Things are not looking good for Google's Android Wear. Three of the top Android Wear smartwatches maker have confirmed that they won't be releasing a smartwatch in the waning months of the year. From a CNET report:While LG launched a watch in the first half, it'll have been more than a year since Huawei and Motorola offered an update on their wearables. That marks a reversal from last year, when all three companies launched Android Wear smartwatches at the early September IFA trade show in Berlin in what was supposed to be a resurgence of the platform. At this year's show, Chinese maker Asus was the only major tech company to return with a new Android Wear watch. The poor showing underscores the general lack of enthusiasm for smartwatches, which the industry has touted as the next hot trend in tech. Consumers, however, continue to question the usefulness of these gadgets. Even Apple, which leads the market for smartwatches, saw its shipments fall 55 percent from a year ago in the second quarter, according to IDC. "Smartwatches still have yet to make a significant impression on consumers as a must-have device," said Ramon Llamas, an analyst at IDC. Time stands still for some in the smartwatch market.

According to reliable product leaker Evan Blass, Google is working with Huawei to produce the successor to the wildly popular Google Nexus 7. Evan Blass tweeted yesterday: "Google's Huawei-built 7-inch tablet, with 4GB RAM, on track for release before the end of the year." Ars Technica reports: "Of course 'Nexus' probably won't be the name of this device. Google is undergoing the Great Hardware Unification of 2016, and according to a report from Android Police, the Nexus line is going away to make way for a unified 'Pixel' line. The two upcoming Google phones are reportedly going to be branded 'Pixel' and 'Pixel XL.' If that report holds true, this device would probably be branded a 'Pixel,' too. We last saw a 7-inch Google tablet in 2013, when the Nexus 7 was released as a follow-up to the original 2012 version. Both of these were built by Asus and were well-received thanks to their novel (at the time) 7-inch, 16:9 form factor and low price (~$230)."

Europe's biggest tech show IFA is underway in Berlin currently. Companies from around the world are showcasing their new smartphones at the event, chearleading the advancements they have made on the hardware side. Pretty much all these devices are running Android, but the way they are presented, you wouldn't be able to tell if that really is the case. The Verge's Vlad Savov writes: Sony would have us believe that buying an Xperia phone grants us a pass into the exclusive Xperia experience. The stuff actually differentiating the Xperia brand is junk and bloatware: the Xperia assistance software is a mobile version of Microsoft's Clippy. Huawei is even worse in its Android omerta, deathly afraid to utter the green giant's name. I understand that hardware companies want to spend more time talking about their hardware, but all these launches feel lobotomized without a proper discussion of the software driving their devices. Tell me about your implementation of Android. Tell me why you think it's okay to launch a phone without the latest software. Reassure me that I won't be left behind the way that many 2014 Android flagships already have been, and explain to your users why they don't need smarter multitasking, improved notifications, and baked-in VR support. Yes, those are harder issues to discuss, but dodging them is what makes customers untrusting of Android manufacturers.

An anonymous reader shares a Bloomberg report: Xiaomi is preparing to enter the U.S. smartphone market "in the near future," employing the same online sales and social media marketing tactics that helped the six-year-old startup become China's largest privately funded startup. Xiaomi can no longer afford to ignore the world's largest smartphone arena by revenue, company vice president Hugo Barra said in an interview. Its international expansion is taking on new-found urgency as growth at home slows and rivals such as Huawei erode its market share. "The U.S. is a market that we definitely have in our sights," Barra said on Bloomberg Television. "We will lead with social media, with the channels that allow us to get in touch with the young generation that are enthusiastic about new technology. We are definitely going there." Barra, who oversees the Chinese company's international expansion, has signaled Xiaomi's U.S. debut before. But the smartphone vendor is now in a better position to launch an incursion onto Apple's turf. In June, the Beijing-based company announced the acquisition of nearly 1,500 technology patents from Microsoft -- a deal that may smooth potential legal tangles over intellectual property as it pushes abroad.

In May, China's conglomerate Huawei filed a lawsuit against Samsung accusing the Korean company of infringing on some of its 4G-related patents. Now, Samsung is returning the favor. According to Reuters, Samsung has filed a lawsuit of its own against Huawei for a very similar reason. From the report: An intellectual property court in Beijing said on its official Weixin account that Samsung sued Huawei and a department store in Beijing and has claimed 161 million yuan ($24.14 million) in damages. Samsung asked the two defendants to stop production and sales of products the South Korean firm says infringes on its patents, including Huawei's Mate 8 and Honor smartphones, the court said.

Samsung said on Thursday that its second-quarter operating profit likely rose 17.4% from a year earlier. The figure marks the highest for Samsung in more than 2 years. The company adds that sales of Galaxy S7 flagship smartphone propelled its mobile earnings. Engadget reports: While Samsung won't be releasing its detailed earnings until the end of July, Reuters believes the top earner this quarter is none other than the mobile division, which also topped the last one. The news source says the division's profit could be up 54.5 percent from the same period last year. According to Yonhap News, Samsung shipped out around 15 million S7 and S7 edge units from April to June, with the latter beating out the basic S7 despite being more expensive.The company's mobile division, which once mostly had to compete with Apple's iPhone in the smartphone market, has been facing stiff competition from Chinese players such as Xiaomi and Huawei especially in the emerging market. But interestingly, some of these Chinese players have started to cut the big margin that their phones enjoyed in the recent months to make more profit.

Nat Levy, reporting for GeekWire: Huawei alleges that Bellevue-based T-Mobile would not make a deal to license several 4G patents from the Chinese telecom company, and is still using those technologies, according to a lawsuit filed Tuesday. The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court in Eastern Texas, alleges that Huawei offered to give T-Mobile license for several 4G patents under fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms (FRAND). T-Mobile allegedly didn't take the offer and continues to use the patented technologies. According to the lawsuit, the conflict goes back to 2014, when Huawei wanted to begin a licensing discussion, but T-Mobile allegedly would not sign a non-disclosure agreement and negotiations stalled. Earlier this year, Huawei filed several patent infringement complaints, according to the Puget Sound Business Journal, which first reported on today's suit. Huawei is not looking for monetary damages, but instead wants a declaratory judgment that would help facilitate a licensing agreement.

According to a report by The Telegraph, Google is working on its first Google-branded smartphone, and plans to release it by the end of 2016. Unlike the Nexus program, in which Google mandates the design and specifications of the phone, but leaves the manufacturing aspect to its handpicked OEM, the new supposed phone will be built from the scratch by Google. From the report:The technology giant is in discussions with mobile operators about releasing a Google-branded phone that will extend the company's move into hardware, sources familiar with the discussions told The Telegraph. [...] The new device, which will be released by the end of the year according to a senior source, will see Google take more control over design, manufacturing and software.NYMag questions company's reported move:It's an unsurprising rumor to hear: Google CEO Sundar Pichai has publicly commented on the company's emphasis on phones, and Motorola's Rick Osterloh was hired earlier this year to head up a new hardware division. And there's also the much discussed Google Ara, a modular phone which lets you swap out pieces like a camera or speakers and is slated for release in 2017. But Google is already working with hardware companies like LG and Huawei on the Nexus line of phones, which are made to the company's exact design specifications but are manufactured by third parties. It's hard to see how Google could take more control over design or software than it already does with Nexus, and while the company is likely eager to move into the manufacturing space, the timeline for Ara hasn't changed, and it seems unlikely that this new mystery Google phone is going to jump in front and actually become available to the public by year's end.

According to a report from The Information, Huawei, the world's third largest smartphone manufacturer is working on its own mobile operating system (paywalled; alternate source). The report adds that the team that is developing this new operating system includes ex-Nokia employees. The new operating system is "meant as a contingency measure in case Google further tightens its grip on Android or stops offering it to smartphone makers." Additionally, Huawei is also putting efforts on making big changes to EMUI, its Android-based skin. From the report:According to The Information, changes could include the addition of an app drawer, redesigned icons (they're all currently iPhone-like rounded squares), and a new, "very clean, fresh" color palette. EMUI's current color scheme focuses on unusually dingy and muted colors -- grays and browns. Abigail Brody (an ex-Apple designer, which Apple hired last year) is reportedly planning to change these for brighter tones including blues and whites, and is looking to animals like jellyfish for inspiration.

An anonymous reader writes: How serious and dangerous is China's offensive on Korean and Western mobile hardware brands? Extremely, according to research conducted between January and March by IC Insights, which predictably positioned Samsung and Apple atop the smartphone manufacturer hierarchy, only followed by a flurry of handheld vendors based in the Middle Kingdom. In fact, eight of the ten vendors that followed the two giants are Chinese. These OEMs are, in order of their market capture, Huawei, Oppo, Xiaomi, Vivo, ZTE, Lenovo, TCL, and Meizu.

Google is actively tracking the time its partner OEMs take to release a new version of Android onto their devices. According to a Bloomberg report, the company is drawing up rankings that could shame some phone makers into better behavior. From the report: Google shared this list with Android partners earlier this year. It has discussed making it public to highlight proactive manufacturers and shame tardy vendors through omission from the list, two of the people said. [...] Google is making progress persuading phone makers and carriers to install security updates quicker "for the good of users," Android chief Hiroshi Lockheimer said. The same expedited process may then be used to send operating system updates to phones, he explained. The most challenging discussions are with carriers, which can be slow to approve updates because they test them thoroughly to avoid network disruption. The report adds that several OEMs are also stepping up their game to better comply with Google's new wishes. Motorola, for instance, is working on offering quarterly updates to its three years old devices.

For users with non-Nexus devices, it's really frustrating to wait for months, and in some cases, years, before their devices from Samsung, Xiaomi, Huawei, HTC and other manufacturers get upgraded to a newer version of Android. Another challenge for Google is to push its partners to actively release updates to affordable and mid-range smartphones. Many OEMs mostly worry about serving those users who have the flagship and high-end models.

An anonymous reader writes: Huawei said on Wednesday it has filed lawsuits against Samsung claiming infringement of smartphone patents, in the first such case by the Chinese firm against the world's biggest mobile maker. Huawei has filed lawsuits in the United States and China seeking compensation for what it said was unlicensed use of fourth-generation (4G) cellular communications technology, operating systems and user interface software in Samsung phones. The lawsuit marks a reversal of roles in China where firms have often been on the receiving end of patent infringement disputes. In smartphones, makers have grown rapidly in recent years but different intellectual property laws outside of China have slowed overseas expansion. "We hope Samsung will ... stop infringing our patents and get the necessary license from Huawei, and work together with Huawei to jointly drive the industry forward," Ding Jianxing, president of Huawei's Intellectual Property Rights Department, said.

An anonymous reader shares a report on Bloomberg: Chinese technology giant Huawei is preparing for a world where people live forever, dead relatives linger on in computers and robots try to kill humans. Kevin Ho, president of its handset product line said his company used science fiction movies like "The Matrix" to envision future trends and new business ideas. "Hunger, poverty, disease or even death may not be a problem by 2035, or 25 years from now," he said. "In the future you may be able to purchase computing capacity to serve as a surrogate, to pass the baton from the physical world to the digital world." He described a future where children could use apps like WeChat (Editor's note: WeChat is a popular instant messaging app in China and other Asian markets) to interact with dead grandparents, thanks to the ability to download human consciousness into computers.For those unaware, Huawei is a major Chinese conglomerate. The company, known for its network equipment, last year got some spotlight for its Nexus 6P smartphone.

An anonymous reader writes: Two researchers have come up with a new method of hacking smartphones that use fingerprint biometrics to protect and lock the user's data. Their method only needs a regular inkjet printer, three AgIC silver conductive ink cartridges, a normal black ink cartridge, and special AgIC paper. The entire attack takes no more than 15 minutes. Current tests only included a Samsung Galaxy S6 and a Huawei Hornor 7. The researchers said that while the Samsung was easy to crack, the Huawei phone needed more tries.

The Linux Foundation is announcing FD.io ("Fido"), a Linux Foundation Project. FD.io is an open source project to provide an IO services framework for the next wave of network and storage software. Early support for FD.io comes from founding members 6WIND, Brocade, Cavium, Cisco, Comcast, Ericsson, Huawei, Inocybe Technologies, Intel Corporation, Mesophere, Metaswitch Networks (Project Calico), PLUMgrid and Red Hat.

Architected as a collection of sub-projects, FD.io provides a modular, extensible user space IO services framework that supports rapid development of high-throughput, low-latency and resource-efficient IO services. The design of FD.io is hardware, kernel, and deployment (bare metal, VM, container) agnostic.

An anonymous reader writes: Amnesty International has accused Apple, Samsung, Sony, and other tech companies of failing to do basic checks to ensure minerals used in their products are not mined by children. A new report explains how cobalt is harvested from mines by children as young as seven years old. The cobalt then ends up in lithium-ion batteries sold to device-makers throughout the world. The list of companies who use these batteries also includes Daimler, Dell, HP, Huawei, Lenovo, LG, Microsoft, Vodafone, Volkswagen, and ZTE. Amnesty International notes that half the world's cobalt comes from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where many mining operations have terrible track records for accidents and concern for workers' welfare. They say, "the vast majority of miners spend long hours every day working with cobalt without the most basic of protective equipment, such as gloves, work clothes or facemasks to protect them from lung or skin disease." According to UNICEF, about 40,000 kids worked in mines across southern DRC in 2014.

An anonymous reader writes: Researchers have discovered a large number of zero-day flaws in 8 routers/modems from 4 manufacturers (ZTE, Huawei, Gemtek, Quanta) that would allow attackers to build a huge botnet by leveraging just a few exploits. Vulnerabilities include remote code execution, firmware rewrites, XSS, and CSRF. All these allow attackers to intercept both HTTP and HTTPS Web traffic, infect computers beyond the modem, intercept SMS messages, and detect the modem's geographical location. After six months, manufacturers have failed to fix the issues.

Computerworld reports a welcome development for everyone with battery powered portable electronics, which might just have applications further afield, too (like electric cars): Huawei has developed a battery based on conventional lithium-ion chemistry but tweaked with the addition of graphite atoms bonded to the anode. From the article: That change means faster charging but not at the expense of usage life or a sacrifice in the amount of energy that can be stored in each battery, [the company] said. It was developed by Huawei research and development subsidiary Watt Lab and the company showed off two prototypes in videos posted online. One of the two batteries has a capacity of 3,000mAh (milliampere hours) -- about equivalent to the batteries in modern smartphones -- and can be charged to 48 percent of capacity in five minutes. The second has a much smaller capacity of 600mAh but reaches 68 percent of capacity in just two minutes.

An anonymous reader writes: A few weeks ago, Google announced its new Nexus phones — the 5X built by LG, and the 6P built by Huawei. The phones are starting to ship, and reviews for both devices have landed. So far, they're largely positive. Ars Technica calls them the Android phones to beat, though criticizes them for having fairly large bezels and no wireless charging. Android Police says the 6P's form factor is an improvement over the Nexus 6, being slightly narrower and taller. Meanwhile, most publications report that the 5X does a good job at carrying on the legacy of the excellent Nexus 5. It's their lower end phone, and most reviews mention that it feels that way in the hand — but battery life is reportedly excellent. The Nexus 6P's battery is capable, but doesn't last as long. Fortunately, the worries about overheating with its Snapdragon 810 chip seem overblown.

Mark.JUK writes: Global Chinese ICT firm Huawei and Japanese mobile giant NTT DOCOMO today claim to have conducted the world's first large-scale field trial of future 5th generation (5G) mobile broadband technology, which was able to deliver a peak speed of 3.6Gbps (Gigabits per second). Previous trials have used significantly higher frequency bands (e.g. 20-80GHz), which struggle with coverage and penetration through physical objects. By comparison Huawei's network operates in the sub-6GHz frequency band and made use of several new technologies, such as Multi-User MIMO (concurrent connectivity of 24 user devices in the macro-cell environment), Sparse Code Multiple Access (SCMA) and Filtered OFDM (F-OFDM). Assuming all goes well then Huawei hopes to begin a proper pilot in 2018, with interoperability testing being completed during 2019 and then a commercial launch to follow in 2020. But of course they're not the only team trying to develop a 5G solution.