Quite frankly, the last missing piece in Samsung’s impressive Android lineup in the United States was probably a rugged device, and the Samsung Rugby Smart for AT&T has arrived to fix that wrong. The handset has been built up to the MIL-STD-810f military spec standards. It is dust proof, shock resistant, and can be be submerged in up to 1m of water for up to 30 minutes. Extreme temperatures are also welcome as long as the Samsung Gravity Smart is concerned.

The smartphone is also a curious example of the enormous parts bin, which the Korean company has on tap. Read more »

The slide-out QWERTY sporting Motorola Droid 4 is one of the fastest product sequels I’ve seen in quite some time. The Android smartphone hit the shelves at Verizon Wireless only six months after its predecessor, Motorola Droid 3 arrived, thus making me curious about the changes it has brought with it.

Speaking about changes in the newcomer, they are actually quite a few. Read more »

Despite trawling all the way through the Fujitsu/Toshiba booth for anything out of the ordinary, we came up short. That was of course until we caught wind of this innocuous little tablet lurking somewhere in the halls at MWC.

Toshiba had a number of phones and tablets on display at their main stand, but we found this unnamed device sitting amongst a host of similarly powered Tegra 3 devices at the Nvidia booth. Read more »

With MWC well under way in Barcelona, HTC were kind to also host an event in New York City, where we got to spend time with the LTE sporting One X, bound to hit AT&T Wireless across the Atlantic. As you probably know by now, the smartphone looks identical to the HTC One X, but sports a different CPU and chipset, which bring its LTE mojo to life.

The HTC One X for AT&T packs Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon S4 chipset. It features two Krait CPU cores, clocked at 1.5GHz, along with Adreno 225 GPU. Read more »

In terms of mobile imaging, the Nokia 808 is a revolutionary device. Not only is it capable of taking images of up to 38MP, but it can also make use of a technology called oversampling, which means that out of 7 adjacent pixels of information it captures, it outputs to memory a single resulting pixel, which hopefully, is picture perfect.

There are three outright advantages to this oversampling thing: amazing image quality, lossless zoom, and superior low light performance. Read more »

The just announced Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 10.1 was kind enough to come by our office on its way to the MWC shelves. The latest Samsung slate is supposed to bring the Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich experience on the 10.1” screen, while keeping the price as reasonable as possible.

Before switching it on, you can barely tell the Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 10.1 apart from its predecessor, but the actual user experience is quite different with the second gen slate. Read more »

RIM have teamed up with Porsche Design Studios to create the BlackBerry P’9981, a mix of hard edges and precise angles unlike any other BlackBerry we’ve seen before.

The P’9981 enters the market as the elite BlackBerry, demanding an exclusive price tag for an exclusive device. We spent some exploring how the Porsche Design treatment changes a product like the P’9981. Read more »

The BlackBerry Playbook OS 2.0 was hotly anticipated, so the news about it seeding the other day spread like wildfire. I spent a few hours of quality time with my Playbook on 2.0, so I’m ready to give you all the details on what’s hot and what is, well, not so much.

And before we continue, I want to answer the most frequent question I got since the release came out: No, you can’t simply drop an Android app on it, install it and use it just like that. It’s an important chunk of information that was known ever since the beta 2.0 leaked, but one that many people have missed for one reason or another.

The BlackBerry Playbook OS 2.0 does not allow you to install Android apps directly, but it allows developers to port them really easily into the .BAR format, which would then be able to run on the Playbook. RIM would also prefer it that you do not download apps from sources other than the AppWorld.

Ok, now that I got that out of the way, let’s see what novelties the Playbook OS 2.0 brings along. Read more »

We met it at CES this year, but now the Sony Xperia S is on our home turf. It’s a huge leap forward compared to Sony Ericsson phones – it’s all dual-core processors, 12MP still shots and FullHD videos.

We had a bit of free time, so dragged the Xperia S right in our studio for a quick hands-on video. Read more »

Let’s face it: the BLU Studio 5.3, which is on our hands today, looks like anything but a budget minded Android smartphone. It is very big and very white. And yes: it also packs two SIM card slots and two (!) homescreen buttons.

Without a closer look at its hardware and specs, the BLU Studio 5.3 can easily pass for a direct competitor to the mighty Samsung Galaxy Note. But it is not. It costs less than half the Korean royalty, and doesn’t have the ambition to go head to head with it Read more »

We were really curious to see how will the LTE rocking Samsung Galaxy Note I717 perform in our battery test. As you probably know already, the AT&T exclusive device sports a different, slightly less powerful CPU and chipset than the Exynos of the mighty N7000. With the rest of the hardware being identical in both devices (including the 2500 mAh battery), we are now going to find out which chipset has the upper hand in energy efficiency.

As always, we are going to kick things off with the talk time performance. Read more »

Mobile versions are what we do this month and now it’s our blog’s turn to get smartphone-friendly. We put a lot of effort in that one too and now we feel it’s ready to make its official debut.

Our main goal when designing the mobile version of the blog.gsmarena.com was to reduce the data needed to load it and improve its loading speed without sacrificing any of the functionality. Good performance and intuitive navigation were also high on our priority list.

Read more »

Yet another Samsung Galaxy S II Android 4.0 ICS ROM escaped the Samsung R&D center and walked right into the hand of indie developers and smartphone enthusiasts. Carrying the version number I9100XXLPH, the new ROM has a build date of February 9 and, as you can expect, it is the most stable and functional ICS ROM for the Galaxy S II to date.

The LPH release is only a short step away from feeling like a polished final ROM. It’s smooth enough, it supports all of the phone’s hardware and it gets rid of the nagging “set up update” notification from previous beta releases. Read more »

At this point we shouldn’t be more than a month and a half away from the Samsung Galaxy Note official Android 4.0 ICS update, but how about getting a little preview of what’s to come? The first ICS 4.0.3 ROM for the phoneblet just leaked and we even managed to install in on a Note we had lying around and test it.

As you will see in a bit, the ROM is really stable and snappy and seems good enough for everyday use. All the hardware is supported, including the S Pen. Read more »

Do you remember Clear for the iPhone? The innovative app for creating to-do lists and managing tasks was made available on the Apple AppStore yesterday and our hands were itching to give it a spin.

The idea behind Clear is simple – easy to-do lists creation. And it does it effortlessly, while relying on an effective, intuitive one-of-a-kind user interface. And that’s a rare thing even in today’s app-filled mobile world. Read more »