You may have heard about the Smoked by Windows Phone competition by now. In these events, a Windows Phone device is pitted against any other smartphone and both are made to do a simple task, with the winner being the one who completes it first. The task is usually something as simple as taking a picture and uploading it to Facebook or finding directions to a place. But as it turns out, this challenge is not as fair as Microsoft makes it out to be, as Sahas Katta of Skatter Tech found out the hard way.

Katta was in a Microsoft store where he wanted to take part in the competition. He was armed with his new Galaxy Nexus. The challenge given to him was to bring up the weather of two different cities as quickly as possible. Read more »

Ever since HTC announced the One series at MWC last month, the one thing that has been bugging me was the layout of the keys at the bottom of the display. You see, unlike the Galaxy Nexus, HTC went for hard keys that are permanently placed at the bottom of the display, instead of soft keys on the display.

As you can see, there is no dedicated Menu button, because Android 4.0 does not require a dedicated Menu button. Google has advised developers to get rid of the Menu buttons completely and place all the important functions on the screen itself, with the other, less important functions inside a drop down menu placed on the top right of the screen in ICS-optimized apps. But what about the older apps that are not ICS-optimized and rely on the Menu button to display all the additional functions? Read more »

The Linux-based Tizen platform is yet to see the light of day on a retail handset but it goes without saying that the OS is being tested internally by Samsung. As such, we are not completely surprised to see the name pop-up in benchmark results, which in this case happens to be the browser based HTML5 test.

What’s interesting, however, is that the Tizen browser not only showed up in the benchmark, it also managed to top it within its category (Mobile Phones) while running on an unknown device. But it wasn’t alone; snapping at its heels was a browser from another, yet to be launched OS, the BlackBerry 10. Read more »

After the launch of the Nvidia GTX 680, the initial reviews that came out painted pretty much the same picture, that this new graphics card is better in almost every way compared to the AMD Radeon HD 7970 and is currently the fastest single GPU graphics card available in the market today.

But even before we could stop ogling at the amazing benchmark scores, Hardware.Info has come out with a new review, where they test not one or two but four GTX 680 in a four-way SLI configuration and then they compared it with the HD 7970, which too was set up in a quad-CrossFire configuration. Read more »

Amidst all the excitement surrounding the launch of Angry Birds Space one important bit of news that got missed out was the fact that Angry Birds Space is the first version of the game on Android that also has a ad-free premium version ($0.99), along with a tablet-optimized ‘HD’ version ($2.99).

When the game got launched, like most people I ended up downloading the free version, thinking that as usual it would be the only version available. Google also advertises only the free version on its Google Play homepage. Read more »

After an unofficial sneak peak yesterday, the first of the Kepler series of graphics cards, the Nvidia GTX 680, has now been officially announced. This is Nvidia’s flagship graphics card for now and is the fastest they have ever built. It uses the 28nm fabrication process, a first for an Nvidia GPU, along with some other new tech, such as GPU Boost.

What GPU Boost does is it automatically increases the clock speed of the GPU when it is under load, from a base clock speed of 1006MHz to 1058MHz to provide better frame rates. But what this feature also does is it reduces the clock speed when the GPU is not being taxed, dropping down all the way to 324MHz during idle. Read more »

Sony may not have had much success in the tablet market but that doesn’t mean it still can’t treat the few people who bought its tablets to the latest version of Android. According to the latest update, Sony will be releasing the Android 4.0.3 update to the Sony Tablet S and Tablet P by the end of April.

Along with the usual Ice Cream Sandwich goodness, users will also be treated so a couple of new features. There will be a Blu-ray recorder app, that will let you watch programs recorded on a compatible Sony Blu-ray recorders. You can also start the camera now from the lockscreen, edit your pictures and take Sweep Panorama shots from the camera. Read more »

The highly anticipated GeForce 600 ‘Kepler’ series GPU from Nvidia is on the brink of being launched with the flagship GTX 680 being the first out of the gate. With this new GPU, Nvidia plans on reclaiming the title of the world’s fastest single GPU graphics card, beating the recently launched AMD Radeon HD 7970.

But before the wraps come off, someone has already managed to snag the official video of the GTX 680 and uploaded it on YouTube. Read more »

Google has updated both its online version of Mail as well as Maps. The new update to Gmail will now tell you exactly why an email was put inside your spam folder. You could see different messages, depending upon the type of mail and its contents. It could tell you about a malicious link or virus, or that the contents of a mail matches other spam messages or that you have previously marked messages from that particular sender as spam.

This should come in handy on occasions where Gmail wrongly puts a mail into the Spam filter but considering how rare that is you won’t be finding much use for this new feature. Nevertheless, it’s good to have it around. Read more »

Rovio’s space themed Angry Birds Space marks the first real departure from their usual bird flinging action. I mean it’s still bird flinging, but this time it’s in space, which means the gravitational force in action here is a little different from the one you experience on Earth.

After a ton of promotion, including by NASA, the game is finally set to launch tomorrow, on March 22 on iOS, Android, Windows and Mac. But before you download and start playing the game, here are some short videos to familiarize yourself with the updated birds that you will be playing with in this new game. Read more »

Yesterday, during the conference call, CEO Tim Cook mentioned that the new iPad had a record-breaking opening weekend, but did not provide any actual figures. Well, that information has arrived, as usual, with its own press release. Apple has sold over 3 million new iPads since launch.

When I say ‘launch’ I mean March 16, which is when the device officially went on sale. So basically Apple sold a million new iPad every day since then. And as AppleInsider explains, this number does not include the pre-orders, which were made before the device went on sale. Read more »

It seems there is trouble in paradise for owners of the new iPad who wanted to use it with the Smart Cover that they bought for their iPad 2. The problem is that with some users the Smart Cover does not work well with the new iPad, i.e., the display does not switch on and off as it should. This is not only a problem with Apple’s Smart Cover but also with some of the third party ones.

So what could be the reason for this? The answer lies in the polarity of the magnets, as Mark Booth has explained fantastically on his blog. Read more »

Google has released another update to the recently updated Google Play Store app on Android, which takes the version number to 3.5.15. Among the list of changes is the ability to sort user reviews and view all your previously downloaded apps, both of which were available on the Play Store website for a while now.

The review sorting feature lets you sort user reviews for an app by the most helpful first or newest first. You can now also choose to view reviews for the latest version of the app and also reviews for just the handset that you use. This will be incredibly useful in separating all the useless reviews from the ones that actually matter to you and your device. Read more »

Some of you may have noticed that the infamous torrent hosting website – The PirateBay – went down yesterday for a few hours, creating quite a bit of panic among those who wear an eye-patch and a wooden leg. Thankfully for them, though, the site wasn’t taken down by the law as they feared and was just down for a bit of maintenance.

When it came back online, however, it had some interesting bit of information to share. It seems now the people at TPB are looking at hosting their servers up in the air, to make them that much more difficult to take down. Read more »

The new iPad launch event was more or less what everyone expected. The air was so thick with rumors before the launch that almost nothing that was announced managed to surprise anyone. Except that one thing that no one saw coming, and that was a new name. Almost everyone and his dog was betting on the new iPad being called the iPad 3 and as such a lot of people were actually disappointed that it wasn’t called that (never mind the fact that it makes absolutely no different to the product at all).

Even here at GSMArena were were quite baffled initially as to why Apple would choose to name their third generation product same as the first one and, at least as far as the name is concerned, place it behind the second generation model. But after a little bit of pondering, a few explanations started to come to my mind. Read more »