Phone Hacks | Android | iOS | Tech News

LG Pay Might Launch in the US in June as “LG Wallet” The mobile payments market is about to get more crowded: LG plans on bringing LG Pay , its payments platform, to the US sometime in June, according to Yonhap News . It’ll go head-to-head with solutions from Google, Samsung, and Apple, which have a substantial head start — Apple Pay is already available in 25 countries and regions, and Android Pay works in 17 countries. LG Pay launched in South Korea in June 2017. It uses LG’s proprietary Magnetic Communication technology, which is similar to Samsung’s Magnetic Secure Transmission Technology, and allows phones that support it to transact with card readers that don’t have NFC radios. LG is reportedly planning to launch its mobile payment service under the name “LG Wallet” in the US, and the initial rollout will be limited to high-end devices such as the rumored G7 . It’ll eventually trickle down to mid-range devices. Source: ...

Google Flights and Google Trips Gain Price Tracking, Deal Alerts Just ahead of the holiday season, Google’s rolling out updates to Google Flights and Google Trips that’ll make nabbing last-minute deals on airline tickets, hotel rooms, and local goings-on easier. Starting Thursday, Google Flights, Google’s Search -powered airfare search tool, will start to analyze historical pricing data in order to predict when fares might rise or fall. Using some of the same machine learning techniques employed by Kayak, Hipmunk, Hopper, and other price-predicting travel planners, Flights will notify you when airline prices reach certain predefined thresholds. You’ll see a tip at the top of your Google Flights results if prices to a destination “won’t drop further”, for example, or “are less than normal”. Source: Google The artificial intelligence-powered predictions are heading to Google’s hotel-searching tools, too. When you’re search...

T-Mobile Will Launch its Own TV Service in 2018 AT&T has DirecTV. Verizon has Go90. And starting next year, T-Mobile will begin offering an over-the-air, direct-to-consumer premium video service of its own. In an announcement published to YouTube on Monday, T-Mobile CEO John Legere said that the carrier had finalized the acquisition of TV tech company Layer3 TV, and that it’d begin to secure the necessary content deals, contracts, and services for a competitive TV service launch in 2018. It’ll be one without “long-term contracts” or “complex bundles and billing,” Legere said, and one that’s priced disruptively. “We’re going to build TV for people who love TV — TV you’ll be able to watch on every connected device you have wherever you are,” Mr. Legere said. “[We’re] about to ‘un-carrier’ your TV. [We want] to take the fight to big cable and satellite TV on behalf of consumers everywhere....

Android Oreo Beta Program Launched for the International Huawei P10 and P10 Plus By now, quite a few smartphone vendors have launched beta programs for the Android Oreo update for their smartphones. The growing list of vendors include  Samsung , Essential , HMD Global , OnePlus , Xiaomi , LG , and Huawei. Up until now, we have seen Huawei launch the Android 8.0 Oreo beta program for the Mate 9 , Honor 9, and Honor V9 . The company has rolled-out the stable Android Oreo update to the Mate 9 as well as the Huawei P10 and P10 Plus in China, but the international variants of these devices haven’t received the stable updates so far. Now, the international Huawei P10 and P10 Plus are being added to the list of devices which have an Android Oreo beta program. Huawei Mobile Romania has announced that the beta program for both devices (that were launched in February 2017) is now live, and the company is looking for beta testers for the Android Oreo update. The beta program targets the ...

Report: HTC Plans to Limit the Number of New Smartphones in 2018 Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, you probably know that HTC’s smartphone business hasn’t been doing all that well lately. Quarter after quarter, the company’s put out earnings reports  that show it’s losing millions of dollars  as a result of poor sales and high overhead. HTC tried to alleviate the issues by selling off some of its handset division to Google, and a new report in DigitTimes  states it’s planning to limit the number of new smartphones it ships this year. The report, citing “industry sources”, claims that HTC will focus on researching, developing, and marketing a limited number of devices in 2018. The cutback’s intended to help reduce the amount of overhead, but also to free up resources for its mid-range and high-end device lineups. According to DigiTimes , the original equipment manufacturer (OEM) will ship at least two smartphones in the coming...

HTC One X10 (Dual SIM) gets Official TWRP Support HTC released the One X10 in July of this year, and since then many enthusiasts have been hoping to receive an official build of TWRP for the device. There had been an unofficial port available for months, but it wasn’t until last week that an official build was released. The unofficial port was version 3.1.1 of TWRP, but this official release brings it up to version 3.2 .1 and simply needs to be flashed via the fastboot flash recovery command. If you already have this unofficial version of TWRP installed, then you can simply update it from within this older version. You’ll find the download page for this TWRP build here while the source code has been made public here . Check out this release of TWRP in our HTC One X10 forum tags : android auto, android wear, android device manager, android 1, android phone, android messages, android studio, android tablet, android emulator, android tv, android p, android 17, android tv bo...