Samsung said on Monday that it is opening what it said is the world's biggest mobile phone manufacturing facility as the South Korean giant seeks to expand production in the world's fastest growing mobile phone market. From a report: The new Samsung factory will have the capacity of 120 million smartphones per year, and make everything from low-end smartphones that cost under $100 to its flagship S9 model, according to the company. Earlier this year, China's Xiaomi displaced Samsung from the No. 1 smartphone spot in the country, breaking its long-held dominance. Indians favor low-end smartphones priced at $250 or less, given the low average annual income of its people, according to Bloomberg Intelligence. That's one reason why Apple has struggled to gain market share in India, with most iPhone models priced beyond $500, according to a Bloomberg Intelligence report earlier this month.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In the United States, if you have an Apple iPhone or iPad, it's a strong sign that you make a lot of money. That's one of the takeaways from a new National Bureau of Economic Research working paper from University of Chicago economists Marianne Bertrand and Emir Kamenica. "Across all years in our data, no individual brand is as predictive of being high-income as owning an Apple iPhone in 2016," the researchers wrote. There are details and caveats to the research, but the economists found that owning an iPhone gave them a 69% chance to correctly infer that the owner was "high-income," which they defined as being in the top quartile of income for households of that type -- like single adult or couple with dependents, for example.

Web monoculture is well and truly alive when Google cannot be bothered to make a full-featured cross-browser mobile search page. From a report: It has been over five years since Firefox really turned a corner and started to morph from its bloated memory-munching ways into the lightning-quick browser it is today. Buried in Mozilla's issue tracker is a bug that kicked off in February 2014, and is yet to be resolved: Have Google treat Firefox for Android as a first-class citizen and serve up comparable content to what the search giant hands Chrome and Safari. After years of requests, meetings, and to and fro, it has hit a point where the developers of Firefox are experimenting by manipulating the user agent string in its nightly development builds to trick Google into thinking that Firefox Mobile is a Chrome browser. Not only does Google's search page degrade for Firefox on Android, but some new properties like Google Flights have occasionally taken to outright blocking of the browser.

Following yesterday's report from Israeli publication CTech that Apple has decided not to use an Intel 5G modem called "Sunny Peak" in future iPhones, Intel has denied part of the report -- and the publication has updated its story to remove its central claim. From a report: "Intel's 5G customer engagements and roadmap have not changed for 2018 through 2020," a spokesperson told VentureBeat. "We remain committed to our 5G plans and projects." When asked whether this meant that Apple is a customer for an Intel 5G modem, the spokesperson said only that "the Intel 5G modem part of the story is inaccurate." The updated report explains that Sunny Peak was not in fact a 5G modem, and did not -- as initially claimed -- combine 5G, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth on one chip. Rather, the unannounced component is only a combined Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chip and was expected to include support for 802.11ad WiGig Wi-Fi, but it ran into engineering issues.

According to analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, Apple's new 2018 iPhones will come in a plethora of colors. The 6.5-inch iPhone will be offered in black, white, and a (new) gold, while the entry-level 6.1-inch LCD iPhone will debut in "grey, white, blue, red and orange." 9to5Mac reports: That's a potential five new colors for the LCD model. It is very possible that when Kuo says "grey" and "white" he is referring to the Space Grey and Silver finishes as seen on the current iPhone X. We've mocked up the new finishes by tinting an iPhone X, but note the 6.1-inch LCD iPhone is not expected to have a dual-camera system. However, that still means Apple is looking to introduce four new options. It seems like the higher end models will add gold to the lineup...

The ~$700 6.1-inch LCD 2018 iPhone (which will mostly resemble an iPhone X's design from the front) will have a larger lineup including blue, red and orange. This harkens back to the iPhone 5c era when Apple rolled out a cheaper iPhone sibling in colorful chassis. We have heard some mumblings prior to today's report about Apple expanding the color options for the cheaper phone, but this is the first time someone reputable has reported specifics. It's not clear if the "red" color means PRODUCT(RED)... Kuo also says that the 6.5-inch OLED iPhone Model should be priced around $1,000 like the current iPhone X, and will feature dual SIM capabilities. Meanwhile, the 6.1-inch LCD iPhone X style device should retail for around $700. The other iPhone expected to be released later this year will be a spec-bump upgrade to the 5.8-inch iPhone X currently available.

In other Apple-related news, Intel will reportedly not provide the 5G modems for Apple's 2020 mobile devices.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Arm is teaming up with Samsung's foundry to manufacture the recently announced Cortex-A76 CPU, which the pair say will run at speeds above 3GHz. At that speed the Cortex-A76 will be more powerful than Qualcomm's best Cortex-A75 SoC, the Snapdragon 845, which tops out at 2.8GHz. At launch, Arm said Cortex-A76 chips would even challenge Intel's Core i7 on performance, meaning it could benefit not just smartphones but laptops too, such as "always connected" Windows 10 on Arm devices from HP and Lenovo, which use Qualcomm's Snapdragon 835.

The collaboration will involve the Arm-designed chips being manufactured on Samsung's 7LPP (7nm Low Power Plus) and 5LPE (5nm Low Power Early) process technologies, combined with Arm's Artisan physical IP platform. However, it could still be some time before consumers see these high-powered Arm CPUs in devices. Initial production on the 7LPP process is set to begin in the second half of 2018. Samsung says 5LPE, the process technology after 7LPP, will allow greater area scaling and ultra-low power.

BrianFagioli writes: People sometimes forget that when the first-ever iPhone launched in 2007, there was no App Store. Believe it or not, Apple's smartphone was limited to the apps with which it came. In fact, Steve Jobs famously didn't want third-party apps on the iPhone at all. Ultimately, the App Store was added in 2008 despite Jobs' initial push against it. This move changed the computer industry forever.

This month, the Apple App Store reaches an impressive milestone -- its 10th Birthday. This day is important for three groups -- Apple (of course), but more importantly, consumers and developers. Apple has made billions of dollars from the App Store, but third party developers have as well -- the company has literally transformed some devs into millionaires. Consumers have benefited from high-quality applications too.

Regardless of your feelings about Apple, the world owes it a collective thank you for its App Store. It inspired other companies, such as Google with Android and Microsoft with Windows 8/10, to adopt the same app concepts. It really did change everything.

Newley Purnell, reporting for WSJ: For millions of people buying inexpensive smartphones in developing countries where privacy protections are usually low, the convenience of on-the-go internet access could come with a hidden cost: preloaded apps that harvest users' data without their knowledge. One such app, included on thousands of Chinese-made Singtech P10 smartphones sold in Myanmar and Cambodia, sends the owner's location and unique-device details to a mobile-advertising firm in Taiwan called General Mobile, or GMobi. The app also has appeared on smartphones sold in Brazil and those made by manufacturers based in China and India, security researchers say.

Taipei-based GMobi, with a subsidiary in Shanghai, says it uses the data to show targeted ads on the devices. It also sometimes shares the data with device makers to help them learn more about their customers. "If end users want a free internet service, he or she needs to suffer a little for better targeting ads," said a GMobi spokeswoman. [...] GMobi is one of several entities using the combination of low-cost smartphones and low regulations to siphon off reams of user data. Shanghai-based Adups and Indian digital advertising firm MoMagic offer similar firmware-updating services in partnership with smartphone makers.

Isaac Stone Fish, reporting for The Washington Post: On Monday, the U.S. Department of Commerce recommended the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) deny a license to China Mobile, the state-run company that is the world's largest phone network by subscribers. (It reaches more people than Verizon and AT&T combined.) The Commerce Department suggested the move because of the national security risk China Mobile poses. Indeed, because China Mobile is an arm of the Chinese state, there are legitimate concerns that Beijing could use it to gather data on American citizens. There is, however, a previously unreported concern with China Mobile that adds to worries about the company's suitability in the United States.

According to several interviews with frequent Chinese travelers to the United States, those with China Mobile as their carrier are often unable to access American websites and apps that are banned in China. A Chinese journalist who regularly travels to the United States for work, and who asked to speak anonymously, said she couldn't access Facebook or the New York Times in the United States with her China Mobile number. Even Google Maps is banned, leading to some frustrating travel experiences. When she was visiting a friend in Brooklyn, the Chinese journalist said, "it took me a long time to find her place because my VPN failed me and I couldn't use Google Maps." She was referring to a Virtual Private Network, a method that some Chinese use to circumvent the Chinese censorship apparatus.

Governments are using migrants' smartphones to deport them. From a report: Across the continent, migrants are being confronted by a booming mobile forensics industry that specialises in extracting a smartphone's messages, location history, and even WhatsApp data. That information can potentially be turned against the phone owners themselves. In 2017 both Germany and Denmark expanded laws that enabled immigration officials to extract data from asylum seekers' phones. Similar legislation has been proposed in Belgium and Austria, while the UK and Norway have been searching asylum seekers' devices for years.

Following right-wing gains across the EU, beleaguered governments are scrambling to bring immigration numbers down. Tackling fraudulent asylum applications seems like an easy way to do that. As European leaders met in Brussels last week to thrash out a new, tougher framework to manage migration -- which nevertheless seems insufficient to placate Angela Merkel's critics in Germany -- immigration agencies across Europe are showing new enthusiasm for laws and software that enable phone data to be used in deportation cases. Admittedly, some refugees do lie on their asylum applications.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Google is turning startup investor to further its goal of putting Google services like search, maps, and its voice assistant front and center for the next billion internet users in emerging markets. It has invested $22 million into KaiOS, the company that has built an eponymous operating system for feature phones that packs a range of native apps and other smartphone-like services. As part of the investment, KaiOS will be working on integrating Google services like search, maps, YouTube and its voice assistant into more KaiOS devices, after initially announcing Google apps for KaiOS-powered Nokia phones earlier this year.

KaiOS is a U.S.-based project that started in 2017, built on the ashes of Mozilla's failed Firefox OS experiment, as a fork of the Linux codebase. Firefox OS was intended to be the basis of a new wave of HTML-5, low-cost smartphones. And while those devices and the wider ecosystem never really took off, KaiOS has fared significantly better. KaiOS powers phones made by OEMs including Nokia (HMD), Micromax and Alcatel, and it works with carriers including Sprint and AT&T -- it counts offices in North America, Europe and Asia. But its most significant deployment to date has been with India's Reliance Jio, the challenger telco that disrupted the Indian market with affordable 4G data packages. "This funding will help us fast-track development and global deployment of KaiOS-enabled smart feature phones, allowing us to connect the vast population that still cannot access the internet, especially in emerging markets," said KaiOS CEO Sebastien Codeville in a statement.

Qualcomm is launching three new chips for mid-tier smartphones -- the Snapdragon 632, 439, and 429 -- all of which promise to make dual cameras more commonplace. Engadget reports: The octa-core 632 is unsurprisingly the headliner, and can support two 13-megapixel rear cameras for those all-important portrait and telephoto shots. It's up to 40 percent faster in raw computational power than the Snapdragon 626, and that means enough power for 4K video capture and "FHD+" resolution displays. Its cellular modem can handle LTE Advanced, too. The Adreno 506 graphics are only about 10 percent faster, but you're still looking at a chip that can handle at least some modern 3D games without flinching.

The octa-core Snapdragon 439 and quad-core 429, meanwhile, are focused more on stepping up the baseline quality for lower-cost devices. They make do with support for dual 8-megapixel cameras and won't handle 4K, but they should deliver up to 25 percent more CPU performance over their forebears (the 430 and 425) on top of the AI-related functions. The best bang for the buck comes with the 429 -- while the Adreno 505 graphics in the 439 are a respectable 20 percent faster, the Adreno 504 inside the 429 is a whopping 50 percent faster. The first phones using these chips will appear sometime in the second half of the year.

wiredmikey writes: The Wi-Fi Alliance, the organization responsible for maintaining Wi-Fi technology, announced the launch of the WPA3 security standard. The latest version of the Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) protocol brings significant improvements in terms of authentication and data protection.

WPA3 has two modes of operation: Personal and Enterprise. WPA3-Personal's key features include enhanced protection against offline dictionary attacks and password guessing attempts. WPA3-Enterprise provides 192-bit encryption for extra security, improved network resiliency, and greater consistency when it comes to the deployment of cryptographic tools.

A security researcher claimed he had figured out a way to bypass the passcode lock limit on an iPhone or iPad, ZDNet reported. But it turned out the passcodes he tested weren't always counted. From a report: "The recent report about a passcode bypass on iPhone was in error, and a result of incorrect testing," Apple said Saturday in an emailed statement. Since the 2014 release of iOS 8, all iPhones and iPads have come with device encryption protected by a four- or six-digit passcode. If the wrong passcode is entered too many times, the device gets wiped, explained ZDNet's Zack Whittaker. But Hacker House co-founder Matthew Hickey figured out a way "to bypass the 10-time limit and enter as many codes as he wants -- even on iOS 11.3," Whittaker wrote.

Bethesda, the video game publisher behind Fallout and The Elder Scrolls, is suing Warner Bros. and Fallout Shelter co-developer Behavior Interactive over the recently released Westworld, alleging that the mobile game based on HBO's TV series is a "blatant rip-off" of Fallout Shelter. Polygon reports: In a suit filed in a Maryland U.S. District Court, Bethesda alleges that Westworld -- developed by Behaviour and released this week for Android and iOS -- "has the same or highly similar game design, art style, animations, features and other gameplay elements" as Fallout Shelter. Fallout Shelter was originally released in 2015 for mobile devices. The game was later ported to Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Windows PC and Xbox One.

Bethesda said in its suit that Behaviour uses "the same copyrighted computer code created for Fallout Shelter in Westworld," alleging that a bug evident in an early version of Fallout Shelter (which was later fixed) also appears in Westworld. Bethesda alleges the companies "copied Fallout Shelter's features and then made cosmetic modifications for Westworld's 'western' theme."

The first iPhone to shed its headphone jack was the iPhone 7, which launched in late 2016. Now it seems like the Lightning port may be the next to go. CNET reports: Apple has considered removing the Lightning port on the iPhone X, according to Bloomberg, citing unnamed "people familiar with the company's work." While earlier rumors suggested that Apple would remove the Lightning port in favor of USB-C, Apple's goal may be to remove all ports entirely.

Bloomberg's report is about the challenges that Apple faces with its AirPower wireless charger, but it also shares some details about Apple's vision for a wireless future. The report says: "Apple designers eventually hope to remove most of the external ports and buttons on the iPhone, including the charger, according to people familiar with the company's work. During the development of the iPhone X, Apple weighed removing the wired charging system entirely. That wasn't feasible at the time because wireless charging was still slower than traditional methods. Including a wireless charger with new iPhones would also significantly raise the price of the phones."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Portland, Oregon officials claim its city has some of the best bike data in the United States -- data revealing how many people ride bicycles, where they're going and what streets they're using. Their collection of that data, however, has been as low-tech as it gets: city staffers and volunteers stand out on street corners for two hours at a time and count. Now, the city is aiming for more comprehensive, accurate data collection with the installation of 200 sensors installed on street lights on three of Portland's deadliest streets: Southeast Division St., SE Hawthorne Blvd. and 122nd St.

The Traffic Sensor Safety Project, for a price tag of just over $1 million, represents the first major milestone for the Smart City PDX initiative. It relies on GE's Current CityIQ sensors, which are powered with Intel IoT technology and use AT&T as the data carrier. GE, Intel and AT&T have already worked together to deploy smart streetlight sensors in San Diego.

According to documents filed Monday, T-Mobile and Sprint have formally asked the FCC to approve their proposed merger. Axios reports: In their filing, the companies said that the deal would "generate substantial public interest benefits for the customers of T-Mobile and Sprint and for U.S. wireless customers as a whole, and do not give rise to any competitive harms." "The merger unlocks the door to new broadband choices and capabilities for consumers across the country while accelerating the arrival of transformative 5G services that will produce innovation, jobs, and economic growth for our country," the companies said. Basically, the two companies have to prove to the FCC that the deal benefits consumers, and avoid antitrust concerns currently being investigated by the Department of Justice.

L-One-L-One writes: Most IoT home projects today are based on Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Zigbee, and friends. But this is not always the ideal solution: you end up swapping batteries frequently, which becomes annoying quite quickly. You also have to deal with signal strength issues and interferences. To address this problem, a new Kickstarter campaign called NoCAN is proposing an Arduino-compatible internet-of-things platform based on wired connections that combine networking and power in one cable. The platform uses a set of cheap Arduino-compatible nodes controlled through a Raspberry Pi. The network uses CAN-bus and offers a publish/subscribe mechanism like MQTT and over-the-network firmware updates. It can also be controlled by a smartphone or tablet. Even with such features, can it succeed in going against the all-wireless trend? We'll know in a few weeks.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Google is beginning to roll out desktop browser support for Android Messages, allowing people to use their PC for sending messages and viewing those that have been received on their Android smartphone. Google says the feature is starting to go out to users today and continuing for the rest of the week. Text, images, and stickers are all supported on the web version.

To get started, the Android Messages website has you scan a QR code using the Android Messages mobile app, which creates a link between the two. In today's blog post, Google also goes over numerous other recent improvements to Android Messenger including built-in GIF search, support for smart replies on more carriers, inline link previews, and easy copy/paste for two-factor authentication messages.