With a 5” IPS LCD display, the BLU Life One sits above the entry-level Life Play, and below the phablet-proportioned Life View in the freshly launched smartphone series from the Miami based manufacturer. Given the increasing popularity which the 5” Android smartphones enjoy lately, the dual-SIM BLU Life One is likely to generate the most interest from potential users.

Save for the smaller display, the BLU Life One packs the same spec sheet as its bigger brother which we previewed a couple of days back. Read more »

The BLU Life View is certainly not what passes as a budget-friendly Android smartphone these days. With a 5.7” HD IPS display, quad-core CPU, dual-SIM functionality, and a metal clad body, the handset looks like anything but a device with a sub-$300 price tag.

Roughly a year ago, the BLU Studio 5.3 turned our idea about a budget smartphone upside down. This time around, the Miami based manufacturer launched a trio of Life series smartphones, and the 5.7” View is leading the way as the flagship of the bunch. Read more »

The latest entry-level smartphone from Samsung has arrived, and we take the opportunity to give you a quick glimpse of it prior to our full review.

The Samsung Galaxy Fame is a single-core 1 GHz with a rather poorly sounding 3.5-inch HVGA screen with only 256K colors, but does run Android 4.1.2 Jelly Bean to sweeten the pot. Read more »

HTC One’s Ultrapixel camera didn’t get quite the best reception but the company has issued not one but two updates since, which supposedly improve on the quality of the photos.

Samsung also issued an update for its Galaxy S4 flagship, which tweaks the camera performance as well. Naturally we wanted to see what those are all about and took the two hottest smartphones of the season for another shooting session. Read more »

HTC One has made it to the carriers’ shelves in the United States over the last week. The Taiwanese flagship is offered by AT&T, Sprint Wireless and T-Mobile across the Atlantic.

We’ve managed to spend some quality time with an AT&T version of the HTC One. Here’s a quick look at the differences between it and the international version which we extensively reviewed. Read more »

The Sony Xperia SP, which we got for a quick hands-on last month, has finally arrived in our office.

We’ve decided to take some quick snaps of it before our review monkeys take it away. Take a look! Read more »

Sony Xperia ZL has landed at our office. It’s the not-so-tough Xperia Z sibling, powered by the same hardware platform and running on identical Android version with the same custom UI (launcher).

The Xperia ZL may not be water or dust-proof, but offers a few extra goodies over the Z model – a hardware camera key, an infrared port, а smaller footprint and a much better grip, thanks to the textured rear panel. Read more »

The Sony Xperia E is the single-SIM variant and second member of the Xperia E family, after the Xperia E dual.

The Xperia E is virtually identical to the E dual, save for the lacking second SIM slot and the Android 4.1 Jelly Bean which replaces 4.0 ICS. Read more »

The freshly announced HTC First made its way to our office. The AT&T exclusive smartphone, as its name mildly suggests, is the first to come with the Facebook Home Android launcher out of the box.

The HTC First is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 chipset with two Krait CPU cores, clocked at 1.4GHz. Read more »

The Nokia Lumia 520 is the Finn’s entry-level Windows Phone designed to win over those on a budget.

It features Nokia’s exclusive apps (like Here Drive, App Highlights, Nokia Music, etc.), costs around $180 sans contract and is equipped with a 4″ WVGA (480 x 800) IPS display, 8 gigs of internal storage with the option of a microSD expansion and not least of all a 5 MP snapper. Read more »

Samsung is at the forefront of Android phablets and its latest gadget is for people who want a bigger, more affordable Galaxy Note. The Samsung Galaxy Mega 6.3 just went official and we had a chance to handle one for a couple of minutes.

Unlike the Note, the Galaxy Mega does not have an S Pen but it does have the S4’s Air View so you can still perform some of the same things as you can with the S Pen. That’s not the only thing the Mega has borrowed from the S4 either. Read more »

The Nokia Lumia 720 came back for some more face time after our brief encounter at the MWC. The phone is similar to the Lumia 820 and it actually offers better specs in a few categories. For one, its screen can detect your fingers even through gloves. The curved Gorilla Glass 2 and ClearBlack tech make the 4.3” WVGA screen very good if not quite as nice as the 820’s AMOLED display.

There’s more too – the Lumia 720 is 9mm thick, the thinnest Lumia yet but it has a 2,000mAh battery, larger than the one in the the thicker and heavier 820. Also, the F/1.9 aperture on the camera is the brightest we’ve seen on a mobile phone yet. Read more »

The list of official Samsung Galaxy S4 accessories is impressive, but the one that got the most people interested, is the S View Cover.

Basically, the S View Cover is an upgraded version of the Flip Cover, which has a neat cut-out window that allows you to take a quick peek at your Galaxy S4 screen to see what’s new or to just check out the time. Sounds good on paper, but is it worth the $70 price tag? Follow us to find out. Read more »

Through the last couple of days we received numerous tips that Sony’s Xperia Z Burst Mode takes pictures with better quality than the ones snapped when using the default Normal or Superior Auto setups.

We decided to look into that and gave the Burst Mode a proper try. The results came out quite surprising (or not, if you have read those threads discussing the issue) – the Burst mode shots are quite different from those produced in Normal and Superior Auto mode. It’s obvious that the post processing applied to the different camera modes is quite different, but surprisingly, we like the Burst mode output better. Read more »

The Samsung Galaxy Note 8.0 leaked so many times prior to its announcement late last month, that it’s almost yesterday’s news.

Nevertheless, we’ve been busy putting it through our gauntlet of testing, and will give you a quick look at what’s in store for you from Samsung’s latest tablet offering.

The Note 8.0 is set to compete directly with Apple’s iPad mini, and is spec’d competitively enough to do just that. It offers a (you guessed it) 8-inch screen of 800 x 1280 pixels resolution, which results in 189 ppi. It has a quad-core 1.6GHz Exynos 4412 processor, 2 GB of RAM, and either 16 or 32 GB of internal storage. Read more »