TL;DR OnePlus and Dirac engineers worked closely to optimize speaker and headphone quality. Dirac’s EQ correction and multi-band compressor algorithms run efficiently on the Snapdragon 845’s DSP. The company provides similar solutions for Oppo, Xiaomi, and Huawei smartphones. The OnePlus 6 is one of the few 2018 flagships that launched with a headphone jack — hooray! But did you also know that it has a selection of other audio enhancement under-the-hood to boost both speaker and headphone quality?

Sennheiser TL;DR The Sennheiser HD 250BT Bluetooth headphones come to the North American market, and retail for $69.95. They feature a 25-hour battery life and support high-quality codecs. The Sennheiser HD 250BT comes to the North American market and brings the club to you. These on-ear headphones take inspiration from DJ headsets, and promise to deliver loud, clear bass. Despite its lightweight design, the HD 250BT can endure all of your urban adventures.

In a media event in New Delhi, Vivo launched its latest mid-range smartphone, the Vivo Y66 in India. Just like the Vivo V5 and the V5 Plus launched in last few months, the Y66 is a selfie-focused smartphone and boasts of a 16MP front camera with ‘Moonlight Glow’ feature. The feature induces a natural glow on the face without straining eyes that lights up the picture irrespective of the lighting conditions.

Update, September 5, 2019 (12:05 PM ET): It only took Sharp about five months after launch, but the Aquos R3 has finally made its way to Europe. The Japanese company announced its European launch details at IFA 2019. The Sharp Aquos R3 will retail for 729 euros (~$805) when it goes on sale in November. We didn’t get an exact launch date or specific European countries though. In case you missed it, the Sharp flagship packs a Snapdragon 855 processor, a 6.

TL;DR Teardowns of recent Play Store APKs hint at a new loyalty program called “Play Points.” Points would be earned for spending money on apps, movies, music, and more. Users might be able to use their reward points for in-app purchases and Play Store credit. Unless you’re trying to install Fortnite, the Play Store is where most Android users immediately go when they want to install a new app.

The Google Play Store was the leading app store among the four major ones in terms of number of downloads in this year’s first quarter, according to Canalys’ App Interrogator research. The research takes into account data for the four major application stores – Google Play Store (which should be getting some look changes soon), Apple App Store, Windows Phone Store, and BlackBerry World. On the financial front, Apple’s App Store is the clear leader, with a 74 percent share of revenue out of a total of $2.

If you feel like Google’s voice recognition is working a little better than it used to, that’s because it is! Today Google reported that their widely-used voice search capability is now being handled by a new engine that recognizes and anticipates words with a much higher degree of accuracy. Google says that these advancements are thanks to the development of more effective neural network acoustic models through the use of “Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) and sequence discriminative training techniques.

Did you need a 15 second distraction to get you pumped up about Android today? Good, that is exactly what Google’s latest Android commercial is for, jam packed with cameras, it is a slam dunk, of sorts. There is very little to say about the commercial itself, more Androidify characters grace the screen, sports are involved, and everyone is taking a photo with their Android device. It is fun. Highlighting the wide range of camera sizes, styles and capabilities available across Android devices is subtly masked behind the action here.

TL;DR Some new renders of the Sony Xperia XZ4 Compact from trusted leaker @OnLeaks just hit the internet. Sony’s “compact” series of variants are smaller versions of its flagship devices. Notably, Sony skipped a compact version of the Sony Xperia XZ3, but apparently, it will not skip it for the XZ4. Trusted leaker @OnLeaks just pushed out some new renders of the Sony Xperia XZ4 Compact (via XDA Developers). It was only a little over a week ago that we saw leaked renders — also from @OnLeaks — for the vanilla Sony Xperia XZ4.

Xiaomi has made a couple of big announcements today. First, the company will be holding a global lanch for its MIUI 7 OS around on August 19th and secondly, the new Redmi 2 Prime will be the company’s first smartphone “Made in India”. Last week, Xiaomi announced that it will be unveiling its MIUI 7 operating system on August 13th in Beijing, alongside a new device, quite possibly the Redmi Note 2.