One of the most unusual smartphones that you have seen just landed in our office – the Meizu MX. At its core, it’s an Android phone, but it takes a lot of design cues from the iPhone. What’s unique about it is that it’s from a Chinese company – a lot of companies have their gadgets assembled in China, but this one was also designed there.

China has all the potential to become a tech powerhouse – and the Meizu MX is probably just the first of many high-end gadgets that have an actual chance of dethroning the current top phones. Read more »

Everyone who has read the The Da Vinci Code or has seen the movie knows what a cryptex is – an old-timey way to password protect your documents. Except today’s documents typically come in digital form, say a flash drive, rather than paper so as cool as a cryptex sounds, it’s no good to use today.

Enter the Crypteks USB – you can guess what it does just by its name. It’s not a real product yet, it’s just a concept on Kickstarter. Still, considering it has received $130,000+ in backing (well over the $12,000 goal), it seems a pretty safe bet that it will be a real product soon. Read more »

After the initial buzz about Google+ dried out, we barely hear any news about the service these days but Google seems determined to make this one a success. They’ve updated Hangouts with some cool new features and bringing it to Google+ Messenger on mobile devices.

With the update, Google aims to make Hangouts the online conferencing tool. The first step is to make it easier to start or join a hangout. Read more »

Look at what stumbled in front of our camera – it’s a baby Sensation. No wait, it’s the HTC Explorer – a petite droid coming to replace the Wildfire S as HTC’s entry level offering.

We were scratching our heads for a while, wondering what has changed since the Wildfire S, and it turns out there’s quite a bit that’s different. Read more »

Samsung made official their Series 5 Ultrabooks – that’s right Ultrabooks, not Chromebooks – in South Korea. While not the thinnest or lightest, they pack some mouth-watering specs.

The Series 5 Ultrabooks come in two sizes, 13″ and 14″, but the difference between them is more than just an inch. Read more »

Another letter of the Galaxy alphabet has come to visit us today – the Galaxy W a.k.a. I8150. It sits in the middle (size-wise) between the entry level Galaxy Y and the high-end Galaxy S.

The Samsung Galaxy W I8150 is in the middle in terms of performance too – the Qualcomm MSM8255T Snapdragon chipset packs one 1.4GHz core and Adreno 205 graphics that offer pretty good performance. Read more »

Here’s something you probably didn’t know about Windows Phone’s messaging – there are a lot more emoticons available than the two pages the keyboard offers. There are so many that it’s hard to think of a use for some of them, let alone remember them.

Anyway, if a friend of yours just bought a Windows Phone handset, you can surprise them with one of what is practically a zoo of emoticons. The full list is available after the jump. Read more »

Google added another feature to their constantly growing bag of tricks – the simple calculator feature of Google Search has grown a graphing calculator. You just type in a function (e.g. sin(x) * x) and you’ll get an interactive plot of the function as the top search result.

You can pan around and zoom in and out, check the value of the function at any point you like and even plot multiple functions (separate them with a comma). All this is done with HTML5 plus SVG, there’s no Flash used (so it should run problem-free on devices without Flash support). Read more »

Ivy Bridge seems to be moving away from us every time we get closer – Intel has reportedly told its partners that their next generation desktop CPUs won’t be hitting the market in March-April as previously thought, but instead will come out some time in Q2 2012.

The new processors feature several key improvements that make it worth the wait – or it did at least when we thought they were coming sooner. Read more »

Box.net is getting pretty aggressive – after the recent Sony Ericsson deal, now LG are getting 50GB of free cloud storage too. Owners of Android-running LGs who install Box on their phones between November 30 2011 and March 31 2012 will get the extra storage for free (50GB up from the usual free 5GB).

It’s not a limited time offer either, like the HTC/Dropbox offer. You get to keep your 50 gigs for as long as you have the account. There’s still some fine print though. Read more »

The Nokia N9 is rolling out the welcome mat for its half cousin that just arrived in our office – the Nokia Lumia 800. The two can almost be siblings, but that lasts only until you turn the screen on. The 800 is Nokia’s first foray into the land of Windows Phone and we’re excited to take it for a test drive.

Let’s open up the box and see if the differences start from the packaging or if it’s just the phone housed inside the box that’s different. Read more »

At the BlackBerry Innovation Forum, RIM showcased a the much awaited update for their PlayBook tablet. It will add three new system apps – an email client, a calendar and a phonebook.

In case you weren’t aware, the BlackBerry PlayBook launched without those apps over half an year ago but they are coming – better late than never. Read more »

Be careful not to cut yourself – the new Motorola RAZR XT910 droid is 7.1mm sharp. We got it out of its box gently to rummage around and then played with the RAZR itself. The Kevlar coating on the turned out to be much more pleasant than we thought and the high-res SuperAMOLED screen does look impressive.

But first things first – the box contents are what you would expect (charger, USB cable, etc.). The interesting accessories, like the Lapdock 500 that turns the RAZR into a 14″ Android netbook, are sold separately. Even without those, however, the Motorola RAZR is an impressive piece of kit. Read more »

Samsung is ready to have a second go at updating the Galaxy Tab 10.1 to Android 3.2 this time everything should go smoothly. The original update that went out last week left some people without Wi-Fi (pretty bad if you have the Wi-Fi only model) and had other issues too. Installing this through Samsung Kies should fix the problem.

People who still have Internet connectivity should be getting notifications that the Over-The-Air update is available. Read more »

The Windows installation process either frustrates people because they know it will take a lot of time (if they know how to do it at all) or intimidates them with the complexity of the procedure. Microsoft are redesigning the process for their upcoming Windows 8 OS to deal with both problems.

You can still do an advanced setup, which will let give you the most control over how the OS is installed, or you can do a streamlined setup, which is started by simply running an .EXE file or via web delivery. Read more »