Another week is over, so let’s recap. If you’ve seen the Galaxy S22 series, you’ve seen the Galaxy S24 series, if the dummies that leaked are to be believed. The three S24 phones all look pretty much unchanged, for the most part. There will likely be under-the-hood changes but on the outside, the phones look quite similar to the S23 series.
A new report doubled down on the fact that Huawei’s HarmonyOS Next will drop Android support. The OS is nearly ready for release and there has been some serious developer recruitment to bring talent over into Huawei’s new OS.
The vivo X100 series arrived in China, premiering the MediaTek Dimensity 9300 chip. The vivo X100 and X100 Pro both have curved 6.78-inch 8T LTPO AMOLED displays with 1260p resolution, 10bit colors, and a 1-120Hz refresh rate. The panels can crank out up to 3,000 nits peak brightness and offer 2,160Hz PWM dimming for eye protection.
Around the back, the X100 Pro brings three 50MP shooters with a 1-inch type Sony IMX989 main sensor. The X100 Pro is equipped with the world’s first mobile telephoto lens certified by Zeiss APO. The apochromatically corrected zoom lens optics align green, blue and red colors into the same focus plane which should translate to improved clarity and less fringing at contrast edges. The new floating periscope module features an f/2.57 aperture and 100mm equivalent focal length with 4.3x optical and up to 100x digital zoom. On the battery front, vivo X100 gets a 5,000 mAh battery with 120W fast charging while the X100 Pro gets a slightly larger 5,400 mAh cell with 100W charging support and 50W wireless fast charging.
vivo X100 and vivo X100 Pro are available in black, white, blue and orange colors. X100 starts at CNY 3,999 ($548) for the 12/256GB trim and tops out at CNY 5,099($700) for the option with 16GB LPDDR5T RAM and 1TB storage. X100 Pro starts at CNY 4,999 ($685) for the 12/256GB trim and tops out at CNY 5,999 ($823) for the 16GB RAM and 1TB storage version.
This week saw huge momentum in the green-bubble-blue-bubble saga. First, Nothing surprisingly announced that Nothing Chats would bring iMessage compatibility to the Nothing phone (2), and then Apple announced that it would bring RCS support to iPhones in 2024. Apple’s move is likely motivated by the EU’s pending ruling on whether iMessage is a core service, which had the potential to force Apple to add RCS support anyway.
While the iPhone will support RCS, it doesn’t mean that iMessage will chat freely with RCS-powered Android messengers. RCS will bring many iMessage-like features to cross-platform messaging between iPhones and Androids: read receipts, typing indicators, high-quality image and video sharing, location sharing, and the works. And in the end, it still won’t matter, because the bubbles will continue to be green.
You can see all the hot topics of the week below!
