The Nokia Transport app for Windows Phone 7 dropped its beta tag back in July, but now it’s time for another beta – this time of a new version of the app -2.3. The new release brings easier searching, simpler to understand directions and constant updates of the changes in public transport.

The number of cities that Transport supports has grown since July. It will give you directions for 100 new cities (550 in total) and there are live timetables for 9 new cities (109 total). Here’s what else has changed in version 2.3: Read more »

The Samsung Galaxy Note II is one of the most impressive droids out there and judging by our mailbox everyone was interested to know more about its its battery performance. Well, we are finally done with the tests, and we are now ready to share the results with you. The tests took a while to complete, for reasons you’ll see shortly.

The Galaxy Note II has a beefy 3100mAh battery – 1000mAh more than the battery in the Galaxy S III, but 200mAh less than Motorola’s RAZR MAXX battery. And there’s a large AMOLED screen and a quad-core processor to feed. Read more »

The Maps issue on iOS is still a hot topic for some people and after Tim Cook himself suggested people try third-party solutions, there has been a lot of chest beating from established map makers. Now Google is putting its features where its mouth is and has enabled Street View in the mobile Google Maps site for iOS.

It’s a stopgap feature as a dedicated Google Maps app is still some way out, but it works well enough. Read more »

BlackBerry OS 10 faced a few delays, but the waiting might be worth it as the new OS is a far cry from its bland, text-based predecessors. The new OS relies heavily on clever gestures for many of the basic tasks – even going back to the homescreen is done with a gesture rather than a button like on Android or iOS. As such, BB OS 10 brings back memories of the (short-lived) excitement that MeeGo caused.

The best way to teach users the new gestures are quick and simple tutorials played on the phone itself. Here are four of them, that show both gestures we’ve seen before and a few of new ones. Read more »

Apple’s latest iPhone boasts an updated 8MP camera over its predecessor, but the question is how much better is it really? You have to take into account that the iPhone 5 is thinner, which always complicates matters on the camera front.

We’ve shot several photos with both the iPhone 5 and the 4S and we’ve picked the ones that have the same shutter speed and ISO to give each phone an equal chance. Read more »

The Samsung I9260 – purportedly the Galaxy Nexus 2 – is such a tease. We’ve already seen a couple of photos that were (perhaps accidentally, perhaps not) uploaded to Picasa and now there’s a new one.

This latest image was shot using newer software – I9260XXALI9 – while the previous two were shot with ALI5 and 6 releases. Read more »

The Sony Xperia Tablet S packs a Tegra 3 chipset, making it more powerful than the original Tablet S. But how does it stack up against other tablets on the market right now? Things should be pretty close, considering the popularity of NVIDIA’s chipset.

We ran practically every benchmark we could think of, testing the CPU (four Cortex-A9 cores at 1.3GHz in the Tablet S), the GPU (an ULP GeForce) and the web browser (stock browser on Android ICS and Chrome). Read more »

Just before the Japanese launch of the iPhone 5, three stores were robbed of a total of 191 units. Then about a week ago, an employee of a London O2 store made off with an entire shipment of 250 iPhone 5s, which are worth about £100,000.

Now there’s a report that on Tuesday there was yet another major iPhone 5 theft, which occurred in France. The number of units stolen wasn’t confirmed, but the whole thing played out like a heist movie. Read more »

The Sony Xperia Tablet S left its Sony HQ home to spend some time with us. It carries over some design elements from its predecessor, like the 9.4″ WXGA screen and fold-over design, but it adds goodies like a quad-core processor (moving from Tegra 2 to 3), thinner aluminum frame and IPX-4 certification (splash proof).

The Xperia Tablet S is 8.8mm thick along its back, with a thicker “fold” on top. This makes the tablet easier to hold in the hand and is used to attach the tablet to various accessories. Read more »

The browser war on the desktop is very heated, but in the mobile space things are pretty calm – the overwhelming majority of Android and iOS users use the default browser on their device.

Here’s something you might not have expected though – Chitika, an ad network and data analytics firm, found out that iOS users are more likely to install and use a 3rd party browser than Android users. Read more »

The Nokia Asha 306 is part of the latest crop of fully touch-operated S40 phones. It is nearly identical to the Asha 305, except that one was a dual-SIM phone and this one has Wi-Fi.

The Nokia Asha 306 relies on a 3″ WQVGA resistive touchscreen – the capacitive units are reserved for the Asha 311 in this family. It’s not as sensitive as we would have liked, but it is multi-touch enabled, which comes in handy in the Gallery. Read more »

Apple may be working hard to get rid of preinstalled Google apps on iOS devices iPhone, but Google is pushing the other way with high-quality apps like YouTube and Chrome. GOOG just updated the Chrome for iOS to make it compatible with the new iPhone 5 and it also fixed a Gmail-related issue.

The latest version of Chrome for iOS is 21.0.1180.82 is out and you can update from the App Store (the app itself will also notify you when there’s an update available). Read more »

The Xperia T is Sony’s first go at a Snapdragon S4-powered phone (not counting the Japan-only Xperia GX), and should give us an idea what to expect from the similarly spec’d Xperia TX and Xperia V.

The Sony Xperia T features a 1850mAh battery, which is one of the biggest we’ve seen in a Sony smartphone. Remember the 1305mAh batteries in a few fairly recent Xperias? Yeah, that wasn’t enough. Read more »

Intel currently has only one smartphone-ready SoC on the market, but it’s already found its way inside six phone models, the most recent (and high-profile) of which is the Motorola RAZR i. The chipset packs a single Atom CPU core (with Hyper-threading enabled) but it does lack LTE, which is a big buzz word recently (especially in the US, where the RAZR i won’t be available).

Well, things are about to change as Intel confirmed it’s developing its own line of LTE modems that will become a part of an upcoming chipset. Read more »

Wait in line for the iPhone 5, exposed to the elements? Wait 3-4 weeks for your pre-order to go through? Nah, someone is Japan decided to go Gone in 60 seconds. Three stores that were going to sell Apple’s latest smartphone in the same night were hit and all but two of their handsets went missing.

The total damage is estimated at 7.45 million yen, nearly $100,000. That sounds like a lot, but it’s only 191 iPhone 5 units that are gone. Here’s what happened. Read more »