Windows has been a mostly desktop/laptop OS with only the occasional slate. But with slates being one of the primary targets of Windows 8, devs had to tackle an interesting problem – what to do with all those sensors that smartphones and tablets have?

Windows 8 will feature support for ambient light sensors and also an accelerometer, compass and gyroscope, which will be mashed together into something Microsoft calls “Sensor fusion” to improve the sensor’s performance. Read more »

The Samsung Galaxy R is wiping the sweat from its brow as it just finished our battery test. We were curious to see how it will stack up against the Galaxy S II, but we’ll compare it to the other phones we’ve tested as well.

The SC-LCD screen should handle web pages better (since they are predominantly white, not a good scenario for AMOLEDs) and the chipset is clocked 200MHz lower, which might give the Galaxy R a crucial advantage when it comes to battery performance. Let’s find out. Read more »

New reports suggest that Sony is already testing ICS on their two Android tablets and that the public release of the update should coincide with the release of the update for the company’s now wholly owned Xperia lineup some time in April.

Sony is also allegedly preparing “some really cool unique bits” to spice up the Android 4.0 for its tablet devices, but we can only guess.

Read more »

One of the cool things about Android is that allows talented devs to create amazing things – like creating a huge touchscreen of sorts (using a projector) driven by a Samsung Galaxy Nexus that takes input from a Microsoft Kinect.

The result lets you interact with your phone through the projection screen just as if you were touching the phone’s own screen. Here’s the setup in action: Read more »

The Pew Internet & American Life Project conducted several studies in the US, which show an interesting trend – in about a month over this past holiday season, the number of owners of tablets and e-readers almost doubled.

In mid-December around 10% of people in the US owned a tablet and just as many owned an e-reader. The study done in early January showed that ownership had jumped to 19% for tablets and for e-readers. Read more »

The Nokia Lumia 710 just finished our battery test course and we guess you’re all very curios to see how it did compared to the Lumia 800. The 710 has a smaller battery (1300mAh vs. 1450mAh) and a different screen, which will have a major effect on the results.

Then again, when we tested the 800 it still hadn’t received it’s battery fix update from Nokia, so things might get pretty close. Read more »

The BlackBerry PlayBook caught a lot of flack when it launched because it lacked apps that seemed central to the functions of a business tablet – contacts, email and calendar. RIM has been working on adding these features in PlayBook OS 2.0, which rumor has it is finally launching on February 17.

We’ve seen leaked screenshots of the new apps a couple of times so we know what to expect. Read more »

Google reported its fiscal results for the last 2011 quarter and for the year 2011 as a whole. The Q4 results were a record for the search giant, with revenue topping the $10 billion milestone for the first time.

CEO Larry Page was also proud with their social network, Google Plus. It reached 90 million users, more than double the 40 million users reported in October. This also puts them on track to reach the predicted 100 million by the end of February (a prediction that sees Google Plus reaching 400 million users by the end of 2012). Read more »

The international version of the Nokia Lumia 710 dropped by our office following the US-bound one and we’re ready to share our first impressions of it. The first thing we noticed was the extra large box – bigger than the boxes most other phones come in – but the contents are pretty standard.

As for the phone itself, it was a pleasant surprise. The Lumia 710 sits slightly lower on the ladder than the Lumia 800, but it has the same hardware inside along with a screen with the same size and resolution. Read more »

You’ve probably heard that there’s an Apple event scheduled for January 19, this Thursday. The invite they sent out promises “an education announcement” and the rumor mill says that Apple will be unveiling new tools and a platform to create and publish eBooks, with a strong focus on interactive content.

According to Steve Jobs’ biography, digital book publishing and its use in education was a pet project of Apple’s former leader and in a couple of days we might see the results. To quote the biography, textbook publishing is a “$8 billion a year industry ripe for digital destruction.” Read more »

The Acer Iconia Tab A700 may have gotten most of the attention at CES, but the A510 was also there. It’s a 10.1″ tablet powered by a quad-core NVIDIA Tegra 3 and running Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich – so far, just like the A700. The big difference is that the screen has only 1280×800 resolution (rather than the 1920×1200 resolution of the A700).

Anyway, the Iconia Tab A510 features a 5MP main camera and 2MP video-call camera. It has lost the full-size USB port that the A500 had but keeps the microHDMI port. Read more »

LG is bringing their latest super droid to Verizon under the name Spectrum, a version of the South Korean Optimus LTE and the LG Nitro HD for AT&T. That means the Spectrum packs a 4.5″ AH-IPS LCD display of 720p resolution, a dual-core 1.5GHz processor and LTE connectivity.

Design-wise, the LG Spectrum is nearly identical to Optimus LTE LU6200, whereas AT&T’s version takes after Optimus LTE SU640. We noticed that the back has changed though – it’s now glossy and gets smudged all over with fingerprints very quickly. Read more »

We already covered the Droid 4, but Motorola had a couple of other interesting handsets for Verizon to show at CES – the RAZR MAXX and the purple version of the original RAZR. The MAXX is the one that had our jaws drop to the floor though, it’s a little thicker and a little heavier than a regular RAZR but it offers the amazing 21.5 hours of continuous talk time. Now go back and read that again.

The key to this nearly day-long talk time (people with insomnia will probably appreciate it) the giant battery that Motorola somehow managed to cram inside. We are talking a capacity of 3300mAh here. Read more »

This year’s CES saw the announcement of the new Samsung Series 9 ultrabook. Its slim aluminum body houses specially designed components that make it one of the thinnest and lightest portable computers around.

It will be available in 13.3″ and 15″ versions, but Samsung claims that it is so compact that the 15″ version is the size of a typical 14″ laptop. Read more »

Verizon and Motorola had some interesting Androids to show at CES, including a brand new member of the Droid family. It’s not as thin as its RAZR siblings, but 12.9mm still sounds great given the arsenal of features it offers (4″ qHD screen, slide-out QWERTY and LTE are the headliners).

We got the opportunity to see the Droid 4 in person and we’re ready to share our initial impressions. Read more »