The brand keeping BlackBerry phones alive across most of the globe, TCL Communications, plans to stop selling BlackBerry phones later this year. In a tweet this morning, TCL announced that it “will no longer be selling” BlackBerry-branded phones as of August 31st, 2020, because it will no longer have the rights to design and manufacture them. Existing devices will continue to be supported.
BlackBerry decided in 2016 to stop making its own phones, after years of failures, and to license its brand out instead. The biggest licensing deal was with TCL, which since December 2016 has had the near-global rights to design and sell BlackBerry-branded phones. It’s done a decent job of it, pairing classically BlackBerry-style designs with the functions of modern Android phones. None of the devices have been blockbuster hits, though, and recent devices have receivedpoor reviews.
Without TCL making new phones, it’s possible the BlackBerry brand will disappear for a moment. BlackBerry does have other phone manufacturing partners, but their relationships are much more limited. BB Merah Putih launched a single phone in Indonesia in 2017, and Optiemus Infracom made some phones for India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Bangladesh. TCL had the rights for all other regions.
We’ve reached out to BlackBerry for comment. There’s no word yet on whether BlackBerry will look for another manufacturing partner or begin to make its own phones again.
The bigger move here may be from TCL. The company has slowly built out its name over the past several years making phones under several different brand names, including BlackBerry, Alcatel, and Palm. This year, the company intends to start selling phones under its own name. Leaving BlackBerry behind may just give the company more time to focus on devices of its own.
Despite updates to Samsung's roadmap indicating that Android 10 for the Galaxy S9 and S9+ might be further out than expected, the company has just started pushing the latest Android build to first phones from 2018's lineup. In contrast to the Galaxy S10's extremely slow rollout, the update is already live in the US and a few countries in Europe.
So far, Reddit users say they've received the update in Germany, Lithuania, Spain, and the US (on Xfinity), but since reports are only starting to trickle in, we might soon see Android 10 in many more locations and across more carriers.
The company wants to deploy the new software until at least April, so depending on your phone's variant, you might be in for a longer wait. Head to the Software update entry in your phone's settings to check for the over-the-air update. If you're particularly impatient, you can also download and flash the update yourself from SamMobile's firmware archive, but you'll lose all your data in the process and might possibly end up with a brick for a phone — proceed with caution and only if you absolutely know what you're doing.
We can currently confirm the rollout for the following carriers and countries:
US
Unlocked
US Cellular
Brazil
Canada
India
Italy
Netherlands
Romania
Russia
Switzerland
UK
US Cellular and more countries
Samsung continues rolling out Android 10 and first people in India, Italy,the Netherlands, Romania, Switzerland and the UK report that they've received the update. In the United States, US Cellular also provides first subscribers with the update.
People in Azerbaijan and the United Arabic Emirates have received the January patch sans Android 10, which could possibly mean that they'll have to wait a little longer for the new OS.
Unlocked US phones and more countries
A tipster confirmed to us that the update is arriving on first unlocked US phones. People based in Brazil, Canada (Rogers), and Russia can also look forward to Android 10 as the rollout has begun in these countries, too.
A new subscription service from Google Photos will print and mail you a selection of your photos each month, 9to5Google reports. The service’s $7.99 monthly fee gets you 10 automatically-selected 4 x 6-inch prints, which are picked from the photos you’ve taken over the last 30 days. Google is currently trialing the service in the US, and you can sign up from a promotional banner that’s appearing for some Google Photos users.
Google has been offering physical photo prints for a little while now, but the interesting thing here is that its algorithms will pick which of your photos get printed, rather than relying on you placing individual orders. 9to5Google reports that you have the option of prioritizing photos with “people and pets,” “landscapes,” or “a little bit of everything.” You also have the option of editing your selection before they’re printed each month.
This curation comes at a cost. At this price the photos work out at $0.79 per print, which is more than double the starting price of $0.25 Google charges for photos printed using its Walmart or CVS partnerships. However, the subscription service is definitely less effort than picking individual photos to print yourself.
Physical photos are one of those things that it’s easy to miss out on entirely if you take most of your photos on a smartphone or digital camera and forget to ever get them printed. Personally, the struggle for me is remembering to take photos in the first place, but knowing that I’m going to get charged at the end of each month could be exactly the kind of incentive I need to get snapping.
That's actually not the most surprising part of the story, although compared to some of Samsung's Android Pie deliveries last year, the turnaround is definitely pretty impressive. What never happens, however, and is in fact happening here is a major OS promotion making its way over-the-air to a US unlocked Galaxy flagship before carriers can take care of the same device.
Technically, the Galaxy Note 9 has scored Android 10 goodies with One UI 2.0 tweaks on top on a few US carriers already, but we're not talking about any of the nation's "big four" industry players. Instead, US Cellular, Xfinity Mobile, Spectrum Mobile, and Comcast apparently managed to beat Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile to the punch, and now the same can be said about unlocked models purchased directly from Samsung, as well as authorized retailers like Best Buy, Amazon, and B&H Photo Video.
Let's just hope this change of pace for the Galaxy Note 9 doesn't mean mobile network operators have bumped into any serious glitches while "optimizing" their Android 10 updates. The Galaxy S9 and S9+ are also yet to make the jump as far as both US unlocked and major carrier-locked models are concerned, but if everything goes according to Samsung's latest plans, all that should change very soon.
Warcraft 3: Reforged is an unmitigated disaster. A bug ridden, incomplete cash grab that not only fails to deliver on its original promise, but scorches its own legacy like a burning legion invasion. The final nail in a gold-plated coffin for a morally bankrupt, creatively anemic company.
As far as I can tell, Warcraft 3: Reforged is fine.
The original cinematics have been scaled badly, and look choppy and low-res as a result. The new in-engine cutscenes are generally an improvement – sometimes excellent – but the lip syncing is way off. Sometimes, the animations are off too, like when I watched Arthas kill Mal’Ganis by stabbing Frostmourne through his left bollock.
The UI changes shown off in the original trailers have been abandoned, replaced by some minor changes to size and visual clarity. Some in-engine cutscenes use the dynamic camera angles shown off at Blizzcon 2018, but many don’t. The model redesigns are excellent, and each new one brings me untold joy, but taken as a whole, the game is missing the post-processing that ties it all together into a cohesive aesthetic. Blizzard did stealth-announce these changes, but failed to pull the original video from the store page. For that, they’re absolutely at fault.
Competitive ladders have been removed from multiplayer. Custom campaigns are not currently accessible. Even players that haven’t purchased Reforged have been forced to download a huge update, and now have to face some of the same server problems.
These are all notable issues, some more serious than others. I don’t mean to downplay the community’s complaints.
Subscribe to the VG247 newsletterGet all the best bits of VG247 delivered to your inbox every Friday!
But I’m still having a blast.
In my review-in-progress, I hoped that after I’d spent more time with Reforged, I’d be able to separate my own nostalgia and history from what I was experiencing.
As It turns out, I can’t. So I’m not even going to try. I can’t tell you what returning to this version of Azeroth should mean to you. Here’s what it means to me.
On the right side of my chest, I have the words “I’ll make it to the moon if I have to crawl” tattooed in simple, black script. I got it just at the tail end of my first year at uni.
I dropped out of school at fifteen years old, didn’t finish my exams. I had no qualifications. No real ambitions aside from playing bass and getting stoned every day. By the time I turned 21, I’d completed community college, and due to the bursaries and loans from being from a low income family, I’d been able to start a three year creative writing course at university. I came close to dropping out several times from depression, but eventually got through the first year.
If I managed that, I decided, I could manage anything.
I’ll make it to the moon if I have to crawl. My first tat, and still the only one I have.
You might recognise the line. It’s from the song Scar Tissue by the Red Hot Chilli Peppers. It’s still one of my favourite lines. But I also felt comfortable getting it inked because I figured – and still do – that if I ever fell out of love with the band’s music, it was good enough poetry to stand on its own terms.
I really loved the band then, and had for a while. I bring this all up because I want to emphasise what a difficult choice it was when, the week Warcraft 3 released back in 2002, my mum – who had just separated from my dad, and was making up for lost time – decided she wanted to take me and my two brothers and sister to see RHCP live. If any of us didn’t want to go, we could have the money instead.
50 quid. Exactly how much Warcraft 3 cost. I could go see a band I loved with my family, or I could have the house – and the PC – to myself for a few days.
It was a great few days.
I’m not sure I’d have ever started writing if it wasn’t for Warcraft 2. At least, I wouldn’t have had my imagination captured by epic fantasy in the same way. Watching old footage back, it seems like a stretch to square up those two concepts. There’s not much epic, in hindsight, about Warcraft 2’s tiny skirmishes. It didn’t feel like that then, though. It felt huge, exciting. Six years before The Fellowship of the Ring awed me in the cinema, commanding these bands of green skinned warriors was the closest thing to watching a full scale battle between elves, humans, dwarves, orcs, and trolls I’d ever seen. I figured Warcraft had invented orcs for quite a while.
Warcraft 2 was even more special because I’d watched my dad playing it first. There was something sophisticated and adult about the concept of a strategy game. Drawing green boxes around bands of units, upgrading weapons and armour, building settlements.
When my Dad, Roy, passed, he had the same long silver hair he’d had for most of his life. He’d let his beard, usually trimmed short, grow out to wizardly proportions. When I spoke to the coroner over the phone to confirm some details, he said to me:
“He looked awesome, your dad. Looked like Gandalf the Grey.”
I tend towards gallows humour on a good day. In times of tragedy, it’s instinctual.
“I don’t think he’ll be back as Roy the White somehow” I responded.
He didn’t know what to say to that.
Thing is, growing up, my dad was Gandalf. A long haired, intimidating, but tender guardian that introduced me and my siblings to mythical creatures and magical worlds. Warhammer. Godzilla films. Comic books. Action figures. And PC games. Like Warcraft.
When I was very young, maybe nine or ten, the record and electronics shop my dad owned was broken into, and the thieves stole dozens of Sega Megadrive games. After that, he only left empty cases in the shop, and brought a huge bag full of PlayStation 1 – and later Dreamcast – discs home with him every day. We weren’t rich, or even wealthy. Everything was second hand, and my dad did swaps for a couple of pounds far more often than he sold anything. But if my dad had it at the end of the day, I could play it.
I think Warcraft 3 was the first game I ever bought from somewhere that wasn’t my dad’s shop, and probably the first game I ever bought new, too. I didn’t love games then any less than I do now, but aside from copies of Suikoden II and Abe’s Exodus I begged for various birthdays, I was usually content to just play whatever my dad had installed, or in-stock.
Not Warcraft 3. Needed to have it. I needed to return to Azeroth, and finish the story. What I found was something far more ambitious and thoughtful than I’d dared to hope. A story that not only expanded what existed previously into a few pages of lore to an MMO-worthy world, but breathed life into two dimensional archetypes. It was inspiring, tragic, gripping, and vast. It was everything a good fantasy story should be.
As I said, without Warcraft, I’m not sure I’d be a writer. Would never have gone to university. Would never have got that tattoo.
All these moments I loved originally are still there. Arthas stopping to catch a falling petal in his gloved hands as he marches into King Terenas’ throne room and commits the act that will damn him forever. Sylvana’s death and undeath. Gromm being corrupted by demon blood, and later, fighting side by side with Thrall again. That incredible final mission, where men and orcs and elves band together to defend the world against Archimonde.
Some are so much better. The remastered cutscene where Arthas finds the cursed blade Frostmourne is stunning. Watching it side by side with the original, it’s impossible to conclude that no care or love went into Reforged. Whether through budget, neglect, or mismanagement, cutscenes like this are the exception – not the rule that was advertised. It’s a shame, because if nothing else, the artists and animators that worked on Reforged seem like they were dead set on creating something truly special.
If there are any serious bugs, I haven’t found any, save the one time I had to restart the game because I was auto-failing any mission I tried to start. I shut it down, started it back up again, and things have been fine since. That said, I get the impression I’m the outlier here, so I’d suggest seeking out some other evidence – as in pictures, videos, specific descriptions, not just vague shouting on the internet – before you make up your own mind.
Two thirds of the way through the orcish campaign in Reign of Chaos, Thrall sends Gromm Hellscream off to a northern forest to collect lumber for a new orcish settlement. What neither of them realise is that the forest is sacred to the Night Elves that reside there. The trees that the orcs cut down and repurpose are ancient beyond measure.
After fighting the Night Elves, and collecting a huge stockpile of lumber from their sacred forest, Gromm starts work on the base. Something new, built from the remains of the old.
Gromm eventually builds the base, and it’s a fine base. Maybe not exactly what was promised, but it’s…fine, you know?
It’s just a shame he has to destroy so much history to get there.
Samsung’s Galaxy S20 series is launching next week and pretty much all major details about the phones have leaked. But we’re now getting information about some new camera features that the S20 flagships might house.
Serial tipster and XDA contributor Max Weinbach says that all three Galaxy S20 phones will get a camera feature called QuickTake. This will allow users to capture three individual photos at the same time from the main, ultra-wide, and telephoto cameras.
also because you guys totally missed it in the S20 one, the S20 will take pics out of 2 or 3 of the lenses and will let you choose pictures after the fact. It’s called Quick Take
So when you hit that button to click a picture, the phones will actually take one image from each of the sensors. You will then be able to go into the image gallery and select which photo you want to keep.
Samsung’s QuickTake feature seems similar in functionality to LG’s Triple Shot feature which was introduced with the LG V40 ThinQ. LG’s triple camera phone also allowed users to take a photo with each lens via this mode.
In addition to saving three images in the photos app, the LG V40 ThinQ also created a short video by compiling the images. The Galaxy S20 trio will also do that (albeit to an even greater extent) with another rumored feature called Single Take.
According to Weinbach, this feature will basically let you pan around your S20, S20 Plus, or S20 Ultra to take pictures and videos from all three lenses. The captured media will be automatically edited, perhaps for social media sharing.
New night mode also incoming?
Samsung has apparently also filed a trademark request for the term ‘Super ISO’ with the UK Intellectual Property Office. This was first spotted by LetsGoDigital.
While we don’t know if this is a new feature for the Galaxy S20 series, it could improve night time photography on the new flagships.
Editor's Pick
Samsung Galaxy Note 10 review: Why you should want it — and why you shouldn’t
For the longest time, the Galaxy Note line has represented the best of the best, the “kitchen sink” of Android phones where nothing was left out. With the Note 10 series, this has changed. The …
As you may know, low-lit scenes require you to increase ISO levels thereby increasing the light sensitivity of your camera. This results in brighter images. Currently, the Galaxy S10 and Note 10 phones on Android 10 allows one to set the ISO at 3200.
We’re not sure if the new feature will make the ISO range even higher. It could also just improve the existing Night Mode in the Samsung Camera app.
Guess we’ll have to wait to see what Super ISO is all about and if it’s actually headed to the Galaxy S20 series.
Are you looking forward to the above mentioned camera features on the Galaxy S20 phones? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.
