As we continue the hard work on the Nokia N9 review we are able to bring you yet another interesting tidbit about the smartphone in advance. We just completed the video playback endurance test of the MeeGo flagship and we were pretty impressed by its performance.

The Nokia N9 managed good 8 hours and 40 minutes of video playback before its battery went from full to 10%. That’s a pretty great achievement, which compares favorably to every other smartphone we’ve put to the same test, but the iPhone 4. Check out the complete rankings Read more »

Qualcomm has released the specifications of its upcoming Snapdragon S4 chipset, which will be the first in the mobile world to be using 28nm process technology. That would give it a substantial advantage in power-efficiency and processing power over its competitors.

The Snapdragon S4 chipset will be packing either two or four brand new Krait cores, which have been custom designed by Qualcomm and should bring a 60% improvement over the currently used Scorpion processors at the same clock speed. However, Qualcomm has obviously found 60% to be an insufficient upgrade and it will be clocking those cores from 1.5GHz to the mind-blowing 2.5GHz. Read more »

As you probably know, we’ve had the Nokia N9 in our office for a few days and we are hard at work to unveil every secret it has. And one of the first findings we had was that the FWVGA AMOLED of the MeeGo flagship is using a PenTile matrix, instead of a regular RGB one.

It’s the same kind of matrix that we saw with Samsung’s first-gen Super AMOLEDs, where each pixel is composed of two subpixels rather than three. This gives less room for sub-pixel rendering and reduces the effective resolution, when displaying super fine detail. Read more »

As Symbian Belle gets ready to start rolling to Symbian handsets near you, Nokia has released another story in its blog about the latest update of the platform. The company got the Belle designers to talk about the background of their creation in this nice 4-minute video.

So if you want to know more about the action going on behind the scenes here’s your chance. You will also learn what Nokia’s top priorities when creating Touch UIs are and what makes great user experience according to the Finns’ R&D team. Read more »

NFC is finally starting to gain popularity among smartphones and cool applications for it were bound to start popping up sooner rather than later. RIM itself stepped on stage to kick off the NFC party on BlackBerry OS by introducing the BlackBerry Tag.

BlackBerry Tag uses the NFC radios in the recently launched BlackBerry Bold 9900/9930 and BlackBerry Curve 9350/9360/9370 smartphones to allow you to share date between them with a simple tap. Read more »

Granted, LG already introduced an actual smartphone with its True HD IPS display, but the company only saw fit to announce the technology officially now. The company held an event in Seoul dedicated to the new screen, detailing its advantages over competing screen technologies.

According to LG, True HD IPS display takes the viewing experience on mobile handsets, thanks to its high resolution (1280 x 720 real RGB pixels) and automatic color adjustments applied by LG’s exclusive Mobile HD Graphic Engine. Read more »

The youngest member of the Galaxy Tab family of Honeycomb slates just got its US pricing revealed. The Wi-Fi-only version of the Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.0 will come in two flavors – 16GB and 32GB, which will cost $399 and $499, respectively.

For that kind of cash you are getting a 7″ slate with a WSVGA PLS LCD that runs the latest, 3.2, edition of Honeycomb on a 1.2GHz dual-core CPU. You should know that there’s a microSD card slot on board, too, so we are not sure that there’s much sense in ordering the 32GB unit for that kind of premium. Read more »

A most welcome guest came by our office today. The MeeGo powered Nokia N9 arrived with its shiny in-depth colored body and gorgeous AMOLED and this time it will stay with us for a full review.

You can bet that one of the most interesting smartphones of the season is receiving the attention it deserves in our lab, but we know the waiting until the review is complete is killing you. That’s why we did what we usually do and prepared a quick hands-on video for you to give you an idea of what to expect. Read more »

The company behind the extremely successful Swype keyboard will be acquired by Nuance in a deal believed to be worth $102.5 million. Swype Inc., which designed the popular predictive QWERTY keyboard for touchscreens only started three years ago, but it’s obviously done pretty well.

Nuance mentioned that it has already paid $77.5 million to Swype shareholders, while the rest of the money will paid 18 months after the deal closes. The condition for the second payment to take place is certain key executives to still be working for Nuance. Read more »

Chances are that the Nokia N9 has either just hit or it’s making its way towards a shop near you. And if you are considering splashing out the cash for the sleek MeeGo handset, its browser performance might be of importance to you.

And what better way to test it out than to compare it to one of the fastest browsers out there – the iPhone 4′s Safari. That’s exactly what that Dutch dude did and, luckily he shot the whole thing on video so we can see how the two competitors did. Read more »

The “$35 tablet” project has finally started bearing fruit as today the first Datawind-made slate was announced. Called Aakash, the slate actually costs $46 dollars, runs on Android 2.2 Froyo and comes with a 7″ resistive touchscreen.

The first edition of the Aakash tablet will be exclusively manufactured for the Indian government (which plans to distribute it to students around the country) and comes with a really modest 366 MHz CPU, but packs a dedicated GPU. Read more »

If you just bought yourselves a shiny new Nokia N9, you are probably eager to connect it to your computer and fill those 16 or 64 GB with tons of multimedia. And, boy, does Nokia have the tool for you.

The Finnish company has just posted an article on their blog, dedicated to Nokia Link – the software kit that makes the connection between your N9 and your computer seamless. Available as a free download for Windows 7, Mac Snow Leopard and Mac Lion, Nokia Link only takes a minute to set up. Read more »

You might be surprised to hear that the Amazon Kindle Fire pre-orders are going really well. Actually, scratch that – a fully functional tablet for $199 was bound to go like hot cakes.

And even so, the number of orders that Amazon has recorded for its newly announced tablet stands at the quite impressive 250,000. That’s a quarter of a million orders in just five days, with the tablet itself being more than a month away from actually becoming available. Read more »

The Apple keynote speeches have become arguably the most important events in the cell phone industry. The unveiling of the next iPhone has always been closely watched by both Apple lovers and haters, as it tends to shape the smartphone race for months in advance.

This time it was Apple’s newly appointed CEO Tim Cook Jobs that led the show, rather than Steve, but that didn’t take anything away from the spectacle (okay, just a little bit perhaps). You can see about that by watching the whole thing on video, kindly provided to us by Apple. Read more »

As usual when Apple announces major addition to its portfolio, the Cupertino-based company released cool promo videos dedicated to each of them. With the Apple iPhone 4S and iCloud being the stars of the show tonight, it was only a matter of time before two videos popped app at the company’s official website.

So here they are for your viewing pleasure. If you haven’t followed the Tim Cook keynote, those videos will do a good job of summing up the best parts of the iPhone 4S and the iCloud service for you. Read more »