News written by Matti Robinson (July, 2018)

Samsung has today released their second quarter results, and the fallout is fairly pessimistic for their smartphone division. The Korean electronics giant's Galaxy phones kept them at the top of the sales figures for years, but this year's flagship's sales figures might spell an unforeseen dive.

While the overall results of Samsung Electronics were good as expected, racking a 58.48 trillion won or around $53 billion in revenue, albeit being slightly less than in Q1 or last years Q2, and increasing the operating profit by 6% to around $13 billion, the top-of-the-line Galaxy smartphone has been suffering from disappointing sales numbers.

Samsung acknowledges that the sales of Galaxy S9 have been slow, and the iterative upgrade has obviously not been exciting enough. Apple and especially competing Android manufacturers are having a field day, but we'll see if that changes once Samsung releases the upcoming Galaxy Note9 smartphone expected in early August.

Fortunately for Samsung the smartphone slump has been filled by extraordinarily good memory sales. Both DRAM and NAND memory chips have been chipping in in record numbers.

WhatsApp has updated their mobile messaging platform with a major new feature. Facebook-owned, world's largest, instant messaging app first unveiled group calling in May, now it's finally available.

Group calls were introduced at Facebook's F8 conference in May and now the company has managed to finish the feature and released it in their mobile app. Both iOS and Android versions of WhatsApp got the feature.

Group calls offer both video and audio only calls between multiple people. There are limitations, though, and most importantly the group calls are limited to four concurrent connections.

Other platforms offer even up to 32 people chatting all at once. However, four people calls is a good start for WhatsApp, and it wouldn't be a complete surprise if the company will expand the support.

What is nice about the WhatsApp calls is that they are entirely end-to-end encrypted, a feature that has made WhatsApp's text messaging a huge success.

To make a group call you'll just make a regular call between two people and add the other recipients from the button on the top right.

This year's Google phone is soon just around the corner and we've been hearing a lot about the phones. Rumors have suggested that we get once again two phones in two distinct sizes.

Now we have also a new leak which offers a fresh look at the devices. A user of XDA Developers has released a few photos that are said to be depicting the upcoming Google Pixel 3 XL, the larger of the two phones.

While the backside hasn't changed an awful lot, although there is no dual tone colors, it is definitely clear from the display, and perhaps even more importantly the parts that lack a display (*ahem* notch *ahem*), that this is indeed not Pixel 2 XL.

The phone is an all white version that has a single camera in the back, as expected, and the front panel is dominated by a large display with a distinct notch. Google has not, however, gone as far as Apple and removed the tiny chin.

The notch seems to be even larger than on Apple's device or many competing Android phones, and it is likely because of the dual cameras that can be seen in one of the pictures below.

OnePlus, a Chinese smartphone company that became known by their Flagship Killer branding used in their early models, has now shared some amazing news to their users. The company has been among the best when it comes to updating their phones to new Android versions, and seemingly the company only is getting better at it.

Android's newest versio, dubbed Android P, is coming to not only the latest OnePlus models, namely the OnePlus 6, but even last years models (both OnePlus 5 and 5T) as well as two year. Those phones are of course the OnePlus 3 released in the summer of 2018 and OnePlus 3T released later that year.

Google is planning the final release of Android P later this fall alongside new Pixel smartphones. Currently the beta version is available for a few Android phones, one of which happens to be OnePlus 6.

The company has previously informed that it will support future devices at least two years regarding Android version updates after the phones release, but seems like it has been more generous to users of past devices, which is admirable. OnePlus also includes a third year of support in which it promises Android security updates.

Reliable and quick updates is one of the better ways smaller manufacturers can challenge big boys like Samsung, especially since most Android manufacturers have been utterly disappointing when it comes to software updates, and new versions of Android. Currently OnePlus stands as one of the better manufacturers in this respect alongside HMD Global, a Finnish company that creates the new Nokia Android phones.