Possible Video Leak of Samsung Galaxy Z Flip; Huawei Outsells Apple in 2019; iPhone Q1 Shipments Down 10% Due to Coronavirus; Amazon Ring- Opt Out Of Police Partnerships

Over the weekend, a video leaked out that seems to show the upcoming Samsung Galaxy Z Flip being opened and closed. Businessinsider.com reports that the brief video was first posed by aTwitter user, @BenGeskin, yesterday. The Twitter account claimed it was the ‘first hands on video’ of the Z Flip. The clamshell type flip phone looks about like a large smartphone when open, and is a bit smaller than a wallet closed. The outside screen is really more of a tiny display of the time, etc…not really capable of displaying more than a line or two of text. The inside screen looks beautiful, and even when the user puts a thumb on the area of the hinge to close it, you don’t really see a seam or wrinkles. As we reported last week, the Z Flip will apparently be priced at a wallet deflating $1400.

Huawei was able to outsell Apple in 2019 and vault into second place in the global smartphone race. According to arstechnica.com, Huawei has 16-17% annual growth right now. Samsung is still #1 with 20% of the market, with Huawei now at 16%, Apple at 13%, and Xiaomi and Oppo holding about 8% each. Huawei has primarily made inroads in their home market of China…which has been good for them, since the US Huawei export ban means US companies can’t do business with them right now, effectively collapsing their US market.

Well known analyst Ming-Chi Kuo says to look for iPhone shipments to fall 10% in the 1st quarter, due to coronavirus. 9to5mac.com says Kuo also says the 2nd quarter production might be iffy as well. Kuo looks for 36-40 million iPhones this quarter. If second quarter is actually affected, it could crimp the rollout of the smaller iPhone, known right now as the SE 2 or iPhone 9…and could even impact production ramp-up for the iPhone 11 models due out in September. The tariffs in addition to lesser demand in China saw total smartphone shipments to that country down as much as 60% year over year over the New Year holiday period.

More and more people have gotten leery about the surveillance society, and particularly since last year, it was uncovered that Amazon had cut deals with numerous law enforcement agencies to allow access to your Ring doorbell videos. According to mashable.com, you will now be able to opt out of all video request notifications from law enforcement, add or remove shared users from your account, and see your two factor authentication settings. This has been more of an issue with the Ring than some others, since all Ring video is uploaded to the cloud. I purposely bought a different brand that only saves locally and on your phone, but has no cloud storage (or annual fee for same!) In the new Ring update, you will be able to see an ‘Active Law Enforcement Map’ clarifying which local institutions are part of the Neighbor Portal network. The control center update should be rolling out on both iOS and Android in the next few days.

I’m Clark Reid