ALERT!

Global smartphone shipments witnessed a steep decline of 38 per cent Year on Year (YoY) in February 2020 in the wake of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak, according to market research firm Strategy Analytics.

It has been the biggest fall ever in the history of the worldwide smartphone market.

According to Linda Sui, Director at Strategy Analytics, “global smartphone shipments tumbled a huge 38 per cent annually from 99.2 million units in the month of February, 2019, to 61.8 million in February, 2020.”

“Smartphone demand collapsed in Asia last month, due to the Covid-19 outbreak, and this dragged down shipments across the world. Some Asian factories were unable to manufacture smartphones, while many consumers were unable or unwilling to visit retail stores and buy new devices,” Sui said in a statement.

A large chunk of of smartphone production happens in China and with the outbreak of the novel coronavirus, manufacturing in the country slowed to a halt in January which disrupted supply chains to many industries around the world, not limited to consumer electronics.

“February 2020 saw the biggest fall ever in the history of the worldwide smartphone market. Supply and demand of smartphones plunged in China, slumped across Asia, and slowed in the rest of the world. It is a period the smartphone industry will want to forget,” said Neil Mawston, Executive Director at Strategy Analytics.

The market research firm noted that despite tentative signs of recovery in China, it expects global smartphone shipments overall to remain weak throughout March 2020.

“The coronavirus scare has spread to Europe, North America and elsewhere, and hundreds of millions of affluent consumers are in lockdown, unable or unwilling to shop for new devices. The smartphone industry will have to work harder than ever to lift sales in the coming weeks, such as online flash sales or generous discounts on bundling with hot products like smartwatches,” added Yiwen Wu, Senior Analyst at Strategy Analytics

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Microsoft Chromium Edge’s development team has been quite consistent in adding new features to the web browser ever since its inception. After getting added last August to the Canary version of Microsoft Edge, Collections is now getting a functional improvement that makes it easier to group similar tabs for faster access.

With the latest build available in Microsoft Edge Canary and Dev channels, you can simply right-click a tab and choose the option “Add all tabs to a new collection”. In doing so, you will see all the current tabs being added to a collection that you can later access from the Collections pane present right next to the address bar

For those unaware, Collections is a feature in Microsoft Edge that lets you classify and organize similar web content so that you can quickly retrieve it. For instance, you may group all your research documents under a collection for accessing later.

When I configured Collections a couple of months back, I had to manually add pages one by one, which honestly was not quite a productive use of time. With this handy option, new users can skip the boring manual process and get right on board with Collections.

As I mentioned earlier, the feature is currently live just on the Canary & Dev channels and hence, you might not be seeing the feature in the stable version. With that said, Microsoft should hopefully be incorporating this neat addition when they release the next stable build of Edge.

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Play store app review times to get longer because of coronavirus??

》》With 👉[COVID-19 cases on the rise] in the US and around the world, Google on Monday detailed a series of steps to reduce the need for its employees to come to work to protect both its workforce and the their communities from an increased risk of exposure from the highly contagious disease that has already claimed the lives more almost 5,000 people around the world.

One of the biggest steps the company is taking includes the increased use of automation and AI algorithms to review content on its platforms, including YouTube and Play Store. However, the company is warning app developers and game publishers that “our automated systems may not always accurately classify content for removal, and human review of these decisions may be slower”.

In an official blog post on Monday, the company said: “Some users, advertisers, developers and publishers may experience delays in some support response times for non-critical services, which will now be supported primarily through our chat, email, and self-service channels”. According to Google, the precautionary steps, which it says are unavoidable “due to these unprecedented times”, may increase app review times to 7 days or longer.

Alongside Android developers, content creators on YouTube will also experience a marked slowdown in dispute resolutions because of the new policies because the company will also be using automated mechanism for content moderation on the platform. Thankfully, though, Google says that all its products and services will remain fully functional though the coronavirus crisis, and the increased dependence on automation will not impact end-users in any way.