With Computex going at full speed, it is only logical that Intel will make a few announcements, hinting of what it has in store for us. The world’s largest CPU manufacturer demoed Honeycomb tablets that run on its silicone, revealed the chips that will power the next-gen netbooks and promised a whole new class of devices, intriguingly called Ultrabooks.

Those Ultrabooks will be mainstream thin and light mobile computers that ambitiously target a market share of 40% by the end of 2012. Intel says Ultrabooks will achieve a thickness of under 0.8” and prices below $1000 thanks to their new 22nm Ivy Bridge chipsets. Read more »

It appears that we haven’t seen the best of the Samsung Galaxy Tab family just yet. Just a few weeks before those super slim Galaxy Tab 10.1 and Galaxy Tab 8.9 hit the shelves, the president of the company’s mobile division, J.K. Shin, went on record saying that they will be releasing at least one more slate this year.

The Galaxy Tab 4G, if we had to take a wild guess for the name, will be released before 2011 has ended, extending the company tablet portfolio to four devices. Read more »

The FCC have just spilled the beans on another unannounced Android smartphone by Samsung. The SPH-D600 was caught running the latest phone-oriented version of the Google OS – 2.3.3 Gingerbread.

The Samsung SPH-D600 is a mid-range device headed to Sprint. Its HVGA screen and back panel suggest a close relation to the Galaxy Ace, but the 1GHz Scorpion CPU and the WiMax connectivity put the D600 higher up the pecking order. Read more »

We are finally ready fellas – the full battery test of the Samsung I9100 Galaxy S II is complete. It took a week of extensive testing and comparing, but now we are ready to throw a load of numbers your way and hope they will be enough to quench your thirst.

The Galaxy S II convinced us that it’s a real beast during the review, but are the huge screen and powerful CPU and GPU too taxing on the battery? Well it turns out that they are not. The slightly larger battery (1650 mAh vs 1500 mAh) and the Gingerbread new, more aggressive stance against battery draining apps obviously have some effect and the Galaxy S II has a slightly better endurance than its predecessor, the original Galaxy S.
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Good news, Motorola Defy owners, your Gingerbread is on the way. What’s even better is that a leaked image coming straight from the Motorola dev center will allow the most knowledgeable among you to bring their handsets to Android 2.3.3. right now.

Of course, even though it’s an official image, it’s not the final thing (or Motorola would have released it themselves). Read more »

We are just back from the GSMArena.com lab, where our hard-working coders do their magic and we have some good news for you. The Phone Finder section of our website has just been updated and you will, hopefully, find it much more useful now.

We’ve added searching by several new criteria – the ones that are probably most important in picking your next cell phone. You can now filter the nearly 4000 handsets in our database by processor clock speed and number of cores, as well as available RAM and internal storage. Read more »

After the total overhaul that the Google Search app for iOS got a couple of months ago, it has become way nicer looking and easier to use. However the feedback that the company has been getting about its performance has obviously been less than flattering.

Well, Google engineers have obviously taken notes and today introduced a new version that addresses the issue. The app has been sped up by up to 20%, which should dramatically improve responsiveness and thus the overall user experience. To achieve this, the company has axed the “Just Talk” by default so if you were using it you would need to activate it manually from the settings. Read more »

If you have been keeping track, you’d know that we are currently extensively testing the Samsung I9100 Galaxy S II battery life. Today’s discipline is web browsing endurance, which, as our recent survey found out, is one of the key usages of modern day mobiles.

And just for the fun of it, we decided to make this one more competitive by including some other handsets we found lying around the office. So here are the contestants – we’ve got the iPhone 4 with its Safari browser, as well as some more droids – the original Galaxy S, the LG Optimus Black and the Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc. Read more »

The popular developer PopCap Games has just announced that it will be bringing a couple of titles to the Android world this month. We are talking about the puzzle game Chuzzle, which is already available and the extremely successful Plants vs Zombies lane tower defense game, which should come in two weeks’ time.

Both titles will be exclusively available on the Amazon App Store for the first two weeks of their Android existence and will be offered for free in the first 24 hours. Read more »

We’ve just completed the first of our dedicated Samsung I9100 Galaxy S II battery tests. We decided to start with the dedicated video playback test and we have to admit, we are pretty pleased with the results.

The new Samsung flagship went through the pretty good 8 hours and 5 minutes of video playback before its battery level dropped to 10%, at which point the video player automatically switched off. Read more »

Japan’s largest carrier, NTT DoCoMo, just unveiled its new smartphone lineup and as expected the MEDIAS WP N-06C made its first public appearance. The watertight super slim Android device measures an unbelievable 7.9mm all over its body, but for the 5 megapixel camera lens, which protrudes to 9.7mm.

The MEDIAS WP N-06C packs a 4” FWVGA touchscreen and offers support for 14Mbps network transfers. Unfortunately, it only works on FOMA networks so taking one back to your home-country is not an option. Read more »

Honeycomb tablets with Tegra 2 under the hood are hardly a rarity these days, but this one belongs to a class that’s still not particularly popular. The newly announced Viewsonic 7x packs a 7” screen and a lightweight body that should attract the attention of those considering slates portable devices. That is of course, if you can trust Viewsonic manufacturing anything else but a monitor.

The 7” screens is where it all began for tablets and Android last year, but for some reason those devices haven’t seen much Honeycomb love. Asus is the only one to come with such a device (the Eee Pad MeMO announced at CES) and that one is not ready to hit the shelves yet (if at all). So the Viewsonic 7x is in a niche of its own. Read more »

Samsung has just released the source code of their new I9100 Galaxy S II Android flagship. This will presumably open the floodgates and custom ROMs and kernels for the extremely popular device will now start appearing at a rapid speed.

Given the really high interest that the Galaxy S II has been enjoying so far we are expecting a good chunk of the knowledgeable XDA-developers user base to start working their magic on the released code. Read more »

Oh, boy, is this getting messy or what? Sony finds itself in all kinds of trouble following the recent attack that brought down the PSN network and compromised millions of accounts, containing sensitive personal data and credit card information.

The Representative Corporate Executive Officer and Executive Deputy President of Sony Corporation, Kazuo Hirai, has just posted an open letter to the US congress, admitting that all 77 million accounts have been compromised. Read more »

The incredibly popular Viber app for iPhones is about to make its Android debut. The application that brought free calls and messaging to iPhone, iPod and iPad users around the globe is said to be coming to the Android market as soon as this week. Well, it was about time already.

Needless to say that such a massive increase in the availability will greatly benefit the app user base – you will now be able to call a much larger part of your contact list for free. Read more »