Sony launched the slimmer, lighter PlayStation Vita PCH-2000 in Japan late last year and the refreshed portable has now made its way to the UK. Its launch price is lower – £180 (the original launched at £200) – and it features more internal storage and better battery life to boot.

Another change in the PCH-2000 compared to the original is that the 5″ qHD AMOLED has been replaced by an IPS LCD of the same resolution. Read more »

The Sony Xperia Z1 Compact promises to be everything the big Z1 is except in a smaller package. The reduction in size, however, meant less room for the battery and the Z1 Compact has a 2,300mAh battery compared to a 3,000mAh battery for the big one.

That’s still great for the class – the HTC One mini has a 1,800mAh battery and the two are roughly the same size. Read more »

Electronic Arts is currently running a promotion on some of its games for Xbox Live and Windows Phone. Xbox games are up to 75% off, while the Windows Phone games are up to 40% off. It’s not just EA either, Amazon has a long list of discounted games too.

The price cut for Electronic Arts games on WP will only last a week, check the list of games after the break. Read more »

A new player has officially entered the ARM CPU market – AMD. Opteron A1100 packs four or eight Cortex-A57 cores clocked at 2+ GHz. As you can imagine (if the Opteron name didn’t give it away), this will be a server part.

This chip is aimed at high-density servers where it’s more important to run many threads than run one thread quickly. Read more »

Samsung put out a sweet AMOLED-packing tablet in 2011 but, disappointingly for AMOLED fans, hasn’t produced a sequel yet. The wait may be coming to an end – according to Korean publication ETNews Samsung Display will start mass production of tablet AMOLED screens next month.

According to the report, the display will be 10.5″ big and pack QHD resolution (2,560 x 1,440). Read more »

If you’re planning on buying a Windows-running Nokia device (Windows Phone or Windows RT) or just bought one, you should know that Nokia is offering a free $20 voucher for apps you can redeem in the WP or Windows Store.

Note that the deal ends on January 31 and is limited to one voucher per account. Read more »

We received excited tips about how much the Nexus 5 camera had improved after the phone was updated to 4.4.2 (having launched with 4.4, which it introduced). We found the improvements worthwhile, but fairly minor.

Perhaps, our dear readers, your view on things will be different, so we’ve prepared some crops for you to vote on. Read more »

Microsoft is done with 8.1 for its mainline OS (both x86 and RT), now we’re waiting for 8.1 to hits the phone platform. While we wait, we get the occasional leak to give us a better idea on what to expect – like on-screen buttons, a file manager and now redesigned HERE Maps and Games Hub.

The changes in HERE Maps are relatively small, but may signal a new direction for the looks of the interface. Read more »

Carmageddon was one of the earliest racing games I ever played and certainly the goriest. The classic has been available on mobiles (iOS and Android) for a while now, but if you didn’t want to pay $2 for a hit of nostalgia then now is your chance – the game is temporarily free.

The offer is available for both platforms too, on iOS it’s part of App of the day. Read more »

We met the Sony Xperia Z1 Compact at CES, but now we’ve lured it into our office and right in front of the camera. This handset promises to revitalize the small, but premium phone market, going against the grain of the phablets and near-phablet handsets that have become the norm forAndroid flagships at the moment.

With a beautiful glass on aluminum frame design and compact dimensions, the Z1 Compact might be able to poach a few dedicated iPhone users. The waterproof rating and 20.7MP camera can’t hurt either. Read more »

eBay had a good final quarter in 2013 to round off a great year – revenue grew 19% both for Q4 and for the whole year, reaching $6.6 billion. Both eBay and PayPal reached record results from mobile, which was one of the major drivers of growth.

For the fourth quarter of last year net income was $850 million with an operating margin of 22.6%, up 0.7 percentage points compared to Q4 the year before. Read more »

Android OS provides mechanisms for push notifications that leverage two services from Google and apps like Gmail, Facebook and Twitter use it to deliver instantaneous notifications. The problem is that those services infringe on patents held by SimpleAir, an “inventor-owned technology licensing company.”

A jury in Marshall, Texas unanimously found that the patent in question, No. 7,035,914, is valid and that the search giant infringed upon five of the claims in the patent. Read more »

The rumor mill has been abuzz with talk of Microsoft’s upcoming virtual assistant, which will borrow its personality from Cortana (you know, from Halo). Now, Head of Microsoft Research, Peter Lee, has confirmed that the a “big focus” for the company is artificial intelligence, including a virtual assistant.

The video interview features a short glimpse of a virtual assistant prototype at work but somewhat disappointingly it didn’t use Cortana’s avatar. Read more »

The Alcatel One Touch Hero phablet runs on power-efficient Cortex-A7 CPU cores, but that large 6″ screen with 1080p resolution puts a bigger demand on the battery than the 720p screens of its opposition.

Most competing phablets are single-SIM devices too, while the Alcatel One Touch Hero we’re testing is the dual-SIM version. Read more »

If you’ve flashed a Samsung Android device then you’ve encountered Odin and you’ve done it through your Windows PC. CASUAL recently launched JOdin3, which is written in Java and supports Linux, Mac OS X and even Raspberry Pi. You can run it in a web browser, too, if you like.

JOdin3 looks mostly like Odin3, which people are familiar with, but uses the Heimdall as a base. This means the app will require a PIT file, but it can automatically grab it for itself if you don’t have it at hand. Read more »