Nokia has just announced the phone it teased this Monday: the new Nokia Asha 210. It’s a feature phone with a hardware QWERTY and a taste for social networking. The 210 is the first phone with a dedicated WhatsApp button, which will be swapped out with a Facebook button in some markets.

Nokia released a hands-on video that goes over the headlining features of the Asha 210. For example, all 210 phones will come with WhatsApp, Facebook and Twitter integration regardless of what function the hardware button has. Read more »

We have some good news and some bad news for Xiaomi fans. The good news is that the company has finally started expanding market availability and now sells its phones in Hong Kong, too. Now for the bad news – it’s still hard to get one as 200,000 Xiaomi Mi-2S units sold out in just 45 seconds.

Xiaomi is also planning to bring its smartphones to Taiwan, but it will have to start making bigger batches to meet the demand. Read more »

Sony took down its online store in Europe for maintenance for a little while and put it back online this Sunday. To apologize for any inconvenience, Sony is giving you a 10% discount code.

The code should work on all European versions of the Sony Store, but if you want to use it you’d better be quick, it’s valid only until tomorrow. Read more »

Google Now is headed for the desktop version of Chrome as an extension (in Russian only, not fully functional yet), but it seems that the mind-reading information service will make its way to the Google homepage as well. References to Now and cards have been discovered in a JavaScript file loaded by Google.com, but the functionality isn’t there yet.

The customizable iGoogle homepage was retired a while back, but Now might prove to be a worthy successor. Read more »

Google got into some hot water when it was discovered its Street View cars are collecting Wi-Fi data (including things like email, passwords and more) and while there was no criminal prosecution, there’s a fine.

Almost the maximum too, for what Johannes Caspar, Hamburg data regulator, calls “one of the biggest data protection rules violations known”. Read more »

Late last year Nokia announced that it will be closing unauthorized access to Navifirm, the online repository of firmwares for Nokia phones. And that time has finally come. Navifirm was often a source of firmware for Symbian and later Windows Phone handsets before it was rolled out over the air, some times before it was even official.

From now on, you’ll need a Nokia Online login to download firmware. Read more »

Microsoft turned in its report card for the first quarter of the year (which is the third quarter on the company’s financial calendar). The total revenue for the quarter was $20.49 billion with net income growing to $6.06 billion, 19% up from the same quarter the previous year. That was a bit better than analysts predicted.

The company’s CFO, Peter Klein, mentioned that Windows 8 will be coming to smaller devices (presumably with the 8.1 Blue update), but said nothing about Microsoft branding one of them as a Surface device (the rumor mill thinks has it that there is a 7” Surface in the pipeline). Read more »

The premiere of Iron Man 3 is just around the corner (May 3 in the US and even earlier in Europe), but you’ll get to play a virtual Tony Stark a few days early with Gameloft’s Iron Man 3 game. In it you’ll be able to develop and fly around in 18 different suits.

Here’s a video that features some of those plus some in-game footage: Read more »

The iPhone 5S is yet to be seen in whole, but various alleged parts are already making the rounds on the Internet. The latest is a look at the front-facing camera of the next Apple phone, along with another unidentified component.

The photos of the components come from Japanese retailer Moumantai. The front-facing camera is compared against that of the current model, the iPhone 5. Read more »

Android sticks and ultra-cheap tablets are often powered by an AllWinner chipset, typically one using an old Cortex-A8 CPU design. The Chinese chipmaker has now updated its lineup with three new chipsets based on the new and power-efficient Cortex-A7.

One chip of particular interest, the AllWinner A20, packs a dual-core A7 CPU, which is up to 5 times more power efficient and offers 50% better performance than the A8. It’s fully certified to run Android 4.2.2 as well. Read more »

New companies have joined ARM’s initiative to build powerful but efficient chipsets using the big.LITTLE architecture. A total of 17 companies have licenses to build chipsets that combine the powerful Cortex-A15 with the efficient Cortex-A7.

ARM didn’t provide a list of the newcomers, but among the companies with a big.LITTLE license are names like MediaTek and HiSilicon. MediaTek are best known for the chipsets in mid-range smartphones from smaller companies and HiSilicon is behind Huawei’s custom chips. Read more »

One of the best things about Google search is that it tries to cut down the distance between you and the data you need as much as possible. Two newly introduced features for the mobile search aim to help that. The first one is the expandable list of links to important pages on a site – e.g. if you search for “rotten tomatoes” you’ll get a link that leads straight to the In Theaters page of the site.

The other is more experimental and works for the English portion of Wikipedia only – it’s called Quick view and it previews the content of a page, which is much faster than opening the page itself. Read more »

The Samsung Galaxy Ace 3 is rumored to hit in late May or early June and while there’s not much known about the mid-range droid, data from GLBenchmark gives us some info on the screen, OS and chipset.

The Galaxy Ace 3 is expected to have a 4” screen and GLBenchmark reports WVGA resolution. That would put it on par with the Galaxy S III mini with 233ppi pixel density. Read more »

The Sony Xperia Z is a tough device – water and dust resistant – so how tough can it be to take apart if you need to repair it? Well, Rounded.com, a spare parts supplier, has a video walking you through the process.

You’ll need a scraping tool, a Phillips 1.5×45 screwdriver, a pincet, a hair drier and a suction cup. Read more »

The developer version of the Ouya game console has been shipping to Kickstarter backers for a couple of weeks now but some eager devs are still questioning the Ouya team about when they’ll get theirs. The team responded with an update saying they’ve already optimized things by changing one of their partners, a change that will shorten the wait by a few days.

The number of consoles shipped per day is on the rise and the plan is to keep increasing the pace. The chart above shows Ouya’s predictions of how many deliveries will be made by the end of the month. Read more »