A sneak peek video of the BlackBerry Torch 9860 has popped up, courtesy of Vodafone UK. It highlights the BlackBerry OS 7-wearing smartphone’s main features and, of course, the fact that Vodafone already has dips on the 9860.

You can see the camera in action and parts of the user interface and the browser but the whole video is not meant to be a thorough walkthrough. Read more »

The Nokia has inspired young talents to create cool videos with its N8 camera phone for a while now. This is the latest in a line of many very cool videos and the largest in scale stop-motion animation shot with the Nokia N8.

The plot is marine in essence – a fisherman in his small boat is taken on a perilous journey after he gets swallowed by a giant fish. You can check out the making of if you’re interested in making your own stop-motion video. The tricky part is that little bot is actually a life-size, real vessel. The person starring is a real man, as well. Read more »

It’s that time again, folks – the time for the iPhone 5 rumor of the week. This time we came across some snapshots of a mysterious iPhone with a design unseen so far anywhere. So, naturally, the question is whether this 64GB would-be iPhone is the real deal or not – is this the fabled new design the next generation iPhone will offer?

Well, here are some arguments that just quickly popped to my mind – the volume keys are again a single piece – which is a step backward from the current design logic. The device looks tangibly thicker than the iPhone 4 (which is just 9.3mm) – a definite no-no in today’s tech design trends.

The outer rim of the phone doesn’t look like an antenna or even made out of steel (it just looks plastic – see how the Apple logo doesn’t seem reflective) so I can only assume this thing’s fake.

Oh, and also look at the bezel around the screen – and there’s also considerable slack space above the home button. And finally the sign – “Designed by APOLLO in California” doesn’t scream legitimate either. Read more »

After a court hearing in Sydney, Australia, Apple has won an agreement with Samsung that the latter won’t advertise or sell its Galaxy Tab 10.1 slate on the count of it infringing on 10 Apple patents. Those include the look and feel, and the touchscreen technology of the iPad. Samsung won’t be able to release the Galaxy Tab 10.1 in Australia until it gets court approval or it resolves the conflict with the Cupertino-based company.

Apple sought an Australian injunction and is looking to get the same result in other countries too (unnamed for now). It comes as a great success for Apple but should it eventually lose its patent infringement lawsuit with Samsung, Apple will have to pay Samsung some heavy damages as compensation. Read more »

We came across a very interesting tablet that came all the way from China and landed in our inbox. The Marvel TBT-10C 7″ Mercury Pad Tablet is a 7-incher, running Android 2.3.1 Gingerbread, with a 1GHz Samsung S5PV210 A8 processor, 512MB RAM and has a 800×400 (WVGA) multi-touch display among other specs. And it looks ghastly similar to the iPhone 4, doesn’t it?

This tablet is certainly nothing out of the ordinary, especially coming from China (fake Apple retail stores anyone?), and is easily outclassed by the current crop of Android tablets with its so-last-year single core processor, WVGA-only screen (even if it is 7″), 2 MP camera and the fact it just looks like a cheap iPhone rip-off. Read more »

The Nokia 500 is still hot out of the oven and Nokia has put up a promo video for it. It’s the second Nokia phone using a 1GHz processor and the first one to do it on Symbian^3. The video revolves around the motto “express yourself” hence the upbeat song in the background.

The video shows-off the functionality of the new Symbian smartphone to install a variety of apps through the Ovi store, changeable covers that make the device look flamboyant, the fast 1GHz processor and finally, the fact that this smartphone gives you more. Read more »

You’ve probably heard of Plants vs. Zombies – one of the hottest games on the App Store since day one. Today it got updated to version 1.7 on iOS to bring users Retina support which means that the graphics are now much crisper and just look awesome.

PopCap Games (creator of PvZ) has also said that they’ve removed some bugs along the way and even made the game speedier so the update is a must. Read more »

If you happen to be situated in the United States and own an Asus Eee Pad Transformer, it’s your lucky day. Version 3.2 of Android Honeycomb is now out for the popular tablet-slash-netbook and with it come stretchable widgets and the compatibility zoom which will make smartphone apps much better to use on the bigger screen.

The 3.1 Honeycomb update came in the first half of June – those are some super-fast update cycles. Also if you have the Transformer plus the keyboard dock you can enjoy the dock’s USB host functionality. Read more »

Downloading Microsoft’s camera codec pack (16.0.0652.0621) will enable your Windows 7 or Vista OS to show RAW format pictures in Windows Explorer and Photo Gallery and it has support for about 120 DSLR cameras. This means that you’ll no longer get the “unknown file” icon when looking into an album of RAW format images.

The RAW photo format is like a digital negative of a photo made with a DSLR camera. It contains (ideally!) uncompressed data from each individual pixel of the camera’s sensor and in layman’s terms it’s a bigger, unprocessed version of the JPEG photo. Read more »

The HTC Puccini is showing its face (and back) to the world again and we heard some rumors on what specs it might offer. At this point the only thing that’s for certain is that it’s bound to AT&T, which has remained unchanged since the previous leak.

The tablet will be HTC’s first 10-incher, should run on a 1.5GHz dual-core processor, run Android Honeycomb and/or have HTC Sense on top and finally it’s rumored to have an LTE radio (that’s the proper 4G for those unfamiliar with the term). We gather from the photos that the Puccini will have an 8 MP camera with a dual-LED flash and will support HTC Scribe (judging by the photos). Read more »

The iPad has been dominating the tablet market since it created it at the beginning of 2010. But there’s also been a dent in its shining armor and that is the lack of a Facebook app – a commodity every droid tablet out there has been enjoying for some time now. Finally, the iPad Facebook app has been confirmed and even tested by the guys over at TechCrunch, which discovered the app tucked away inside the code of the latest update to the Facebook for iPhone app.

The Facebook for iPad app has been discovered inside the code of the 3.4.4 update Facebook pushed out for the iPhone app. It was a minor one, bringing some fixes like the reappeared “send” button for the comment and chat functionality of the app. Read more »

Research in Motion (RIM), BlackBerry’s owner, announced it will cut its workforce by 11 percent in order to cut down costs and be able to stay in the game with competitors such as Apple and Android. The total number of people getting fired is 2,000, which is huge and would leave the company with 17,000 people on staff.

RIM has announced a number of changes to its executive board, including the retirement of Chief Operating Officer Don Morrison. Some senior executives at RIM have jumped the boat and joined rival Samsung Electronics. Read more »

A top-secret snapshot has surfaced of an “Assistant” function on iOS 5, which has people hitting the speculation button that this could be the fruits of the Apple’s Siri buy last year and the work with Nuance’s text-to-speech technology.

For those unfamiliar with Siri – it’s a voice-controlled assistant on the iPhone that can carry out cool orders like finding you a restaurant near your location, book tickets and more. So far it works via a dedicated app but this new screenshot could mean that we’re in for some deeper OS integration. The benefits of such an app built right into the OS is that apart from access to the internet it could get access to your contacts information and more, thus ending up being much more useful than a simple voice controller. Also such a feature could cut your physical texting in half by providing fluent voice-to-text conversion. Read more »

We already had the pleasure of getting the Galaxy S Plus around our office a while back. It even guest-starred in an epic fight with the Optimus 2X and Galaxy S II and survived to head its own preview. All the while it was powered by a pre-release 1.2GHz processor instead of the final 1.4GHz Qualcomm MSM8255T one. Now it’s here with all the toppings in all of its retail glory and you can bet it’s ready for its own review.

As we’re working on it we thought we’d at least bring you an unboxing video with a short UI demonstration. Read more »

Rumors of an iPad with Retina display began circulating shortly before the current iPad 2 became official. It has been speculated to arrive as early as Q4 this year, bringing more bang than ever before.

Well, LG’s Display CEO – Kwon Young-soo jumped in and poured more gasoline into the rumor mill fire by saying in an interview with the Korean Times that LG’s Retina display have been used in iPhones and iPads. He went on saying that more smartphone manufacturers will release new models employing the Retina display. Read more »