Author: Mark Evans

A few days after the team at Beeper proudly announced a way for users to send blue-bubble iMessages directly from their Android devices without any weird relay servers, and about 24 hours after it became clear Apple had taken steps to shut that down, Apple has shared its take on the issue. The company’s stance here is fairly predictable: it says it’s simply trying to do right by users, and protect the privacy and security of their iMessages. “We took steps to protect our users by blocking techniques that exploit fake credentials in order to gain access to iMessage,” Apple…

The Xperia name has been around for a long time. If you’re a phone enthusiast, surely you remember the Sony Ericsson Xperia X1, the 2008 Windows Mobile-powered handset with the slideout QWERTY keyboard, the panel interface, and the 3-inch display with a resolution of 480 x 800. There was the Xperia PLAY which was released in 2011 designed for game players with a slide-out game pad. Sony eventually bought out Ericsson in 2012. Even after offering the first smartphone with a 4k resolution display in 2015 with the Sony Xperia Z5 Premium, the Xperia line just could not catch on in…

Tesla will release its 2023 Holiday Update next week with a few big changes, including one that lets Teslas call 911 automatically if the car’s airbags deploy in a crash. On Thursday, the company announced the update is coming next week, and it highlighted other coming features like Apple Podcasts support, rear-screen Bluetooth headset support, an updated version of the park assistance with 3D visuals, and new blind spot indicators.Apple Podcast support joins Apple Music, which Tesla added last year. Not a Tesla App reported yesterday that Tesla owners can sync podcasts with Apple devices. The site added other details…

A worrisome rumor about the Amazon app is making the rounds. The rumor is that Amazon has been hacked and the attackers added random Amazon lockers to users’ lists of saved addresses on the app. Scared Amazon subscribers said that these were not legitimate lockers and that orders sent to one of these fake lockers, located in places labeled as Amazon Locker, Amazon Hub Locker, Amazon Fresh, or Amazon Counter would end up stolen by the thieves responsible for posting the lockers listed in the app.While my personal Amazon account did not have any of these Amazon lockers listed, my…

The OnePlus 12 – it’s finally here! Well, not here at PhoneArena but over there (in China), but it’ll be here sooner or later… (allegedly January 24)The new OnePlus 12 is wearing sister company’s Oppo’s flagship armor both on the inside and outside, and the reason why this is important is because it means the “China-grade” flagship hardware that used to be exclusive to Chinese flagships is finally coming to the US, UK, and Europe (soon).There are two reasons why this is an important moment in smartphone history:After the 2019 US trade ban on Huawei, premium Chinese flagships in the…

Discovered by university researchers in Singapore, vulnerabilities have been found in 5G modems produced by Qualcomm and MediaTek leaving 714 5G phones open to what is being called a “5Ghoul attack.” There are 14 vulnerabilities in the affected systems and while 10 of them have been disclosed publicly, four remain undisclosed due to security reasons. The attacks can lead to mobile 5G service freezing or getting dropped on a smartphone temporarily. Phones under attack also could find a 5G signal getting downgraded to 4G.The 5Ghoul attack requires a phone get connected to a rougue 5G base stationPer BleepingComputer, the researchers…

We’ve found Apple’s latest generation of its base-model iPad to be a bit awkwardly priced from the start. At $449 it’s a little close to the much nicer iPad Air and simultaneously a lot pricier than its ninth-gen predecessor. But that all looks different when you knock a Benjamin off of it — because right now you can get the 10th-gen iPad with base 64GB of storage for $349 ($100 off) or expanded 256GB for $499 (also $100 off) at Best Buy until December 11th. This matches its Black Friday best pricing, making it a much better purchase. The 10.9-inch…

A few months ago, I downgraded my internet, going from a 900Mbps plan to a 200Mbps one. Now, I find that websites can sometimes take a painfully long time to load, that HD YouTube videos have to stop and buffer when I jump around in them, and that video calls can be annoyingly choppy.In other words, pretty much nothing has changed. I had those exact same problems even when I had near-gigabit download service, and I’m probably not alone. I’m sure many of you have also had the experience of cursing a slow-loading website and growing even more confused when…

UPDATE 12/9/23: Beeper has provided an update on both the Beeper Cloud and Beeper Mini apps. Beeper Cloud is partially working, but only for Apple ID logins and not using your phone number. Beeper Mini is still down and the company has had to deregister all the phone numbers from iMessage that were registered via their workaround. This had to be done so that messages from iPhone folks to Android would defer back to being sent via SMS instead of disappearing into the ether. The company does say there is a fix coming soon for both.Furthermore, the free trial period…

Voice messaging on WhatsApp is to become much more James Bond-ish very soon!The world’s most popular chit-chat app is introducing the option for users to send and receive self-destructing voice messages on its platform (via Engadget). There’s a great hunger for this type of “ephemeral data”, and if you don’t believe it, check this out: in December 2019, an analytics report announced Snapchat to be the fifth most downloaded mobile app of the decade. And you know what Snapchat was all about back then. Ahem, ahem.Voice messages that automatically delete after being played are joining the other “Top Confidential!” messaging…