A huge flock of press images have surfaced on the web that show off the latest lens camera from Sony – the ILCE-QX1, called the QX1 in short. It’s the successor to Sony’s QX10 and QX100, which were shown on IFA 2013 and were essentially a cameras with their own lens and sensor but that could be attached to a smartphone and use its screen as a viewfinder.

The QX10 had a 1/2.3″ sensor (around the same size as an Xperia Z2′s sensor) while the QX100 had a much bigger 1.0″ one. The leaked QX1 takes things to a whole new level with an APS-C-sized sensor and the option to swap E Mount lenses. The device should share an image sensor with one of Sony’s interchangeable lens cameras like the current flagship APS-C in Sony’s line 24MP α6000 or 20MP α5000, for instance. Read more »

The latest fashion victim of the “Swarovski for Samsung” collection is the Samsung Gear S smartwatch.

The watch’s strap will be covered with Swarovski cut crystals that will complement the curved design of the Tizen-based smartwatch. Read more »

Windows Phone 8.1 has already received its first general distribution release (GDR1) but now rumors are pointing to the second one. According to sources claiming they’ve played with a functional WP device running the GDR2 software the settings menu can finally be sorted alphabetically.

Currently the WP settings menu is a list of settings prioritized the way Redmond saw best and is very confusing to many users. The source claims that the Action center will carry a mobile data toggle and that Cortana (while still in Alpha phase) will become available to more markets. Read more »

The Sony Xperia Z2 is getting its last minutes of fame thanks to a rather interesting promo video where it plays more of a background role.

In its latest promo Sony is shining a light on UK Bourton-on-the-Water 100-year old river football tradition and throwing the Xperia Z2 in there to take photos and video of the event above and under the water. Read more »

The Sony Xperia M2 Aqua added dust proofing and water resistance to the original Xperia M2 but left the majority of internals intact without change. Among the untouched parts is the 2,300mAh battery so one would only expect the Xperia M2 Aqua to perform along the lines of the 67-hour Xperia M2.

However there’s one more side to the story – while the Xperia M2 launched (and we tested it) with Android 4.3 Jelly Bean, the M2 Aqua has Android 4.4.2 KitKat and that has led to a big improvement on the battery performance. Find the numbers after the break. Read more »

The Sony Xperia M2 Aqua was announced only recently and as the name suggests, it’s a water-resistant version of the Sony Xperia M2.

Mostly this is the same phone but there are some differences which we’ll discuss here. For starters the phone now offers IP68 certification for staying in up to 1.5m deep water for 30 minutes and it’s fully dust proofed. Read more »

Sony just took the wraps off its Xperia M2 Aqua smartphone – a water-proofed Xperia M2 and now the promo videos are live.

The videos run through the phone’s strengths and shows it getting wet on more than one occasion – something that tends to get users’ mouth to water pretty fast these days. Read more »

Nvidia makes a big deal of its tegra K1 chipset as impossibly advanced and having the most advanced mobile graphics and is so determined to improve it that it launched a 64-bit version a few days ago.

It just so happens that we have the first tablet to commercially carry the non-64-bit Tegra K1 – the Xiaomi Mi Pad 7.9 and naturally we wanted to focus on the K1 benchmarking prowess. Check the very impressive results after the break. Read more »

The Samsung Galaxy S5 mini matches the looks of the big Galaxy S5 and even most of its features but opts for a smaller display, body and in turn smaller 2,100mAh battery.

The screen of the Galaxy S5 mini is 4.5″ against the 5.1″ of the Galaxy S5 and the resolution is more than two times lower at 720p. The chipset should also be less power-hungry so the 700mAh-less battery should do okay to match the 72 hour endurance rating of the bigger Galaxy S5. But there are a slew of minis to fight as well – let’s see how the Galaxy S5 mini did. Read more »

The week is done and so is the last poll we did. It faced probably the best portable tablets on the market currently in the face of the Samsung Galaxy Tab S 8.4 and the Apple iPad mini 2.

You guys gave your votes and now that we’re about to close the subject we can reflect and see what’s what. Some fights were very close the whole week and ended close, others ended with a big difference in scores. The verdict – sorry Apple fans but your portable slate got its digitizer handed to it in a statement win for the Galaxy Tab S 8.4. Read more »

The day finally came when Samsung unleashed a powerful mini to go along with its flagship smartphone. The Galaxy S5 mini isn’t just an under-powered lookalike of the Galaxy S5 but retains most of what makes the S5 one of the most desirable smartphones on the market, only in a more pocketable form factor.

Samsung has gone with a bigger 4.5″ display (compared to the 5.1″ of the Galaxy S5 and the 4.3″ of the Galaxy S4 mini) but more importantly, it has still bundled the mini with a superb Super AMOLED panel. The fingerprint scanner and IR blaster are here as well and so is the water resistance – yay! Read more »

Lenovo has just announced the premium-built VIBE Z2 Pro smartphone and right away we get the promo video on YouTube.

In it we see the device’s key selling points – Android 4.4 KitKat with Lenovo’s VIBE UI 2.0, a precision-crafted unibody made out of brushed metal and just 7.7mm thick and the 16 MP snapper. Read more »

We’re taking a little detour from our regular routine with poll making and will be pitting two slates against each other instead of smartphones. Well, maybe not such a big detour after all.

In this weekly poll installment we’re putting the two best-equipped portable slates around – the newly-arrived Samsung Galaxy Tab S 8.4 against the market-leading Apple iPad mini 2. Read more »

Samsung has patented three new smartwatch designs, all of which have a rounded display instead of that on their well-known rectangular Gear smartwatches.

The patent number is US D709,873 S and covers the design of three smartwatches with slightly different displays and straps. All of them feature a camera on the strap, which may indicate the use of Tizen OS over Android Wear. Read more »

According to TPK, the company that’s reportedly in charge of producing silver nanowire ink for Apple’s iWatch, the watch will enter mass production in the final four months of this year and not in the third quarter as previously expected.

TPK, which expected solid profit in Q3 because of the deal with Apple, has now reevaluated things with a higher Q4 profit expectation. The reason – TPK expected the Apple iWatch to enter mass production in the third quarter, not the fourth one. With this development doubts have risen as to whether Apple can build the quota of iWatches it needs to meet 2014 demand. Read more »