Motorola announces an addition to the budget-friendly Moto E smartphone series-- the E6, a 5.5-inch handset featuring a fairly basic design, if one offering a "water repellent" coating as well as Android Pie capabilities.

The E6 is smaller than last year's 5.7-inch E5, if with the same 1440 x 720 resolution, making the IPS LCD panel appear slightly sharper. The battery also sees a downgrade, being 3000mAh instead of 4000mAh, but it is actually removable. The processor is improved, being a Snapdragon 435 chip promising a 50% improvement over the Snapdragon 427 inside the E5, while RAM and storage remain identical at 2 and 16GB respectively.

Samsung starts mass production of what it says is the first 12Gb LPDDR5 mobile DRAM in the industry. Aimed at the premium smartphones of the future, the memory is optimised to enable 5G and AI features.

The announcement comes all of 5 months after Samsung started mass producing 12GB LPDDR4X memory, and just a month before it starts mass producing 12GB LPDDR5 packages combining eight of the 12Gb chips, in line with growing demand for higher performance and capacity from premium smartphone makers.

LG launches the G8S ThinQ-- a variant of the flagship G8 ThinQ promising "unique touches" popular with target consumers, such an improved camera with a wide field of view and continuous zoom capability.

The G8S retains the same triple-lens rear-facing camera setup as the G8. It features a 137-degree field of view, the widest in an LG smartphone yet, as well as continuous zoom, bokeh effects and stabilisation enhancements to video. The front-facing camera also promises improvements, since it uses IR and "3D point clouds" for more accurate face-based unlocking, even in the dark, as well as the simulation of studio lighting in selfies.

Samsung manages to complete a two-month redesign of the Galaxy Fold, Bloomberg reports, possibly allowing the S. Korean giant to start relaunch the much hyped foldable smartphone just in time for the holiday season.

Initially set for an April 2019 release, test versions of the Fold sent to multiple publications were hit by an embarrassing series of technical faults. One such issue is the result of users peeling off what looks like a regular plastic film, but is in actual fact a crucial display component. The latest version of the Fold seeks to bypass the issue by stretching the film to wrap around the entire display and flowing into the outer bezels, making it impossible to peel off by hand.