China

If Overwatch players are familiar with anything, it's the game's loot boxes — rewards for rank-ups and various numbers of match wins — and their tendency to almost never give the most desired cosmetic items. Players have often complained about the poor drop rates for Epic and Legendary items, which include things like costumes, voice lines, and emotes. Now, thanks to new regulations in China, Blizzard has disclosed the exact odds of players receiving different types of loot box items.

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This week the folks at OnePlus have confirmed that the OnePlus 5 will be released this summer and that it will, indeed, be called the OnePlus 5. A post to Twitter this morning by the official OnePlus Twitter account added some credence to previous rumors of the name for the phone with two words: "True Story". In doing so, they've not only suggested that the phone was named after a basketball player, but that some other rumors are true.

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Bluboo, a company based in Hong Kong, has taken the wraps off a new Android smartphone that features dual rear cameras, a fingerprint sensor, and a price tag that tops out at $80. That likely makes this the cheapest smartphone available at the moment with such features, giving budget shoppers an opportunity to get in on the dual-camera game. Depending on how many units are ordered, the Bluboo D1's price goes as low as $9.99 each.

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A Chinese cargo spacecraft successfully docked with the country's Tiangong-2 space lab on Saturday, marking a significant achievement for the nation's space agency. The Tianzhou-1 cargo ship was launched on April 20th from the Wenchang Satellite Launch Center in Southern China, and is the first such supply delivery mission to the space station. Once the spacecraft arrived, it connected to the station via automated docking process.

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Xiaomi has officially launched the Mi 6, a sleek Android smartphone with a bunch of high-end features, including USB-C, a ceramic back (with the Exclusive Edition), 3D curved glass, optical image stabilization, dual rear cameras, and more. This follows several leaks surrounding the handset, which Xiaomi says achieved a 184,292 AnTuTu benchmark score. Storage capacity goes up to a huge 128GB.

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Apple has finally caught a break in its rather tumultuous relationship with the Chinese market. The Cupertino-based company has long been trying to woo one of the world's largest smartphone markets with mixed results. While iPhones are indeed popular in China, Apple has been experiencing rather strong opposition not just from rivals but also from government agencies and patent holding entities. At least Apple has gotten a slight reprieve now that the Beijing Intellectual Property Court has overturned a previous ruling that found Apple guilty of copying a design patent for the iPhone 6.

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The Huawei Mate 9 represents a real maturation of Huawei in a number of areas - most importantly in the company's dedication to a solid final product. What we've seen from Huawei in the past is a set of fairly good or really great components mixed with questionable execution. Here in the year 2017, Huawei has a smartphone that's ready to compete with the biggest brands in the United States, as well as the rest of the world.

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Ford has taken its super-truck, the 2017 F-150 Raptor, to China, cashing in on the growing appetite there for unusual Americana. Chinese buyers are getting a special version of the Raptor especially designed for the market, complete with a tweaked example of Ford's EcoBoost engine. Initially, only one body-style will be offered, however.

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This week we're having a peek at the Xiaomi Mi Note 2, a device released internationally at a key time in the company's history. Given the look and the feel of the device at hand, this is also a key time for the company to do battle against one of its biggest adversaries in the market: Samsung. With no new Galaxy Note on the market and the Galaxy S7 Edge nearing a year old, the Xiaomi Mi Note 2 looks - on the surface, at least - to be able to offer an alternative to Samsung defectors.

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This week the folks behind LINE chat app have given the app an update it's needed for quite a while. With this update, users are finally able to send photos and videos at the same time. Where before, separate windows were needed to send photos and video, now they'll be able to be selected all from the same screen. It'll feel unnatural for users are first, but after a few tries, it'll feel like it's always been this way.

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It's time to do a duel between two of Xiaomi's most popular "Note" devices - the Note 4 and the Note 3 - and toss in the new Xiaomi 4 Prime for good measure. This battle will be based on specifications, only - we'll have to get the whole collection in our hands at once before we're able to do any face-to-face comparisons. For now we'll go ahead and assume that more advanced processors mean bigger power and that all three devices are equally reliable.

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China, in order to meet its stated Five Year Plan coal capacity goal, has stopped the development of 85 coal power projects across 13 different provinces. The news was recently announced by China’s National Energy Board’s Electricity Division, which says the projects would have totaled more than 100 million kilowatts of power. The notice says these projects were “ceased or postponed,” making it unclear whether any will be resumed in the future.

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