You know that we are really into nicely shot video ads and super cool smartphones. And we struck gold on both counts with that clip we just stumbled upon.

It’s a Nokia N9 TV advert for the Chinese market, featuring Fan Bingbing, which is reportedly one of the most popular actresses in China. The 2:22 minutes of dramatic black and white footage certainly make for one of the most impressive video commercials we have seen. Read more »

Apple made such a big deal of the iPhone 4S voice assistant, Siri that it was bound to attract the hacker’s attention. And, sure enough, the protocol of the service was cracked open we have most of the Siri mysteries revealed.

A group of hackers set up a proxy server and made the iPhone 4S send its Siri traffic through it to the Apple servers. That way they could monitor what gets sent and received and could see what was going on under the hood. Read more »

The HTC Rezound is packing a reasonable 1620 mAh battery, but with LTE connectivity and a 4.3″ HD screen reasonable is not always enough. That’s why HTC released an extended 2750 mAh unit for their flagship droid, which should allow it to last for days on a single charge.

Of course, there is a price that needs to be paid and in this case we are not even talking about the outrageous $60 cost of the battery itself. The real sacrifice here is the added millimeters around the Rezound waistline. Read more »

The latest version of Nokia Maps, 3.08.203, has just graduated from Beta and is now being seeded to Symbian-running smartphones around the globe. You can get it right now from the software update tool on your device or via the Nokia Suite.

The new Maps app brings a beautiful little weather app to help you plan for the day by the hour or give you a handy five-day overview. It also comes with live traffic routing info in the Drive start screen, a cleaner UI and easier-to-read search results. Read more »

It’s episode three of our new battery test and we have the Samsung Galaxy Note starring this time. The phoneblet has a 2500 mAh battery, which is much larger than that of the average smartphone, but it also has a very power-hungry 5.3″ screen.

As a direct result, the Samsung Galaxy Note’s performance in our test was quite unusual. While it got a monstrous score on the telephony part, its web browsing endurance were quite disappointing. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Read more »

Free app of the day is one of the best parts of the Amazon appstore and today it offers one of the best bargains in its history. QuickOffice Pro is one of the most functional office applications around and thanks to Amazon, you can download it for free today.

Of course, most droids ship with a document-editor preinstalled nowadays, but not all of those are better than the QuickOffice Pro, so it could serve as a decent upgrade, too. There is a reason why the app normally costs a penny under $15. Read more »

The holiday shopping spree is already less than a month away, so it is almost certain that the Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime will be the only quad-core slate at the shelves for Christmas. It’s too late for new announcements now, so everyone looking for the ultimate performance will be putting this fella high on their shopping list.

That’s why we thought, you might enjoy a few live shots of the device and a quick video demonstrating its Tegra 3 chipset in action. The impressive benchmark results were a good start, but we all know it’s the real life performance that really counts. Read more »

Our Samsung Galaxy Note review unit arrived at the office and we’ve already started exploring its secrets. We’ll be doing our best to being out the review as quickly as possible, but before that arrives, here’s something to bring you up to speed.

As usual, we unboxed the new arrival on video and took a brief tour around its interface to give you an idea of what to expect. The Galaxy Note is quite an interesting device, going where very few have gone before him. Read more »

ARM has just unveiled the next gen Mali GPU, dubbed Mali-T658. The GPU is said to deliver desktop-class performance, offering 10 times the processing power of the Mali 400, which is used in the Samsung Galaxy S II.

According to ARM, the Mali-T658, should also offer four times the performance of the Mali-T604, which was previously announced, but is still to enter mass production. That’s the T-604 that is rumored to feature in the next generation Exynos chipsets and we might see in the Galaxy S III. Read more »

We are already done with testing the second smartphone to go through our new battery life test. The Apple iPhone 4S did slightly better than the Nokia N9 becoming the new device to beat.

As the blog regulars among you know, the new test involves three individual challenges (video playback, web browsing and voice calls) and a combined, general usage test. Read more »

“Exclusive” is really a word that the XDA community really can’t stand. That’s why it’s no surprise that the Nokia-developed Maps application that was supposed to bring extra value to the WP smartphones of the Finns is already freed and made available to anyone with an unlocked (as in dev-unlocked not as in SIM-free) WP device.

Some helpful members of the hacking community got their hands on the Nokia Maps XAP file and they were kind enough to share it with everyone. The XAP file is all that you need to install Nokia Maps on your non-Nokia WP smartphone, so the app exclusivity seal is really broken. Read more »

We just introduced our redesigned battery test and we thought the Nokia N9 would be a great device to try out the new course. The MeeGo flagship seemed to do quite well, though we’ll be able to confirm that only when the results of more devices come out.

Let’s start with the Nokia N9 performance in the three individual components of the test. Read more »

You’d be surprised to know, battery life tests are the most time consuming and the most criticized articles that we do. And in the same time, they are of high interest to the readers. The previous iteration of our battery test required that we have the phone around for at least a week after the reviewing routine is over. It included many different tasks, which took quite a lot of time and meant that the tested devices couldn’t be used for anything else for days in a row (so that the test is as controlled as possible).

And with so many tasks involved, many of you found it hard to compare our testing scenario to their typical usage. It was hard to persuade those of you that never give their smartphones a rest that it’s possible to use a phone for two days without recharging it. Read more »

That’s right fellas, there’s no need to wait any more. You can have an Android Ice Cream Sandwich firmware up and running on you Samsung Galaxy S II right now, thanks to the skillful developers behind the MIUI ROM.

The great news is this thing is blazing fast. The first benchmarks indicate that the performance has doubled compared to what the stock Galaxy S II has to offer. The Quadrant score is over 5,000, compared to 3,500 before the update (higher is better here). Read more »

We all know that the iPad is still the tablet to beat, but the kind of dominance it enjoys in the tablet market doesn’t cease to amaze us. According to the latest estimates, provided by the market analyst from Canaccord Genuity, the Apple iPad and iPad2 will account for 65% of all slates shipped in 2011.

Despite the increased competition, the iPad managed to stand its ground and Apple will complete the year as the largest tablet manufacturer by selling north of 39 million units. According to the estimates, Samsung will come in second, shipping just 5 million slates, whereas Asus will somewhat surprisingly catch third place with 3 million tablets shipped. Read more »