Author: batteryforpc

Rumors keep piling up that we’re going to be seeing the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 sometime soon, but we’ve just seen reports that AIB – add-in board – partners may be clearing out their stock to prepare for an Nvidia Ampere launch. 

This was reported in a now-deleted post in China Times, graciously picked up by the folks over at Wccftech. In it, the outlet reports that Taiwanese manufacturers, led by Asus, have started slashing the cost of Turing graphics cards. For instance, Asus’ GeForce RTX 2060 has apparently been cut down to NT$10,000 (about $330, £270, AU$510). 

Right now the word is that Nvidia Ampere graphics cards are going to start launching in Q3 2020. This timing makes sense, as aftermarket graphics card manufacturers would want to clear out stock to make room for the new hotness. 

The China Times report also suggests that the launch of Nvidia Ampere may follow in the footsteps of the 2018 Turing launch, where the initial lineup would only comprise of the RTX 3080 Ti, RTX 3080 and RTX 3070, with the 3060 and below presumably following in the months afterwards – the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 didn’t launch until January 2019, after all. 

Still, it’s important to note that this is all practically graphics card gossip at this point and should all be taken with a grain of salt. We won’t know what Nvidia’s next-generation graphics cards will look like until Team Green is ready to share. Then again, Nvidia apparently has something cooking for a May 14 event, so we might even end up seeing Ampere early.

According to a new leak from WinFuture, Huawei is set to refresh its P Smart handset. The device itself isn’t particularly exciting, sitting quietly in the lower end of the mid-tier. What’s interesting is that according to the report, Huawei is actually going to load it up with Google apps.

To be clear, American companies still aren’t allowed to do business with the Shenzhen firm. This is because about a year ago, it was added to the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Entity List, thanks to U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade war with China. Since then, the company has launched a number of devices from its Huawei and Honor brands, all without Google services on them.

What makes the P Smart different, according to WinFuture, is that it’s an old device in a new chassis. It has the same octa-core HiSilicon Kirin 710F (four 2.2GHz Cortex-A73 cores and four 1.7GHz Cortex-A53 cores) as its predecessor, and it also has the same 13MP f/2 main camera. It maintains the 2MP depth camera as well, along with the 3,400mAh battery.

What’s different is that it comes with a 6.21-inch 2340×1080 LCD, 4GB RAM instead of 3GB, and 128GB of storage instead of 64GB. The version of Android will still be 9.0 Pie, and it will be running EMUI 9.1. It’s expected to arrive for between €200 and €220.

The new second-gen iPhone SE is the cheapest iPhone you can buy, which means you have to make a few sacrifices, particularly when it comes to the cameras.

But what do you give up by spending £420 instead of £1,050 for a base-model iPhone 11 Pro? Well, you only get one 12-megapixel rear lens instead of three, and a single 7-megapixel selfie lens instead of a 12-megapixel depth-sensing camera. That means no Face ID, but some people prefer unlocking their phones with the fingerprint sensor. (Now that I have to wear a mask in public, I’m one of them.)

The SE’s camera lenses are reportedly lifted straight from the 3-year-old iPhone 8, according to an iFixIt teardown of the new phone. But the SE also has the iPhone 11 Pro’s A13 Bionic processor, which works some behind-the-scenes camera magic.

I didn’t expect to be wowed when comparing the iPhone SE’s photos to the £1,150 iPhone 11 Pro Max (the only new iPhone I had on hand in these locked down times). But the SE holds its own, particularly when it comes to shooting in Portrait Mode.

Check out the video above to see how the SE stacks up to the 11 Pro Max and to see what you miss out on to save £630.