Opera just published its State of the Mobile Web report for December 2010 and this time the special feature part is dedicated to holiday shopping. According to Opera, the Amazon usage share reached 1.6% in December, compared to 0.9% in January. And that is despite the fact that the total number of users also rose 84.7% YoY to reach 85.5 million.

Which means that nearly 1.5 million people used Opera Mini to visit the Amazon web site last month, while in January 2010 only half a million did so. Read more »

Samsung has just unveiled a new member of their feature phone family. The Samsug Ch@t 350 C3500 (now that’s a mouthful) is an entry level handset with a taste for messaging. It packs a side-sliding full QWERTY keyboard and runs on the Samsung proprietary TouchWiz platform.

The screen on that one is a 2.4” LCD of QVGA resolution, which isn’t exactly ideal, but it’s about what you could expect in this class. There’s no 3G or Wi-Fi on board, so you are left with EDGE for your data transfers. Bluetooth 2.1 and FM radio are included though. Read more »

We just got a retail unit of the BlackBerry Bold 9780 and you can bet we’ll be doing a full review of the thing. The BlackBerry OS 6 running smartphone is only the second RIM-made device that comes with a 5 megapixel shooter.

With a thing like that as its key feature you can tell that the Bold 9780 is hardly the most feature-stuffed handset around. Yet, much like its Bold 9700 predecessor the interest it generates is tremendous. Read more »

The Apple iPad spent almost two years in Rumorland, prior to its announcement, but once the floodgates have been opened there’s no time to wait. The Apple iPad 2 (or whatever they decide to call it) is all but certain to come in a few weeks’ time and rumors about its specifications are as intense as ever.

First we have this leaked image from the iBooks 1.2 source files suggesting that the iPad2 will indeed pack an ultra high-res display (Retina if you will). Read more »

We are pleased to welcome a real celebrity in our office. The Samsung I9010 Galaxy S Giorgio Armani is the seemingly perfect blend of smartphone muscle and high-end looks.

Carrying the Armani logo and combining the 1GHz processing power of the Cortex A8 CPU with the fastest growing operating system and the gorgeous 4” Super AMOLED display, the Galaxy S Giorgio Armani is a handset that simply cannot go unnoticed.

We are already hard at work on the full review, but until it is complete here’s a quick video and some live shots to whet your appetite. Read more »

The Sony Ericsson XPERIA Play has just been taken apart by a bunch of curious Chinese geeks, eager to see what hides under the skin of the PlayStation phone. At this point we already know so much about the handset that it’s might come as a shock to you that it hasn’t even been officially announced yet.

The tear down treatment revealed that the two trackpads were supplied by Synaptics, while the screen is packing the Bravia Engine, much like the Sony Ericsson XPERIA Arc display. The Scorpion CPU used is most likely identical to the one on the HTC Desire Z, but according to the source, it’s clocked at 1Ghz, rather than 800 MHz. Read more »

According to 27% of the people that took part in the latest Nielsen survey 4G is what the latest iPhone is called. True story!

With American carriers all keen to boast about their 4G networks to anyone who would listen, Nielsen decided to check how much people really know about 4G wireless tech. As it turned out 17% of the participants have never heard of it, while only 51% of the rest claimed to know what it means. Now that speaks volumes of the efficiency of those multi-million ad campaigns, doesn’t it?

And back to where we started, some 27% of the interviewed claimed that it was the name of the current iteration of the Apple iPhone. A new Android phone from T-Mobile was the answer of every 7th participant. Another 43% thought 4G stands for new devices that process data faster. Read more »

So many compact cameras are being thrown at us at this year’s CES that I’m starting to feel a little dizzy. Panasonic, just like the other major players in this game felt the need to introduce a large bag of digicams that are hard to tell from each other.

The first two new additions to the Lumix lineup are FP5 and FP7, which sport internal zooming. The dirt cheap S1 and S3 couple follows. Then, there is also the no-nonsense FH2 and FH5 and finally, and most excitingly, the FH27 and FH25. Read more »

Sony starts 2011 with the announcements of 11 new members of its Cyber-shot family of compact cameras. There’s a 3D-capturing shooter, four other full HD-recording point-and-shoots and six budget-minded snappers.

The star of the day is the 16 megapixel Sony TX100V. Built around a backlit Exmor R sensor, the TX100V is doing 3D still shots and sweep panoramas. This is also the first compact camera that can record 1080p footage at 60 frames per second. The final treat is the 3.5” OLED touchscreen display at the back. Read more »

Olympus announced several new additions to their portfolio at CES 2011 including the enthusiast compact XZ-1 and the Micro Four Thirds E-PL2. Along with those, the company unveiled a couple of rugged ultra compacts (TG-610 and TG-310), a budget camera (VG-120) and a superzoom compact (SP-610UZ).

Olympus PEN E-PL2 is built around the same 12 megapixel Micro Four Thirds sensor as its larger and more expensive sibling, the Olympus E-P2. The E-PL2 comes with a larger and higher resolution screen than its predecessor – 3” and 460k dots vs 2.7” and 230k dots. There’s also a built-in flash. The camera also comes with a redesigned version of the collapsible 14-42mm f/3.5-5.6 kit lens. Read more »

Fujifilm has just announced the new FinePix HS20 superzoom camera with 30x zoom lens. Dubbed by its creators “the ultimate all-in-one” Fujifilm Finepix HS20 packs some serious punch under the hood.

The camera is built around a 16 megapixel backlit 1/2” EXR-CMOS sensor that allows FullHD 1080p video capture at 30fps. There’s also a high-speed movie mode for creating 80/160 and 320 fps videos (though the greatest framerate is only available for 320 x 112 pixel videos). Read more »

Samsung just announced the Wi-Fi-enabled SH100 ultra compact digital camera. It packs a 14 megapixel 1/2.33 CCD sensor and 5x zoom lens covering the 26-130mm range in 35mm equivalent, which sounds nice on its own. However its Wi-Fi functionality marks the start of a whole new chapter in the digicam evolution.

It’s not so much about the point-and-shoot allowing Wi-Fi file transfers per se – we’ve seen that before. It’s more about what else it does with it – for instance, you can use your Galaxy S smartphone to establish a connection to the SH100 and control it remotely. How about that? Read more »

The civil GPS receivers nowadays are good for almost all purposes practical, but there are still some areas, where the 10m accuracy just doesn’t suffice. Luckily Mitsubishi and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency come to the rescue, introducing a new system that betters this achievement about 333 times.

During a recent public test a conventional GPS receiver using complementary data from the Michibiki satellite successfully offered pinpoint accuracy with deviations going as far as only 3cm. Read more »

Today HTC announced a new addition to their CDMA smartphone lineup, the EVO Shift 4G. The full QWERTY-packing Android smartphone comes with a 3.6” LCD screen of WVGA resolution. The 4G moniker and the Sprint allegiance give away the EVO Shift WiMax radio, but you should know that there’s also EV-DO support for when the new generation networks aren’t available.

The HTC EVO Shift 4G packs a Qualcomm MSM7630 CPU, clocked at 800 MHz and a 5 megapixel camera capable of HD video recording. Read more »

Right now we have Opera Mini, that’s mostly meant for devices with small screens and low processing power and Opera Mobile for the more capable smartphones. And pretty soon we’d be enjoying a new version of the popular mobile browser, designed with tablets in mind.

With the slates popularity skyrocketing, it’s no wonder Opera wants to be a part of that market too. Тhe good thing is they are doing so with a completely new app rather than just upsizing one of their old ones. Read more »