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Buying an iPad? Check out its most honest review yet first

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If you are reading this standing in line in front of the Apple Store in your country of residence it’s probably too late, but if you have decided to wait a few days and see if the new iPad is worth your hard-earned cash by all means see this first. It’s the first truly honest review of the Apple latest slate.

Okay, we might have oversold it a bit. What we actually have here is a pretty funny video that’s hardly worth much in terms of consumer advice, but is certainly worth checking out. Read more »

New Aakash 2 tablet comes with better specs and screen, retains $40 price tag

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Remember the Indian government’s project to put a tablet in the hands of every student? Well it seems to be progressing rather well and what we are seeing here is the second version of the ultra-cheap slate. The new Aakash slate is based on the Ubislate 7+ and brings a healthy improvement in specs without upping the price and represents a huge leap forward, just three months after the first version.

Most importantly, the 7″ resistive screen has been replaced by a capacitive one and the tablet got a proper CPU architecture – Cortex-A8. Okay, it’s an old proper architecture and at 700 MHz frequency it will hardly be blazing fast, but that’s more than you can demand from a $40 device. Read more »

Native panorama app for Lumia 800 just around the corner

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The Nokia Lumia 800 has one of the most solid cameras in the Windows Phone realm (or at least until the HTC Titan II comes out). However, this doesn’t mean Nokia is done improving it or has already moved on – in fact, the company just confirmed that there’s a cool new feature coming up for it.

The news came from the personal Twitter account of Damian Dinning – the head of the Nokia camera division. Apparently, the native panorama app is already on its way and we can probably count on it coming with the next software update. Read more »

Angry birds fly straight into F1 – check out the new helmet of Heikki Kovalainen

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The Formula 1 season is just about the start and there will be a surprising new presence on the grid this year. We are talking the title that became a synonym for mobile gaming, Angry Birds, which will appear on the helmet of Heikki Kovalainen.

Rovio managed to strike a deal with their compatriot and Caterham driver and his helmet was branded with the immensely popular game. It’s unclear if the deal will only last for a few races or the whole season, as the submitted official image of Kovailainen’s helmet has no Angry birds on it. Read more »

Nokia tablet project confirmed by design chief

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Prepare to act surprised. The Nokia head designer Marko Ahtisaari reportedly confirmed that his company is working on a tablet. What’s more, Mr. Ahtisaari says that he has dedicated no less than a third of his working time to the project in order to make the device stand out in the crowd.

Reuters reports that Nokia still hasn’t joined the tablet party due to the company’s wish to offer a product that’s easy to differentiate. Read more »

Toshiba unveils 95MB/s EXCERIA SD cards, claims “fastest in the world” title

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Toshiba’s latest EXCERIA SD cards are not just growing in extra capacity. Toshiba just introduced its new lineup of SD cards and is promising to deliver some blazing fast performance. The new EXCERIA cards come in three different flavors – Type 1, Type 2 and Type HD.

The Toshiba EXCERIA Type 1 SD cards will offer a capacity of 8GB, 16GB or 32GB, read speeds of up to 95MB/s and write speeds of up to 90MB/s. On paper, that makes them the fastest SD cards we have seen so far, but you’d need an UHS-I supporting host to get them to fulfill their potential. Read more »

Sony Xperia sola official video ad demonstrates the hover touch

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Yesterday Sony unveiled the Xperia sola – one of the most interesting mid-range droids that we have seen for a long time. Featuring the new hover touch technology (we only saw that on the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1, previously) and a cool distinctive design, the Xperia sola has arguably the best potential of all smartphones in the company lineup.

We are now giving you the official Sony promo video for the Xperia sola, which takes a closer look at the hover touch and a few of the other highlights of the smartphone. Read more »

15-inch MacBook Air coming next month?

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Here’s a particularly exciting rumor for the ultrabook fans out there. The MacBook Air, which is where the whole ultra-light laptop revolution started, might be getting a 15″ version next month.

The spicy info comes from an unnamed vendor, who demonstrated his inability to keep a secret at a UK accessories expo held in London on Tuesday. Normally, we wouldn’t advise you to believe such sources, but the rumor aligns nicely with previous mentions of a 15″ MacBook Air from November. Read more »

Kindle Fire steals some market share, but iPad is still king of tablets in Q4, IDC reports

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The analysts from IDC just published their report on the global tablet market in the last quarter of last year and it appears that the picture was pretty much what we saw throughout 2011. Android is improving rapidly, but Apple’s iOS is still the king of the hill, accounting for more than half of all sales.

Apple managed to ship 15.4 million units in Q4 of last year, which secured them a market share of 54.7% (down from 61.5% in Q3). The best performer of the quarter was obviously the Amazon Kindle Fire, which got a share of 16.8% even though it was only on sale for a month and a half. Read more »

Super High Aperture: the technology that made the iPad retina display possible

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Addicted to that ultra-high res screen of the new iPad, aren’t you? Well here’s a bit more information about the underlying technology that enabled Apple to quadruple the resolution of its slate.

You see the main problem with high pixel densities is that when things get cramped up, signals can get crossed, which leads to degradation in image quality – most notably in terms of color accuracy and sharpness. So you actually turn out with a poorer screen. So how did Apple went about solving this engineering challenge? Read more »

Nokia to release a Snapdragon-powered 10″ Windows 8 tablet in Q4

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We’ve heard so many rumors of Nokia jumping on the tablet bandwagon that we are not sure what to believe anymore, but this latest bit sound rather plausible. The Finns are reportedly working on a 10″ slate running Windows 8, which should arrive to the market by the end of the year.

The Nokia tablet will be powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 chipset, featuring a couple of Krait CPU cores. The production of the device itself will be outsourced to the Taiwanese company Compal Electronics and initial volumes are said to be the rather modest 200,000 units. Read more »

Asus Padfone to cost 700 pounds in the UK, keyboard dock and tablet included

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Back at CES, Asus unveiled its $250 quad-core Memo tablet and got everyone quite excited by the possibility to have a powerful tablet with a proper OS on the cheap. Then came the cold shower and the news that the Memo won’t be available in the UK, as Asus believes the Padfone will be better suited to that market.

Those led some of us to believe that the Asus Padfone price will be at least close to what the Memo will be going for, but here comes another disappointment. According to reports, based on insider information, the Padfone will hit British stores costing £699.98. Read more »

LG Rumor Reflex featurephone with QWERTY keyboard for Sprint and Boost Mobile unveiled

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We were almost convinced that the featurephone messenger class of devices is now gone for good, but here comes LG to prove us wrong. The company just announced its Rumor Reflex side-slider for Sprint and Boost Mobile, carrying the modest price tag of $79.99 off contract.

The LG Rumor Reflex is built around a 3″ WQVGA LCD and packs GPS connectivity, a 2 megapixel camera and a microSD card slot for expanding the (unknown) internal memory. It will go on sale in two days in the titanium grey color you see in the picture above. Read more »

Samsung Galaxy Tab 11.6 with a 2560 x 1600 pixel screen coming tomorrow?

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There’s a particularly juicy rumor for you – we might see the official announcement of the Samsung Galaxy Tab 11.6 slate tomorrow. The tablet, which is said to feature an 11.6″ LCD with the insanely sounding resolution of 2560 x 1600 pixels might be unveiled at the SXSW event in Austin, Texas.

The rumor is based on an unnamed source close to the matter, who confirmed to Pocket-lint that the Samsung Galaxy Tab 11.6 will be announced at an even in Texas. The Korean company mentioned earlier that it will be making a “special announcement” at the event tomorrow and the rest is simply a matter of connecting the dots. Read more »

iOS 5.1 jailbreak already available, only non-A5 iDevices supported for now

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We’ve got some good news for those of your packing an iDevice with a non-A5 chipset. The iPhone Dev Team has updated redsn0w tool to support the newly released iOS 5.1, so you can update your iPhone 4, iPad (original one), iPhone 3GS without losing the full access to your system fails.

Sadly, that’s a tethered jailbreak, so you will need a computer every time you restart your iOS 5.1 iDevice, but we guess that’s just the price you have to pay for enjoying the latest and greatest from the Cupertino software developers right away. Read more »