While Xiaomi has the lion's share of the Chinese market and fellow Chinese OEM OnePlus making waves in the international scene, OPPO remains undoubted and produces a steady stream of smartphones every year. A stream that, in all honesty, has accumulated into a rushing river that threatens to flood the smartphone market with nearly indistinguishable devices. Save for a few standouts, like the recently launched F3 and F3 Plus, OPPO's smartphone nearly look identical not just with each other but with other brands as well. With the OPPO R11, however, the company seems to be ready to break out of that mold. While still not exactly premium smartphone material, the OPPO R11 takes a step forward in joining the big leagues.

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While still waiting whether Minecraft will ever officially be on an augmented reality platform, Microsoft HoloLens or otherwise, console players can bid their time with some new features designed specifically for their largely unmovable (save for the Switch) boxes. From new skins to new UIs, the Mojang uses the update to reassure certain Console Edition owners that they won't be abandoned when being Better Together isn't exactly better for them.

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Last April, Google's machine learning crew revealed AutoDraw, a fun little demo of all that neural network theory. In a nutshell, the web app tries to guess what your scribble looks like and identify it. Now Google's researchers are taking that idea one step further. Called Sketch-RNN, this "recurrent neural network" model does for doodles and drawing that autocomplete does for words and sentences, trying to predict how to best complete your indistinguishable scribble.

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Believe it or not, there are still Yahoo Mail users, much to the amusement as well as consternation of many Internet users. Never mind the perception of being uncool, Yahoo has repeatedly proven itself rather inept at safeguarding its own users. In typical Yahoo fashion of turning a blind eye to issues, the soon to be acquired company has proudly announced a revamp of its webmail interface. And, despite a potential upheaval of its business, it is also proudly announcing a new Pro subscription for those willing to pay for the privilege of having an @yahoo email address.

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Although it doesn't exactly represent majority of the cases, supporting a project on Kickstarter or Indiegogo always involves a chance of never getting what you invested in. Sometimes it's due to a scam, sometimes it is due to unfortunate circumstances. And sometimes it's a little bit of both. It's still too early to say where on that range the SMACH Z lies, but its silence was broken by rather terrible news. The project just lost a partner of a critical component, further delaying a product that was to supposed to ship last April. If it ever ships at all.

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Although fingerprint scanners hiding underneath glass displays is quite the hot topic in smartphones these days, the dream isn't actually new. It has been around a few years back and some even had nearly working solutions. One of those is Qualcomm and it is now reminding everyone of that. At MWC Shanghai, the mobile chip maker will be showing off its latest ultrasonic fingerprint scanner running underneath the display of an actual commercial smartphone. And, in a way, it will be showing Samsung what it might be missing out on.

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In an increasingly competitive world of connected security cameras, Nest has turned to Alphabet-sibling Google and its facial recognition tech to make the Nest Cam IQ stand out. Not just the latest in the company's sophisticated home security camera line-up, the Nest Cam IQ represents a complete platform upgrade, with an all-new sensor, lossless zooming support, and the ability to recognize and track faces. On the downside, it also commands the highest price of a Nest camera so far, so does it deliver for $299?

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Although it's not as insanely innumerable and unnameable as in ages past, Samsung still has quite a variety of smartphones in the worldwide market today. Each of the S, A, J, and C series has at least 3 models per year, and one or two other variants. That's not counting the lone Galaxy Note every year either. With that many models in the past year and current, the question of which ones will get which major Android update is always a guessing game. Fortunately, SamMobile has done a bit of research, scrying, and wishing to bring this compilation of which ones will get the "Big O", a.k.a. Android 8.0, in Samsung' vast Galaxy.

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Smartphone makers have been trying to make it easier for users to secure their smartphones without having to remember strong passwords and PINs. But aside from the fingerprint, which itself isn't infallible, very few technologies have offered both security and convenience in a single package. Even Samsung concedes it won't use its own iris scanning as the only authentication for Samsung Pay, for example. Sony, however, might have something better in mind, one that involves not only your eyes or even your face but your entire head as well.

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Amazon has announced the addition of five new unlocked Android smartphones to its Prime Exclusive Phones lineup for the company's Prime customers. These phones all run Android, and counted among them is the newly unveiled Nokia 6 model. Why buy one of these handsets? They're steeply discounted versus what you'd pay elsewhere.

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Do you have master fidget spinner skills but no solid way to prove it? A soon-to-launch fidget spinner with built-in Bluetooth has the solution, using the wireless technology to connect the spinner to a smartphone running a companion app. Things like speed, combos, and more are tracked in the app, which then allows the user to share their results, brag about their score, and see how fast they were spinning.

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There are two primary reasons you may need to order someone else an Uber ride: they don't have a smartphone or they're too incapacitated (read: drunk) to do it themselves. In that case, you can use your own phone to order them a ride, but it's a hassle and not one that many people enjoy. Here to fix that is Uber itself, which has rolled out a feature greatly enhancing the ordering-a-friend-a-car experience.

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