Seemingly every new smartphone out there is bound to get the teardown treatment at some point, and the Meizu M1 Note is no exception. The handset which was unveiled late last year has been carefully dismantled in its home country.

The phone bears all, letting us get one or two (or three) glimpses into the components that make it up. The whole thing is held together by a magnesium alloy chassis which is incredibly light, weighing just 16g. Read more »

HTC started rolling out the update to Android 5.0 Lollipop for the unlocked and Developer Edition units of the One (M8) in the US a couple of weeks ago, and today the Taiwanese company has made the next important step for developers.

It’s now posted the kernel source for its particular flavor of Sense-infused Android 5.0.1 Lollipop on its specialized developer website. This release is different than Google’s Lollipop kernel source exactly because it’s for phones running HTC’s UI overlay. Read more »

When a new smartwatch is announced, two questions are immediately asked – “is it round?” and “does it last longer than a day?” Asus will be addressing the second question with a successor to the ZenWatch, which will deliver 7 days on a charge, up from 2 days currently (by official numbers, in practice more like a day).

The news comes from Chairman Jonney Shih, who mentioned it briefly at an end-of-the-year party at Asus. Read more »

Facebook has employed a rather odd approach to the mobile market and it seems to be betting on quantity, rather than quality for quite some time now. When the social media giant decided to detach the messenger from its main application, thus making it all that less appealing to most users it sparked an avalanche of complaints with a lot of subscribers rage-quitting on the main app.

Facebook surely must have felt the negative consequences and while initially it seemed like a good enough marketing step to promote the messenger itself the detrimental effect have apparently caught on as a new application has silently made its way to the Google Play Store. It is essentially a lightweight version of the social platform that aims to offer services to low-end devices at faster speeds and best of all, with lower bandwidth. Read more »

It seems that selfie contests are becoming as popular as the selfie itself – first Xiaomi, now Oppo too. Oppo’s Selfie Showdown asks you to post your favorite, creative or unusual selfie.

The winners will grab a brand new Oppo N3. The company’s photography flagship has a mechanized rotating camera so selfies get the first-class treatment and are taken with the 13MP camera and dual-LED flash. Read more »

The Nexus Player by Asus is now available outside to the Google Play store. The Android 5.0 set-top box is available in major US retailers that include Amazon, Best Buy, and Newegg.

Newegg and Amazon are the only ones to offer the Nexus Player online. Read more »

YotaPhone 2 is among those smartphones you just can’t miss in the news. It is unique and innovative and we just had to take it for a spin. So, here is the unique YotaPhone 2 arriving at our office. And it has a premium retail box to match.

The YotaPhone 2 isn’t just a flagship with a 5″ 1080p AMOLED screen and running on a Snapdragon 800 chip. It is more than just a phone, thanks to its rear 4.7″ electronic paper display, which can be used as an e-book reader, as well as a primary display to operate the basic phone functions. Read more »

Popular OS X and iOS app iA Writer is coming to Android. The developers have announced a beta version, which will be available for the first 999 people to sign up on their Google+ page, with the final version arriving later.

iA Writer beta will be available through the Play Store for $0.99. The reason behind this is that Google doesn’t allow developers to release a free app and then make it paid later. On the upside, if you are one of the 999 people to get the beta for $0.99, then you won’t have to pay anything extra when it gets updated to the final version later, which will cost $4.99. Read more »

There have been recent concerns over the security issues in the rather outdated WebView mode in Android Jelly Bean. Due to its outdated nature, it is facing security issues, which would otherwise be a non-issue on newer versions of Android.

Google has responded to these concerns by basically saying they won’t be updating the WebView in Jelly Bean. But while that may not be what people have been expecting, Google does have a reasonable explanation for it. Read more »

Huawei CEO Richard Yu recently shared his thoughts on Xiaomi’s latest flagship handset – the Mi Note Pro. It appears that he was less than pleased with the phablet’s battery life after being able to experience it firsthand.

The Xiaomi Mi Note Pro is equipped with a 6-inch QHD display and has a 3,000mAh battery. This is precisely where Richard’s grudge with the device lies. According to a recent post he made on Weibo, the CEO considers that the resolution is overkill for a screen of this size and the human eye has difficulties distinguishing between Full HD and QHD at this scale. He continue to criticize Xiaomi’s hardware of choice by stating that the power-hungry, high-resolution display only diminishes battery life. Read more »

MINIX, a reputable media center hardware manufacturer, has announced the latest addition to its device lineup. It comes in the form of the Minix Neo Z64 Mini PC. The name is more than fitting, as the device is truly small and will fit nicely in front of any TV and also packs quite a punch offering PC-grade performance.

It is powered by an Intel Z3735F 64-bit processor with 2MB of cache and a Turbo clock of 1.83GHz. Tech-savy readers are sure to recognize the chip, as it is the same silicon that powers most of today’s Windows-based tablets. That being said, the device will more than readily run Android as well, making it as universal as it gets in terms of media PCs. Read more »

Who said the midrange had to look classless? Not Samsung – the Galaxy A5 is a grand exclamation to the opposite – it’s an upper midrange smartphone with a quality build and quality specs all without pushing you to flagship-worthy expenses.

The Samsung Galaxy A5 flaunts a 6.7mm body with an exquisite flat metal frame with metal buttons, a white pearl finish that flashes different nuances under light, a 5″ 720p panel of Super AMOLED quality up front and a very acceptable weight of 123g. Read more »

Complying with US sanctions on Crimea and following in the footsteps of Apple, Google will soon restrict the use of some of its services in the peninsula. Late last year the US government issued a new round of sanctions to retaliate against Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and this is the direct result of that.

Google can’t collect money for services from the peninsula, nor can it make payments to anyone over there. So the company will cut off services – some that will mostly impact businesses, such as AdWords and AdSense, but also one that will have an effect on ordinary citizens too, namely the Play Store. Read more »

Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 810 has come under fire with reports that it will be delayed because overheats, though both Qualcomm and LG (which launched the first S810-powered phone) refute those claims. What can we expect from this chip?

After all, it’s based on ARM’s CPU cores not a Qualcomm custom design. Well, the GPU is a custom design and GFX Bench gives us a taste of what it is capable of. Read more »

Google has quietly expanded the availability of the Nexus 9 tablet and the Chromecast to two new countries. The lucky winners are New Zealand and Taiwan. Residents of both can head to the Play Store if they want to grab a unit.

The new Nexus 9 is one of the few tablets around with Nvidia’s Tegra K1 chipset with the custom Denver CPU core. Even Nvidia’s own Shield tablet uses the more common Cortex-A15 core. Read more »