Eager to have a piece of the quad-core Tegra 3 tablet action, are we? In that case you’d be glad to know that you can book your Asus Transformer Prime by pre-ordering it through the company’s website right now.

The offer only applies to residents of Canada and US, for now as the pre-orders aren’t recorded by Asus themselves, but by some of their sales partners. Prices start at $499, which buys you a 32GB version of the slate. Read more »

Our LG Optimus 2X got its Android 2.3.4 update at the start of this month and we’ve playing with it ever since. And since the LG former flagship is once again becoming a smartphone many are considering (this time due to the lower price, not top functionality), we thought we might give you a rundown of the improvements we noticed.

The truth is, Gingerbread is by far not as major an update as Froyo was and the Optimus 2X doesn’t feel like a completely different phone after you get it – the overall experience is similar. However, you are free to disagree with us if the updated bits and pieces were just the one bothering you. Read more »

We’ve got the battery tests results of yet another smartphone to share with you. The HTC Sensation XL will try and protect the honor of the company after the rather disappointing performance of the HTC Radar yesterday.

If you are just looking at the specs, you wouldn’t back the Sensation XL to do too greatly. A 1600 mAh battery and a 4.7″ LCD seemingly put the XL at a disadvantage, but maybe it has an ace up its sleeves. Read more »

Apple has scored a point in their ongoing court match against HTC. The US International Trade Commission has ruled that the Cupertino-based company doesn’t infringe any of the HTC-owned patents.

Earlier, ITC declared that Apple was, in fact, violating some of the patents that HTC acquired with its purchase of S3 Graphics. However, it was OS X, rather than iOS, which was found in the wrong and Apple has obviously done enough to fix that. Read more »

You may have already forgotten all about the HTC HD2, but the hacking community clearly hasn’t. The Windows Mobile (that’s BC in Microsoft speak) smartphone got its lifetime extended way beyond what its manufacturer expected thanks to the efforts of some indie developers, who keep porting the latest versions of Android to it.

Now, the HTC HD2 is even ready to run the latest Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, long before most Android smartphones can do so. An HD2 ROM based on the AOSP release of Ice Cream Sandwich is available for download and you can try it right now. Read more »

The iPhone 4S has just become the second most popular cameraphone among Flickr users. Hardly a shocker, we can imagine as its predecessor is still the most popular camera on Flickr and that the 4S is miles ahead of it in terms of photo capabilities.

It only took just over a month for the iPhone 4S to go that far, so we can imagine it will be overtaking the iPhone 4 in no time. The iPhone 4S, which we found to be the most capable 8MP smartphone currently around, already has almost half the user base of the iPhone 4, so it’s probably just a Christmas shopping spree away from overtaking it. Read more »

So far we’ve put five smartphones through our new battery test, but the HTC Radar is the first to fight under the WP flag. The Mango-running smartphone will give us the first indication on how the Microsoft platform fares against its competitors in terms of power efficiency.

The HTC Radar comes with a 1520 mAh battery and a 3.8″ LCD screen, so it had a reasonable fighting chance. In fact it is one of the most favorable battery-to-screen-estate ratios we’ve seen so far in our test. Read more »

Tablets are what everyone wants for Christmas and several millions are bound to fly off the shelves in the following month and a half. RIM obviously wants to make sure that their PlayBook will get a proper share of the fun and is even willing to cut down on its profits to achieve it.

The Canadian company just announced that its PlayBook slate will be available for $199 for a limited time in selected US and Canada retailers. That’s certainly makes the PlayBook one of the bargains of the season, even if you consider the limited number of apps available for the QNX-based platform. Read more »

We thought Samsung left the GPS issues behind after they replaced the original Galaxy S as their flagship device, but it turns out that the Galaxy S II has some issues with its GPS connectivity, too. It appears that the units distributed by Vodafone have a faulty GPS configuration file, which prevents them from acquiring satellite lock quickly.

There are several lengthy threads in the Vodafone support forums dedicated to the issue, but the carrier is still unable to come up with a solution. Even the Android 2.3.5 update, which was released just a few weeks ago didn’t address the faulty file. Read more »

True, you have seen us put the Samsung Galaxy S II battery thought its paces before, but we thought you might be interested to see how it does over our new testing course. So here goes the Samsung Galaxy S II battery life test, revisited.

The Android smartphone comes with a 1650 mAh battery and a pretty large 4.3″ screen. Judging by those specs alone, we probably shouldn’t expect the Galaxy S II to top our charts, but the power-efficient Super AMOLED Plus might help it put in a decent performance. Plus, its latest Android update is said to improve battery performance, so who knows. Read more »

If you just bought a Nokia Lumia 800, you might want to check this one out. The Finnish company released a series of photos depicting the different stages of the making of the smartphone.

The photo story isn’t focusing so much on the process of adding the different bits and pieces together to create a smartphone, but more on what happens next. There are some cool photos of white glove-wearing Nokia employees who put the assembled Lumia 800 through a few tests to make sure everything’s working fine. Read more »

What you see here is one of the coolest USB sticks we’ve ever come across. Called Cotton Candy, it carries a fully functional chipset running the Android operating system inside it. All it needs is a USB cable to draw power and an HDMI cable to connect to a screen of some sort.

Thanks to this creation of the Norwegians from FXI technologies, you can turn any available screen into an Android device. Your TV and computer monitor can grow brains of their own with this stick. Read more »

Yet another smartphone dared to try its capabilities in our new battery test. The Sony Ericsson Xperia Pro is here and, knowing how many fans the manufacturer has, we are sure many will be interested to know how it did.

The Sony Ericsson battery has 1500 mAh of capacity, which is not quite as impressive as what the Galaxy Note (the only other droid we’ve tested so far) had to offer. It is important to note however, that the device has a screen more than two times smaller than that of the Samsung phablet, so we were pretty interested to see the results. Read more »

The Digital Living Network Alliance announced that it has incorporated the Wi-Fi Direct technology into the DLNA standard, making ad-hoc streaming of your multimedia content a piece of cake.

In effect this means that soon you will be able to stream content from one of your DLNA devices to another without the trouble of setting up a Wi-Fi network. It will work in much the same way Bluetooth does nowadays, which is about as convenient as we can imagine. Read more »

We just got word on what might be the next big thing in the tablet world. Or rather things, as the leak involves two Android-running slates. Acer Iconia Tab A701 and Iconia Tab A700 are a couple of monster devices running on the Tegra 3 chipset, featuring a quad-core Cortex-A9 CPU.

Yet we feel that the displays of the two slates will be what proves to be their key selling point. We are talking 1920 x 1200 pixel resolution here. That’s FullHD in 16:10 aspect, which is unprecedented in the tablet world. Read more »