Last year Google announced a new project: covering an entire city with fiber optic connections and providing its citizen with internet connection 100 times faster than before. Naturally there was no shortage of applicants – 1100 cities all over the US wanted to have a taste of the 1Gbps internet speeds.

Google took their time reviewing the applications and announced today that the lucky winner is Kansas City, Kansas. A development agreement with the city has already been signed and work on the actual project has already started. Read more »

Now that was fast. The first kernel modification for the HTC Thunderbolt 4G overclocking its Snapdragon chipset appeared only a few hours after the Taiwanese company officially released its source code. The frequency was pushed to the impressively sounding 1.8 GHz, which has resulted in some pretty impressive benchmark results.

The 1.8GHz HTC Thunderbolt 4G scored over 3000 in Quadrant, which is immense for a single-core handset. Read more »

When one company releases an extravagant product such as the Optimus 3D you can never be sure if that’s the start of a new trend or they are aiming for publicity rather than sales. However when two of the major smartphone makers in the world hop into the same boat almost simultaneously you instantly know that it’s just the beginning.

The French HTC office confirmed that the EVO 3D will be available in Europe, which officially started the 3D wars. We’ve got two of the hottest smartphones we have seen sporting dual cameras at the back and stereoscopic screen and it’s pretty easy to tell that you cannot go wrong with either one. Yet the question remains – which one is better? Read more »

Those of you willing to replace the hardware keyboard of your laptops with a touchscreen, please stand up and get your credit cards ready. Ok, you don’t need to stand up, just joking. The thing is the dual-touchscreen Acer ICONIA has just gone on pre-order and you can book your unit right now (as long as you live in the US).

The great news is that the asking price is actually lower than the previously announced $1500. Instead you can get your Intel Core i5-packing ICONIA for a cent under $1200. Pre-orders have already started and the first units should arrive to their new owners in April. Read more »

After a few smartphones, Google has reportedly decided to release a tablet with their own branding. The Nexus Tablet will be running the slate-friendly Android 3.0 Honeycomb and will be manufactured by LG.

Rumor has it that unlike the Nexus One and the Nexus S, the Nexus Tablet won’t have a twin sold under its manufacturer branding. So could this mean that Google will finally be trying to make some good sales on their own device? Read more »

Display quality is climbing higher and higher on the priority list of everyone in the search for a new handset, so we thought it would only be fair if we give it more coverage in our reviews. That’s why we have just expanded the display section with another, more scientific test that should help you get a better impression of each unit.

Contrast ratio is the most important aspect of the performance of each display – deep blacks and bright colors is what everyone wants to have on their next handset. However manufacturers usually don’t list the exact specs and even if they do, they post misleading numbers that don’t reflect real-life performance accurately.

That’s why we decided it would be best if we started measuring that ourselves. From now on, you will see a new table in each of our reviews quoting the exact luminance levels (brightness) of white and black colors and the contrast ratio for every handset. Read more »

The world’s fourth largest manufacturer (yeap, that’s ZTE) has just unveiled a couple of new additions to its mobile devices portfolio. The Chinese company is preparing a high-end Android smartphone called Style S and the V11 10” LTE-packing tablet, running on Honeycomb.

The full specs sheets haven’t been confirmed just yet, but we understood that the Style S will be an Android 2.3 Gingerbread smartphone with a 4.3” screen. Read more »

The BlackBerry PlayBook just got a whole lot hotter. The tablet was already looking like a pretty sweet deal with its incredibly user-friendly UI and the serious stuff that was going on under its hood, but the lack of apps looked like it might hold it back.

With Android and iOS already in the hundreds of thousands, the PlayBook looked doomed to be relegated to the role of an also-ran. Fortunately, RIM seems to have found a cure to this issue, making its tablet look like a winner from the very beginning. Apparently, the slate will be supporting native BlackBerry and Android apps, giving it an easy access to the goodies offered by developers in both App markets. Read more »

NVIDIA seems to have developed a taste for dual GPUs recently. Today the company launched its latest GTX590, which is basically a couple of GTX580 units soldered together.

And even though some power/heat limitations forced NVIDIA to lower the clocks of 1024 CUDA cores inside the GTX590, compared to the GTX580 this is one beast of a GPU. Early reviews put it within 1% of the AMD Radeon HD 6990, a.k.a. the fastest single card on Earth. And the new NVIDIA baby is way quieter, too. Read more »

The Samsung Apps application store for Bada has just shot past the 100 million downloads mark. It took it about nine months, which means that four Bada apps have been downloaded every second.

Of course, those numbers aren’t quite as impressive as those of the Apple App Store, which got its first 100 million downloads in about four months, but it’s a good achievement for a platform that is meant to be a replacement for feature phones. Read more »

We should see the latest and greatest Mozilla browser launch officially later today. And as the tradition goes the company has made it available for download through its FTP server a day early for the most eager among you.

So if you want to give the final version of Firefox 4 a try you can do that right now. Read more »

For such a minor manufacturer Archos certainly brings plenty of innovation to the table. The Archos 70 and 101 tablets were pretty exciting already with their slim waistlines and remarkable feature to price ratio, but it seems the best is still to come.

The company has just released some details about its upcoming ninth generation tablets and those look like some pretty powerful beasts. For one, they will be packing 1.6 GHz dual-core Cortex A9 CPUs, which is 60% better than what the current best (think iPad 2 and XOOM) have to offer. Read more »

The HTC Incredible S is the first smartphone with rotating button inscriptions. Sure, it’s not a big deal, but our geeky minds just wouldn’t let us sleep until we found how they did it.

Well luckily our insomnia was short-lived as we managed to get to the bottom of this quite easily. Read more »

Apple announced the death to MobileMe as we knew it a few weeks ago and speculations about the future of the service haven’t stopped ever since. This latest rumor just came in and it says MobileMe is going to become free and get deep iOS integration.

The iLounge source claims that Apple will turn MobileMe into a free cloud-based service for photos, videos, and music service, which sounds pretty cool to us. Read more »

LetsTalk has just made you an offer that’s pretty hard to refuse. The LTE-packing HTC Thunderbolt will be available for a reduced price of $175 this weekend. And unlike the $180 deal that Amazon is offering the phone is in-stock here.

Of course a contract is required and if you fail to fulfill at least half of it you will also need to refund LetsTalk the discount you are getting now. However if you are on the lookout for the ultimate high-speed internet on your smartphone, the $175 Thunderbolt seems like a deal too good to miss. Just have in mind that the offer is only valid through the weekend so you should make up your mind quickly.

If you decide to get it you can do so by following this link.