It’s Symbian day at our office today as we say hello to another of Nokia’s recently announced smartphones. The Nokia 701 will be one of the flagships of the new Belle edition of Symbian so its role in the company’s future plans is certainly big.

Bringing the new notification area, the customizable widgets and the flat menu, the Belle update certainly brings Symbian a step closer to the competition. In fact, the Nokia 701 felt quite intuitive to use, unlike the early Symbian^3 devices, which were still unable to shake off their non-touch heritage. Read more »

There’s no denying the iPhone 4 has an excellent camera and it turns out, it could get even better with just a little extra effort and the right DIY mindset. Over at Instructables.com we stumbled upon this guy’s DIY camera lens system, designed for the iPhone 4 and we were pretty amazed at how easy it is to create one of your own.

With some tweaks, this simple system would allow you to use lenses with different focal ranges (i.e. different zoom levels) with your iPhone and add cool filters (like a polarizer, for example). And the best part is, you don’t need to lug along this setup all the time. The setup is not fixed to the iPhone itself so you can only take it with you when you know you will be shooting something that’s worth it. Read more »

The Nokia N8 has just made the official jump to Anna, but those unafraid to mess with their smartphone platform (and void their warranties in the process) have already been spending quality time with the next Symbian revision – Belle.

Today we got yet another video showing the Nokia cameraphone flagship running on Symbian Belle. Even longer than the last one, this new clip demoes just about every part of the updated user interface. Read more »

It always seemed rather improbable that Apple would release two generation of its tablet in a single year, but a part of us really wanted to believe it will happen. Yet, the Wall Street Journal just took stage and killed whatever hopes we had left for seeing a Retina display-packing iPad 3 this year.

According to the publication, the Cupertino-based company is aiming at starting trial-production of the iPad 3 in October, so the official launch cannot realistically come sooner than the start of next year. Read more »

26,691 South Korean iPhone users have filed a class action lawsuit against Apple for alleged privacy violations over the collection of location data. Each of them demands a compensation of 1 million Korean wons ($936) as their handsets violated their privacy by recording their location without their knowledge.

The lawsuit is filed just over a month after the Cupertino-based company was forced to pay the same compensation to a customer of their over the same issues. Mr. Hyung-suk, who won the case back then is actually a lawyer and he and his company have been preparing the class action ever since that initial victory. Read more »

Unlike some other Google projects, which seem to spend an eternity in the beta stages of their development, it only took Photovine a little over a month to graduate. The ambitious photo-sharing service is now accessible for everyone.

And by everyone, I mean only those who have an iOS device, as Photovine is currently only available as an app in the App Store. At least it covers the lot with iPhone, iPod touch and iPad units running iOS 4.2 or later being supported. Read more »

Nokia N8 hasn’t even received the official Anna update yet, but the most daring of its users are already rewarded with the next Symbian iteration – Belle. The files required for flashing Belle on your N8 are already available for download so if you are knowledgeable enough and decide that it’s worth voiding your warranty you might get it up and running right now.

There’s not much in the way of instructions on how to flash it in the forum thread that lists the download files, but you can find them over here. You would need to apply the Anna update first though, if you haven’t done so already. Read more »

Mozilla has released the next iteration of their Firefox browser for Android. Version 6 comes with a slightly refreshed interface, including a new welcome screen and a slight facelift to the menu.

Yet the main changes that Firefox 6 brings are under the hood with faster zooming, crisper text and reduced pixelation promised to be the results of the new enhanced image rendering algorithms. Read more »

The Asus Eee Pad Slider was a cool Android tablet/netbook announced at CES 2011, along with the Transformer, but unlike its super-popular relative it’s nowhere to be seen just yet. However the latest bit of online rumor suggests that it might become available before the end of September for the tempting €479.

For that kind of cash you are getting a 10.1 IPS display of WXGA resolution (1280×800 pixels), covered under a layer of Gorilla Glass, an Nvidia Tegra 2 chipset, featuring a couple of 1GHz CPU cores, and a QWERTY keyboard for all that typing to be done on. Read more »

The Google dev team announced a new feature for the Gmail web interface. The world’s most popular mailbox just got a preview pane, which allows you to check out an email without opening.

It’s almost hard to believe that this feature, which has been available on most desktop email clients and even the web interfaces of some competing mail services for a while now, is only now making its way to Gmail. Read more »

Samsung kept its promise and delivered the firmware update for their Galaxy Tab 10.1 Honeycomb tablet today. Available over the air, the update brings the custom TouchWiz user interface to the slate, making it the first Android tablet with such deep UI customizations.

The update, which should help the Galaxy Tab 10.1 stand out in the increasingly dense crowd of Honeycomb tablets, is just under 190MB so we’d suggest you use a Wi-Fi network to get it. In addition to new apps like the Samsung proprietary Media and Social Hubs, the new firmware brings a customized bar at the bottom, which allows you to launch specially designed mini apps. Read more »

Qualcomm has been among the most successful chip manufacturer as of late, but I don’t think many of you can name more than a couple of their products. The Snapdragon brand name is all fine, but the different chipsets within the family were so confusingly named that you couldn’t tell which one has a high-end dual core CPU and which is designed for the run-of-the-mill handsets.

Luckily, the company has finally decided to do something about it and from now instead of all the MSM, APQ and QSD madness we will be seeing just one number to indicate a chipset class allegiance. Read more »

Sorry to break the bad news to you, but it seems that the iPad 3 with a Retina display isn’t going to happen this year. Earlier, rumors pointed at the arrival of another Apple slate later this year with four times the resolution of its predecessor, but it seems we won’t be in luck this time.

And the reason is quite simple – touchscreen and display manufacturers will be unable to produce the parts for the high-res iPad 3 until sometime in 2012 (more pessimistic predictions even say the second half of next year). Read more »

We have some bad news to those of you eager to taste some quad-core mobile action. Nvidia has confirmed that it will be delaying its Kal-El platform by a couple of months and tablets with it will only be available in Fall, rather than this month.

And the first smartphones based on the Kal-El will only become available around CES next year. Of course, extending the wait isn’t ideal, but considering that the quad-core Nvidia Kal-El should bring a 5x performance improvement over Tegra 2, we would still be getting better treatment than the Moore’s law would suggest. Read more »

If you have been keeping track you would know that the recent batch of high-end Xperia smartphones pack some of the best LCD displays we have seen. Their Reality displays might lack a bit in viewing angles, but their image quality is downright splendid, and as the company would gladly tell anyone, their new Mobile BRAVIA Engine certainly plays a big part in delivering it.

Bravia Engine OnNote: Mouse over or tap to toggle between Bravia Engine on and off.

Now marketing talk is always sweet, but very rarely true so we decided to check out if that engine really does anything or it’s a gimick. Here come our observations along with plenty of photos evidence that we gathered along the way. Read more »