The new Xperia Z has a cool angular design and Sony will be releasing a matching angular dock for it. The DK26 charging dock uses the two exposed pogo pins on the phone to charge it but that’s about all it does.

The port doesn’t extend the MHL USB port, it’s just for charging. Read more »

Tablets killed the netbook star, but are notebooks next? According to analysts at NPD DisplaySearch, tablets shipments will overtake laptop shipments this year and will start building a gap to push them out in the following years.

What’s more interesting is that according to NPD‘s projections, the most popular screen size by the year 2017 will be 7.9″ and not the currently popular 7″ or 9.7″/10.1″. Read more »

With the big ticket items out of the way, we can turn our attention to the other gadgets that Sony has brought to CES. The company has a new range of four NFC-equipped speakers to work with the One-Touch tech that Sony introduced with the new Sony Xperia Z and Xperia ZL smartphones.

There’s also a voice-controlled remote for Sony’s Google TV box, the NSZ-GS7. Read more »

Besides point-and-shoot cameras, Sony also announced a wide range of camcorders last night. The new offerings range from the entry-level $250 camera and move up the range adding features along the way. The cameras have versions with a built-in projector and the higher-end models have manual controls.

There’s a 3D camcorder too, but that comes only in one version. Read more »

The new Xperia Z and ZL were the stars of the Sony show yesterday, but the Japanese company also unveiled a number of digital cameras. Five new point and shoot cameras debuted and they are all pretty feature-packed.

Potentially the most popular of the new cameras will be the CyberShot WX80 – a $200 camera with a 16.2MP sensor, 8x optical zoom (25-200mm), 1080i60 video capture and built-in Wi-Fi. Read more »

According to rumors, Asus has plans to introduce two cheap 7″ Android tablets at CES (maybe as cheap as $129). A leak from retailer Icecat.us points to a cheap 10″ tablet that might be joining them at the Asus CES booth.

The tablet is known only as Asus ME301T MemoPad 10, will apparently pack a Tegra 3 chipset (like the one in the Nexus 7) and will run Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. Read more »

Android’s mascot, affectionately known as Bugdroid, has become instantly recognizable in the mobile world and it has already gone several transformations to match the dessert a given Android version is named after. But Bugdroid wasn’t the first mascot.

These loopy-looking robots were. They were created by Dan Morrill, who worked in developer relations, when he decided that slides for a presentation to Google’s dev team needed eye candy. Read more »

Corning’s Gorilla Glass has become synonymous with scratch-resistance for mobile devices (both phones and tablets), so we’re excited to see the third iteration of the product. Corning will showcase it at CES and its president will give a talk about the future of specialized glass for the video and gaming industry.

Gorilla Glass 3 promises a 3x increase in scratch resistance and fewer visible scratches. Read more »

The official dock for the Google Nexus 7 tablet was first announced in early August last year, but we’ve barely heard from it since (the Asus Japan site has it listed, but it’s currently out of stock). So, here’s some good news – B&H Photo Video has the dock listed on their site as coming soon.

The Nexus 7 dock features a microUSB port used for charging and data connectivity along with a 3.5mm audio jack to plug in external speakers. Read more »

Samsung put a number of exclusive features on their high-end Android devices, like Smart Stay and Smart Rotate. Now, using the GMD Smart Rotate app you can replicate both of those features on a non-TouchWiz device (or on a lower-end Samsung).

The free version of the app implements Smart Rotate – it uses the front-facing camera instead of the accelerometer to rotate the screen. The advantage is that there are situations where the accelerometer gets it wrong – e.g. when you’re lying on your side or if the phone/tablet is on a flat surface. Read more »

We already saw how the Windows Phone 8 Store is doing, time to have a look at the Windows 8 store. According to MetroStore Scanner, the store for Microsoft’s new computer OS has over 35,000 apps, over 22,000 of which are available in the UK.

That’s not bad, considering that the Store had only 10,000 apps at the end of October. Read more »

The Apple iPad is the most popular tablet hands down and unsurprisingly it dominates the web traffic share in the US and Canada with 87% in the month of December (was 88% in November).

The data comes from Chitika Insights who use it as a yard stick. Read more »

Samsung is teasing a new TV that will be unveiled at CES early next year. The video is obscure as can be, but the company’s Flickr account has several images of the revamped Smart TVs, which will be showcased at CES too, and are slightly more generous with the details.

The new Smart Hub promises easier to use interface and it will serve as a content platform – the TVs will handle broadcast television as well as on-demand TV shows and movies, browse photos and support apps too. Read more »

California-based camera sensor maker Aptina announced a couple of 8MP sensors that promise high-quality, high-speed video recording. The smartphone-bound AR0835 sensor does oversampling (a technique used by the Nokia 808 PureView) to provide what the company claims is broadcast quality video capture.

And it can do it at 60 frames per second, if you’re shooting 1080p video, and 120fps for 720p. Read more »

Asus seems to have two low-cost Android tablets in the works, carrying the model codes ME371MG and ME172V. Their specs were dug up by an Italian website and promise two 7″ tablets with Android 4.1 Jelly Bean at a low price. The duo should make an appearance at CES.

The lower-end tablet, the Asus ME172V, will have a 7″ screen with a resolution of 1024 x 600 pixels, built with TN tech rather than IPS (so viewing angles probably won’t be great). Read more »