Google announced that it will be performing some optimization of its business, shutting down ten of its minor projects. The company says it’s done in order to streamline and simplify the user experience as most of these are already integrated in its other services.

Here comes the list, along with the reasoning, as provided by the Big G itself: Read more »

We’ve got some good Kindle news and some bad Kindle news for you. The good news is that the Amazon’s Android-based Kindle tablet is real and one reporter even got to play with it.

What’s even better the 7″ Amazon Kindle tablet will launch with a really cool-sounding $250 price tag. It will be, reportedly, very similar to the BlackBerry PlayBook in terms of form factor and it will a pack a full-color LCD (no eInk here). Then there’s also this rumor that a one-year subscription to Amazon Prime (worth $79 on its own) will be included in the price. Read more »

HTC Titan and Radar were officially announced yesterday at a public event that we covered live for you. And while that did give us most pieces of the puzzle, one of the most important ones was missing – we knew nothing about the pricing of either WP7 smartphone.

Now we hear that an HTC representative went on record saying that the HTC Titan will cost €609 ($868), while HTC radar will go for €399 ($569). Granted, those are European prices (German, to be specific), and they include 19% VAT, but they still seem a bit too high to us. Read more »

Just like the HTC Radar earlier today, the HTC Titan just got to star in a bunch of ads published on its manufacturer’s website. The WP7 Mango smartphone with a 4.7″ screen is unsurprisingly looking pretty hot in the four videos that you are about to see.

Actually those videos cover pretty much the same bases as the HTC Radar ads, but for one exception. The Taiwanese company obviously thinks that the Titan will be more skilled at multitasking than its smaller-screen’d sibling and with a 1.5GHz CPU we can see where this is coming from. Read more »

The developer of some of the finest mobile games, EA Mobile, has announced a huge Labour day sale, offering a nice number of its titles at reduced prices in the iOS App Store. With discounts of up to 80% 20 iPhone and iPod games are now available for just a cent under $1, while 29 of the iPad titles are going for $1.99.

There will also be discounts on in-game purchases for three iPhone-only games – Surviving High School, Cause of Death and Ghost harvest. Read more »

The luxurious phone manufacturer Gresso just announced yet another customized version of the Apple iPhone 4. Dubbed ArtPhone Lady Noir, this version of the iPhone 4 comes with either black diamonds or Swarovski crystals ornaments.

For your $30,000 (diamond version) or $7,000 (crystal one) you are also getting diamond-coated mineral glass to replace the regular iPhone 4 glass panels. There are also three hand-assembled clocks at the back that offer Swiss precision. Read more »

The HTC PR team just released the first batch of video ads for the HTC Radar WP7 smartphone, which was announced yesterday. So grab the popcorn, make yourselves comfortable and get ready to be treated to a few doses of Mango goodness.

HTC has identified four key selling points of the Radar and has dedicated a video to each of them. According to the Taiwanese company the main reasons to go for the Radar are its cool looks, its great camera, its spotless connectivity and sharing options and the great entertainment option it provides. Read more »

Samsung continues with the announcements as the IFA 2011 rolls out for the public today. We just got word that the company will be releasing a special edition of their Series 9 ultra-sleek laptops.

There will be no changes to the internals of the netbooks, but their exterior will be available in two new colors, Midnight Blue and Luxury Rose Gold, in addition to the Black version that is already available. The special edition laptops will also feature crystal accents on their bodies. Check them out in more detail in the following videos. Read more »

With all the fuss around the pre-IFA announcements today we almost forgot to introduce you to a dear guests we had at our office. The Sony Ericsson Live with Walkman Android smartphone came by and while it refused to stick around for a preview, it at least posed for a bunch of live shots.

Not that a preview of the Sony Ericsson Live with Walkman is so vital. The hour or so we spent with it almost entirely convinced us that this is simply a Sony Ericsson Xperia mini with a slightly larger screen and a Walkman button. Read more »

Samsung introduced three new cameras at the start of this year’s IFA. We got the NX200 mirror-less camera with interchangeable lenses, the normal-to-wacky-in-3.5 MV800 compact and the WB750 superzoom.

We start with the most exciting of the bunch – the Samsung NX200. Not only is this the highest resolution camera in the EVIL (electronic viewfinder, interchangeable lenses) class with its 20.3 MP APS-C sensor, but it also packs a sweet sounding 3″ 614k-dot AMOLED screen on the back. Read more »

Google has just announced that the latest version of the Android SDK in now available to developers. Classified as a minor feature update, the new Android SDK brings, as usual, a new set of APIs that should allow developers to create better apps that are compatible with a wider range of devices.

The focus of the SDK update is mainly on making compatibility with different screen sizes and resolutions easier. Previously Android 3.2 was said to be the Honeycomb version best suited to 7″ tablets and now you can see why – it’s just that it will be much easier for developers to make apps that are better suited for such tabs. Read more »

The popular mobile software developers from SPB Software have released a Symbian^3 compatible-version of their SPB Shell 3D user interface. The customization package is available immediately through the company website, so everyone with a Symbian^3 device and $15 to spare can get a taste of it.

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The SPB Shell 3D UI brings a complete overhaul of the user interface of the smartphone that solves most of the usability issues (illogical menu navigation, one click-two click inconsistency etc.) and adds some welcome eye-candy to the mix. And while the pricing might seem a bit steep at first, it’s probably worth it as it comes as a novel facelift to the widely criticized for their usability Symbian smartphones. Read more »

We’ve got some great news for those the Samsung Galaxy S II owners (or at least for those that find its battery life not quite satisfactory). The Korean company has just announced an official extended battery for its top dog smartphone that has 2000 mAh worth of juice.

The price that needs to be paid for the extra endurance is an increase in thickness of 1.5mm over the original 1650 mAh battery. Naturally, the new thicker battery doesn’t fit under the old battery cover, so Samsung is shipping the new battery with a replacement back panel. Read more »

Adobe has just released a new app for the iOS devices that lets you edit PDF documents from your smartphone or tablet. Now, I know touchscreen devices aren’t the most comfortable things to edit documents on, but it is certainly nice to be able to make a few minor changes on the go.

And the great news is that the application, called CreatePDF by the way, also supports a number of other document (docx, doc, xlsx, xls, pptx, ppt, rtf etc.) and image (ai, psd, indd, jpg, bmp, png, gif, tiff) formats. Read more »

With this year’s HTC big summer event coming up we thought you might enjoy a quick rumor roundup, so you’d know what to expect. Last year the event saw the announcement of the HTC Desire HD and the HTC Desire Z, which were some of the best Android devices we had seen at the time.

Yet this year the Taiwanese company is almost certainly going to out do itself and make it an even more glamorous event. A good thing too as it will be competing with the other Android top dog for a spot in the limelight – Samsung will be having one of their unpacked events on the exact same day.

No less than six unannounced HTC devices are doing the rounds on the web and we suspect the Taiwanese will be officially unveiling some of them in London. There are three Android smartphones, a couple of WP7 handsets and a tablet. Here’s what they are about: Read more »