smartphone News - Page 3 of 78 - CNX Software

October 4, 2025October 5, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 10 Comments

kv4p HT – Turn an Android smartphone into a ham radio transceiver

kv4p HT is an open-source hardware VHF or UHF radio designed to plug into the USB-C port of an Android smartphone and turn it into a handheld ham radio transceiver. It’s based on an ESP32 wireless module and an SA818 radio module. This accessory makes your phone capable of off-grid voice and text communication with a Technician-class amateur radio license. It’s small enough to fit into a pocket, partially because it does not need a battery, relying on the built-in battery of your phone. kv4p HT V2.0 specifications: Wireless module – ESP32-WROOM-32E-N4 SoC – ESP32 dual-core Tensilica LX6 microcontroller @ up to 240 MHz with 520KB SRAM Storage – 4MB flash Wireless – 2.4 GHz WiFi 4 and Bluetooth 4.2 BR/LE connectivity, built-in PCB antenna VHF Radio SA818-V radio module or DRA818V (134 – 174MHz) VHF low-pass filter SMA antenna connector Tx Power – Up to 1 Watt for several […]

September 29, 2025November 6, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

Linux 6.17 release – Main changes, Arm, RISC-V, and MIPS architectures

Linux 6.17 has just been released on LKML: No huge surprises this past week, so here we are, with kernel 6.17 pushed out and ready to go. Below is the shortlog for just the last week – not the full 6.17 release – as usual. It’s not exciting, which is all good. I think the biggest patch in there is some locking fixes for some bluetooth races that could cause use-after-free situations. Whee – that’s about as exciting as it gets. Other than that, there’ the usual driver fixlets (GPU and networking dominate as usual, but “dominate” is still pretty small), there’s some minor random other driver updates, some filesystem noise, and core kernel and mm. And some selftest updates. This obviously means that the merge window for 6.18 will open tomorrow, and I already have four dozen pull requests pending. Thanks to the proactive people – you know who […]

September 15, 2025September 15, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 4 Comments

Android 14 smartphone offers 6.13-inch E-Ink color display, 5G cellular connectivity

Bigme HiBreak Pro Color is an Android 14 smartphone with 4G LTE and 5G cellular connectivity, and a more unique feature: a 6.13-inch E-Ink color display. We had seen a few smartphones with E-ink grayscale displays in the past, with products such as the Hisense A5 or YotaPhone 3, but phones with an E-Ink color display are more of a rarity, and the Bigme HiBreak Pro Color adds to the Hisense A7CC. Other key features include a MediaTek Dimensity 1080 octa-core Cortex-A78/A55 processor, 8GB of RAM, and a 256GB UFS flash. Bigme HiBreak Pro Color specifications: SoC – MediaTek Dimensity 1080 Octa-core CPU – 4x Arm Cortex-A78 cores @ 2.6 GHz, 4x Arm Cortex-A55 cores @ 2.0 GHz GPU – Arm Mali-G68 MC4 VPU Video decoding – H.265, H.264, MPEG-4, VP9 up to 4K @ 30 FPS Video encoding – H.265, H.264 up to 4K @ 30 FPS System Memory […]

September 10, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

Arm introduces Lumex platform with SME2-enabled C1 CPU for Edge AI, Mali-G1 GPU

Arm Lumex CSS (Compute SubSystem) platform for mobile devices combines high-performance Arm C1 CPUs with Scalable Matrix Extension version 2 (SME2) and Mali-G1 GPUs to enable real-time on-device AI use cases like assistants, voice translation, and personalization. Lumex is part of Arm’s new product naming architecture announced last May, and targets specifically mobile devices. Arm says SME2-enabled Arm CPUs can deliver up to 5x faster AI performance, 4.7x lower latency for speech-based workloads, and 2.8x faster audio generation. Lumex components: Next-generation SME2-enabled Armv9.3 CPU cluster: C1-Ultra for flagship peak performance with +25% single-thread performance vs Cortex-X925; suitable for large-model inference, computational photography, content creation, generative AI C1-Premium with C1-Ultra performance, but greater area efficiency (35% smaller area than C1-Ultra); suitable for sub-flagship mobile segments, voice assistants, multitasking C1-Pro for sustained efficiency; +16% sustained performance vs Cortex-A725; ideal for video playback, streaming inference C1-Nano for maximum efficiency, smaller area for wearables, […]

August 13, 2025August 13, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

Arm neural technology to add AI acceleration to Arm GPUs, enable “Neural Super Sampling” for lower bandwidth/higher FPS

Arm neural technology will add dedicated neural/AI accelerators to Arm GPUs launched in 2026 and beyond to deliver up to 50% GPU workload reduction for mobile games and other graphics-intensive apps. The first application is called Arm Neural Super Sampling (NSS). It’s a kind of AI Super Resolution implementation for games, where rather than upscaling videos, the AI accelerator upscales graphics to lower the required bandwidth and increase the frame rate (or lower the power consumption) with no impact on the rendering quality. Watch the video below to see a demo rendered at 540p resolution by the GPU and upscaled to 1080p resolution by Arm neural technology with no obvious defects. The upscaler will introduce some lag, but only about 4ms per frame in sustained performance conditions, as explained in a technical blog about the Arm Neural and NSS announcement: We assume a target of 10 TOP/s per-watt of neural acceleration […]

July 28, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 5 Comments

Linux 6.16 Release – Main changes, Arm, RISC-V, and MIPS architectures

Linus Torvalds has just announced the release of Linux 6.16 on LKML: It’s Sunday afternoon, and the release cycle has come to an end. Last week was nice and calm, and there were no big show-stopper surprises to keep us from the regular schedule, so I’ve tagged and pushed out 6.16 as planned. It’s worth noting that the upcoming merge window for 6.17 is going to be slightly chaotic for me: I have multiple family events this August (a wedding and a big birthday), and with said family being spread not only across the US, but in Finland too, I’m spending about half the month traveling. That means that I will try very hard to get most of the merge window done the first week before my travels start, and I already ended upgiving a heads-up on that to the people who tend to send me the most pull requests. […]

June 26, 2025June 26, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 11 Comments

Fairphone (Gen. 6) is a sustainable, repairable 6.31-inch Android 15 smartphone with Snapdragon 7s Gen 3 SoC

The Fairphone (Gen. 6) is a 6.31-inch Android 15 smartphone powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 7s Gen 3 SoC designed to be sustainable and repairable with eight years of software updates, a 5-year warranty, a modular design, and the use of recycled materials. The Fairphone (Gen. 6) – not sure why it was not just called Fairphone 6 – offers mid-range features with an octa-core processor, 8GB RAM, 256GB UFS and microSD card storage, a 6.31-inch touch screen display, two rear cameras, a front-facing camera, 5G, WiFi 6, and Bluetooth 5.4 LE connectivity, as well as support for NFC for payment, and a USB-C port for charging and expansion. Fairphone (Gen.6) specifications: SoC – Qualcomm Snapdragon 7s Gen 3 Mobile Platform CPU – Octa-core Kryo CPU with 1x Prime core @ 2.5 GHz, 3x Performance cores @ 2.4 GHz, 4x Efficient cores @ up to 1.8 GHz GPU – Adreno […]

June 3, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 37 Comments

Liberux NEXX is a Linux smartphone with Rockchip RK3588S, 32GB RAM, 6.34-inch OLED (Crowdfunding)

Liberux NEXX is a Linux smartphone powered by a Rockchip RK3588S octa-core Cortex-A76/A55 processor coupled with 32 GB LPDDR4x and a 512GB eMMC flash, as well as a 6.34-inch 2400×1080 OLED display. We’ve seen other Linux smartphones in the past with the most popular likely being the Purism Librem 5 and Pine64’s PinePhone Pro. However, those are showing their age with older NXP i.MX 8M and Rockchip RK3399 SOCs, and the Liberux NEXX brings much-needed performance with a Rockchip RK3588S and 32GB of RAM, enabling mobile/desktop convergence to an extent. Liberux NEXX specifications: SoC – Rockchip RK3588S CPU – Octa-core processor with 4x Cortex-A76 cores @ up to 2.4 GHz, 4x Cortex-A55 cores @ up to 1.8 GHz GPU – Arm Mali-G610 GPU with OpenGL ES 3.2, OpenCL 2.2, and Vulkan 1.2 support VPU – 8Kp60 video decoder for H.265/AVS2/VP9/H.264/AV1 codecs, 8Kp30 H.265/H.264 video encoder AI accelerator – 6 TOPS NPU […]