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Apple will shed light on plans for its $100 billion cash reserve tomorrow

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Apple’s intentions towards its cash reserve of around $100 billion have been been the talk of the business world for quite some time now. Thankfully, we are going to find out more about the company’s “discussions concerning its cash balance” tomorrow, in a conference call hosted by its CEO Tim Cook, and Peter Oppenheimer – the giant’s CFO.

The conference call will be held at 9AM Eastern Time (GMT-4) tomorrow morning – a good half hour before the opening of the stock exchanges in the United States. Read more »

Motorola Droid XYBOARD 8.2 hands-on

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As the Droid RAZR quickly became a seriously popular smartphone, it is no surprise that Motorola took its looks and solid build quality to its tablet lineup as well. The LTE packing Droid XYBOARD 8.2 for Verizon Wireless is part of this group. The slate has taken the good looks of the RAZR family to go with its impressive build quality.

The Droid XYBOARD 8.2 packs the same TI OMAP 4430 chipset with two 1.2 GHz Cortex-A9 cores, and PowerVR SGX540 GPU as its RAZR relatives. Read more »

Samsung Rugby Smart finished our battery test, here go the results

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As a proper rugged device, the battery life of the AT&T exclusive Samsung Rugby Smart is among its most important features. After all, finding a charging spot when outdoors is not necessarily the easiest thing to do, right?

The smartphone features a 1650mAh battery, which is the same as the unit found in the Samsung Galaxy S II. In the case of the Rugby Smart however, the spec sheet is significantly more modest, so we did expect a commendable performance. Read more »

Assassin’s Creed III trailer gets outed by Ubisoft

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The trailer of the latest Assassin’s Creed installment has gone live, folks. Ubisoft call the game the largest project in the company’s history with three years of development gone into it, as well as collaboration with six other studios.

Assassin’s Creed III features an all new game engine, which delivers stunning graphics and artificial intelligence. Read more »

Samsung Rugby Smart threw itself in front of the camera, here’s the hands-on

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Quite frankly, the last missing piece in Samsung’s impressive Android lineup in the United States was probably a rugged device, and the Samsung Rugby Smart for AT&T has arrived to fix that wrong. The handset has been built up to the MIL-STD-810f military spec standards. It is dust proof, shock resistant, and can be be submerged in up to 1m of water for up to 30 minutes. Extreme temperatures are also welcome as long as the Samsung Gravity Smart is concerned.

The smartphone is also a curious example of the enormous parts bin, which the Korean company has on tap. Read more »

Motorola Droid 4 review

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The slide-out QWERTY sporting Motorola Droid 4 is one of the fastest product sequels I’ve seen in quite some time. The Android smartphone hit the shelves at Verizon Wireless only six months after its predecessor, Motorola Droid 3 arrived, thus making me curious about the changes it has brought with it.

Speaking about changes in the newcomer, they are actually quite a few. Read more »

Here’s how Huawei’s Pegasus cellphone statue came into being

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In case you saw our earlier coverage from Huawei’s press conference, you must have noticed the seriously cool Pegasus statue outside the venue. It is made from Huawei handsets, and aims to tell the world that the Chinese giant is ready to play alongside the heavyweights on the market for smartphones and tablets.

The Pegasus statue is a seriously fascinating engineering achievement on its own, so Huawei have released a separate video to mark the occasion. Read more »

Watch the Huawei Ascend D quad promo video

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Huawei Ascend D quad just got announced, and now we have the flagship’s promo video for you. Having just hit YouTube, the clip features the handset, alongside the mythical Pegasus, built from the Chinese company’s smartphones.

The Huawei Ascend D quad packs a spec sheet, which is worthy of its ambitions. Read more »

BLU Studio 5.3 in white makes a point out of not being your typical budget smartphone

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Let’s face it: the BLU Studio 5.3, which is on our hands today, looks like anything but a budget minded Android smartphone. It is very big and very white. And yes: it also packs two SIM card slots and two (!) homescreen buttons.

Without a closer look at its hardware and specs, the BLU Studio 5.3 can easily pass for a direct competitor to the mighty Samsung Galaxy Note. But it is not. It costs less than half the Korean royalty, and doesn’t have the ambition to go head to head with it Read more »

Here is the breakdown of the Samsung Galaxy Note I717 performance in our battery test

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We were really curious to see how will the LTE rocking Samsung Galaxy Note I717 perform in our battery test. As you probably know already, the AT&T exclusive device sports a different, slightly less powerful CPU and chipset than the Exynos of the mighty N7000. With the rest of the hardware being identical in both devices (including the 2500 mAh battery), we are now going to find out which chipset has the upper hand in energy efficiency.

As always, we are going to kick things off with the talk time performance. Read more »

Pantech Burst for AT&T visits us, packs a lot of ambition

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Let’s be honest here – when talking high-end, dual-core Android smartphones, Pantech surely won’t be on top of your list of brands. The Korean company is mostly known around the world for making highly affordable feature phones, or low-end smartphones, with its home market being an exception of sorts. The aforementioned facts make the AT&T exclusive Pantech Burst quite interesting, as it aims to (cautiously) change the company’s image in the United States, where the market is brimming with options.

Believe it or not, the LTE sporting Pantech Burst has a spec sheet, which can compete with the top dogs in its segment. Read more »

Samsung Galaxy Note for AT&T comes our way, here’s the hands-on

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Despite looking just as imposing as its global sibling, the LTE packing Samsung Galaxy Note I717 for AT&T certainly is a different character from the international N7000. For starters, the U.S. bound phoneblet has gone through the same treatment as its local cousins from the Galaxy S II family, which includes having four touch-sensitive buttons at its front, instead of the three button configuration with a hardware button at the center of the global version. The AT&T Galaxy Note has also ditched the mighty Exynos chipset for Qualcomm-made silicon instead.

Like I mentioned above, the Samsung Galaxy Note for AT&T features a Qualcomm Snapdragon S3 chipset with two Scorpion cores, clocked at 1.5GHz. The GPU is Adreno 220. Read more »

Nokia Public Transport drops its beta moniker, wants to show you the way on your Belle device

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First introduced as a beta several months ago, Nokia Public Transport has made its way into a commercial release. As its name suggests, the Nokia Belle app is ready to help you navigate your way around the transportation systems of about 80 cities and urban areas.

The application lets you search for any address in the supported locations. Read more »

Motorola DROID RAZR MAXX review

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The Motorola DROID RAZR MAXX looks so familiar, you can easily mistake it for its slimmer brother from certain angles. Aside its massive built-in battery and a change in the internal memory capacity, the newcomer in Verizon’s LTE lineup is identical to the DROID RAZR, which broke cover in November last year.

Quite frankly, I never thought that battery capacity will be the star feature in a high end Android smartphone, but, given my experience with a number of top notch devices from the past year, it makes perfect sense. After all, I witnessed several Android top dogs with massive spec sheets display battery performance, which puts their daily usability in question, thus forcing me to walk around with a charger in my pocket. The DROID RAZR MAXX is clearly aimed at this painful issue. Read more »

Skype makes its way to Nokia Belle, sans video calling for now

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Skype has finally made its way as an app to Nokia Belle, folks – a good deal of time after Nokia’s latest Symbian OS saw the world.

The popular messenger app sports an improved performance as well as improved look and feel compared to older Symbian versions – right in line with the Nokia Belle UI. Read more »