Star Wars smartphones coming to Japan

Japan, telecommunications giant SoftBank is marking the release of Rogue One: A Star Wars story by launching two Star Wars themed smartphone that lets you choose your Force allegiance. Made by Sharp the Star Wars smartphone will be available in Dark and Light side editions.

The Star Wars smartphone will run Android Marshmallow and will pack Star Wars goodies on top of that:

• Live wallpapers that make the phone look like an X-Wing or TIE fighter cockpit
• Excessive Android 6.0 skin in both light and dark side themes
• Five exclusive metal figurines taken from Rogue One
• A Star Wars Movie Player app that lets you watch The Force Awakens until the year 2020
• Pre-loaded Star Wars: Force Collection card game with a code for a gold card pack ticket
• Star Wars-themed alarm clock app
• Star Wars emoji
• Star Wars ringtone

As far as specs are concerned, the Star Wars phone will have 5.3-inch Full HD display, Snapdragon 820 processor, 3GB RAM, 32GB inbuilt storage, microSD card slot, 4G LTE and 3000mAh battery. The camera unit is 22.6MP on the rear and 5MP on the front. It also features a TV tuner card and are IPX5, IPX8 certified, making it resistant to water and dust.

The Star Wars smartphones Dark and Light side editions are already up for pre-order in Japan, and will be available via SoftBank on December 2. Unfortunately, it is highly unlikely that the phone gets an international release. 

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Japan's SoftBank to buy chipmaker ARM for $32 billion

Japan based internet and telecommunications company SoftBank has agreed to buy popular UK-based chip design maker ARM Holdings for about 24 billion pounds ($32 billion), a deal which is touted to be the largest ever acquisition of a European tech firm.

ARM dominates the smartphone market, with its lineup of chips that are used in 95 percent of the smartphones to date. Some of the notable clients include Samsung, Apple and Huawei. The number of devices running ARM-designed hardware crossed 60 billion last year. 

The firm, unlike Intel, does not manufacture its own processors, instead licenses the IP for its designs to manufacturers such as Qualcomm, Samsung, Huawei, NVIDIA, Apple and others, so that they design their own products. For instance Samsung licenses Cortex processor or chip architecture from ARM to design their own CPU like the Exynos M1 CPU on Exynos 8890 SoC, which is utilized by Galaxy S7.

SoftBank is a major investor in the tech segment, and some of the notable companies that it acquired stake include U.S carrier Sprint, China's e-commerce giant Alibaba, India's e-commerce space Snapdeal and rid aggregator Ola Cabs among others.

SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son said that ARM would function as an independent business, with an intention to double the number of employees employed by ARM in the UK over the next five years. He added "ARM will be an excellent strategic fit with the Softbank group as we invest to capture the very significant opportunities provided by the internet of things"

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