An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Apple has long performed like clockwork, growing steadily and producing an ever-growing stream of profit. Not anymore. On Tuesday, the Silicon Valley behemoth said that its net income had fallen 13 percent and that its revenue rose 1 percent in the latest quarter, with iPhone sales continuing to decline and gains in the company's services and wearables business failing to make up the difference. The results showed persistent signs of weakness for one of the world's financial standouts. Apple built its enormous business on the iPhone, but sales of the device have slipped for three straight quarters in a saturated market for smartphones. Yet the results also suggested that the company could be starting to halt declines in those sales and other key areas, including revenue from the Chinese market. Over the previous two quarters, Apple's profits and revenue had fallen over all.

Apple said net income had dropped to $10.04 billion for its fiscal third quarter, from $11.5 billion a year earlier, with profit of $2.18 a share exceeding Wall Street estimates. Revenue rose to $53.8 billion from $53.3 billion a year earlier. In the latest quarter, revenue from iPhone sales fell nearly 12 percent, to $25.97 billion, from a year earlier. In the company's previous quarter, iPhone sales fell 17 percent. For the first time since 2013, iPhone sales did not account for at least half of Apple's revenue, said Yoram Wurmser, an analyst at the market-research firm eMarketer. Sales in China have declined nearly 25 percent over the previous two quarters, the report adds. "In the latest quarter, Apple's sales in the region fell 4.1 percent, while revenue specifically in mainland China grew."

Millions of first-time internet consumers from the Ivory Coast to India and Indonesia are connecting to the web on smart feature phones that cost only about $25. "[T]hese hybrid phones, fueled by inexpensive mobile data, provide some basic apps and internet access in addition to calling and texting," the Wall Street Journal reports. From the report: While global smartphone sales began sliding last year as markets became saturated, smart feature phone shipments tripled to around 75 million from 2017, according to research firm Counterpoint. Some 84 million are likely to be shipped this year. Even as rich nations start to roll out 5G technologies, some 3.4 billion people around the world remain cut off from the internet, according to We Are Social, another research firm. Most of them already use traditional, unconnected mobile phones, meaning they can easily make the transition to similarly shaped devices capable of high-speed web connections.

Smart feature phones aren't only inexpensive, but they also have physical keypads that are less intimidating than touch screens for those new to the technology. Meanwhile, their batteries last for days, a bonus in places where electricity is unreliable. There is a trade-off for the low price. The devices typically have slower and less powerful components, only basic cameras and their screens are usually just a few inches in size, factors that contribute to their longer battery life. There also are fewer apps available for smart feature phones.

In news that will shock absolutely nobody, LG and Sony continue to struggle when it comes to selling smartphones. An anonymous reader shares a report: Despite posting record second-quarter and first-half revenues and operating profit totaling $559.4 million -- largely due to strong home appliance sales -- LG's Mobile Communications division continues to underperform. Sales of $1.38 billion equate to a 21.3% drop compared with the same period last year, although it is an increase of 6.8% over the previous quarter. The company blames the usual factors for these results: stagnant demand across the whole sector and "continued aggressive pricing by Chinese brands." Further improvement is expected in Q3 with new products coming to market and greater demand for 5G products, apparently. It's a similar story over at Sony, whose sales in the Electronics Products & Solutions division that smartphones are now a part of reached $776 million, marking a 15% decrease year-on-year. The Japanese company attributes the poor performance to a drop shipments of not just smartphones, but also televisions and digital cameras, two areas that Sony usually does better in.

Apple Wireless Direct Link (AWDL), a protocol installed on over 1.2 billion Apple devices, contains vulnerabilities that enable attackers to track users, crash devices, or intercept files transferred between devices via man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks. From a report: These are the findings of a research project that started last year at the Technical University of Darmstadt, in Germany, and has recently concluded, and whose findings researchers will be presenting later this month at a security conference in the US. The project sought to analyze the Apple Wireless Direct Link (AWDL), a protocol that Apple rolled out in 2014 and which also plays a key role in enabling device-to-device communications in the Apple ecosystem. While most Apple end users might not be aware of the protocol's existence, AWDL is at the core of Apple services like AirPlay and AirDrop, and Apple has been including AWDL by default on all devices the company has been selling, such as Macs, iPhones, iPads, Apple watches, Apple TVs, and HomePods. But in the past five years, Apple has never published any in-depth technical details about how AWDL works. This, in turn, has resulted in very few security researchers looking at AWDL for bugs or implementation errors.

schwit1 shares a report from ScienceAlert: It may sound strange at first, but a team of researchers in Australia has come up with a method to predict your personality traits using just the accelerometer in your phone. Well, that and your call and messaging activity logs. Also, the system works for some traits better than others. But it's an interesting take on how we may find connections through such seemingly unrelated things. In this case, we start at the Big Five personality traits. These have been used in psychology since the 1980's to help classify five dominant parts of our personalities. These five traits are extraversion (outgoing vs reserved), openness (curious vs cautious), neuroticism (confidence vs nervous), agreeableness (compassionate vs detached) and conscientiousness (organised vs easy-going).

The researchers analysed 52 people's phone habits between March 2010 and July 2011. Each participant was given a phone with sensing and collection software on it, which gave the researchers information on when and how much the phone was moving (accelerometer data), as well as the number and time of day of all calls and messages. The participants were also asked to complete a Big Five survey to score their personalities on the five traits. Then, the team also created a list of features related to the aspects of phone use they measured, that might potentially determine personality traits; for example, physical activity on weekend nights might predict extraversion, or the number of calls one makes might predict agreeableness. After crunching the numbers, the researchers found that some of the phone features really did predict some of the personality traits for the 52 participants. The phone data best predicted neuroticism, conscientiousness, and extraversion, but had trouble predicting the other two traits, especially openness. "There's also the issue of whether the team were actually looking at personality traits, or if the personality traits could be masked by other factors," the report adds. "For instance, neuroticism may be associated with different regularity of activity intensity in the night, however we cannot rule out many other possible explanations (e.g. neurotic people are more prone to stress and therefore - if this is the case, anyone with different personality traits that are stressed will still exhibit the same results)."

The study has been published in the journal Computer.

In a YouTube video and blog post, Google revealed that its upcoming Pixel 4 smartphone will feature face unlock technology and a feature called "Motion Sense," which confirms that it will have a Project Soli chip that uses radar to detect hand gestures near the phone. The Verge reports: Adding face unlock puts the Pixel 4 on par with modern iPhones for unlocking, and it's (at least in theory) more convenient than an in-screen fingerprint sensor. Google also confirmed that the Pixel 4 will use the face unlock feature for payments: "face unlock works in almost any orientation -- even if you're holding it upside down -- and you can use it for secure payments and app authentication too." As with the iPhone, Google says that biometric data will be stored locally in a secure chip and never share with other Google services. The Pixel 4's face unlock feature will use a variety of sensors to identify your face, including depth, infrared, and RGB. That should mean that it will work in a variety of lighting situations and also work with a diverse set of faces. Google has told me that it has done "field research" to ensure both of those things.

As for the "Motion Sense" feature, there's not a ton that we can glean from Google's article. Earlier rumors have pointed to it being related to Project Soli, which uses radar to detect tiny hand or finger movements above the device. For example, Google has demoed rubbing your thumb and index finger together to simulate turning a dial on a smartwatch. Some code found in the next version of Android has suggested it could be used for media controls at the very least. Google's post cites a possible use case where the Soli chip could detect your hand reaching for the phone, which would automatically turn on "the face unlock sensors." If it all works, the phone would automatically unlock itself and be ready by the time you're looking at it.

schwit1 quotes IEEE Spectrum: In 2017, members of the mobile telephony industry group 3GPP were bickering over whether to speed the development of 5G standards. One proposal, originally put forward by Vodafone and ultimately agreed to by the rest of the group, promised to deliver 5G networks sooner by developing more aspects of 5G technology simultaneously.

Adopting that proposal may have also meant pushing some decisions down the road. One such decision concerned how 5G networks should encode wireless signals. 3GPP's Release 15, which laid the foundation for 5G, ultimately selected orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM), a holdover from 4G, as the encoding option. But Release 16, expected by year's end, will include the findings of a study group assigned to explore alternatives. Wireless standards are frequently updated, and in the next 5G release, the industry could address concerns that OFDM may draw too much power in 5G devices and base stations.

That's a problem, because 5G is expected to require far more base stations to deliver service and connect billions of mobile and IoT devices. "I don't think the carriers really understood the impact on the mobile phone, and what it's going to do to battery life," says James Kimery, the director of marketing for RF and software-defined radio research at National Instruments Corp. "5G is going to come with a price, and that price is battery consumption." And Kimery notes that these concerns apply beyond 5G handsets. China Mobile has "been vocal about the power consumption of their base stations," he says. A 5G base station is generally expected to consume roughly three times as much power as a 4G base station. And more 5G base stations are needed to cover the same area.

The Justice Department approved T-Mobile's acquisition of Sprint, a deal it rejected under the previous administration, clearing one of the biggest hurdles to a takeover that will reshape the wireless industry. From a report: T-Mobile and Sprint agreed to sell multiple assets to Dish Network as a condition for approval, paving the way to creating a new wireless company, the Justice Department said in a statement Friday. The carriers have promised to deploy a 5G network that would cover 97% of the U.S. population within three years and 99% within six years. "The remedies set up Dish as a disruptive force in wireless," said Makan Delrahim, the head of the Justice Department's antitrust division, during a briefing with reporters.

Alex Hern, reporting for The Guardian: Apple contractors regularly hear confidential medical information, drug deals, and recordings of couples having sex, as part of their job providing quality control, or "grading," the company's Siri voice assistant, the Guardian has learned. Although Apple does not explicitly disclose it in its consumer-facing privacy documentation, a small proportion of Siri recordings are passed on to contractors working for the company around the world.

They are tasked with grading the responses on a variety of factors, including whether the activation of the voice assistant was deliberate or accidental, whether the query was something Siri could be expected to help with and whether Siri's response was appropriate. Apple says the data "is used to help Siri and dictation ... understand you better and recognise what you say." [...] Apple told the Guardian: "A small portion of Siri requests are analysed to improve Siri and dictation. User requests are not associated with the user's Apple ID. Siri responses are analysed in secure facilities and all reviewers are under the obligation to adhere to Apple's strict confidentiality requirements." The company added that a very small random subset, less than 1% of daily Siri activations, are used for grading, and those used are typically only a few seconds long." Further reading: Google Contractors Are Secretly Listening To Your Assistant Recordings; and Amazon Workers Are Listening To What You Tell Alexa.

An anonymous reader shares a report: For the better part of two years, the folks at Mozilla have been diligently chipping away at Mozilla WebThings, an open implementation of the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) Web of Things standard for monitoring and controlling connected devices. In April, it gained a number of powerful logging, alarm, and networking features, and this week, a revamped component of WebThings -- WebThings Gateway, a privacy- and security-focused software distribution for smart home gateways -- formally debuted. Experimental builds of WebThings Gateway 0.9 are available on GitHub for the Turris Omnia router, with expanded support for routers and developer boards to come down the line. (Separately, there's a new build compatible with the recently announced Raspberry Pi 4.) Mozilla notes that it currently only offers "extremely basic" router configuration and cautions against replacing existing firmware, but the company says that it's a noteworthy milestone in its path to creating a full software distribution for wireless routers.

In an effort to gain an elusive trading edge, some of the world's biggest hedge funds have been snapping up large swaths of alternative data from Fitbits, Rokus, Teslas and employment websites like Glassdoor. Bloomberg reports: Spotting trends and patterns in consumer habits is big business, part of a global market for big data, that a JPMorgan Chase report said could reach more than $200 billion by next year. Still, there's no guarantee all that information will lead to riches. It needs to be scrubbed, organized and aggregated to be of any use. WiFi and Bluetooth connections have become so ubiquitous they're often taken for granted. But hedge funds have become keenly interested in tracking devices that connect to the internet.

Capturing signals they emit can show "when and where new things appear in the world,"; said Hugh O'Connor, director of data sourcing and partnerships at Eagle Alpha, which gathers alternative data for the finance industry. Firms can keep tabs on the number of Roku video-streaming devices or Fitbit fitness trackers being used, the length of time consumers spend on them and their approximate locations. Similarly, if you buy a Tesla Model 3 car and use its Bluetooth-enabled media, a data provider can capture when your new ride is hitting the road. There's been "incredible demand" from some of the world's largest asset managers for this type of information. Hedge funds are also pulling data from mobile phones as they can reveal, in real time, the number of people carrying devices at a particular location. "This can shed light on how many -- or few -- people are frequenting a retailer, supermarket or fast-food joint," the report says. They're also scraping the web to create bespoke collections of public data. "Some examples include pricing trends on airline flights or hotels, inventory figures for products offered on coupon website Groupon, or sales posted for merchandise on Amazon.com," reports Bloomberg.

Additionally, social media sites and credit card data help shed some light on what consumers are thinking. Employment data is also very insightful. "If a tech giant suddenly starts seeking talent from the health-care industry, for example, that could suggest it has a new product or service in the works," reports Bloomberg. "A spike in the removal of job postings from a company's website could signal corporate distress."

Samsung said it has made the necessary improvements to fix the Galaxy Fold and put it back on sale. The April launch of the device was postponed after early reviewers reported broken screens; it's now scheduled to go on sale in September. From a report: "Samsung has taken the time to fully evaluate the product design, make necessary improvements and run rigorous tests," the company said in a statement. Improvements include extending a protective layer to make it clear it is not meant to be removed, as well as strengthening the hinge area with new protection caps. One explanation for the broken screens appears to have been that some reviewers removed a film which they thought was a typical protective layer that came with the phone when first bought.

RED's Hydrogen One phone had a rocky rollout to say the least, and founder Jim Jannard has offered a partial explanation while announcing the first details on the device's successor. From a report: In a post on the Hydrogen-focused H4Vuser.net website, Jannard blames the Hydrogen One's unnamed Chinese ODM (original design manufacturer) for having "significantly under-performed" and making it "impossible" to fix the issues with the phone. Now Jannard's attention is on the Hydrogen Two as well as a long-promised camera module that will work with both phones. The Hydrogen Two is being designed "virtually from scratch" in partnership with a new ODM that is "clearly more capable of building and supporting the product we (and our customers) demand," Jannard says.

Similar to last year's introduction of the iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max, and iPhone XR, Apple will release three new 'iPhone 11' models this fall, news outlet 9to5Mac reported on Tuesday. From the report: The new iPhones will feature the Apple A13 chip, internally known by its platform codename Cebu, model T8030. According to people who've seen the devices, all three iPhone 11 models will still feature a Lightning port, contrary to some speculation that they would be moving to USB-C after the change on iPad Pro last year. The 'iPhone 11' models are known as D42 (iPhone12,3) which will replace the iPhone XS; D43 (iPhone12,5) which will replace the iPhone XS Max; and N104 (iPhone12,1) which will replace the iPhone XR. D42 and D43 will have a 3x OLED Retina display, while N104 will still feature the 2x Liquid Retina display just like the current generation. All three iPhones will feature the same screen resolution as their predecessors.

Asus has unveiled a spec-heavy gaming phone called the ROG Phone II. When it launches later this year, it'll be one of the only phones to feature Qualcomm's new gaming-focused Snapdragon 855 Plus processor, a 120Hz AMOLED display, and massive 6,000mAh battery. PhoneDog reports: The ROG Phone II features a 6.59-inch 2340x1080 AMOLED display with a 120Hz refresh rate and it's the first phone to include Qualcomm's gaming-focused Snapdragon 855 Plus processor. Both the CPU and GPU in the SD855 Plus are clocked higher than in the standard SD855, helping you get better performance. ASUS has crammed 12GB of RAM inside the ROG Phone II's body, too. Another gaming-centric feature of the ROG Phone II are its AirTrigger buttons. Located on the side of the device, they give you extra buttons for your games and an improved software algorithm over the first ROG Phone that lets you rest your fingers on the AirTriggers, meaning you can react more quickly since you're not having to move your fingers to reach for the buttons.

Other notable features of the ROG Phone II include a 48MP main camera with Sony IMX586 sensor, a 13MP ultra wide rear camera with a 125-degree field of view, and a 24MP front camera. There's up to 512GB of built-in storage available, an in-display fingerprint reader, dual front-facing speakers, and a 3.5mm headphone jack. Powering the whole package is a whopping 6000mAh battery. There are two USB-C ports on the ROG Phone II, with one in a traditional place on the bottom of the device and the other on the side of the phone so that it doesn't get in your way when you're gaming and charging. Both ports support Quick Charge 3.0, but the side port can charge more quickly with QuickCharge 4.0 support. It also includes support for 4K video output using DisplayPort 1.4. We don't have an official price or release date yet, but it's likely to start shipping later this year at around $899, which was the cost of the original ROG Phone.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Apple is in advanced talks to buy Intel's smartphone-modem chip business (Warning: source paywalled; alternative source), "a move that would jump-start the iPhone maker's push to take control of developing the critical components powering its devices." From the report: A deal, covering a portfolio of patents and staff valued at $1 billion or more, could be reached in the next week, the people said -- assuming the talks don't fall apart. Though the purchase price is a rounding error for companies valued in the hundreds of billions of dollars, the transaction would be important strategically and financially. It would give Apple access to engineering work and talent behind Intel's yearslong push to develop modem chips for the crucial next generation of wireless technology known as 5G, potentially saving years of development work.

For Intel's part, a deal would allow the company to shed a business that had been weighing on its bottom line: The smartphone operation had been losing about $1 billion annually, a person familiar with its performance has said, and has generally failed to live up to expectations. Though it would exit the smartphone business, Intel plans to continue to work on 5G technology for other connected devices. Earlier this year, it was reported that Apple began discussing plans to acquire parts of Intel's smartphone modem chip business last summer, around the time former Intel Chief Executive Brian Krzanich resigned. "Mr. Krzanich championed the modem business and touted 5G technology as a big future revenue stream," reports The Wall Street Journal. "When Bob Swan was named to that job in January, analysts said the odds of a deal rose because his focus on cleaning up Intel would require addressing the losses in the modem business."

Chinese tech giant Huawei could have helped secretly build a 3G wireless network for North Korea, according to internal documents leaked by a former employee of the company. From a report: Huawei worked with another Chinese company, Panda International Information Technology, on a number of projects in the region over the course of eight years, as suggested by work orders, contracts and spreadsheets published by the Washington Post on Monday. The revelations come as the latest blow to Huawei's reputation in a series of events over the past year, a period in which the company has come under fire from the US government amid its trade war with China. In January, the US Justice Department unsealed indictments that included 23 counts pertaining to the alleged theft of intellectual property, obstruction of justice and fraud related to its alleged evasion of US sanctions against Iran. President Donald Trump has blacklisted the company as a security threat, and Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou is under house arrest in Canada awaiting extradition to the US.

Russian lawmakers want to make it a legal requirement for all smartphones, computers and smart TV sets sold in Russia to come pre-installed with certain Russian software in a bid to support domestic software producers, according to a draft bill. From a report: The bill, tabled at the lower house of parliament on Thursday, would allow authorities to draw up a list of mandatory, locally-made software. If passed, it would come into force in July 2020. Russia's cell-phone market is dominated by Apple, Samsung and Huawei products. Those who do not abide by the rule, the proposed law says, would have to pay a fine.

Back in 2015, Apple introduced pressure-sensitive iPhone screens alongside 3D Touch as a potentially major hardware-software innovation, but barely supported the feature, leading to informed speculation that all of 2019's iPhones would lose their pressure-sensing hardware. This week's release of the fourth iOS 13 and iPadOS 13 developer betas appears to put the final nail in 3D Touch's coffin, tightening up the responsiveness of its replacement: Context Menus. From a report: If you aren't already familiar with 3D Touch, the concept was simple: slight, medium, and heavy pressure on an iPhone's screen could be recognized differently, such that a light press would open an app while a firm press in the same spot would instead conjure up a contextual menu. Apple sometimes nested additional "peek and pop" features within iPhone apps using the same pressure sensitivity, giving users extra options if they pressed down more on the screen.

Over the last few beta releases of iOS 13 and iPadOS 13, Apple has been rolling out a replacement called Context Menus -- a change it set the stage for last year by releasing the iPhone XR without 3D Touch hardware. Back then, Apple said it was giving the XR an alternative called "Haptic Touch" that pulled up the same sort of contextual menus as earlier iPhones, but did so using two tricks: Instead of pressure, it sensed button press time, counting an extra split-second as a stronger button press, confirming the different intent with a "thump" from the phone's vibration feature. Now iPad users will get a version of Haptic Touch minus the haptics.

Zac Bowden from Windows Central makes the case for why Microsoft may want to make a Surface phone that runs Android. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from the report: While a Surface Phone running Android would never sell to the quantity that Samsung smartphones do (or at least not a first- or second-generation phone), Microsoft could utilize the Surface brand to showcase the best of Microsoft's Android efforts all in one place, just like it has done for Windows PCs. I'm picturing a Surface-branded, Microsoft-built smartphone that comes with Microsoft Launcher, Edge, Office, Your Phone phone-mirroring integration, and more, out of the box. In fact, that's one of four unique selling points that a Surface Phone running Android could have:

-- Showcase the best of Microsoft's efforts on Android.
-- Seamless integration with Windows PCs using Your Phone.
-- Provide the best security and update support on Android.
-- Brand recognition that can rival Apple and Samsung.

That last point is more for Microsoft fans, but the first three are important. A Surface Phone running Android would be the only smartphone out there that's always guaranteed to work with all of Your Phone's features. I have a wide array of Android smartphones, yet 90 percent of them don't support all of Your Phone's features on Windows 10. Screen mirroring is only available on select devices, and while that may improve, there's no guarantee your smartphone will ever get it, or if it'll work well. Microsoft could also provide enhanced features, such as the ability to take cellular phone calls on your PC directly from your Surface Phone. It could also build out dedicated Phone and SMS apps that sync up with the Messages app on your PC, instead of having to relay it through the Your Phone app. There's so much more potential when you build your own Android phone.