The Android-powered OUYA console has started shipping to Kickstarter backers, as promised. This is the developer console with a transparent plastic casing, while the retail unit (scheduled to hit shelves on June 4) will have a metallic outer shell.

The OUYA team says consoles will be shipped out of the factory over the next few weeks so you might not get yours right away. You will receive an email when yours leaves the factory. Read more »

A couple of months ago Panasonic unveiled its plan to improve digital cameras by replacing the ubiquitous Bayer filter. The company claims a Bayer filter blocks 50%-70% of the light entering the camera, while its new color splitter design uses all the available light. A new video goes into more detail on the tech.

According to Panasonic, the color splitters are a pop-in replacement for Bayer filters, so the same sensor tech can be used. Also, the splitters can be made by current manufacturing processes, the big problem was that getting the design right took a lot of computing power to run simulations. Read more »

Google Translate is a great tool for bridging the gap between languages – the Android app was pretty awesome but it let you down when you needed it most, in a foreign country with no data connection. That’s no longer an issue, as the latest version of Translate for Android (requires 2.3 and above) can download offline language packs for 50 languages.

All the popular languages are available and even less common languages are included, like Haitian Creole, Maltese and Esperanto. Read more »

SamMobile received a system dump of the Samsung Galaxy S4 firmware and ripped out some interesting bits –the APK of the new S Voice, the high-res wallpapers and the ringtones.

Meanwhile, a member of XDA-Developers has ripped the ringtones from the HTC One and shared them with the world. Read more »

The Samsung Galaxy S4 is about the same size and weight as the Galaxy S III, except that the new model is slightly thinner. Even so, the battery capacity has increased by 500mAh to a nicely sounding 2,600mAh total.

Still, that battery has to feed four Krait 300 cores and a bigger screen with over twice the number of pixels. Let’s see how the 2013 flagship from Samsung compares to the one from 2012. Before we continue, we should make it clear that we’re using the I9505 for this test, that’s the Snapdragon 600 chipset and not the Exynos 5 Octa. Read more »

Nokia Transit is a great app for those relying on public transportation, but so far it was exclusive to Lumia phones. Well, not for long – a beta version of the app can be installed on the full touch Nokia Asha 3xx phones.

In case you’re unfamiliar with Transit, here’s what it does – it finds nearby stations (or you can search for stations by address), tells you about departure times and can plan a route to your destination, even across several lines and modes of transportation. There are detailed instructions for each route and favorite routes can be saved for offline usage. Read more »

Steve “Cyanogen” Kondik, the leading man behind the popular CyanogenMod, joined Samsung in mid-2011 but now, less than two years later, he left the company. He had spent some “quality time” with the new Galaxy S4 and had some words to share about it.

For one, he seems to be a fan of the device, saying in a Google+ post that it “blows the competition out of the water” and feels more solid than the Galaxy S III he loves and uses every day. What he had to say about TouchWiz was less pleasant. Read more »

NVIDIA has included an interesting new feature with its fourth generation Tegra chipsets – the Computational Photography Engine, a.k.a. Chimera. It allows for things like always-on HDR (for still shots, videos and more) achieved with just a single shot.

The current approach is to snap multiple photos at different exposures and stitch them, but that leads to motion artifacts and has other limitations that Chimera solves by doing HDR in a single shot. Read more »

Yesterday we got some potentially bad news for Europe – that the Galaxy S4 version in sold in Sweden will use the Snapdragon 600 chipset instead of the Exynos 5 Octa that geeks were hoping for. The same version will be sold in North America. However, then we saw some reassuring benchmarks and now we can add one more.

Primate Labs, makers of the Geekbench app took interest in the Samsung Galaxy S4 performance and made a chart to see how the new Galaxy flagship performs. Using data from a benchmark run by Android Authority, the Primate Labs chart shows that the S4 is over twice as fast as its predecessor. Read more »

The LG Optimus G Pro brings several upgrades over the regular Optimus G, including a big 3,140mAh battery, but also a new screen and updated chipset. Let’s find out if the increase in battery capacity offsets the higher power demands of the screen, which is both bigger and higher res.

Before we go on, we’d like to note that our Optimus G Pro review unit (which came from Korea) has a spare battery and a battery charger/phone stand in the box. The international version might not have these goodies. Read more »

Emergency broadcasts on the radio or on TV are a thing of the past – people rely on the Internet for such things. For that reason, Google is bringing its Public Alerts international starting with Japan.

Earthquake and tsunami warnings for Japan will appear on Google’s Search page, Maps and even Google Now. Read more »

Samsung has managed to keep a surprisingly tight lid on the Galaxy S IV, especially considering that the launch is just a week away. GottaBeMobile partnered with Martin Hajek to try and guess what the Galaxy S IV will look like. The result is cool-looking concept renders like this one:

The design is based on the most common rumors about the device and a healthy dose of imagination. Read more »

The LG Optimus G Pro is the current king of phablets – other phablets couldn’t put up much of a fight against the 5.5” 1080p screen or the Snapdragon 600 chipset. The phablet market exploded after the first Galaxy Note came around and quickly went from niche to millions of units and LG has engineered the Optimus G Pro to be the best in that field.

The screen is pretty amazing – it has excellent viewing angles (better than the Optimus G screen) and great colors. Read more »

Sony had an impressive video wall at its MWC booth, which was built entirely out of Sony Xperia ZL smartphones (196 of them). And it’s a candidate for a world record – it’s not official yet, but the current record is held by a setup with only 72 phones. Guinness is expected to confirm the record.

The video wall was created by Visionmill and one of the guys who worked on it, Matt Mapleston, shared some details on the wall on his blog. Read more »

NVIDIA is primarily a GPU company and it utilizes its close relationship with game developers to promote its products. The new Tegra 4 chipset is no exception and the company already announced 5 more games that are specifically optimized for the chipset.

The Tegra Zone has been around since the Tegra 2 came to be and it is a platform for showcasing Tegra-optimized (Android) games. The Tegra 3 optimized games looked pretty good, but the newly announced chipset is massively more powerful than that – NVIDIA went from 12 cores @ 520MHz architecture in Tegra 3 to 72 cores @ 672MHz in Tegra4. So check out the first titles that will make the best use of the hardware update. Read more »