The Sony Xperia ZR is the little brother of the Xperia Z and Xperia ZL, and boasts pretty much every key specification they have. The major is the 4.55″ 720p display, which should be kinder to the equally large 2300 mAh battery inside the phone.

Identical chipsets and batteries plus a smaller screen of lower resolution give the Xperia ZR every chance of beating its premium rivals. Read more »

Google has teamed up with Starbucks to provide a free Wi-Fi hotspot in all of the chain’s 7000 coffee shops around the USA. The search giant promises that once the update has finished, customers will be able to enjoy the web at speeds “up to 10x faster than before”.

And if a particular Starbucks coffee shop happens to be in the few areas where Google has its Fiber service set up, the speed bump will be up to 100 times. Read more »

Gameloft has released a new trailer for its upcoming Asphalt 8: Airborne game. The game was featured at the Google Android event last week to show the capabilities of the new Nexus 7 in terms of graphics performance.

And in this trailer you can see some of the game’s glorious graphics, including some in-game footage. That’s a result of the brand new physics engine the game is boasting. Read more »

Developers of the OpenSignal app for Android have used their vast user base to measure the level of fragmentation of Google’s mobile operating system. This year, more than 682,000 devices have been surveyed, almost 11,868 of which were distinct Android devices.

In comparison, in 2012 OpenSignal’s report saw just 3,997 distinct Android devices. Those are huge numbers for sure, and they also make for some interesting revelations. One of them is that a 47.5% of the devices are Samsung-made, which is no surprise considering the company’s recent performances. Read more »

Rumors have it that Samsung has its first “true octa-core” CPU in the works. This follows MedaTek’s announcement of the first eight-core processor a few days ago.

The Samsung Exynos 5440 Octa is the company’s latest octa-core CPU at the moment, but technically it isn’t a true octa-core since a maximum of four cores can work at once – either the four Cortex A7 or the four Cortex A15 cores. Read more »

If the 41MP camera of the Nokia Lumia 1020 wasn’t enough of a selling feature for you, then this cool and detailed infographic showing 41 reasons to get the cameraphone might prove useful.

Made by Nokia USA, the infographic shows the Lumia 1020 in a very nice and detailed way with pointers to each of the 41 reasons the company thinks are worthy of your attention. Naturally, the list starts with the 41MP sensor and goes on with its features – digital zoom, six-element ZEISS lenses, optical image stabilization and excellent low-light performance. Read more »

The Sony Xperia ZR has rushed into our office in dire need of review treatment. Before that though, we are giving it a quick test drive in front of our camera to show you some of its awesome features.

You can’t really mistake the Xperia ZR, can you? Especially with this cool pink paint job, which should really become a favorite of the ladies. It looks the part thanks to the high quality plastic used, which feels very sturdy and premium. Read more »

Sony has decided not to waste any time and push the freshly announced Android 4.3 Jelly Bean as part of its Android Open Source Project (AOSP) for the Xperia Tablet Z.

Sony Community manager Marcus Hansson says that Sony developers began work only after Google made its Android announcement at the event yesterday just to get the latest Jelly Bean version running on the Tablet Z. As a result, not all of the Android 4.3 functionality works just yet. Read more »

The second-generation Google Nexus 7 is now official and the company has launched a promo trailer to go with it and try to convince you to buy one, if the specs of the device didn’t already do that job.

Entitled “Fear Less”, the new Nexus 7 promo video is not only inspirational, but also quite smart and nicely made, showing a young boy’s fight with anxiety of public speaking. Read more »

Google announced a second-generation Nexus 7, which retains the screen size, but increases the resolution tremendously to 1920 x 1200 pixels. This continues the affordable slate’s role as yardstick for other portable Android tablets to be measured against. But how does it stack up against Apple’s portable tablet warrior – the iPad mini? Should you rush to the Google Play Store to get one to replace your first-gen Nexus 7?

We’ve prepared a quick comparison table that’ll bring you another step closer to making the decision. Read more »

Windows Phone 8 has finally received its own a native torrent client after wpTorrent graduated from beta and is now available on the Windows Phone Store.

Obtainable in a paid and a free versions, the app allows you to download files from torrent files and magnet links alike. Read more »

Google is finally taking the conquest of Europe more serious and has expanded the availability of its Play Books and All Access Music services to 13 new countries.

The latest ones to get access to to the Books and Music part of the Google Play Store are Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania and Sweden. Read more »

HTC has posted an infographic dedicated “little things that pack a big punch”. Needless to say, it’s a well done attempt at teasing the public for its One Mini smartphone.

The phone itself has appeared multiple times on camera and HTC’s start of the One Mini’s marketing campaign is a good sign we can expect it to debut soon. Read more »

If you haven’t heard of the If This Then That service, now is as good time to familiarize yourself. The concept is pretty simple – if a condition is met (forecast says it’s going to rain tomorrow) then do a task (send me an SMS with the text “get an umbrella”).

Thankfully, the power of IFTTT isn’t limited to just the web app anymore, as its creators have launched an iOS app available on the Apple App Store free of charge. Read more »

Drobpox is holding its first developer conference today dubbed DBX where the company’s CEO announced that the cloud storage service is now responsible for the files of 175 million users. They are syncing more than a billion files every day. Impressive, indeed.

Additionally, there are over 100,000 apps that use the Dropbox API set. More interestingly, It is getting updated with an interesting Datastore API, which will allow users to backup their application data, which means that settings, bookmarks, contacts, to-do lists and game scores can get backed up to the Dropbox cloud. Read more »