While the Nokia sub-unit that Microsoft acquired is going through some hard times, the Nokia company still musters some excitement and continues to develop its launcher replacement, the Nokia Z Launcher.

The latest update brings a short changelog but it’s all welcome improvements. Read more »

Samsung expanded its 850 SSD series with 2TB drives, in both the PRO and EVO lineups. The company says it has seen increased demand for 500GB and bigger SSDs and the 2TB drives are a “strong driver into the era of multi-terabyte SSD solutions.”

The 2TB versions Samsung 850 EVO and 850 PRO are available in 50 countries right now. Read more »

The vultures are circling – AMD has been struggling to compete with Intel on the CPU front and with Nvidia on the GPU front and profitability has been elusive. Naturally, acquisition rumors have cropped up, first Samsung and now Microsoft.

Microsoft is a full-time hardware maker and it really needs chips – for its Xbox One console, for the Surface tablets, perhaps even for its Lumia phones. Read more »

The Android 5.1.1 update for the Samsung Galaxy S6 has been out for a while and it finally landed in our grasp so we updated our unit and took it for a quick spin. And we do mean quick as the changelog is particularly short.

We dug around the interface, tried shooting a RAW image and ran some benchmarks. Our findings are pretty slim – the 0.1 update brings only a handful of features. Read more »

A while back we tested the fastest smartphone charging technologies and remarked that wireless charging is convenient but slow. The Wireless Power Consortium is coming up with an upgrade of the Qi charting standard that pushes out a whopping 15W of power – that’s as much as the wired Quick Charge 2.0!

This will allow Qi wireless charging to put as much as 60% charge into a battery in just 30 minutes. Read more »

DxO, known for testing camera quality among other things, has decided to jump into hardware with the DxO ONE. It’s a camera module that attaches to an Apple device that can snap RAW images with its 1″ 20.2MP sensor behind a fast f/1.8 lens.

The DxO ONE uses a physical connection to the iPhone or iPad, over the Lightning port, which eliminates lag compared to the wireless connection of Sony’s QX cameras. Read more »

The super-thin phone trend means we’ll probably never see a xenon flash on a phone again, so flash add-ons are a thing now. The iblazr² is getting kickstarted now and should be delivered this September.

The add-on uses four LEDs and a wireless connection (Bluetooth) to up to twice as more light as your phone’s built-in flash can. It supports both iOS and Android phones. Read more »

Gillette taught us that that what appears to be the main product and what makes the big bucks aren’t always the same thing. Slice Intelligence has analyzed millions of emails and has concluded that 17% of Apple Watch buyers also sprang for at least one extra band.

It may seem like a simple thing, but a basic sports band retails for $49, but may cost as little as $2.05 according to IHS (that’s without packaging, shipping and other costs). Read more »

If the high pixel density of the Kindle Voyage e-reader tempted you, but the $200 price tag was holding you back, now you can get the same 300ppi density at $120 with the 2015 edition of the Kindle Paperwhite. That’s a decent jump from what you got with previous Paperwhites (212ppi).

The premium model still has a number of advantages though. Read more »

Apple is taking a second swing at music streaming, based on the Beats Music service. The base pricing in the US is pretty standard ($9.99 a month) but it was the family plan that turned some heads – up to 6 people can share a plan for just $14.99.

What if your cash doesn’t have dollar signs on it? For Europe at least you just stick your local symbol in front of 9.99 and 14.99 for the respective single and family plans. Read more »

The previous week Google unveiled the upcoming version of Android, dubbed just M, and this week Apple unveiled iOS 9 along with the new Watch OS. All three OSes tackled different issues, but do you think they were the right issues and that both companies did enough?

Time for another round of hot or not. Read more »

Farmers take note – Rovio has reached expert levels at milking things, pushing its Angry Birds cash cow into new territory. The new Angry Birds Fight! ditches the physics-based gameplay and switches to the “match three” mechanic popularized by the likes of Candy Crush Saga.

The game brings back the cute, animated characters with lively animations and sounds, which is perhaps the game’s biggest asset. Read more »

Samsung tried to sum up the best features of the Galaxy S6 edge into a 60 second ad. Most of them are enabled by the first dual-curved display – People Edge, Edge Lightning, Night Clock, Information Stream – but also both cameras and Samsung’s charging options.

Here’s the 1 minute crash course into Samsung’s flagship. Read more »

Your favorite ad blocker may soon land in Safari – both the iOS 9 and the Mac OS X El Capitan versions. The new functionality allows apps to give Safari rules about blocking cookies, images, other resources, pop-ups and other content.

This should enable everything from ad blocking to privacy add-ons to work natively on Apple gadgets. Read more »

If you’re serious about your gaming hardware and are on the lookout for a new monitor, the new LG 27MU67 offers 4K resolution, 10-bit colors and AMD FreeSync support.

LG already showed off a FreeSync monitor at CES 2015, though that one had “only” 1080p resolution (in 21:9 widescreen format). Read more »