The new 7-inch tablet by ZTE provides decent specs at a price that can readily compete with the big boys.

Set to feature the latest Android Honeycomb version, 3.2, the Optik will also have a dual-core 1.2GHz Snapdragon processor and 16GB of internal memory. Read more »

Here’s an interesting phone designed by a 23 year-old student at Middlesex University – an Android-powered smartphone, whose body is made of a single piece of bamboo. It’s a unibody that Kieron-Scott Woodhouse, the designer, claims is as strong as plastic, but is eco-friendly and is twice as light as an iPhone.

Woodhouse is working for a Chinese company called ADzero that will make the phone – the bamboo phone won’t suffer the fate of most beautiful concepts that never make it into the hands of consumers. Read more »

Google has updated the Google Docs app for Android and introduced the much needed offline access support for documents. Now, you can mark a document for offline viewing and the app will download it to your device. You can set the app to automatically update the offline documents when the device is connected to Wi-Fi or you can also manually refresh the document at any time.

Another change brought by the update is an improved experience on tablets. Read more »

With a 3300 mAh battery out of the box, the Motorola Droid RAZR MAXX has almost twice the capacity, compared to any of its direct competitors, so, naturally, the expectations for the smartphone’s battery performance ran quite high.

Well, here are the results from the RAZR MAXX run in our battery test, people. Prepare to be impressed! Read more »

Google’s Android Developers program has just landed on Google+. It’s a bit strange that it took so long because they have had a Twitter profile for a while now.

The new Google+ profile is meant for “Android developers everywhere to meet, share, and connect with the people behind the Android developer experience”. Read more »

The white color Galaxy Note has been an elusive bird and it’s rarely been sighted. We finally have one and we’ve prepared a bunch of photos for you.

Samsung announced the Galaxy Note back in October, but it launched only a black version of the unique phoneblet, as we like to call it internally. Just before Christmas though, the Galaxy Note appeared in snow white dress in Korea and a few other markets.

A few days ago the white Galaxy Note hit the UK and other European markets, AT&T US is also launching both the black and white Notes next month.

Read more »

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 »