Microsoft has been tinkering quite a lot with Android applications lately, even if with mixed success. One of their more interesting creations for the platform is the Next Lock Screen – a smart, location-aware lockscreen that pulls relevant information from user apps and places it right beside notifications for easy access.
Now Microsoft’s experimental brain child has gotten even smarter. The latest update adds weather information to the mix as well as a visual redesign with a lot more freedom for customization. Read more »
Samsung’s latest Galaxy Note 4 promo videos take us away from the cute animals, and into the chilly New York City. The trio of clips feature a Snapchat artist and a Vine star, who team up to make New Yorkers’ lives more interesting.
The duo of social media stars connect with people who participate in Samsung’s #NoteMyDay campaign. Read more »
We have the Samsung Galaxy Core Prime at HQ and decided to bring you a quick video and some photos of it.
The Galaxy Core Prime sits in the lower-bracket of the midrange and its highlights are the 4.5″ screen of WVGA (480 x 800px) resolution, the 5MP camera on the back, capable of 1080p video, and the 64-bit Snapdragon 410, coupled with 1GB of RAM. Read more »
Remember that nifty search app for Android Wear by Microsoft called Torque? The Redmond giant’s garage team has expanded its functionality to Android smartphones with an update to version 2.0.
Activating Torque Search on an Android smartphone is just as easy as doing it on a wearable device. Read more »
Having a global best-seller is nice, but for a company that makes as many devices as Samsung, targeting different regions with different phones makes a lot of sense. The Samsung Galaxy Prime has modest display specs, while keeping the rest on proper mid-range levels. There’s a dual-SIM option in certain regions.
It’s questionable whether it will garner a lot of popularity in the developed western markets, but such phones are selling like hotcakes in the rest of the world. Read more »
Making a dent in the mid-range smartphone market is a tough job for anyone to pull off, but Lenovo might be just on to something with the Vibe X2. The multi-layered smartphones, as the company touts it, boasts a very cool and colorful design without coming off as tacky.
Of course, there will be people that don’t like the design, but trust me, it’s looking even cooler in person. Now that the company officially owns Motorola, it is competing outside China as well and has the ambitions to conquer the likes of Apple, Samsung and LG. And what better way to grab consumer’s attention than a flashy look? Read more »
One of the thinnest smartphones around, the Gionee Elife S5.1, has just made it through our review routine and you can find out what happened in our in-depth article.
The Gionee Elife S5.1 uses a 4.8″ Super AMOLED screen and runs on the MT6592 chip with an octa-core Cortex-A7 processor. We’ve seen this platform perform rather poorly, when it comes to battery endurance, so we didn’t expect anything impressive from the Elife S5.1 but we surely had our eyes open for potential surprises. Read more »
YouTube for Android got received a major update. Version 6.0.11 of the application brings Android 5.0’s sleek material design to the popular video sharing platform.
In addition to the fresh new look, the latest YouTube for Android offers revamped navigation panel. Read more »
Motorola has released four new ads for the Moto 360 smartwatch. The ads focus on the design and craftsmanship of the device while stressing that despite its classic design it’s a device made for modern times.
The ads are pretty awesome and genuinely amusing. They also perfectly encapsulate the experience of using the device, that despite its sophisticated appearance you are still going to occasionally get a silly notification on it that’s just at complete odds with design. Not something that would happen with an actual premium watch. Read more »
The KitKat update for the Samsung Galaxy S4 Zoom started rolling out back in July, but it amazingly managed to so far not make it to AT&T’s version of the device. Only now, many months later, can we report that the Galaxy S4 Zoom sold by AT&T is in the process of receiving the new software.
Of course, KitKat isn’t the latest version of Android anymore. Though given the fact that this is the first ever update that AT&T’s S4 Zoom has gotten, we wouldn’t bet on it seeing Android 5.0 Lollipop anytime soon. Read more »
One of the many services that Samsung created a few years back is WatchON. It allows you to watch TV shows and movies, like so many other similar offerings out there. Apparently Samsung has finally realized how redundant WatchON is, and hence decided to shut it down, effective on December 31.
This will happen worldwide, except for two countries: the USA and South Korea. Over there WatchON will continue to exist even after this year ends. Read more »
Just a few weeks after releasing it, Google has updated its Messenger app with the ability to allow you to choose your own colors for individual contacts, a feature requested by many. Earlier, the app used to do this automatically.
To access the feature, go to the “People and Options” button from the overflow menu and select the color you want to assign to the contact. In addition, the update also brings some Material Design related animations following complaints of a significant delay and lag in the old sliding animation. Read more »
One of the main purposes of the fingerprint scanners, incorporated in various current devices is user authentication. But besides trivial tasks, like unlocking, which is often more of a novelty that an actual useful feature, fingerprint identification has a much more serious possible use – verifying online payments.
PayPal has had a successful partnership with Samsung, bringing the futuristic security feature through its Android application to supported devices. Until now, however, this was done on a separate branch of the PayPal app that was only distributed through Samsung’s own Application Store. Now the internet payment giant has taken another step forward in the utilization of the technology by incorporating support for fingerprint authentication in the Google Play Store version of the PayPal app as well. Read more »
AirDroid for Android has been given a major update in v3.0. The app now has companion desktop apps for Windows and Mac that brings iOS Continuity like features to your Android device.
With the new desktop app, you can get notifications from your phone on your computer. You can reply to SMS from your computer or pick up or receive calls (calls can only be answered from the phone, however). You can also mirror apps on your computer, so you can, for example, reply to WhatsApp messages from your PC. Mirroring apps only works on rooted devices for now. Read more »
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