Samsung have undertaken less than subtle ways to continue its fight against Apple in Australia. They’ve set up a temporary shop in Sydney just outsides Apple’s own shop and are offering Samsung Galaxy S II droids for $2.

Sounds like a great deal, right? It is, but there’s a catch. Even so, the line to the Samsung store is reportedly longer than the line to Apple’s store. Read more »

We just found out that the Nokia Sea Ray, the first Windows Phone handset from the Finnish manufacturer, will supposedly be called ‘Sun’. There are at least a couple of other WP7 Nokia phones in the rumor mill and one of them might be called ‘Lumia’.

Occasional Gamer, who develop games for Windows Phone, have a stats page with a long list of phones. One of them is the Sea Ray, but there’s also the Nokia Lumia 800. Read more »

Yesterday’s event put an end to the rumors that the next iPhone will have NFC – it doesn’t. The iPhone 4S does have Bluetooth 4.0 however, does that replace it? Well, my guess is no. But it does open up the door for improvement in some categories of wireless gadgets popular with the iPhone crowd.

Bluetooth 4.0 features a Low Energy mode that uses less power, has lower latency and higher range, but doesn’t have the bandwidth for bulk data transfers. Read more »

Well, there’s no iPhone 5, just the 4S. But what of the older models? In a surprising move, Apple decided not to deprecate the 3GS, which puts the number of iPhone models currently available to three.

First of all, the iPhone 4 was just put in the “old” category and it will remain in the portfolio only in its 8GB version. Read more »

You couldn’t have missed it – the Internet almost collapsed under the pressure of people who wanted to see the next smartphone from Apple. Well, the announcement is over so here’s a list of countries that will get the iPhone 4S first.

Tim Cook says “This will be the fastest iPhone rollout we’ve ever had”. It will happen in three waves of announced launches. The first starts on October 14th (with pre-orders taking place from the 7th onwards), here are the lucky countries: Read more »

It’s time to shed any remaining doubt about the iPhone 4S (not that there was much left). Images from Apple’s own website show the black and white 4S model (the file name clearly says “4s”), that is practically indistinguishable from the iPhone 4.

However, have a closer look at the icon just above the “Phone” app. It’s the Newsstand app, which is a part of iOS5 – the OS that the 4S will launch with. Read more »

Nokia bet the house on the Microsoft deal, so they’re trying to make sure all goes well once their first Windows Phone 7 handset launches. They are reportedly talking to app developers, trying to lure them in and expand the app catalogue of the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace.

Microsoft is also trying to grow the developer base for WP7 through promotions of their own, so devs can cash in on the incentives from both companies. Read more »

Here’s a quick tip for droid users who are wondering what to do during the weekend – Gameloft has lined up a selection of four games, each of which will cost just $0.99 just this weekend. The games are N.O.V.A., UNO, Assassin’s Creed and Asphalt 6.

iOS users are covered too – UNO and Asphalt 6 cost $0.99 right now and you can snatch up The Oregon Trail for free (this is a limited time giveaway). Read more »

So, it’s here – it because we’re still not quite sure what to call the Samsung Galaxy Note. It’s too big to be a phone, a 5.3″ is quite a bit bigger than even the 4.65/4.7 inch screens we’ve been seeing lately.

It’s not quite a “tablet” either Read more »

The HTC Runnymede peeks out of the rumor mill again, this time on video. It’s been spotted before, but seeing an actual running device means that it’s either very close to completion or already completed – and an official announcement can’t be too far off.

The Runnymede, or perhaps Bass, puts a 4.7″ WVGA S-LCD screen and Beats Audio in the same package as a 1.5GHz single-core CPU, among other specs. Read more »

Adobe announced that the upcoming versions of their Flash and AIR platforms will be out in October and published a laundry list of improvements. One of the biggest changes is the hardware acceleration of both 2D and 3D graphics. Adobe claims gives 1000x performance increase compared the old versions, which will allow devs to create “console-quality games”.

Flash 11 and AIR 3 will run on every platform you can imagine – Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, including 64-bit support for these OSes, but also Android, iOS, BlackBerry’s tablet OS and connected TVs. Read more »

NVIDIA’s Kal-El has a secret – the quad-core CPU actually has a fifth core, called a companion core. It’s a low-power core that is meant to handle background tasks while the phone is idle (e.g. syncing email, checking Twitter for new messages and so on).

The architecture of the companion core has been designed with power efficiency in mind and its clock speed goes up to 500MHz.That doesn’t offer a lot of performance, but for a lot of tasks you don’t need it – and it manages to offer great power savings. Read more »

Another week, another HTC party – we didn’t even make it through the door when we were greeted by a lavender-colored Android miniature keychain. From then on, it was an easy guess that the HTC Rhyme is the guest of honor.

The Rhyme is designed with an emphasis on style and boasts a ton of accessories. Read more »

Those HTC guys just keep the party train rolling – they have an event starting right about now (probably to announce the HTC Rhymes for Verizon) and they already have another event scheduled.

It will be held just two weeks from now, on October 6th, but HTC is playing coy and says it’s a “press conference and party”, but mention nothing of any devices they might announce. Read more »

Street Fighter is coming to Android, thanks to a collaboration between LG and CAPCOM. LG’s CEO took the time to “HD” four times in four sentences, underlining “HD smartphone”.

Street Fighter IV will come to Android in the last quarter of this year and be exclusive to the LG’s own app store (LG World) for the first three months of its droid existence. There was no mention of its pricing, though. Read more »