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Why you might want to wait until 2017 to buy an Android smartphone

Next year’s Android smartphones will be really fast

If you’re looking at buying a high end Android smartphone, you might want to hold off until next year. That’s because Qualcomm just announced its new, top of the line mobile chip, the Snapdragon 835. The new design promises to be 27 percent faster while using 40 percent less battery. It will also feature Qualcomm’s Quick Charge 4.0 technology that can get you a whopping five hours of use from just five minutes of charging.

The Snapdragon 835 will be built in collaboration with Samsung, so there’s a pretty good chance it’ll be inside Samsung’s Galaxy S8 which theoretically launches in March 2017. Also look for the new chip in new offerings from LG and HTC.

Apple’s OLED iPhone woes

The killer new feature on the iPhone 8 is rumored to be an edge to edge OLED screen. However, according to Bloomberg, the displays may be in short supply. The new OLED panels are both thinner and deliver a more vibrant picture, but they’re also more difficult to make. Samsung is thought to be the exclusive supplier for these edge to edge OLED display panels and unfortunately their ability to make them is reportedly constrained.

But, don’t fear iPhone fans, other manufacturers like LG, and Sharp could be tapped to make displays for next year’s smartphone.

Fake Facebook news is still news

Fake news is still news thanks to more digging into how Facebook has been overrun by bogus articles. In the last 3 months of the presidential election, Partisan clickbait headlines drew more shares and likes on the social network than real news stories, according to Buzzfeed. False headlines like “Hillary sold weapons to ISIS” were actually seen by more people than legitimate, real news. To be fair to Facebook, they didn’t write the headlines, but they created the mess.

Websites looking to cash in on the run-up to the election and push political agendas took advantage of Facebook’s social algorithms. This puts Mark Zuckerberg in a difficult position. Maybe they shouldn’t have disbanded their news curation department after all.

Greg Nibler
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Greg has worked as a Host, Producer, and Writer in radio and television since the early 2000s, working for such companies as…
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