On the heels of a weaker than expected 2022, International Data Corporation (IDC) has lowered its forecast for augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) headsets in 2023. Global shipments are now expected to reach 10.1 million units this year, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Augmented and Virtual Reality Headset Tracker. Despite the revised outlook, total AR/VR headset shipments are expected to grow 14% in 2023 and accelerate over the 2023-2027 forecast period with a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 32.6%.

According to TrendForce's latest research, global smartphone production totaled around 289 million units for 3Q22, showing a slight QoQ drop of 0.9% and a YoY drop of 11%. The smartphone market thus exhibited an extremely weak demand situation as the "iron law" of positive growth in the third quarter was broken after being in effect for years. The contraction of smartphone production during this year's peak season was mainly attributed to smartphone brands giving priority to consumption of channel inventory for whole devices and maintaining a fairly conservative production plan for 3Q22. Moreover, they had kept lowering their production targets due to strong global economic headwinds.

Regarding the performances of the major smartphone brands in 3Q22, Samsung posted around 64.2 million units in device production, showing a QoQ increase of just 3.9%. This was the result of the brand scaling back production since 2Q22 and maintaining a conservative outlook on the future market situation. Due to persistent inventory pressure, Samsung is expected to again post a QoQ decline for 4Q22. In the aspect of product development, Samsung has been the leader in foldable smartphones. This year, the global market share of foldable smartphones is estimated to reach 1.1%; and within this segment, Samsung is expected to hold a market share of almost 90%. As for 2023, the global market share of foldable smartphones is forecasted to climb to 1.5%, and Samsung is forecasted to retain a market share of almost 80% in the segment.

Worldwide tablet shipments were down 8.8% year over year in the third quarter of 2022 (3Q22), totaling 38.6 million units, according to preliminary data from the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Personal Computing Device Tracker. This was the fifth straight quarter of decline for the tablet market. Chromebook shipments also struggled in 3Q22, falling to 4.3 million units and a year-over-year decline of 34.4%. Both markets have now shifted from supply constrained industries to ones that are demand challenged as consumer and education spending has slowed in the face of economic uncertainties.

Chinese vendors continue to do well in emerging markets where there is low-end demand. Sanctions from many vendors also enabled Chinese vendors like Huawei to perform well in the Russian market. Meanwhile, the emergence of low-priced Chinese OEMs like Realme, Xiaomi, Oppo and others, has fueled strong competition in the lower range devices. However, these gains still couldn't offset the decline experienced by the main tablet vendors.

Qualcomm. introduces Snapdragon Spaces XR Developer Platform, a headworn Augmented Reality (AR) developer kit to enable the creation of immersive experiences that seamlessly blur the lines between our physical and digital realities. With proven technology and an open, cross-device horizontal platform and ecosystem, Snapdragon Spaces delivers the tools to bring developers' ideas to life and revolutionize the possibilities of headworn AR. Snapdragon Spaces is in early access with select developers and is expected to be generally available in the Spring of 2022.

Qualcomm Technologies is a pioneer in Augmented Reality with over a decade of AR research and development. Utilizing these years of innovation and expertise, Snapdragon Spaces offers robust machine perception technology that is optimized for performance and low power for the next generation of AR glasses. The Snapdragon Spaces platform provides environmental and user understanding capabilities that give developers the tools to create headworn AR experiences that can sense and intelligently interact with the user and adapt to their physical indoor spaces. Some of the marquee environmental understanding features include spatial mapping and meshing, occlusion, plane detection, object and image recognition and tracking, local anchors and persistence, and scene understanding. The user understanding machine perception features include positional tracking and hand tracking.

Xiaomi today unveiled its latest breakthrough in heat dissipation - Loop LiquidCool Technology. Inspired by cooling solutions used in the aerospace industry, Loop LiquidCool Technology utilizes a capillary effect which draws liquid cooling agent to the heat source, vaporizes, and then disperses the heat efficiently towards a cooler area, until the agent condenses and is captured via a unidirectional closed looped channel. Compared to conventional vapor chambers solutions, this new technology has twice the cooling capabilities and ranks as the most efficient smartphone cooling solution. Xiaomi aims to bring Loop LiquidCool Technology to its products in H2 2022.

This new technology features an annular heat pipe system that is composed of an evaporator, a condenser, a refill chamber, as well as gas and liquid pipes. Placed at heat sources, the evaporator has refrigerant that evaporates to gas when the smartphone is under high workload. The gas and airflow is then diffused to the condenser, where the gas condenses into liquid again. These liquids are absorbed and collected through tiny fibers in the refill chamber—which refills the evaporator—making it a self-sustaining system.

There appears to be no shortage of new TWS headphones being announced, but these ones are slightly different from the competition, as they have 27 year Sennheiser veteran Axel Grell behind them. The grell TWS/1 is the first product from grell, a brand from STRAX, which is also home to Urbanista, WeSC and several other brands that mostly focuses on audio or mobile accessories.

The TWS/1 does as you'd expect, focus on audio quality, but also includes all the kind of features you'd expect from current generation TWS headphones, such as ANC, Bluetooth 5.2 and support for the SoundID app from Sonarworks. The TWS/1 is based on Qualcomm's QCC5141 Bluetooth SoC which sits in the premium tier of Qualcomm's product stack and features a pair of DSPs as well as a system processor and an application processor.

Xiaomi today took another bold step in the exploration of future technology with its new bio-inspired quadruped robot - CyberDog. The launch of CyberDog is the culmination of Xiaomi's engineering prowess, condensed into an open source robot companion that developers can build upon.

CyberDog is Xiaomi's first foray into quadruped robotics for the open source community and developers worldwide. Robotics enthusiasts interested in CyberDog can compete or co-create with other like-minded Xiaomi Fans, together propelling the development and potential of quadruped robots.

Xiaomi is preparing to release their next-generation Mi OLED gaming television lineup with support for NVIDIA G-Sync. Xiaomi has posted three teasers on their Weibo account about the upcoming TV promoting its OLED panel and G-Sync support however they are yet to announce any details about potential resolutions, refresh rates, or prices. The TV may be part of the NVIDIA Big Format Gaming Display program which all include dedicated G-Sync modules however no confirmation has been given by either company. We can deduce that the TV will support HDMI 2.1 given the inclusion the NVIDIA G-Sync support and the lack of bandwidth offered by HDMI 2.0. Xiaomi will release more details for the Mi OLED TV at an official announcement on August 10th.

The recent wave of COVID-19 outbreaks in India has weakened sales of retail storage products such as memory cards and USB drives, according to TrendForce's latest investigations. However, demand remains fairly strong in the main application segments due to the arrival of the traditional peak season and the growth in the procurement related to data centers. Hence, the sufficiency ratio of the entire market has declined further. NAND Flash suppliers have kept their inventories at a healthy level thanks to clients' stock-up activities during the past several quarters. Moreover, the ongoing shortage of NAND Flash controller ICs continues to affect the production of finished storage products. Taking account of these demand-side and supply-side factors, TrendForce forecasts that contract prices of NAND Flash products will rise marginally for 3Q21, with QoQ increases in the range of 5-10%.

The US Government, specifically the Department of Defense (DoD), has under the Trump administration blacklisted the Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi. This was a way to impose sanctions on the Chinese company as it was believed that Xiaomi was involved with the Chinese military, thus the Trump organization had problems having US investors taking a share of it. However, the company has issued legal proceedings against the US government for making such claims, and now the US govt., administrated by the President Joe Biden, has reached an agreement with the company. Xiaomi managed to prove that it is not owned or controlled by the Chinese military, so the US DoD has removed the company from its blacklist.

This has caused the company shares to soar on the Hong Kong stock exchange by as much as 6.7% after the news appeared. "The Biden Administration is deeply concerned about potential U.S. investments in companies linked to the Chinese military and fully committed to keeping up pressure on such companies", said Emily Horne, a spokeswoman for the White House National Security Council.

Demand for DRAM exceeded expectations in 1Q21 as the proliferation of WFH and distance education resulted in high demand for notebook computers against market headwinds, according to TrendForce's latest investigations. Also contributing to the increased DRAM demand was Chinese smartphone brands' ramp-up of component procurement while these companies, including OPPO, Vivo, and Xiaomi, attempted to seize additional market shares after Huawei's inclusion on the Entity List. Finally, DRAM demand from server manufacturers also saw a gradual recovery. Taken together, these factors led to higher-than-expected shipments from various DRAM suppliers in 1Q21 despite the frequent shortage of such key components as IC and passive components. On the other hand, DRAM prices also entered an upward trajectory in 1Q21 in accordance with TrendForce's previous forecasts. In light of the increases in both shipments and quotes, all DRAM suppliers posted revenue growths in 1Q21, and overall DRAM revenue for the quarter reached US$19.2 billion, an 8.7% growth QoQ.

Demand for PC, mobile, graphics, and special DRAM remains healthy in 2Q21. Furthermore, after two to three quarters of inventory reduction during which their DRAM demand was relatively sluggish, some server manufacturers have now kicked off a new round of procurement as they expect a persistent increase in DRAM prices. TrendForce therefore forecasts a significant QoQ increase in DRAM ASP in 2Q21. In conjunction with increased bit shipment, this price hike will likely drive total DRAM revenue for 2Q21 to increase by more than 20% QoQ.

TrendForce's investigations find that India has become the second largest market for smartphones since 2019. However, the recent worsening of the COVID-19 pandemic in the country has severely impaired India's domestic economy and subsequently dampened various smartphone brands' production volume and sales (sell-in) performances there. TrendForce is therefore revising the forecasted YoY growth in global smartphone production for 2021 from 9.4% down to 8.5%, with a yearly production volume of 1.36 billion units and potential for further decreases going forward.

TrendForce further indicates that the top five smartphone brands (Samsung, Apple, Xiaomi, OPPO, and Vivo) have either set up assembly plants in India or sought assistance from EMS providers with operations in the country. Hence, the share of made-in-India smartphones has been on the rise over the years, even though the majority of the domestically manufactured devices are still for meeting the demand of the home market. Judging from the current state of Indian smartphone manufacturing, TrendForce expects the second wave to reduce the country's smartphone production volume for 2Q21 and 3Q21 by a total of 12 million units, in turn resulting in a 7.5% YoY decrease in smartphone production in India for the whole year.

The third-generation semiconductor industry was impaired by the US-China trade war and the COVID-19 pandemic successively from 2018 to 2020, according to TrendForce's latest investigations. During this period, the semiconductor industry on the whole saw limited upward momentum, in turn leading to muted growth for the 3rd gen semiconductor segment as well. However, this segment is likely to enter a rapid upturn owing to high demand from automotive, industrial, and telecom applications. In particular, the GaN power device market will undergo the fastest growth, with a $61 million revenue, a 90.6% YoY increase, projected for 2021.

Global DRAM revenue reached US$17.65 billion, a 1.1% increase YoY, in 4Q20, according to TrendForce's latest investigations. For the most part, this growth took place because Chinese smartphone brands, including Oppo, Vivo, and Xiaomi, expanded their procurement activities for components in order to seize the market shares made available after Huawei was added to the Entity List by the U.S. Department of Commerce. These procurement activities in turn provided upward momentum for DRAM suppliers' bit shipment. However, clients in the server segment were still in the middle of inventory adjustments during this period, thereby placing downward pressure on DRAM prices. As a result, revenues of most DRAM suppliers, except for Micron, remained somewhat unchanged in 4Q20 compared to 3Q20. Micron underwent a noticeable QoQ decline in 4Q20 (which Micron counts as its fiscal 1Q21), since Micron had fewer work weeks during this period compared to the previous quarter.

Global sales of smartphones to end users declined 5.4% in the fourth quarter of 2020, according to Gartner, Inc. Smartphone sales declined 12.5% in full year 2020.

"The sales of more 5G smartphones and lower-to-mid-tier smartphones minimized the market decline in the fourth quarter of 2020," said Anshul Gupta, senior research director at Gartner. "Even as consumers remained cautious in their spending and held off on some discretionary purchases, 5G smartphones and pro-camera features encouraged some end users to purchase new smartphones or upgrade their current smartphones in the quarter."

MediaTek today unveiled its new Dimensity 1200 and Dimensity 1100 5G smartphone chipsets with unrivaled AI, camera and multimedia features for powerful 5G experiences. The addition of the 6 nm Dimensity 1200 and 1100 chipsets to MediaTek's 5G portfolio gives device makers a growing suite of options to design highly capable 5G smartphones with top of the line camera features, graphics, connectivity enhancements and more.

"MediaTek continues to expand its 5G portfolio with highly integrated solutions for a range of devices from the high-end to the mid-tier," said JC Hsu, Corporate Vice President and General Manager of MediaTek's Wireless Communications Business Unit. "Our new Dimensity 1200 stands out with its impressive 200MP camera support and advanced AI capabilities, in addition to its innovative connectivity, display, audio and gaming enhancements."

Access to affordable electronics isn't looking much of a reality for US citizens, as the US government (presently in the outgoing days of Trump's administration) has now announced the addition of Chinese tech company Xiaomi to its military-connections blacklist. The move, enforced via a presidential executive order, now also demands U.S. investors to divest, or sell out, of affected holdings of any companies on the blacklist, by Nov. 11 this year. This addition to the US blacklist is done in accordance with the US National Defense Authorization Act of 1999, and doesn't place XIAOMI in the Entity list, of which Huawei is a part of, which would impede the Chinese tech giant from acquiring US technology and components for fabrication of its products.

The US Department of Defense (DOD) said in a statement that "The Department is determined to highlight and counter the People's Republic of China's (PRC) Military-Civil Fusion development strategy, which supports the modernization goals of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) by ensuring its access to advanced technologies and expertise acquired and developed by even those PRC companies, universities, and research programs that appear to be civilian entities". Xiaomi has been classified as one of nine "Communist Chinese military companies".

With the launch of AMD's next-generation mobile processors just around the corner, with an expected launch date in the beginning of 2021 at the CES virtual event. The Cezanne lineup, as it is called, is based on AMD's latest Zen 3 core, which brings many IPC improvements, along with better frequency scaling thanks to the refined architecture design. Today, we get to see just how much the new Cezanne generation brings to the table thanks to the GeekBench 5 submission. In the test system, a Ryzen 5 5600H mobile processor was used, found inside of a Xiaomi Mi Notebook, paired with 16 GB of RAM.

As a reminder, the AMD Ryzen 5 5600H is a six-core, twelve threaded processor. So you are wondering how the performance looks like. Well, in the single-core test, the Zen 3 enabled core has scored 1372 points, while the multi-threaded performance result equaled 5713 points. If we compare that to the last generation Zen 2 based "Renoir" design, the equivalent Ryzen 5 4600H processor, the new design is about 37% faster in single-threaded, and about 14% faster in multi-threaded workloads. We are waiting for the announcement to see the complete AMD Cezanne lineup and see the designs it will bring.

Reports circulating the web point towards Xiaomi planning to take the high-refresh rate market by storm, following very interesting releases in the more "mainstream" gaming display market. Reports place the company as preparing for an announcement on November 11th for the launch of a new, 1080p high-refresh-rate monitor. Sources seem to be in disagreement over the actual refresh rate - whether 240 Hz or 360 Hz - but they are adamant that a product - or perhaps both products - will emerge.

The $145 pricing is something that Xiaomi could well pull-off; the company tends to bet on market penetration first, before scaling its production with higher ASP products. Diagonal are expected at the 24.5" range, and a 1080p panel is all but guaranteed at those refresh rates. It's currently uncertain what kind of panel technology is at stake here - some mention AUO's IPS solutions, while others claim a TN panel is mandatory to achieve these prices. There's only so much tech that can be bought into with $145. That said, this monitor could become an extremely attractive proposition for gamers on a budget, though we all know that 360 Hz (and even 240 Hz) at 1080p are somewhat hard to achieve due to CPU limitations on performance.

Xiaomi today unveiled what it considers to be the third defining piece of technology for its 10th anniversary - the 55" Mi TV LUX Transparent Edition. As the name implies, and as Xiaomi will pridefully tell you, this is the world's first fully edge-to-edge transparent OLED display - the images are displayed on its transparent screen and thus appear to be "floating in the air" - taking a cue from most science fiction settings. Xiaomi has also taken this opportunity to announce that they've become the first China-based company in the world to produce transparent OLED TVs, as well as China's number one OLED Basic Module (OBM) manufacturer.

Xiaomi is looking to grab a piece of the premium TV market with the new Master Series. Xiaomi's new flagship TV, to be announced for the Chinese market on July 2nd, will be offering up a 65-inch OLED panel with a snappy 120 Hz refresh rate, which means it will be able to take full advantage of next-generation consoles' "up to" 120 Hz FPS delivery. Besides the OLED chops, there's Dolby Certification for both Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos.

Other specs include HDMI 2.1, VRR support, and ALLM (Automatic Low Latency Mode). A quad-core Arm Cortex-A73 custom chip will be powering the TV's graphical and OS processing. Apparently there will be some sort of RGB lighting on the TV's frame, and a metallic remote control with NFC support aims to increase the premium feeling. Xiaomi's CEO Lei Jun described it as "Xiaomi's ultra-high-end OLED TV" and "very amazing." Well. We'll have to see now won't we. If it's actual competition to today's premium mainstream LG C9 and Samsung Q90R TVs, it's bound to sell like hotcakes.

Xiaomi today soft-launched a new, high-refresh rate IPS gaming monitor on their Mi line. The Xiaomi Mi Display 165 Hz brings a 27", 8-bit IPS panel with a 2560 x 1440 resolution and a pretty impressive 95% DCI-P3 color space coverage. Response time is quoted at 4 ms (1 ms GtG, as most manufacturers insist on quoting their response time speeds). There is support for VRR technologies (AMD's FreeSync and NVIDIA's G-Sync Compatible), as well as Display HDR 400 certification (the lowest that can be had, but still, it's certified). Peak luminance in HDR is set at 400 nits, with typical brilliance standing at 320 nits.

I/O-wise, we're looking at 3x USB 3.0, 1x HDMI, 1x DisplayPort and 1x 3.5 mm headset port. The reported specifications, including the DCI-P3 color space coverage, should make this monitor interesting for users ranging from gamers to amateur/semi-professional photo and video editors. pricing, however, is the icing in the cake: Xiaomi will be selling this monitor for 2,199 yuan (which amounts to roughly $299) - a bargain when one considers the overall specifications on this monitor. The monitor will be available from June 17 in China, with international availability following.

Xiaomi today announced the impending release of three new laptops with 13", 14", and 16" diagonals. The ideal is tantalizingly clear: to launch a laptop available at all the most popular resolutions, with the specs to match, and pricing that's incredibly aggressive - as is Xiaomi's usual trademark. All three Xiaomi RedmiBook models carry AMD's Latest Ryzen 4000 CPUs in the form of the Ryzen 5 4500U or Ryzen 7 4700U - so you know you're in for very attractive performance and battery life metrics from the get go.

The RedmiBook 13 comes in three configurations. The base model, featuring an AMD Ryzen 5 4500U CPU, 8 GB RAM and a 512 GB SSD variant is priced at CNY 3,799 (roughly $530); the AMD Ryzen 5 4500U CPU, 16 GB RAM and 512 GB SSD variant is priced at CNY 3,999 (roughly $560); upgrade for an AMD Ryzen 7 4700U CPU (Vega 8 graphics) paired with 16 GB RAM and a 1 TB SSD and you'll be asked for CNY 4,999 (roughly $700).

Smartphone giant Xiaomi is under aggressive expansion ever since its consumer electronics portfolio took off in 2017, with the debut of its Mi TV line of affordable smart TVs. The company is now reportedly turning its attention to the desktop PC monitor market, Shortly after its April announcement of the Mi Display 1A , the company is planning a product under its Redmi brand that rewrote the rules of "bang for the buck" in the smartphones market.

Big things have small beginnings, the Redmi Monitor 1A will be a cost-cut version of the Mi Display 1A. The monitor will offer a 23.5-inch display panel with thin bezels on three sides, likely Full HD resolution, 178°/178° viewing angles, 250 cd/m² brightness, and 60 Hz refresh-rate. Uninterested? Wait till you hear what Xiaomi is reportedly asking for this thing: USD $86. That's it. The Mi Display 1A under Xiaomi's main brand goes for $99. If these two pick up traction, even in China, Xiaomi has the guts to pull off extraordinary value propositions (think a 28-inch 4K IPS monitor under $250), spelling trouble for current monitor makers. Xiaomi plans to announce the Redmi Monitor 1A along with several other consumer electronics products tomorrow (May 26).

Micron Technology, Inc., today announced it has shipped the world's first low-power DDR5 DRAM in mass production to be used in the soon-to-be-released Xiaomi Mi 10 smartphone. As Xiaomi's memory technology partner, Micron provides LPDDR5 DRAM with superior power efficiency and faster data access speeds to meet growing consumer demand for artificial intelligence (AI) and 5G functionality in smartphones.

"Micron's leadership in delivering the industry's first low-power DDR5 DRAM for use in a smartphone will accelerate enablement of 5G and AI applications," said Dr. Raj Talluri, senior vice president and general manager of the Mobile Business Unit at Micron. "Our customers and partners require next-generation memory solutions, based on the latest process technology, that drive unmatched power and performance to support 5G and AI systems. Micron's LPDDR5 DRAM addresses those requirements with a 50% increase in data access speeds and more than 20% power efficiency compared to previous generations."

"We value Micron's long-standing leadership and innovation in memory," said Chang Cheng, vice president at Xiaomi Group. "Micron's LPDDR5 DRAM market-leading features ensure our Xiaomi Mi 10 smartphone will remain power-efficient while still offering incredible performance and greater stability. We believe LPDDR5 will be the standard configuration for all flagship devices in 2020."