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The OnePlus 2 now costs $349
If you need a high-end phone but have budget issues, OnePlus has permanently lowered the price of its OnePlus 2 smartphone from $389 to $349 (€345 and £249 in Europe and the UK). That makes it just $100 more than its entry-level OnePlus X phone, and could push it from "kinda expensive" to "okay, I can handle that" for a lot of folks. To prevent any bent noses, the company said it would refund the $40 difference to anyone who purchased the OnePlus 2 within the last 15 days. It'll also throw in a free StyleSwap cover for a limited time.
Vertu's posh smartphone is probably more powerful than yours
If you're going to shell out $9,900 or more on a smartphone, you're either nuts or you've really made it in life. Or both. Either way, Vertu's done its part by updating its flagship luxury smartphone line, the Signature Touch, with pretty much all the best specs available in the current market. As CEO Max Pogliani put it, this "is the most complete Vertu smartphone that we have ever produced." Most notably, this new titanium device runs on Android 5.1 and packs an octa-core Snapdragon 810 chipset with 4GB of RAM, along with 64GB of internal storage plus another 64GB on the included microSD card (expandable up to 2TB). Funny how at a time when mainstream players like Samsung, Xiaomi and OnePlus are staying away from microSD expansion, Vertu found no issues with this feature and has therefore chosen to side with spec-hungry folks like us this time.
Qualcomm will pay $975 million in anti-monopoly fines to China
It looks like Qualcomm has more troubles than just possibly losing Samsung as a customer: the firm is paying out nearly $975 million (over 6 billion Chinese yuan) in fines to the Chinese National Development and Reform Commission as a result of the NRDC's anti-monopoly investigation. Furthermore, Qualcomm has agreed to not contest China's legal decisions and has to give current OEM customers the chance to renegotiate their contracts in light of new, mandated price adjustments. Oh, as well as a few more concessions...
Xiaomi mocks Apple with its very own premium phablet
There's just no stopping for the world's most valuable startup. After adding an air purifier, an IP camera, a smart light bulb and the affordable Redmi 2 to its portfolio, Xiaomi is now going right after the iPhone 6 Plus with its very own high-end phablet, the 5.7-inch Mi Note. While kicking off today's keynote, CEO Lei Jun emphasized that his 6.95mm-thick, 161g-heavy phone is ever so slightly slimmer and lighter than Apple's offering. But even without the cheeky comparison, the dual-SIM Mi Note is already impressive enough, given that it's mostly wrapped in Gorilla Glass 3 on both the front ("2.5D" curved) and back ("3D" curved), with an aluminum alloy frame exposed in the middle. Most interestingly, though, is that this CN¥2,299 (about $370) off-contract base price is a tad higher than Xiaomi's usual sub-CN¥2,000 tease, but it'll unlikely deter Xiaomi fans in China.
Qualcomm's 2015 chips may make you regret getting a new phone this year
Thanks to Moore's Law, anybody can predict that even the most powerful smartphones and tablets coming out right now (the HTC One M8 and Samsung Galaxy S5, for instance) will be made obsolete by whatever flagships get announced in 2015. These predictions fortunately don't have to be based off of speculation anymore, since Qualcomm just revealed the Snapdragon 810 and 808, a pair of 64-bit high-performance chipsets slated to show up in flagship Android devices early next year.
