TL;DR
Sprint has announced a new high-end unlimited plan, called Unlimited Premium, for $90 a month. It includes a free subscription to Amazon Prime, in addition to free access to Hulu and Tidal. The plan also throws in 50GB of LTE mobile hotspot data a month. Sprint made a surprise late Friday announcement, revealing that it has launched a new unlimited plan. This one is called Unlimited Premium, and it has a few features that might make it very attractive for many customers, even with its high price tag of $90 a month (with auto-pay) for one line.
The processor in my smartphone has more CPU cores than my desktop PC! It is true, but it doesn’t sound right. How is it that this little handheld device is sporting eight-cores but my PC only has four? Does my smartphone perform better than my PC? Does my smartphone need 8 cores, or even 10? These are good questions and according to a Forbes article written by Patrick Moorhead, the well known technology commentator, 8 and 10 CPU cores in smartphones are a bad idea, and he uses the car as an example.
You now have one less choice for major voice assistants on your phone. MacRumors reports that Microsoft has shut down the Cortana app for Android and iOS about two and a half years after its November 2018 launch.
Any content you created using Cortana has stopped functioning in the app, including lists and reminders. You’ll have to use either Cortana on Windows or the To Do app on Android and iOS to fetch your information.
Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 7.0
The SM-T310 has been seen in previous reports that claimed this particular model number is Samsung’s first 8-inch Galaxy Tab version, but it only showed up at the FCC now. The same SM-T310 was spotted at the Bluetooth SIG in late March, where it was confirmed to be a tablet, so we kind of expected it to hit the FCC sooner or later.
While the commercial name for the product is not offered, and Samsung is yet to officially announce the tablet, there’s more circumstantial evidence suggesting this will indeed be the Galaxy Tab 3 8.
Google criticized Apple last week for taking advantage of peer pressure around the iMessage app and the green bubble phenomenon. The company called on Apple to switch to the more modern RCS protocol for Android users in iMessage, as opposed to the archaic SMS standard.
Our own Rita El Khoury felt that RCS won’t solve Google’s messaging problems. But what do readers think of RCS and its prospects in the messaging landscape?
Often overshadowed by its bigger sibling, the Samsung Galaxy J7 Prime is a respectable phone in its own right. The 5.5-inch 1080p screen is just right for today’s media consumption. Under the hood, the octa-core Exynos 7870 is no slouch. Bundled with 3GB of RAM and 16 or 32 GB of onboard storage, and this is a phone that can handle just about any task you throw at it. As such, it deserves to be protected.
We have enough app stores ready to deliver all the digital content we’d be interested in enjoying on our mobile devices, so we don’t really need another one, do we? That’s rather a rhetorical question, especially since Facebook has finally launched its own app store, conveniently called App Center.
However, the store, available at www.facebook.com/appcenter, is not a store in the true sense of the word. Instead, it’s more like a list of “high-quality” apps available on Android and iOS, which Facebook wants you to discover.
TL;DR
Google is testing a new crowdsourced rewards app called Task Mate. Task Mate allows users to complete tasks to receive monetary rewards. Per support pages, the invite-only app is currently only available in India and Kenya. There’s a new Google app that lets users earn money for completing tasks on their smartphones. Dubbed Task Mate (h/t 9to5Google), the app is currently available in India and Kenya only.
David Imel / Android Authority
Smartphone chipsets have come a long way since the early days of Android. While the vast majority of budget phones were woefully underpowered only a few years ago, today’s mid-range smartphones perform just as well as one or two-year-old flagships.
Now that the average smartphone is more than capable of handling general everyday tasks, both chipmakers and developers have set their sights on loftier goals. With this perspective then, it’s clear why ancillary technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning (ML) are now taking center stage instead.
Announced in June, Motorola’s affordable Moto E4 can be yours for anywhere from $70 to $100, depending on where you buy the phone from. Starting July 31, however, that price will be even lower, thanks to the phone’s upcoming availability on MetroPCS.
As a refresher, the Moto E4 packs a fingerprint sensor that sits below the 5-inch 720p display, an 8 MP main shooter, and 5 MP selfie camera. Powering the phone are the quad-core Snapdragon 425 and 2 GB of RAM, with the 16 GB of storage augmentable through the microSD card slot.