China Tech News

The Mi Band 5 should hit US shores this month. You can preorder it right now for just $42.

The Xiaomi Mi Band 5 is coming soon to the US, bringing a wealth of impressive features to your wrist on the cheap. How impressive and how cheap? Let's start with the latter: If you simply can't wait to get your mitts on one, Walmart has the Xiaomi Mi Band 5 for $41.99. Note that it's being offered via a third-party seller, and that it says delivery will take about two weeks.

The Mi Band 5's predecessor was already a pretty solid product, selling for around $35 and standing toe-to-toe with the pricier Fitbit Inspire HR. There's no official price on the new model, but I'm seeing it from various China-based sellers for $40 to $50. I suspect it'll end up in the higher end of that range once it reaches US warehouses.

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Apple, Samsung and Huawei have long been mainstays on the global smartphone leaderboard, but in recent years there's been a string of new players. Xiaomi, Oppo and Vivo might sound unfamiliar to most Americans, outside a tech-savvy bubble, but they're right up there with the world's top brands.

While Samsung wears the crown as the world's largest smartphone company and Apple still pulls in the most profit, Chinese phone makers have ascended rapidly worldwide and are displaying resilience amid the coronavirus pandemic. Huawei surpassed Apple to become the world's second largest seller of smartphones last year, achieving this coveted milestone without selling any phones in the US, and briefly eclipsed Samsung in April. A Shenzhen-based phone company, Transsion, meanwhile, has overtaken Samsung as the No. 1 phone supplier in Africa since its launch there in 2018.

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Chinese phone-maker Vivo recently unveiled its X50 series, marking the launch of its first global flagship this year. Vivo, which is one of the top 10 phone manufacturers by market share despite being relatively unknown in the West, advertises its latest phone as a "professional photography flagship." It introduces an internal gimbal camera system to the series, which it's selling outside China for the first time.

There are three phones in this range, the X50, X50 Pro and X50 Pro Plus. The X50 Pro has a cutting-edge Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 processor (as seen in the Galaxy S20, among others), while the X50 and the Pro both have Snapdragon 765G CPUs. But although the X50 Pro has a slower processor, it also has a gimbal. Vivo said it chose to add the gimbal to the Pro, rather than the more costly Pro Plus, to make the feature more widely accessible.

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A new report claims that 48 percent of all gaming happens on PCs, with a whopping 3.1B gamers worldwide across all platforms, consoles, and mobile devices. What’s interesting here is how the data breaks down across region and in terms of gaming spend.

The data here is from DFC Intelligence, via PCGamesN, and suggests that the PC-versus-console framing for understanding gaming is outdated. Only 8 percent of gamers identify exclusively as console gamers, meaning most gamers play across multiple devices. The study does not say if console gamers who only play ported console titles on mobile devices, such as Fortnite, would be considered console-plus-mobile gamers or strictly console gamers, but I’m assuming the former.

This makes sense. Even those of us who identify strongly with one platform — and I’m very PC-centric — still often have some other kind of platform. Technically, my Super Nintendo Classic and the old Wii we’ve got hooked up for some vintage Smash Bros makes me a console gamer. I’ve also got a handful of games on my phone. What am I? A PC gamer. But what am I technically? A multi-device player who has a number of avenues available for how to spend gaming time.


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Huawei said that it would open up its operating system, Harmony OS 2.0, to third-party hardware manufacturers, including rivals, on Thursday. This is part of an effort to bolster its number of users and potentially take market share from Apple's iOS and Google's Android operating systems.

"The milestone we're marking is that we're supporting Huawei devices from Harmony OS 2.0, but at the same time Harmony OS 2.0 may also be available to other vendors' devices," Wang Chenglu, president of Huawei's consumer business group's software department said at the company's annual developer conference in the Chinese city of Dongguan on Thursday.

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After over a month of negotiations, TikTok has chosen a US company to partner with: Oracle, a California-based cloud computing giant.

On Sunday Microsoft, long tapped to purchase the ByteDance-owned app, announced its bid had been rejected by the Beijing-based company. ByteDance instead selected Oracle to be its "technology partner" in the US, a person familiar with the situation said on Sunday evening. The proposed deal is expected to meet the needs of TikTok's users, as well as satisfy American national security concerns, the person said.

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Portable power stations are the smaller, lesser-known cousin of generators. These versatile, lunch-box-sized devices can go with you on camping trips, to construction sites -- and anywhere else you need electricity -- to keep your phone, power tools and other electronics charged and running smoothly.

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Earlier this month, Sony posted an extensive teardown of the PlayStation 5. Now, the engineer featured in that video has given an exclusive interview to Japanese website 4Gamer, in which he shared some additional details on how the console functions and what kind of game improvements customers can expect over a game’s lifetime.

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Defining ‘PC’ in This Context

Conceptually, the Xbox Series X challenges the utility of a Home Theater PC, or HTPC, as well as a living room gaming PC (these are sometimes the same thing). HTPCs are pretty common in the enthusiast community, going all the way back to ATI and the days of their All-in-Wonder video capture card. An HTPC is typically (but not always) a secondary system attached to a TV rather than someone’s primary rig. They can be optimized for low power consumption and high storage capacity or kitted out more like gaming systems for simultaneous HTPC and high-end big-screen gaming capabilities. Content playback and gaming are the two markets where an HTPC would typically compete with a console and I’m comparing them on that basis.

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Nvidia rolled out ray tracing capabilities in its Turing-based graphics cards in 2018, which can make in-game lighting effects look eerily realistic. You don’t usually think of Minecraft as a realistic game, but the developers have been hard at work adding RTX ray tracing to the game for the last eight months. It’s finally out of beta today, and it really works with the blocky look of Minecraft.

Ray tracing on Nvidia RTX cards replaces traditional raster techniques like cube and depth mapping. These cards can generate reflections, refractions, and shadows by tracing the path of light, making scenes look more realistic. This data doesn’t replace the rasterization process, but it does augment it. Minecraft for Windows 10 uses full-path tracing for all in-game lighting, which requires a lot of graphics processing power. DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) 2.0 is an AI technology that can boost frame rates.

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