periods of time. Some of these have included the Samsung S4, S5, S8+, Note 4, S7, iPhone 5, and Huawei Honor 8. I have stayed away from Apple... My favorite phone was the Nokia 920 Windows phone for its fluid performance and simplicity and hardware camera button, but that phone is long gone.

When searching for an unlocked phone after leaving my current job I ordered a Huawei Honor 8 which refused to join a network, and a iPhone 7 which was DOA. This led to my reluctant purchase of a Sony Xperia XA2 Ultra when the Microcenter sales team couldn't find the last Google Pixel they had in stock. Had no idea I was in for such a treat. The Sony Xperia phone experience is well refined and a joy to use.

Are there any other unlocked phones that you know of under $500 that run this good?
Share your own opinions and experiences in the comments. What's the best unlocked smartphone?

Critics scoffed Apple when the company priced the iPhone X at $1,000. But the way the market has responded to it, there is a good chance that the upcoming flagship smartphones from Apple and those of its rivals -- Samsung, Google, and HTC -- will be pricier. From a column: The critics were wrong. Apple CEO Tim Cook said in July that the iPhone X had outsold every other Apple device in each week since it went on sale Nov. 3, 2017. With strong iPhone X sales, Apple proved that mainstream buyers are willing to pay almost as much, if not more, for their cell phones as they would for a powerful laptop. And with rumors of an even pricier 2018 iPhone X Plus-style phone coming down the pike this September, Apple's moves to usher in the era of the $1,000 phone may just be getting underway. Apple isn't alone in boosting mobile phone prices ever higher. Creeping prices on high-end handsets from Samsung, Huawei and even "value" darling OnePlus signal that price hikes are here to stay. In just two years, the cost of Samsung's Galaxy phone for US buyers has spiked 15.1 percent from the Galaxy S7 in 2016 to this year's Galaxy S9, while the Huawei P series has climbed 33 percent since 2016 -- and that doesn't even account for the existence of a "Pro" model. [...] The trend of increasingly costly handsets in the top tier underscores the cell phone's importance as an everything-device for communication, work, photography and entertainment. And as processing power, camera technology, battery life and internet data speeds improve generation after generation, the value people attach to a phone is sure to swell.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: For the first time in seven years, Samsung and Apple have not taken the top two positions in the worldwide smartphone market. All hail Huawei. Although Samsung held onto first place -- the South Korean giant typically dominates the first three quarters of the year, with the American company winning the fourth quarter -- Huawei passed Apple for second place this part quarter. The Q2 2018 figures come from IDC (though Canalys and Strategy Analytics both agree that Huawei passed Apple in the quarter).

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Some newer Huawei phones are actively being blocked from installing the open-source VLC media player app from Google Play. VLC's developers announced today that they're blacklisting some of Huawei's devices after unhappy users left too many one-star reviews for the app. But the negative reviews stem from a decision on Huawei's part and has nothing to do with VLC. The negative reviews are a result of Huawei's aggressive battery management and tendency to kill background apps, which directly affects VLC's background audio playback feature. Huawei users on VLC's forums are well aware of the issue. It's possible to manually disable these battery optimizations and have the app function properly in the background, but VLC claims that people often don't know how to do that, so they blame the app instead. The devices being blacklisted are the Huawei P8, P10, and P20. Users can still manually download the APK from VLC's website if they're interested in using the player.

A recently discovered bug in many Bluetooth firmware and OS drivers could allow an attacker within about 30 meters to capture and decrypt data shared between Bluetooth-paired devices. Researchers at the Israel Institute of Technology discovered the flaw, which was flagged today by Carnegie Mellon University CERT. It affects Bluetooth's Secure Simple Pairing and Low Energy Secure Connections. ZDNet reports: As the CERT notification explains, the vulnerability is caused by some vendors' Bluetooth implementations not properly validating the cryptographic key exchange when Bluetooth devices are pairing. The flaw slipped into the Bluetooth key exchange implementation which uses the elliptic-curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH) key exchange to establish a secure connection over an insecure channel. This may allow a nearby but remote attacker to inject a a bogus public key to determine the session key during the public-private key exchange. They could then conduct a man-in-the-middle attack and "passively intercept and decrypt all device messages, and/or forge and inject malicious messages." Thankfully, patches are on the way. "Intel recommended users upgrade to the latest support driver and to check with vendors if they have provided one in their respective updates," reports ZDNet. "Dell has released a new driver for the Qualcomm driver it uses while Lenovo's update is for the flaw in Intel software. LG and Huawei have referenced fixes for CVE-2018-5383 in their respective July updates for mobile devices." It is not yet known if Android, Google, or the Linux kernel are affected. Apple has released a patch for the flaw earlier this month.