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Honor, the budget offshoot of Chinese hardware giant Huawei, is releasing another surprisingly decent budget-minded smartphone to Europe and the US.

The Honor 6X, which was released in China in late 2016, features a 5.5-inch 1080p screen, speedy octa-core Kirin 655 SoC, and a dual-camera system for sharper pictures. And while that might not sound too exciting on paper—and despite Honor's teeth-gritting claim that the Honor 6X "is the smartphone for Internet-minded millennials"—those are impressive specs for a phone that costs a mere £225/$250. That's nearly half the price of a OnePlus 3T.

Even better, Honor hasn't skimped on the rest of the phone to hit that price point. Alongside the Kirin 655 SoC—which features four A53 cores running at 2.1GHz and four running at 1.7GHz—there's 3GB or 4GB of RAM, 32GB or 64GB of storage with microSD expansion, and a hefty 3340mAh battery that Honor claims will last as much as two days without a charge. Should users run short on power, there's 5V/2A fast charging support too.

(credit: Aurich Lawson)

As of January 1, the delivery of ransomware is illegal in California thanks to Senate Bill 1137 going into effect. State prosecutors had previously brought such cases under existing extortion statutes.

The new law was signed in September 2016, but it did not take effect until earlier this week in America's most populous state. The maximum penalty for ransomware usage will be four years in state prison. Wyoming became the first state to pass a similar statute in 2014.

“This legislation provides prosecutors the clarity they need to charge and convict perpetrators of ransomware,” Sen. Bob Hertzberg (D-Van Nuys) said in a statement in September 2016. “Unfortunately, we’ve seen a dramatic increase in the use of ransomware. This bill treats this crime, which is essentially an electronic stickup, with the seriousness it deserves.”

Enlarge / The highly anticipated Beyond Good & Evil 2 (shown here in concept art) could be a Nintendo Switch timed exclusive, according to a recent report.

As we get closer and closer to Nintendo's January 12 announcement of additional Nintendo Switch details—and an expected March launch for the hybrid portable/home console—we're starting to get more information on what kind of support the system might get from third-party developers.

The most interesting tidbit comes from Laura Kate Dale, who's come through with a number of reliable Nintendo Switch leaks in the recent past. Dale's recent tweets suggest Ubisoft's long-anticipated Beyond Good & Evil 2 will reportedly be "exclusive to Switch for 12 months," and the game will come to Xbox One, PS4, and PC only after that time. That information should be confirmed at Nintendo's January reveal, according to Dale.

Ubisoft has been one of the biggest proponents of the Switch, with the company's EMEA director, Alain Corre, telling Japanese magazine Famitsu in November that Ubisoft has "big expectations" and was planning "a wide variety of software" for the system. Ubisoft has been a big backer of recent Nintendo systems, too; the inventive Rabbids series and best-selling Just Dance both got their start on the Wii, after all.

Enlarge / On the left, Qualcomm Vice President for Product Management Keith Kressin. On the right, Samsung Senior Vice President for Foundry Marketing Ben Suh. In their hands, the ever-so-tiny Snapdragon 835 processors. (credit: Qualcomm)

When Qualcomm and Samsung together announced the existence of the Snapdragon 835 in November, they were a little light on details. The chip is a derivative of the Snapdragon 820 and 821 found in phones today, built on Samsung's new 10nm manufacturing process. At the time, the companies claimed that this would result in 27 percent more performance or 40 percent less power.

In a new announcement leaked by Evan Blass, we learn a little more about Qualcomm's next systems-on-chips. That "or" is now an "and," with the chip designer saying that the Samsung 10nm process has enabled a 30 percent size reduction of the 3-billion-transistor chip to use 40 percent less power and as much as 27 percent more performance. The CPU carries the Kryo 280 branding, and the GPU is an Adreno 540 (compared to the 530 in the Snapdragon 820). It's all combined with a Hexagon digital signal processor and Spectra 180 image processor.

Qualcomm says that the new GPU is 25 percent faster at 3D graphics, and it supports "60 times more display colors," suggesting support for 10-bit per channel HDR graphics. Keen to ride the virtual and augmented reality bandwagons, the company is claiming a 20 percent reduction in motion tracking latency, along with support for six degrees of freedom positioning.