The Note 9 is available in three different colours – Ocean Blue, Metallic Copper and Midnight Black – as well as two configurations, one with 128GB of onboard storage and 6GB of RAM for $1,499, and the other with an unprecedented 512GB of storage and 8GB of RAM for $1,799.
Boasting flagship features and impressive specs at affordable prices, the up-and-coming Chinese smartphone manufacturer Realme has announced that it will officially launch a range of devices in the Australia market on October 17, 2019.
The launch lineup promises to shake up the Australian budget handset market, with Realme set to offer four handsets priced between AU$200 and AU$500.
While the Shenzhen-based phone maker is saving specific model announcements for its October 17 launch event in Sydney, we have to assume it'll bring its hero handset, Realme X (pictured above), to Australian shores.
Realme X sports numerous premium-level features, including a bezel-free 1080p OLED screen with in-display fingerprint scanner, a Snapdragon 710 chipset, up to 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, a 16MP pop-up selfie camera and a 48MP + 5MP dual camera setup on the device's rear – an impressive set up for around US$260 (roughly AU$386).
Get to know the Realme
Once a subsidiary of fellow Chinese manufacturer Oppo, it perhaps comes as no surprise that Realme's handsets operate on Oppo's own ColorOS firmware, which is based on Android.
Realme plans to sell its four handsets exclusively online via the e-commerce sites of Australia's biggest retailers, including JB Hi-Fi, The Good Guys, Bing Lee, along with the likes of eBay, Amazon, Kogan, Catch, Mobilciti and its own website.
Make sure to check back in on October 17 to find out exactly which affordable smartphones Realme is releasing in Australia.
5G networks are the next generation of mobile internet connectivity, offering faster speeds and more reliable connections on smartphones and other devices than ever before.
Combining cutting-edge network technology and the very latest research, 5G should offer connections that are multitudes faster than current connections, with average download speeds of around 1GBps expected to soon be the norm.
The networks will help power a huge rise in Internet of Things technology, providing the infrastructure needed to carry huge amounts of data, allowing for a smarter and more connected world.
5G networks are already starting to appear and are expected to launch across the world by 2020, working alongside existing 3G and 4G technology to provide speedier connections that stay online no matter where you are.
When will 5G launch?
In the US
Verizon surprised most of the world by launching its 5G network at the start of April 2019, making it the first globally to offer the next-generation network.
It's currently only available in limited parts of Chicago and a few other locations, and there are just two handsets currently available to use on the new 5G network.
In Chicago, US we've managed to obtain speeds of up to 1.4Gbps, which is massively faster than 4G's theoretical top speed of 300Mbps (although average speeds tend to be below 100Mbps).
However, 5G coverage is patchy and we had to move around the city's various 5G masts to get this top speed. We did tend to get around 1Gbps quite consistently though.
5G in London, UK is more of a mixed bag, with speeds in our test ranging from 200Mbps to 550Mbps - still much quicker than 4G, but not the same level as we are seeing in Chicago.
AT&T has rolled out its 5G network to 19 cities across the States, but it still doesn't offer any 5G phones - with your only option for now a 5G Netgear Nitehawk mobile hotspot.
Meanwhile, T-Mobile is yet to launch its 5G network in the US, but it previously said it would bring 5G to 30 cities, starting in New York City, Los Angeles, Dallas, and Las Vegas.
EE was the first UK carrier to launch its 5G network, switching it on in six cities on May 30 2019. It has promised to bring 5G to 10 further cities by the end of 2019.
It was followed by Vodafone on July 3, 2019, when it launched 5G in seven cities, rolling out to a further eight towns and cities on July 17.
Next up was Three, which launched a 5G service in London on August 19, however, there's a catch - it's initially only available for home broadband. However, it will be coming to mobile later this year, as well as to 24 more towns and cities.
O2 meanwhile is the only major UK network not to have any sort of 5G service yet, but it plans to roll 5G out in October.
Telstra's 5G coverage went live as of May, 2019, with the launch of the first 5G smartphone in Australia – the Samsung Galaxy S10 5G – and Optus has now joined in.
At the time, Telstra coverage was limited to 10 major cities and regions and, within those regions, was somewhat limited and patchy. This includes Adelaide, Brisbane, Canberra, Gold Coast, Hobart, Launceston, Melbourne, Perth, Sydney, and Toowoomba.
The rollout continues, however, and coverage is steadily increasing for both major telcos. For a detailed and up-to-date map on coverage across Australia, check out Telstra's dedicated 5G page as well as the Optus 5G page.
What 5G phones are available?
Image Credit: TechRadar
A number of 5G phone announcements have been made in 2019, however only a handful are currently available, and the choice is further limited by country and carrier.
In the US, Motorola's 5G Moto Mod provides next-generation connectivity to a select few Moto Z handsets, plus the Samsung Galaxy S10 5G is also available.
For those in the UK, you can currently get hold of six 5G phones; the Samsung Galaxy S10 5G, Oppo Reno 5G, OnePlus 7 Pro 5G, Xiaomi Mi Mix 3 5G, Huawei Mate 20 X 5G, and the LG V50 ThinQ 5G. The Samsung Galaxy Note 10 Plus 5G is also available for pre-order at the time of writing.
5G speeds will vary between locations, countries, carriers and devices, but on the whole the average internet speed you can expect should be much greater than what's currently offered on 4G.
We've been testing the first 5G networks in the US, UK, and Australia, and have found speeds to be a little bit of a mixed bag.
01/07 - NETWORKS - Three: 5G is our "biggest opportunity" - Contiguous spectrum and infrastructure boost could be the key to helping Three pull ahead in 5G...
05/04 - NETWORKS - Mobile networks fork out £1.4bn for 5G spectrum - Ofcom publishes the results of its 5G spectrum auction, revealing that the UK's biggest mobile network operators spent almost £1.4 billion...
Expansion of advanced technologies - such as self-driving cars & smart cities
How fast will 5G be?
It’s still not exactly known how much faster 5G will be than 4G, as much of the technology is still under development.
That being said, the networks should provide a significant upgrade to current download and upload speeds - with the GSMA proposing minimum download speeds of around 1GBps.
Most estimates expect the average speed of 5G networks to reach 10Gb/s, and some even think transfer rates could reach a whopping 800Gb/s.
This would mean that users could download a full-length HD quality film in a matter of seconds, and that downloading and installing software upgrades would be completed much faster than today.
What will a 5G network need?
The GSMA has outlined eight criteria for 5G networks, with a connection needing meet a majority of these in order to qualify as 5G:
1-10Gbps connections to end points in the field (i.e. not theoretical maximum)
Adam Neumann’s fall from grace was astonishingly swift once his company, WeWork, filed to go public in August. Even while his spending was fairly well-documented across time (as were his apparent conflicts of interest), he was humiliated for enriching himself, then ultimately kicked out of the corner office before the company, in the least surprising turn of events in recent weeks, today yanked its S-1 registration.
Neumann never exactly hid who he is or how he operates, so what suddenly sparked the ire of reporters — and investors — around the world? What, exactly, in an ultimately unsurprising IPO filing had people coughing up their morning coffee? Boiled down to the worst offense (including selling his own company the trademark “We” for $5.9 million in stock) was very likely the lock on control that Neumann had set up through a multi-class voting structure that aimed to cement his control. And by ‘cement,’ we mean he would enjoy overwhelming control for not just for 5 or 10 years after the company went public but, unless Neumann sold a bunch of of his shares, until his death or “permanent incapacity”
Given that Neumann is just 40 years old and mostly abstains from meat, that could have been an awfully long time. Yet this wasn’t some madcap idea of his made from whole cloth. There are plenty of founders who have or who plan to go public with dual or multi-class shares designed to keep them in control until they kick the bucket. In some cases, it’s even more extreme that that.
Consider at Lyft, for example, Logan Green and John Zimmer hold high-voting shares entitling them to twenty votes per share not until each is dead but both of them. If one of them dies or becomes incapacitated, Lyft’s so-called sunset clause enables the remaining cofounder to control the votes of the deceased cofounder. Even more, after the lone survivor kicks the bucket, those votes still aren’t up for grabs. Instead, a trustee will retain that person’s full voting powers for a transition period of 9 to 18 months.
The same is true over at Snap, where cofounders Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy have designated the other as their respective proxies. Accordingly, when one dies, the other could individually control nearly all of the voting power of Snap’s outstanding capital stock.
That’s not the worst of it, either. Many dual class shares are written in such a way that founders can pass along control to their heirs. As SEC Commissioner Robert Jackson, a longtime legal scholar and law professor, told an audience last year, it’s no academic exercise.
You see, nearly half of the companies who went public with dual-class over the last 15 years gave corporate insiders outsized voting rights in perpetuity. Those companies are asking shareholders to trust management’s business judgment—not just for five years, or 10 years, or even 50 years. Forever.
So perpetual dual-class ownership—forever shares—don’t just ask investors to trust a visionary founder. It asks them to trust that founder’s kids. And their kids’ kids. And their grandkid’s kids. (Some of whom may, or may not, be visionaries.) It raises the prospect that control over our public companies, and ultimately of Main Street’s retirement savings, will be forever held by a small, elite group of corporate insiders—who will pass that power down to their heirs.
Why public market investors haven’t pushed back on such extremes isn’t clear, though they’re far from an homogenous group, of course. Surely, some aren’t aware of what they’re agreeing to when they’re buying shares, given that dual-class structures are far more prevalent than they once were. Other investors may plan to churn out of the shares so quickly that they’re uninterested in a company’s potential governance issues later in time.
A third possibility, suggests Jay Ritter, who is a professor of finance at the University of Florida and an I.P.O. expert, is that even with dual-class structures, shareholders have legal rights that limit that ability of an executive who has voting control to do anything he or she wants, and the board of directors, including the CEO, has a fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value.
Says Ritter, “I don’t think it’s accidental that with the We Company, the board of directors let [Neumann] get away with various things, and as it was transitioning to a public company, a lot of [outside participants] pushed and said, ‘This is a company where we’re worried about corporate governance and we’re willing to apply a big discount to people with inferior voting rights.'”
Of course, some investors believe visionary founders should be left to control their companies as long as they wish because, in the case of Alphabet and Facebook specifically, their founders have produced asymmetric returns for many years. But we’re still fairly early into this experiment. Do we really want more situations like we saw with Sumner Redstone of Viacom, with trials over founders’ mental capacity playing out in the media?
For his part, Alan Patricof — the renowned venture capitalist who founded the private equity firm Apax Partners before cofounding the venture firm Greycroft — say he isn’t looking forward to that future. Instead, he think it’s time the exchanges that list these companies’ shares do something about it. “I”m not holier than thou in this industry,” says Patricof, “but if you want to be a publicly traded company, you should act like a public company.” To Patricof, that means one vote for one share — period.
There’s a precedent for intervention. Patricof notes that dual-class stock first emerged in 1895 and by that 1926, there were 183 companies with such stock. It became so widespread, that the New York Stock Exchange banned the use of non-voting stock until 1956, when it made changed its rules for the Ford Motor Company, which granted only partial voting rights to new shareholders. In the ensuing years, few companies took advantage of dual-class listings until Google bounded onto the scene and now, 15 years after its IPO, it’s like 1926 all again.
Indeed, while Patricof is sympathetic to the argument that founders might need protection for a few years after an IPO, things have gone way too far, in his estimation, and he thinks the best solution would be for the NYSE and Nasdaq to meet for lunch and decide to ban multi-class shares again.
There aren’t a lot of other options. VCs aren’t going to force the issue by turning away founders with whom they want to work. Neither are bankers or large institutional investors like mutual funds; they’ve also shown they’re more than happy to look the other way if it means money in their pockets. “I could be wrong,” says Patricof, “but I don’t think it would that tough for [the big exchanges] to impose a ban that keeps founders from wielding so much power at the expense of the company’s other shareholders.”
Given how fiercely competitive the exchanges are, it’s certainly hard to imagine, this meeting of the minds. But the only other plausible path back to a saner system would seemingly be the Securities & Exchange Commission, and it seems disinclined to do anything about the issue.
Indeed, while Commissioner Jackson has advocated for change, SEC Chairman Jay Clayton would clearly prefer to leave well enough alone. After the S&P Dow Jones Indices and another major index company, FTSE Russell, decided to ban all companies with multiple classes of stock a couple of years ago — they’re uncomfortable with forcing popular index funds to buy stakes in companies that give investors little say in corporate decisions — Clayton reportedly called the moves “governance by indexation” at a conference.
It’s easy to see his argument that the indexes are being heavy handed. On the other hand, a lot of market participants might rather see companies forced to do away with dual-class structures — or at least forced to dismantle their multi-class structures after a fixed period or specific event — to watching those with with unchecked power be broken into pieces afterward.
The reality is that neither WeWork, nor Neumann, are not the zany outliers they’ve been made to seem. They’re very much a product of their time, and if shareholders don’t want to see more of the same, something has to be done. It might be incumbent on the exchanges to do it.
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With the next generation of mobile data connectivity already beginning to spread across Australia, it's time we start to look at how to ...
5G in Australia: the best phones and networks ranked
With the next generation of mobile data connectivity already beginning to spread across Australia, it's time we start to look at how to get the most out of 5G.
You can check out our detailed look into what 5G actually is, but the short and sweet of it is that it's an improvement on 4G connectivity that allows for significantly faster (up to 1GBps) download and upload speeds while using a mobile internet connection.
While still in its infancy, there's already a few 5G handsets and contract plans available to compare, so we've done the legwork and checked them all out thoroughly – rounding them up in one neat place.
In Australia, there's currently only five or so 5G-ready handsets available to customers, and not all of them can be purchased outright or are available on all carriers, so that doesn't leave us with too much in the way of choice just yet.
Regardless, here are the best 5G phones you can buy right now in Australia.
1) Oppo Reno 5G
2) Samsung Galaxy Note 10 Plus 5G
3) Samsung Galaxy S10 5G
5G on iPhone
Not one to rush things in terms of the forefront of phone tech, Apple has chosen a more cautious approach to adding 5G to its popular iPhone range.
At the moment, there's no Apple iPhone capable of supporting 5G, and there's no official word on when we'll see one either, although rumours have recently pointed to either 2020 or 2021.
The handsets that are already out and supporting 5G all boast the same chipset – Qualcomm's Snapdragon 855. Apple was engaged in a long-running legal battle with Qualcomm, but in order to maintain its 5G targets, settled the dispute.
However, since then, there have been rumours that Apple will buy up Intel's smartphone modem division in order to bring the development of 5G tech in-house, adding to the growing list of iPhone components that the Cupertino giant aim to produce themselves.
5G devices from Samsung
On the other hand, Samsung has already released two 5G-capable handsets – the Samsung Galaxy S10 5G and the Samsung Galaxy Note 10 Plus 5G – both of which are available in Australia both outright and with carrier plans.
Telstra 5G plans
Right now, Telstra has a bit of an advantage in the world of 5G plans, launching ahead of Optus and to much greater fanfare. In fact, right now, you can't sign up to a new Telstra plan without getting some form of 5G connectivity.
Currently, Telstra is offering four different plans – Small, Medium, Large and Extra Large. The Small and Medium plans offer 15GB and 60GB of data respectively and both come with access to the 5G network on a trial basis (which means you'll need to start paying for it if you want to use it after June 30, 2020).
The Large and Extra Large plans offer 100GB and 150GB of data respectively and include full 5G network access, even after June 30, 2020.
Telstra 5G coverage
As Telstra's 5G trial period is live, coverage of the future-ready network continues to grow. At present, there are only 10 cities and regions that have 5G network coverage – Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra, Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth, Hobart, Launceston, Gold Coast, Toowoomba.
It's worth noting that, while these cities do have some degree of 5G coverage, it doesn't account for the entire region. For an up-to-date map of where you can and can't get coverage, check out Telstra's dedicated page.
In our own testing, we found that download speeds on the fringes of these 5G coverage zones were actually considerably worse off when compared to the 4G signal attained just outside of the zones.
It is still very much in its infancy – more-so than Telstra's at this stage – but 165 sites are said to have been built and Optus claims that it will reach the 1,000 mark by March 2020 (it previously aimed for 1,200 but has since adjusted that benchmark).
As for coverage, you can check out the finer details on the official Optus 5G page, but despite having many regions in a number of cities live, the coverage map shows a rather patchy signal.
We expect the rollout will follow a similar pattern to Telstra's current coverage, with the select few areas that currently have the new network slowly expanding over the following months.
Nintendo's Switch Lite may have only been released less than a fortnight ago, but it appears the company is already prepping an updated model, according to new FCC filing spotted by Digital Trends.
The new filing sports the identification number BKEHDH002 (the original Switch Lite's ID number was BKEHDH001), suggesting a minor update rather than a drastic redesign.
The name 'Joy-Con drift' has been applied to an issue which sees the Switch analog sticks continue to register movement, even when sitting idly in a neutral position.
Originally, the drifting issue was thought to only affect the original Switch console's detachable Joy-Cons, but users are now reporting that the Switch Lite's built-in analog sticks have the same problem.
While the FCC filing doesn't explicitly state that Nintendo is addressing the Joy-Con drift issue, it's hard think of any other reason why the company would be thinking about hardware revisions this soon after the Switch Lite's release.
In the meantime, Switch Lite users affected by Joy-Con drift can opt for one of these matching third party controllers – even if they do lack thumbsticks.
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