Romdhane Marble

Last week, we told you that Samsung might be planning to incentivize the loyalty of Note 7 customers in South Korea by treating them with  discounts on the upcoming Galaxy S8 and Galaxy Note 8 . At the time, we had little to no idea on how the scheme would work, but Samsung has just announced a smartphone upgrade program for South Korean Note 7 customers, offering a very interesting bit of information in the process.  Those who've purchased the  Samsung Galaxy Note 7 in South Korea and will opt to replace their phone with a Samsung Galaxy S7 or a Galaxy S7 edge will be given the chance to upgrade to the Galaxy S8 or the Galaxy Note 8 next year. The upgrade will not be offered for free. Instead, customers will have to pay for half of the price of the Galaxy S7 or Galaxy S7 edge (depending on which phone they've replaced their Note 7 for) to qualify for the upgrade. Essentially, the upgrade will be offered through a discounted variant of Samsung's Galaxy Upgrade Program

The  Huawei Mate 9  is  expected to be introduced on November 3rd . Three different variants of the high-end phablet are expected with one version carrying 4GB of RAM and 64GB of internal storage. A second version comes with 4GB of RAM and 128GB of native storage, while the top-of-the-line model features 6GB of RAM and 256GB of flash storage. The 5.9-inch screen will come with a 1080 x 1920 resolution. The home-grown Kirin 960 chipset is under the hood, and a dual camera setup is on back. Using Leica optics, the rear cameras weigh in at 20MP and 12MP. Selfie fans will have an 8MP front-facing camera at their disposal. A fingerprint scanner is on back, underneath the two snappers, and Android 7.0 is pre-installed. Huawei's Emotion UI 5 runs on top of Android. Monday morning, images of what is said to be the instruction manual for the Mate 9 surfaced. The document confirms the dual-camera setup and the accompanying dual tone LED flash. A Type-C USB port is on board, and

These days, the  music  collection of your average smartphone user is usually in the thousands of songs, but often it is just a particular verse, rhythm or chorus that is the catchy part of a song that you want to hear right away. Up until now, you'd have to listen to the whole song to find that one special moment. That's where the new Playmarks app for iPhone and iPad comes in: allowing you to create up to 30 custom bookmarks within a  song , so that you can skip right to that special moment. Playmarks requires Apple  Music  and supports emoji, making it a great tool for the modern age of expression. It's a free app supported by ads, but you can also opt for the paid subscription model that runs at $5 a year and allows you an unlimited amount of bookmarks, as well as removes the ads. Another cool feature is that you can share that special moment of a  song  with friends easily, so they don't need to listen to the whole song to know what you'r

Just because the  Samsung Galaxy Note 7  has  been recalled twice , and  Samsung has told owners of the phone never to turn it on again , there are some who are so taken with the phablet that they won't part with it. Putting their lives and the lives of friends and family at risk, these people do not want to exchange their Galaxy Note 7 for another phone. There are also those who are willing to risk an explosion and would buy a Galaxy Note 7 if only they could find one to buy. While it is illegal in the U.S. to sell the phone, in other countries there might not be any law preventing a retailer from selling the device. A photo published recently shows a Hong Kong store with a number of Galaxy Note 7 units on display. These are phones that were recalled when the photo was snapped, and are being sold at a special price. Some are buying heavily discounted Galaxy Note 7 units to play a game we like to call "smartphone arbitrage." Buying the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 at

Android usually gets a lot of flak for being prone to hacking and leaking personal info, ubiquitous as it is. Research from digital security firm Zscaler, however, pegs iOS apps to be a bit leakier in terms of user info, though most of the information that emanates from mobile apps there in general was found to be pretty benign. On average, Android apps that passed through the company's cloud transaction, leaked user data in 0.3% of the cases, while that figure was 0.5% for iOS apps, yet the number there is derived from a larger sample. Both are not big numbers, though, plus it is mostly device info and location data that are shared. Only a fraction of the leaked data was found to be personally identifiable info (PII). This is where Android and iOS differ again - just 0.2% of the iOS leaks included PII data, while on Android that share was 3%. The geographic distribution of the leaky apps is also pretty interesting - 70% of iOS privacy-related traffic comes from