Good news for those of you living in South Korea. If you are still wondering whether to purchase a Samsung Galaxy Note or not, this may help you decide.

Samsung is offering to engrave the battery cover of your brand new Galaxy Note for free. There are lots of custom fonts and languages supported, so you shouldn’t worry about the lack of customization options. Read more »

With the MWC closing in, the rumors of what will (or won’t) be announced are all over the place. One of the more consistent rumors is that Samsung will announce the Galaxy Tab 11.6 Android tablet.

The name suggests a 11.6″ screen, but according to the rumors, the tablet itself won’t be much larger than the Tab 10.1. The screen will supposedly have a whopping WQXGA resolution (2560×1600). Read more »

Motorola’s newest tablet, the oddly named Xyboard, has gone on sale in the US. The tablet is now available on Motorola’s website and will be delivered to you within two days with free shipping.

Motorola is offering you two models, in 8.2-inch and 10.1-inch display sizes and each of them will be available in 16GB and 32GB variants respectively. The prices for the 8.2-inch models are $399.99 and $499.99 and the 10.1-inch models will cost you $100 more at $499.99 and $599.99 for the same storage capacities. Currently, only the Wi-Fi version is on sale. Read more »

Despite a point of contention over the true nature of these applications, a string of 13 apps have been identified as potential threats on the Android Market.

One of the largest security software makers in the business, Symantec (best known for the Norton security software family) say they’ve identified these applications and relate them to a botnet-like virus called Android.Tonclank. Read more »

Over the past year or so, we witnessed the Android smartphones more than double their processing power and graphic performance, thus reaching levels, almost comparable with entry level personal computers. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said about the battery life of the devices we encountered. Quite often, we witnessed top shelf Android handsets display battery performance which almost questions their practicality.

Meet the Motorola Droid RAZR MAXX, people. An Android smartphone, designed specifically with battery performance in mind. In a rather impressive feat of engineering, the guys over at Motorola have managed to stuff a battery big enough to power a laptop, while sticking closely to the impressive waistline of the original Droid RAZR.

In terms of specs, the Motorola Droid RAZR MAXX is mostly identical to its slimmer sibling. Read more »

Qualcomm recently launched GameCommand to showcase games that leverage on the capabilities of the their Adreno GPUs. GameCommand features games from various dev companies, but apparently, Qualcomm are upping the ante with a game studio of their own.

They are also working on a much improved version of GameCommand, which is expected to launch at the upcoming MWC. Read more »

Google Earth has reached version 6.2 and with it come several improvements, the best of which is the improved rendering. It does away with the poor stitching that spoiled the viewing experience in previous versions.

The new version also adds a quick way to share a screenshot on Google+, improves searching and adds waling, biking and transit directions. The updates are coming to both the desktop and the Android version. Read more »

When Google launched the Galaxy Nexus along with Ice Cream Sandwich, they removed the ubiquitous menu button that was found on all the previous Android devices. Instead, they incorporated the functionality of the menu button inside an action bar that appeared on top of the screen. If there were additional options that need not be immediately shown to the user, they were hidden inside a drop down menu signified by a Windows Phone-style vertical ellipsis.

However, this change was only visible inside the native apps in Ice Cream Sandwich whereas the third party apps continued to use a standard menu button functionality, which was replicated on the Galaxy Nexus by displaying the vertical ellipsis in the bar at the bottom of the screen.

It’s obvious that this is not a very elegant solution so now Google is urging everyone to ditch the menu button and incorporate the action bar in their application interface, which as it demonstrated on its site, is not difficult at all. Read more »

Samsung has releasing report of its Q4, 2011 earnings and the numbers are very impressive. For starters, the company earned 47.3 trillion Korean won (US$42 billion) in revenue and 5.3 trillion Korean won (US$ 4.7 billion) in profits.

Samsung’s mobile division saw a strong growth of 54 percent compared to last year, helped no doubt by the popular Galaxy S II, with 17.8 trillion Korean won (US$15.2 billion) coming from it. Unfortunately, Samsung hasn’t released sales figures so we have no idea about, say, the number of smartphones sold in the last quarter. Read more »

Steam has released a new companion application for the iOS and Android platforms. This app lets you browse all the Steam games, see if there are new offers and chat with your Steam friends. Unfortunately, it seems you can’t buy any games through the app for now but you can add it to your cart so you can purchase it through the desktop client.

But what’s worse is that the app will only let you use it if you’re part of the beta program. Steam has restricted access to a few accounts and you have to sign in to request an invite. After that you wait for the invite to arrive so you can use the app, which let’s face it, doesn’t let you do much. Read more »

We just got the report on the tablet market in 2011 from Strategy Analytics and it tells some interesting stories. The iPad managed to just over double its sales compared to 2010 and is still the dominant force, holding a market share of 57.6%.

However, the iPad is no longer able to keep up with the overall market growth, which is fueled by the strengthening Android sales. The green robot tablets shipments grew over three times year-over-year and that helped them reduce the gap to their iOS counterparts. Read more »

Normally, it goes like this – a cool product enters the market and the crafty guys from ifixit take its shiny new body to pieces and expose every chip hiding inside. Well that didn’t happen with the Samsung Galaxy Note, so the Koreans took it upon them to perform the task.

Samsung has provided detailed descriptions of all the important Galaxy Note functional elements. You should keep in mind that what we have here is the US version of the Note, featuring a Qualcomm chipset and LTE, instead of Exynos and HSPA+. Read more »

The Samsung Galaxy R is wiping the sweat from its brow as it just finished our battery test. We were curious to see how it will stack up against the Galaxy S II, but we’ll compare it to the other phones we’ve tested as well.

The SC-LCD screen should handle web pages better (since they are predominantly white, not a good scenario for AMOLEDs) and the chipset is clocked 200MHz lower, which might give the Galaxy R a crucial advantage when it comes to battery performance. Let’s find out. Read more »

Back in July of 2010 the US government ruled that jailbreaking and rooting weren’t a crime as long as the intention behind them isn’t circumventing copyright.

The ruling is set to expire soon and unless renewed, jailbreaking and rooting of smartphones will become illegal once again. Read more »

Asus surprised nastily quite a lot of people, when they shipped their Transformer Prime monster of a tablet with a locked bootloader, but it seems that things are about to fall back into place. The company just announced through its Twitter account that the tool for unlocking the quad-core beast is on its way.

According to Asus, it should be coming in February and that is just a week away now. There are no more details given, but we guess those will be made available when the tool is finalized. Read more »