News

BlackBerry Has Officially Pulled The Plug On Older Devices

The company is pulling the plug because it has been focusing exclusively on delivering enterprise software and services to enterprises and governments.

Published

2 weeks ago

January 5, 2022

David

blackberry has officially pulled the plug on older devices

Long gone are the days when BlackBerry smartphones dominated the world of business with their characteristic QWERTY keyboards that made it possible for managers to bombard employees with text messages and emails at a much faster rate than phones with the old-school keypad allowed.

Now, older BlackBerry devices have turned from unused to unusable because the legacy services for BlackBerry 7.1 OS and earlier, BlackBerry 10 software, BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.1 and earlier versions are no longer available from January 4, 2022.

“As of this date, devices running these legacy services and software through either carrier or Wi-Fi connections will no longer reliably function, including for data, phone calls, SMS, and 9-1-1 functionality” stated the company in their announcement.

The company is pulling the plug because it has been focusing exclusively on delivering enterprise software and services to enterprises and governments since it discontinued its BlackBerry line in 2016 and changed its name from Research In Motion (RIM) to BlackBerry Limited.

The last mobile phone operating system released by RIM is BlackBerry 10, which became available in 2013 and reached its last version (10.3.3.3216) on April 4, 2018. Since then, Chinese electronics giant TCL released several BlackBerry-branded phones, but their reception was lukewarm at best.

Also Read: How To Enable WhatsApp Disappearing Messages For All Chats

In August 2020, the BlackBerry brand changed hands again when it was picked up by OnwardMobility, a US-based company in the mobile security space. The company announced a new BlackBerry 5G smartphone with a physical keyboard, but it has already missed the advertised release date of 2021 by a few days, and there’s no indication that the smartphone will hit the shelves any time soon.

Indeed, it’s possible that OnwardMobility has realized that the demand for a smartphone with a physical keyboard simply isn’t there anymore because most consumers have gotten used to typing on increasingly intelligent virtual keyboards on their 6-inch and larger smartphone displays.

News

Samsung’s New Exynos 2200 Smartphone Chip Comes With AMD Xclipse GPU

The new GPU will enable next-level mobile gaming experiences, support 200 MP camera sensors, and ensure smooth performance under all circumstances.

Published

1 day ago

January 21, 2022

David

samsung's new exynos 2200 smartphone chip comes with amd xclipse gpu

Samsung’s Exynos smartphone series of ARM-based system-on-chips (SoCs) traditionally comes with Mali GPUs, but the company’s new premium SoC is breaking this tradition by featuring an Xclipse GPU with AMD’s RDNA 2 graphics architecture.

The new GPU, together with 8 Armv9 CPU cores (1 powerful Cortex-X2 core, 3 balanced Cortex-A710 cores, and 4 efficient Cortex-A510 cores) and an upgraded neural processing unit (NPU), are supposed to enable next-level mobile gaming experiences, support camera sensors with a resolution of up to 200 MP, and generally ensure smooth performance under all circumstances.

“Built on the most advanced 4-nanometer (nm) EUV (extreme ultraviolet lithography) process, and combined with cutting-edge mobile, GPU and NPU technology, Samsung has crafted the Exynos 2200 to provide the finest experience for smartphone users” said Yongin Park, President of System LSI Business at Samsung Electronics.

Samsung named its new GPU “Xclipse” to reflect the fact that it’s positioned between console and traditional mobile graphic processors. The South Korean conglomerate believes that the GPU will bring an end to the old era of mobile gaming and usher in a new era characterized by features that have until now been associated primarily with PC gaming, such as hardware-accelerated ray tracing and variable rate shading.

Also Read: BlackBerry Has Officially Pulled The Plug On Older Devices

According to David Wang, Senior Vice President of Radeon Technologies Group at AMD, the Xclipse GPU is the first result of multiple planned generations of AMD RDNA graphics in Exynos SoCs, so fans of Samsung smartphones have a lot to look forward to in the future.

In addition to the already mentioned performance-oriented improvements, the Exynos 2200 integrates a better 5G modem capable of achieving speeds of up to 10 Gbps by utilizing both 4G LTE and 5G NR signals at the same time. The SoC’s Integrated Secure Element (iSE) can safely store cryptographic information for enhanced data security and privacy.

The Exynos 2200 is currently being mass-produced, and it’s expected that it will be one of the main selling points of the upcoming Galaxy S22 smartphone.