Acer Announces Liquid Jade Primo, Flagship Windows 10 Mobile

Today, Acer is announcing the Liquid Jade Primo smartphone. This device is supposed to be their flagship smartphone running Windows 10 Mobile. This means the latest SoC, Snapdragon 808, a 5.5” FHD AMOLED display, a 21MP f/2.2 rear camera, 8MP front-facing camera, 3GB of RAM, 32GB of internal storage, and 802.11ac MIMO WiFi. In order to better support Continuum, the Liquid Jade Primo also supports USB-C and can connect an external monitor, keyboard, and mouse for enhanced productivity.

Acer indicates that the antennas are integrated into the back cover with laser direct structuring, which is an industry standard method for placing antennas in a back cover. The display is also said to have on-cell touch, which is standard for all SAMOLED displays. The Liquid Jade Primo also has some cooling system without much detail in the press release, but it wouldn’t be a big surprise to discover either the use of heat pipes and/or thermal paste to help disperse heat.

Pricing for the Liquid Jade Primo is currently unknown, but the specs are fairly high end so it’ll be interesting to see if Acer will try to undercut the Lumia 950 and 950 XL on price.

Windows 10 Mobile Update For Older Lumias Pushed To 2016

Earlier this year Microsoft stated that their plan was to begin the roll out of Windows 10 Mobile to existing Lumia devices in December. With December being half over by this point, the fact that the update would probably be pushed to 2016 was something of an unofficial but accepted truth. Today Microsoft has made that truly official. The company said the following in a statement to ZDNet:

“This November we introduced Windows 10 to phones including brand new features such as Continuum and Universal Windows Apps with the introduction of the Lumia 950 and 950 XL. The Windows 10 Mobile upgrade will begin rolling out early next year to select existing Windows 8 and 8.1 phones.”

It’s not made explicitly clear why the update has been delayed, as the OS is already available on Microsoft’s recently launched Lumia 950 and 950 XL. From my experience with the beta/developer releases of the OS that Microsoft has made available, it’s entirely possible that they still need to work on ironing out bugs and improving performance. Many reviews of the new Lumia phones have a similar sentiment, and with many of the older Lumia devices running less capable hardware from Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 400 series than the 950 and 950 XL, it wouldn’t be such a bad thing to have the update delayed to ensure it doesn’t cripple performance on those phones.

At this time it’s also not known how many devices will receive the update to Windows 10 Mobile. Microsoft has stated that phones will need 8GB of NAND, but it’s not clear if there are other hardware requirements. Given that the Lumia 550 just launched with Snapdragon 210 and runs Windows 10 Mobile, I would hope that Microsoft plans to update a significant number of existing devices.

Apple and UnionPay Will Bring Apple Pay To China In Early 2016

Today Apple and China UnionPay announced plans to bring support for Apple Pay to China by the beginning of 2016. China UnionPay is the only bank card organization in China, and so partnering with them was essential to Apple expanding the Apple Pay service to the country. Apple Pay is Apple’s mobile payment service that utilizes NFC and either an iPhone or an Apple Watch to make mobile payments at merchants that have the necessary payment terminals to support contactless payments.

At launch, Apple Pay will be available on 15 of China’s leading banks. It’s not specified exactly which banks have signed on for the original roll out, but if the service expands in the way it has in the United States that number will end up growing fairly quickly. The launch of the service will be subject to approvals by Chinese regulators, which could cause delays to Apple’s planned roll out timeline. With China UnionPay having issued bank cards for hundreds of millions of customers, the expansion to China could potentially provide a big boost to the number of users using the service. The expansion into China also makes sense when one considers Apple’s recent attempts to gain a better foothold in the Chinese market.

As for Apple Pay in general, the launch of Apple Pay in China will mark the fifth expansion of the service. It originally launched exclusively in the United States before expanding to the United Kingdom, and it was recently introduced in Australia and Canada through a partnership with American Express.