With CES 2014 fast approaching, tech companies start teasing their upcoming product announcements. Samsung has also joined the bandwagon and has started spreading hints on what it’s going to be focusing at this year’s CES.

On the official Samsung Tomorrow blog, the company recalls the Galaxy Gear announcement at IFA 2013 and the smart home products that also debuted there, adding there’ll be more of the same at CES 2014. Read more »

Proudly announced nearly a year ago, Panasonic’s Toughpad 20″ 4K tablet was finally scheduled to hit the US in January. However it has suffered yet another delay in production and is now expected to start shipping in mid-February.

The Toughpad 4K tablet is priced at &pund;2,700 and arrives with Windows 8.1 Pro out of the box. The resolution produced by the 20″ display is 3840 x 2560 pixels resulting in a pixel density of 230ppi. Read more »

According to the latest browser usage data from NetApplications, Internet Explorer 11 has tripled its market share from 3.27% to 10.42%. This brings the total Internet Explorer market share to 57.91%, which is 0.45 percentage points less than what it was in the month of November.

Internet Explorer 11′s growth is at the cost of IE 10 and IE9′s and the fact that IE10 introduced automatic updates. As a result, Internet Explorer’s usage is down by 6.45 percentage points to 11.05%. Read more »

AOL would have shut down the Winamp music player, as previously announced, but the company has received an offer to sell the now dead software and has accepted it.

The offer comes from online radio aggregator company Radionomy and the sum it payed to acquire Winamp as well as the Shoutcast music services is undisclosed. Read more »

So that’s that then – the big day has finally come. 32 smartphones, 30 games and just over 1 million votes have lead to this moment – the grand final of the Smartphone Champions League.

The all Nokia affair sees the two latest flagships of the Finnish company stand against each other in the search for the ultimate prize. The Lumia 1020 and Lumia 1520 had to overcome plenty of tough challenges to get here, but now they both face the ultimate challenge. Read more »

The semifinal stage of the Smartphone Champions League is now over and we have the names of the two finalists. The two games enjoyed amazing attention and gathered over 120,000 votes and were quite exciting to watch.

The Nokia loyalists community showed that it’s not only very loyal, but also greatly organized and it managed to achieve its goal – an all Lumia final. Read more »

We are into the deciding stages of the Smartphone Champions League and now it’s time to turn our heads to the semifnals. In case you missed the dramatic developments there, here are the Quarterfinals match results.

Four smartphones enter the arena, hoping to get one of the coveted spots in the final of the tournament. Interestingly, out of the four contenders only one is a non-Nokia phone – the LG Nexus 5. The rest are the Nokia Lumia 1520, Lumia 1020 and the Lumia 520. Read more »

The 2013 Mac Pro is a beautiful piece of tech and when it was announced we were quite pessimistic about its prospects of down-the-road upgrades and how repairable it would be. Thankfully, the iFixit team has proven them wrong by giving the Mac Pro its usual teardown treatment.

In its teardown iFixit has found out that the Mac Pro isn’t too hard to disassemble and once you do, you can easily replace the RAM and fill the four slots with SDRAM of your choosing. Read more »

The Oppo N1 is the first smartphone offered with CyanogenMod out of the box. It’s a great milestone for the CyanogenMod team and we have installed the custom Android ROM on the N1 to see what the experience is like.

Currently, the CyanogenMod 10.2 version is available for the N1, which is based on Android 4.3 Jelly Bean. However, Oppo and the CyanogenMod team promise that version 11 will be out soon. Read more »

The Wall Street Journal reports that Google and Audi plan to announce a partnership for car infotainment systems running on Android. The two companies will reveal their joint plans at CES 2014, which kicks off next week.

The in-car entertainment system in question would run from hardware that’s built into the car’s dashboard and won’t be relying that much on the owner’s smartphone. Read more »

We are now at the Quarterfinals stage of the Smartphone Champions League and things are really heating up! Only 8 out of 32 participants are now left and every one had to go through tough battles to get here. And four of those will be one step closer to the Winner’s podium after today’s games complete.

We have some high rollers as well as a few surprises entries here and there. The Nokia Lumia 1020 which stands up against the Samsung Galaxy S III, then there are the LG Nexus 5 vs Sony Xperia SP, HTC One vs Nokia Lumia 520 and the Sony Xperia Z1 vs Nokia Lumia 1520. Read more »

The first four quarterfinalists in our Smartphone Champions League have already been revealed, and now it’s time to learn the names of the other four. Some really exciting games await as 8 more smartphones will battle it out for the remaining spots.

We’ve got the LG-made Google Nexus 5 in actual today against the Apple iPhone 5s in what should be a thrilling encounter. The other Apple smartphone is also going to see some action today, hoping to put an end to Samsung’s participation in the tournament. We’ve also got an in-house battle and a proper mid-ranger contest – all the ingredients of an exciting matchday. Read more »

The first four games in the SCL Round of 16 are now complete, the scores have been counted and now know the names of half of the quarterfinalists.

Sony already has two smartphones in the next round, while Nokia and HTC also got their names on the board. Read more »

Canonical has managed to give Ubuntu enthusiasts a nice Chrimasts present. Developers and advanced users can now download a special preview image of Ubuntu Touch which can dual boot Android.

Yes, you can now have both Ubuntu Touch and Android on a single smartphone with the option to easily switch between the two. Canonical says the image is suitable only for those who are comfortable with flashing custom firmwares on their devices. Read more »

With the Round of 32 part of our Smartphone Champions League now over, it’s time to turn our heads to the Round of 16 where things get more and more interesting by the day. You can check out the results from Matchday 4 to see the which smartphones went through in the opening round and which had to go home after their very first game.

Today we have the first batch of eight handsets who survived the Round of 32. In the Matchday 1 of Round of 16 we’ll see some ferocious battles. There are the Samsung Galaxy S4 vs HTC One, Nokia Lumia 1020 vs Motorola Moto G, Sony Xperia SP vs Nokia Asha 501 and Sony Xperia Z1 vs Sony Xperia Z. Read more »