When Google’s Hugo Barra announced at the Google I/O 2013 that the Samsung Galaxy S4 will be offered directly from the Play Store as a “Google Play Edition” device running stock Android, many people got really excited. Later on, HTC also jumped on the bandwagon with the HTC One, giving you a choice between two excellently spec’d smartphones that offer the Nexus experience.

As planned, the devices went on sale on June 26 and almost immediately, an alleged Galaxy S4 I9505G unit was discovered that runs on the yet unannounced Android 4.3 Jelly Bean instead of the official Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean. Shortly after, a ROM that any regular Galaxy S4 owner with a Snapdragon 600 (yes, including the regular TouchWiz version) can flash popped up. Read more »

The last update Google made to Gmail for Android was quite substantial and included a lot of user interface changes. One of them was the removal of the Delete button, which caused a hurricane of negative feedback. Today, Google has responded by bringing back the Delete button in a small update for its mail client on Android.

Other than that, the latest version of the Gmail (v4.5.2) includes an undisclosed number of bugfixes as well as the feature to select multiple emails by tapping on their sender’s photo. Read more »

Splitting the bills when out for a dinner with friends or colleagues is always an irksome task which includes passing the receipt multiple times around until everything is cleared out. Now, there’s an app for that. It’s called DivvyUp and is exclusive for Windows Phone 8.

Just snap a photo of the receipt and scan it with DivvyUp. It features Optical Character Recognition to read through the receipt and then assign each item to the person who ordered it. Read more »

Today at its Build developer conference, Microsoft released the preview of the Windows 8.1 update and it is now available for users to download and try out.

The update brings a lot of changes to Windows 8 in an effort to improve the experience and fix the stuff that people have been complaining about. The major one of them is the removal of the Start button in Windows 8. Happily, it’s back in Windows 8.1 Read more »

The Xperia Z Ultra was announced yesterday and we were quick on our feet on giving you an extensive hands-on of Sony’s phablet. However, we simply didn’t have the time to film the smartphone on camera as extensively as we’d liked. Luckily, Lutz Herkner of Mobilewatch managed to get a prototype of the device and give it a thorough hands-on treatment.

Covering all the basics, Herkner goes through all the major features and gives valuable insight on each of them. There’s even a detailed screen comparison between the Xperia Z Ultra’s 6.4″ 1080p TFT Triluminos display and Xperia Z’s 5″ 1080p TFT display. Read more »

Dropbox has launched a minor update for its iOS app, bringing it to version 2.3. While not really substantial, the update brings some improvements as well as bug squashing for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch.

You can now share entire folders right from the application, as well as share single or multiple files at once, which is convenient. Read more »

Nokia has just launched one of its biggest updates to the HERE Maps app ever with the addition of indoor mapping for 49,000 buildings in 45 countries.

Among the major additions are shopping malls in London as well as major shops and New York at the Times Square and 5^th avenue. Read more »

Microsoft has teamed up with Japanese mobile game studio KLab to bring its best-selling title Age of Empires to Android and iOS devices, according to Reuters.

KLab will be responsible for sqeezing the game onto smaller screens and making the real-time strategy thumb-friendly. Read more »

At its event today, Sony unveiled another accessory, in the form of the Smart Bluetooth Handset (SBH52). Designed to go hand-in-hand with the Xperia Z Ultra, this wireless mini-handset can receive calls and thus save you the trouble of placing the massive Ultra against your ear to answer a call.

The Sony SBH52 features an OLED display which is good to display the caller ID, music track information, the time or even text messages.The casing of the SBH52 is waterproof and comes with NFC connectivity for fast pairing. Read more »

With 8 million kilometers clocked and counting, Google’s Street View service is aiming even higher to offer its users more and more breathtaking sights – literally. Street View’s latest update now features the Burj Khalifa in Dubai – the world’s tallest building.

This is the first time the Street View team goes to capture every centimeter of a skyscraper and the endeavor has taken a total of three days to complete. Read more »

Samsung announced its ATIV Q convertible notebook capable of dual-booting Windows 8 and Android thanks to its 1.6GHz Intel Core i5-4200U CPU. The new generation Intel Haswell CPUs are impressive on paper, but how would ATIV Q’s processor fare on the Android AnTuTu benchmark?

Thankfully, ePrice have asked the same question and have put the Intel Core i5 chip through the AnTuTu hoops to find out. Read more »

At an event in Beijing, China, HP officially took the wraps off the Slate 21 Android tablet. It’s built around a 21.5″ IPS display sporting a 1920×1080 pixels resolution.

The rather oversized tablet is powered by NVIDIA’s Tegra 4 chipset and runs Android 4.2.2. The extra space is further used to house a dual speakers DTS Digital Theater Systems setup. Read more »

Unquestionably, the exclusive apps are part of the charm of the Nokia smartphones, over their WP8 competitors. As you would imagine apps such as Nokia Drive, Nokia Here Maps and Nokia Music are unavailable for owners of non-Nokia smartphones running Microsoft’s OS. Up until now.

WPDang has found a simple exploit giving users access to all Nokia WP8 applications in the Microsoft Windows Store. Read more »

Smartphones aren’t going to be the only thing that Sony is going to announce at its upcoming event on June 25, Tuesday. The company has teased today its plans to unwrap a new smartwatch at its event on Twitter.

There, the company has published a photo stating a research by BI Intelligence, stating that one in three people want to have a smart wrist wear. Sony already has a smartwatch, announced over an year ago, so it’s clearly a time for a refresh. Read more »

It was kind of amusing when Nokia first started poking fun at other smartphone manufacturers with its specially created internet memes, but now, when the Finns have produced yet another batch of them, their charm is kind of lost.

Today, we’ve got five more memes that take a jab at Samsung and other smartphone makers and their products. Read more »