Best Buy unveiled its planned price cuts for Black Friday, but apparently it couldn’t wait until midnight and Apple products are already discounted – and some devices already running out.

The deals are available now online and will be available in stores starting 5pm. Read more »

Black Friday is fast approaching and OnePlus has decided to make it a collaborative event – the company will be trading Facebook shares for money. Or rather for discounts on its accessories – 5% off goes for 2,000 shares, but the maximum 20% off is a steep 20,000 shares.

This is an interesting type of promotion – the more people that hit the share button, the more people will see the promo, which should lead to an avalanche effect. Read more »

Black Friday deals have spread across the world, but the US still gets the best offers. Like a Samsung Galaxy S5 for $1 from Best Buy – with a 2-year contract, of course, but carrier stores still have it listed at $200. This offer is for AT&T, Verizon and Sprint. For $26 total you can get an S-View Flip case too.

Best Buy also has some salivating offers for pre-paid phones on multiple carriers. The cheapest is LG Realm for Boost Mobile for $20, but you can grab an LTE-enabled HTC Desire 510 on Virgin Mobile for $30 (note that the US version of the phone is not 64-bit like the European version). There’s also a 4G-enabled Galaxy S III for Sprint. Read more »

Carriers don’t have the best reputation when it comes to the speed of software updates, however, Verizon may be on track to release Android 5.0 Lollipop for its Motorola Moto X (2014) soon.

Nothing is official yet, but Motorola has invited participants in its Motorola Feedback Network to take a new software version out for a spin. Read more »

The Jolla Tablet campaign reached its (rather low) funding goal of $380,000 in a couple of hours and now in its second day it has already passed the $1 million mark. The campaign is going so well that the price keeps rising – the first 1,000 tablets went at $190, the current batch of 1,000 tablets is priced at $209.

And the price will keep rising, eventually reaching its estimated retail price of $250 – matching the metal-clad Nokia N1. Read more »

Real time traffic information is great if you’re already on your way, but does little to help you plan a trip ahead of time. Here Maps are getting a new feature, Predictive Traffic, which can improve ETA estimation by up to 20% by accurately predicting the traffic in the next 12 hours.

Nokia’s Here has partnered with Esri, one of the world’s top Geographic Information System (GIS) providers. Read more »

Flash storage for mobile devices is typically described by just its capacity, but if you’ve looked at a computer SSD you may have noticed initialisms like MLC and TLC. TLC is cheaper per gigabyte since it stores three bits per cell compared to the two of MLC, so Apple used TLC storage for some 64GB and 128GB iPhone 6 and 6 Plus units.

And it’s been nothing but headaches. First the controller in the TLC storage went haywire causing crashes, boot loops and slow speeds, now benchmarks have surfaced showing that MLC easily outperforms TLC. Read more »

The Samsung Galaxy Note Edge is largely based on the Note 4, save for the unique curved screen. This reduced the internal volume, which in turn made the battery smaller – 3,000mAh instead of 3,220mAh in the Galaxy Note 4.

The screen is different too as is some of the software, which have a much bigger impact on battery life than those lost 220mAh. Read more »

So, Nokia announced an Android-running clone of the Apple iPad mini. There are multiple things wrong with that sentence, but while your rub your eyes in disbelief you can watch this short reveal video as evidence the Nokia N1 is indeed real.

The N1 is Nokia’s first Android tablet, it previously tried making Windows RT tablets but that fizzled out quickly. Read more »

Nokia’s custom Z Launcher is ready to graduate from pre-beta – it lands in the Play Store today and it even works out of the box on the new Nokia N1 tablet.

The tablet is similar to Aviate – it learns from your usage and picks up contextual cues (e.g. whether it’s morning or evening), but the feature that sets it apart is scribbling. Read more »

Chainfire is back and this time brings the number of rooted Lollipop-running Nexus devices to six – CF Auto Root is available with SuperSU v2.20 (which isn’t available anywhere else currently).

For Lollipop devices the latest Chainfire version includes a ZIP to patch the kernel to run CF Auto Root at boot. Read more »

NVIDIA’s Shield portables can stream a game from your computer, but they will soon gain the ability to stream from NVIDIA’s computers – support for the Grid gaming service will arrive as part of the Lollipop upgrade. The service runs the game in the cloud and streams 720p@60fps footage to the Shield, with very low latency (so the company promises).

“State-of-the-art NVIDIA GPU servers” will handle the rendering on the cloud part. Read more »

New display technologies have a chicken and egg problem – there’s no content for them, because there are no such cameras (because there’s no displays to watch stuff on). It happened to 3D and it may happen to VR – Virtual Reality – unless products like Samsung’s Project Beyond become popular.

Project Beyond shoots 360° 3D panoramic photos and videos, which can then be viewed on the Samsung Gear VR headset. Read more »

Six months after unveiling the Simband and SAMI – a wearable with a rich biometric sensor array and its supporting cloud platform – Samsung has unveiled the second generation of Simband. It’s based on the Gear S but will not be sold commercially – instead it’s a development platform that developers can pre-order today.

They can reconfigure the sensor array as needed and even develop their own sensors and algorithms to plug into the system. Samsung has made the Simband and SAMI an open platform to draw in partners and developers. Read more »

Samsung just launched the Gear S smartwatch in India, but if you don’t need all the added connectivity options you might want to check out the LG G Watch. Like the Gear S, it’s a square smartwatch (the round one is called G Watch R) and it’s currently 50% off on Flipkart.com.

Users report it had been priced as low as INR 6,500 temporarily (57% off) but it went up a bit over the last few hours. Read more »