It’s this time of the year again and we’re expecting Android 4.1 Jelly Bean to be unveiled tomorrow evening at the Google I/O keynote. If you had any doubts about it, Google is eager to dispel it.

Today they’ve put up one of their customary over-sized figures (or statues, if you will) to commemorate their next Android release.

Android Jelly Bean is supposedly not as major a release as Ice Cream Sandwich was. Nevertheless, it’s supposed to bring along a curious novelty. Read more »

You all remember the sleek hardware that Microsoft presented last week. Called Surface, the tablet has two versions – one with a Tegra 3 chipset, running Windows 8 RT, and another one with a proper x64 processor by Intel – that one running regular Windows 8 Pro. We’ve all been wondering what sort of pricing would the new tablets have.

Well, know we sorta know. According to “a close source to Microsoft”, the Tegra version will have a price tag of $599 and the Surface Pro will go for $999. Read more »

Microsoft unveiled some pretty major revamp of their mobile phone OS. They are not simply upgrading it, they are rather bringing their Windows 8 tech to mobile phones. Regular Windows computer developers will be able really easily to port their applications and games to the mobile platform.

We already have a pretty good coverage of the announcements at the event, but if you are interested, you might as well watch it yourself. Read more »

Imagine yourself walking into a McDonald’s and ordering a burger. The person, taking your order, would probably ask you whether you’d like fries or a drink with that. Predicting your client’s needs is one of the mainstays of great customer service. SatNav manufacturers can learn from this little gesture and perhaps, give it a nice thought to how it may relate to their business.

The past month or so I’ve traveled thousands of kilometers across Western Europe in various directions as part of my plan to get to know the place better. I’m still nowhere close to finishing my optimistic travel agenda, but as I go, I’m getting increasingly frustrated with SatNav devices and their unimaginative interfaces and designs. They are nowhere nearly as versatile as they are supposed to. And today’s tech has the means to enable much better functionality with just a bit more of creative thinking. Read more »

Sony announced the Xperia tipo and tipo dual this morning (among other things). And here come the first promo videos of the two mini droids.

The Xperia tipo is an entry-level smartphone but it comes with the latest Android ICS out of the box. Inside the Xperia tipo there is a 800Mhz Snapdragon chipset, 2.9GB of built-in memory and a 1500mAh battery. The screen is a smallish 3.2″ HVGA TFT unit and there’s a 3 megapixel snapper on the back. Here’s the promo video, showing the smartphone. Read more »

Apple WWDC is off to a good start and among the first announcements in the event’s keynote speech is the refresh of the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro lineups. Both lineups are getting the latest IvyBridge processors by Intel. And yes, the 17-inch MacBook Pro is getting axed off the production line.

The MacBook Airs now can be rigged with processors up to 2.0Ghz dual-core i7 (with Turbo boost up to 3.2Ghz). The RAM options go as high as 8GB and the SSD options reach the spectacular 500GB. That’s 500GB SSD. The read speeds for the SSD drives has gone up to 500Mbps too, so it’s double the one on the current SSD drives used in the Airs. Read more »

The Nokia Belle FP1 rolled out in April we already knew back then that Nokia is already working on the FP2. And while we’re hoping this may be getting closer to release we got to see the first screenshots of this new edition of the mobile OS. Naturally, as with most other Feature Packs, the update brings some new features to the now elderly software.

As you can imagine, there’s no detailed changelog so far, but the upgrades suggested by the leaked screenshots include a redesigned keyboard, a new gallery (with share button), a new music player, a new search button in home screen toolbar, and a new unlock screen (by swiping). Read more »

Broke your screen as soon as you got your shiny new Galaxy S III and you are looking to replace it yourself? Or you are into “gadget porn”? Whichever you are after, I’ve got you fixed-up with this new video, showing the complete disassembly and assembly process of a white Galaxy S III unit.

We’re no strangers to dismantling various electronic devices and we like watching other people teardown expensive gadgets too. In the case of the Galaxy S III, a detailed teardown was already published by iFixIt courtesy of Chipworks, but today we are looking at a video showing the intricate process of turning the latest Samsung flagship into bits and pieces. Read more »

At an event held today in the company’s San Francisco offices, the Google Maps team presented their latest and greatest achievements. The most important mobile news is that Android devices are getting offline access to GMaps. But there are other new things too – Google Earth and possibly Maps are getting a fly-by 3D view and we also saw the Google StreetView’s latest camera rig that’s meant to snap hiking trails and such, carried on… the back of a human operator.

The offline maps for Android bit is naturally of much higher interest to us than the other stuff, but you gotta know the new 3D view is also designed to be accessed on mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones. The new 3D view mode, similarly to the project by Bing Maps, uses image data captured by dedicated airplanes, which capture detailed images of metropolitan areas while flying over them in strict patterns thus providing greater degree of detail than was possible before. Read more »

Ten years ago sci-fi movie Minority Report, starring Tom Cruise, showed a mesmerizing new way of controlling software interfaces – by waving your hands and making gestures in the air in front of the monitor (a giant monitor wall in the case of the movie). Well, we’ve all seen Kinect and what it has done to home gaming but we are yet to witness the next revolution – commanding your run-of-the mill Windows or Mac OS computer with similar hand gestures in the air.

Well, meet this tiny USB gizmo, made by a company called Leap Motion, that promises to enable just that – and it’s just $70. They’ve got a great video to prove their point. Let’s hope that the real product delivers on the promises. Read more »

LG came out public today, detailing a new concept for their custom UI skin to be used on their upcoming IceCream Sandwich smartphones. The company issued a lengthy press release that makes a lot of promising and does little in terms of actual demonstrations.

The key new features include a QuickMemo integration throughout the UI and enhanced lockscreen functionality. As any smiling South Korean girl would tell you (ok, not on their Samsung shift, they won’t), these innovations would certainly provide a more upscale user experience.

LG actually have prepared a nice little list of all the changes they’ve implemented and I’m sure you’re dying to read it (if you are not here just for the girls). So here it is along with another shot of this nice looking gal. Read more »

Starting today, Google is introducing its latest gen search technology. Moving away from keyword indexing, the Knowledge graph makes a transition to a world of entities, nodes and relationships. As they put it, Google will now try and search for “things, not strings”.

In the past 2 years Google has been working on the information database for the project and not it’s gathered “more than 3.5 billion facts about and relationships between these different objects”. In simple words, Google will recognize ambiguous search strings by understanding they might mean several things and it will adjust your search results based on your choice of topic. Still sounds vague? Well, watch this video that will hopefully explain it better than me. Read more »

The LG Optimus 4X HD is expected next month but LG has already revealed its first promo video. The Optimus 4X HD is LG’s first quad-corer smartphone (it uses a Tegra 3 chipset with 1GB of RAM). We first met the device back the the MWC 2012.

The smartphone is centered around a 4.7-inch screen True HD IPS screen (also known as HD-IPS). It also comes with a 8 megapixel camera. Here’s the promo video… Read more »

As of today, the long-awaited Adobe CS6 suite is available for purchase online. The beta versions of some of the products have been around for some time but it’s time for the real thing with all the promised magic tricks. The Adobe Creative Suite 6 is one of the most major releases in recent times.

Photoshop CS6, for instance, brings about 60% more feature changes than CS5. Visually, there are over 1,900 icons that have been replaced, and the engineers have also tweaked alignment, cursors, buttons, layout and even grammar throughout the application. And there’s a lot more. Read more »

LG is stepping up its game with the announcement of a cloud storage service of its own. Unimaginatively called LG Cloud, what else, the new service is now available. The service will offer 50GB of free storage for the first six months.

Best of all, right from launch, LG Cloud comes with a desktop client (for Windows, at least). What’s also interesting is that the file stored in the LG Cloud will be accessible by LG SmartTVs too. Read more »