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 »

Nokia Maps is well known alongside Google Maps and Bing Maps though it’s been naturally exclusive to Nokia phones on the mobile scene. Starting today, the service is available to iOS devices (iPod Touch, iPad and the iPhone) and Android phones with HTML5-compatible browsers. This means that you’ll be able to use the browser-based Nokia Maps services (directions, searching for places, browsing maps) on your iOS or Android smartphone without the need to change camps.

As I personally can attest, Nokia Maps works great on an iPhone 4. It offers full multi-touch support and feels fluid. All services on it (positioning yourself on the map, searching for directions, etc.) work just fine. Read more »

The Angry Birds Seasons episode – Summer Pignic got its final level unlocked yesterday and if you’re already feeling sad to see it end you can watch this cool trailer made for the episode by creator RovioMobile.

The video shows the typical birds-vs-pigs battleground situation, a slingshot and the eggs being held hostage. It looks as though the pigs will prevail until the boomerang bird swoops in to save the eggs seconds before it’s too late. Read more »

The original Samsung Wave (which first showcased the SuperAMOLED wonder of a display) is arguably among the best equipped smartphones out there (outside the Android and iOS camps). It’s bound to get even hotter with the release of the Bada OS 2.0.1. It will surely take some time but while you wait, you can try the beta version right now.

The beta brings a set of new features, worth having, like the new UI look, the drag-down widgets screen, the Music and Social hubs, the revamped gallery with stacked albums, the 3D cover flow-like music player, the Dolphin browser 3.0. You might remember the beta landing on the Wave II just a couple of days ago. Read more »

Facebook is a fundamental part of every SNS-offering phone these days. It’s still the most popular social network out there and has by far the largest user base of about 750M people (July 2011). So we’re not really surprised that almost every premiere smartphone OS out there is trying to dig into the hype and offer as much as it can to its users.

Sony Ericsson recently introduced a new, deeper way of integrating Facebook in their recent Xperia smartphones (Arc, Neo, Pro, Play, Mini and Ray). They call it Facebook inside Xperia and we are about to see what it’s like. Read more »

Viber, the app that lets you call and text your contacts for free, is now available in the Android Market. It utilizes either your data plan or Wi-Fi connection to place calls and send messages, so instead of using your call minutes it uses your data plan megabytes. And now that the iOS-only restrction no longer applies it can unleash its full potential.

The app is absolutely free and automatically recognizes which users in your phonebook have the app installed, so you can call them free of charge. On Android it’s even supposed to be integrated in the phonebook so you can call without even opening the Viber app, but having tried it on a few handsets we didn’t get that integration. Read more »

The BlackBerry Tablet OS (that’s the PlayBook platform) just got an update to version 1.0.7. It brings an updated BlackBerry Bridge app, portrait mode in pictures app, pinch zooming in videos and extended language support.

The BlackBerry Bridge app is used to connect your BlackBerry smartphone to your PlayBook tablet wirelessly. What’s new with the app is that now you can save email attachments to either a removable SD card or the internal storage of the smartphone. Also you can also download .ZIP attachments to your smartphone for editing or viewing. Read more »

The Sony Ericsson Mix Walkman is a small feature phone with music-centric features and a thing for flashy colors. It also brings a fun, teenish design and touch of simplicity to the table which coupled with a good price tag could prove a winning formula.

It is, however, a sheep in wolf’s clothing in the aspect that it looks like the Android powered W8 but it is in fact a prettier Yendo – a dumb phone with no multitasking, a limited number of optimized apps and no flashy OS to flaunt in front of others. Still, it brings some notable improvements over the Yendo (the better looks aside) – it has a bigger 3″ display with a superior resolution of 240×400 pixels (over the 240×320 of the Yendo). Connectivity-wise it features Wi-Fi and finally in the multimedia department has e 3.15 MP fixed-focus camera instead of just a 2 MP one. Read more »

We came across some photos of a device which devilishly looks akin to the current iPhone 4 but runs on a test software and is said to be a prototype of the next, much anticipated iPhone 4S, 4GS, 5 or whatever Apple will call it. According to the person, who leaked this, the device features a 5 MP camera instead of an 8 MP one and runs iOS 4.0, but inside there’s the latest A5 dual-core processor as seen on the iPad 2.

A picture is usually worth a thousand words but in this case we see nothing truly new or interesting. The device has no visible changes to the exterior whilst the software is made for testing purposes and is also old news. Still rumors suggest this could be the N94 – a prototype iPhone 5 with the dual-core A5 processor, 5 MP camera and support for the T-Mobile USA network.

Update: Now that we’ve looked more carefully into the facts, it seems the most likely scenario is that this phone is a prototype or rather a test unit for the last year’s iPhone 4, similar to the one being sold on Ebay not long ago. The original source doesn’t suggest in any way there’s an A5 chip inside plus there’s this thing it runs on the original iOS 4.0. Obviously the fellows over at 9to5mac.com (our intermediary source) have been a little bit overexcited and have reported mainly their own speculations on the matter.

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Two of the most important application stores in the mobile world celebrated important milestones these days. iPad and WP7 smartphone owners both have reasons to celebrate as the tablet App store and Windows market place now have 100,000 and 25,000 apps respectively.

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