Category: Hardware

China’s Oppo partners with Vodafone for bigger European push

Huawei is facing an uphill challenge in the overseas market as its upcoming devices lack the full set of Google apps and services. That leaves ample room for its Chinese rivals to chase after foreign consumers. That includes Oppo, the sister brand of Vivo under Dongguan-based electronics holding company BBK. In…

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Apple begins reopening some stores with temperature checks and other safeguards in place

In mid-March, Apple closed all of its stores outside of China “until further notice.” It was a sweeping — but necessary — move for a world facing down a growing pandemic. In a statement issued today until the title, “To our Customers,” Retail SVP Deirdre O’Brien offered insight into the…

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This Week in Apps: Houseparty battles Messenger, Telegram drops crypto plans, Instagram Lite is gone

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the Extra Crunch series that recaps the latest OS news, the applications they support and the money that flows through it all. The app industry is as hot as ever, with a record 204 billion downloads and $120 billion in consumer spending in 2019. People are…

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Foxconn’s profits plunged nearly 90%, due to COVID-19 shutdown

As earnings season winds down, we’re getting a solid picture on just how profoundly the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted corporations’ bottomline. Taiwan-based manufacturing giant Foxconn is among those companies that were utterly walloped over the previous quarter. Plant shutdowns — particularly in China — lead to a 90% year-over-year drop…

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Trump adds another year to Huawei/ZTE ban

Donald Trump this week signed an extension of last year’s national emergency declaration aimed at barring commercial trade with certain foreign telecom companies. The extension comes nearly a year to the day after the first order, this time extending things through May of 2021. Per the original language, the order…

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NVIDIA begins shipping the A100, its first Ampere-based data center GPU

NVIDIA announced today that its NVIDIA A100, the first of its GPUs based on its Ampere architecture, is now in full production and has begun shipping to its customers globally. Ampere is a big generational jump in NVIDIA’s GPU architecture design, providing what the company says is the “largest leap…

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