Category: Hands-on
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Tough and touch – the Sony Xperia acro S comes by for a visit

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The Sony Xperia acro S stopped by our office and brought along its powerful 12 MP snapper and HD Mobile BRAVIA display in an attempt to impress us.

If you thought that the Xperia acro S is just another smartphone, you thought wrong. It’s an IP57 certified device, meaning it’s dust resistant and can survive when submerged in up to a meter of water for as long as 30 minutes. Read more »

Motorola RAZR MAXX comes by our office with its friend, Android ICS

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The new Motorola RAZR family has a long distance runner in its family – the RAZR MAXX. The phone isn’t new and we’ve already reviewed the CDMA version for Verizon and the GSM version of the regular RAZR, but Motorola pushed out the ICS update about a month ago, so we thought we should put it through our review routine.

The Verizon version has been our battery test champ for quite a while now and no phone seems like it can dethrone it. We will, of course, do a battery test on this one too, just to check if there are any differences, but that will come later. Read more »

The Google Nexus 7 enters our office, gets ready to rally the Android troops

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Google’s Nexus 7 is a milestone in Android’s development, so we were all over it when it came to our office. The Nexus lineup lays down the development direction for Android gadgets in general and Jelly Bean that debuted on this tab is quite interesting indeed. Unlike some previous Nexus gadgets, the Nexus 7 will probably gain a lot of traction with consumers making it even more important.

The Nexus 7 packs a Tegra 3 chipset, a 7″ LCD screen with WXGA resolution and a highly competitive price. Read more »

Sony Xperia neo L gets in front of our camera, bets on ICS and a bigger screen

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The Sony Xperia neo L is a blast from the past – it’s the second redesign of the 2011 neo model and brings some improvements as well as some setbacks. For one, it runs Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich out of the box, even though some newer Sony devices are still waiting to get the update.

The other change is the bigger screen – it now spans to 4″ instead of the original 3.7″. Read more »

Quad-core Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 finally lands in our office, shows what its capable of

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The Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 got off to a rocky start after its official announcement at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this year, after which it returned to the company’s R&D drawing board for a specs overhaul.

And several months later, here it is – the brand new Galaxy Note 10.1 with more powerful innards ready to take over the tablet scene. Or so it thinks. Read more »

The tough Sony Xperia go lands at the office, stands in front of our camera

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The Sony Xperia go is here and is ready to get the GSMArena review treatment. The rugged droid will be eyed by many as it seems like one of the best smartphones you can take to the beach with you.

The Xperia go is descendant of the Xperia Active, a tough little droid, which we met (and loved) at the end of last year. The new smartphone fixes two of the main shortcomings of its predecessor by offering a larger 3.5″ LCD at the front and a beefier dual-core processor under the hood, so it’s certainly an interesting package. Read more »

Emotiv EPOC neuroheadset review: The telepathy device you were looking for (or not)

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Here at GSMArena, phones and tablets are our bread and butter, but our love for tech is by no means limited to them. So imagine our excitement when we got the opportunity to test a gadget which reads your thoughts and allows you to do cool things with it on your computer.

The gadget in question is called EPOC and is made by Emotiv. It’s a futuristic looking headset, which reads your brain activity via the scalp of your head and translates it into various actions. With that in mind, I was particularly excited with Professor Xavier and his powerful telepathic powers immediately popping into my head. Sadly, this isn’t the case… yet. Read more »

Meizu MX 4-core shines in front of our camera, flexes its quad-core muscle on video

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Meizu MX 4-core is company’s second phone we have the pleasure to review. It looks exactly like the dual-core Meizu MX, but adds two additional Cortex-A9 CPU cores and a more powerful GPU to bump the performance.

The Meizu MX 4-core runs on the so-called Flyme OS 1.0 which is based on Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. The customizations run a lot deeper than any other UI we’ve seen, but they cut off features instead of adding new. Read more »

Motorola Atrix HD for AT&T brought some Kevlar wrapped Android goodness to our office, here’s the hands-on

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Another top-shelf Android smartphone has joined AT&T’s LTE ranks, people. Beginning tomorrow, the Motorola Atrix HD will become the third Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 equipped powerhouse offered by the carrier, which means that it has never been a better time to be a prospective Android smartphone buyer.

The Motorola Atrix HD features two Krait CPU cores, clocked at 1.5GHz and Adreno 225 GPU. Read more »

HTC DROID Incredible 4G LTE has arrived, we go hands-on

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The third installment of the popular HTC DROID Incredible series for Verizon Wireless has come upon us, bearing one of the longest names we’ve encountered to date. Unlike its predecessor, which was a marginal improvement over the original however, the HTC DROID Incredible 4G LTE is a proper, pocket-friendly powerhouse.

The DROID Incredible 4G LTE features a Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 chipset with two Krait CPU cores, clocked at 1.2GHz, and Adreno 225 GPU. Read more »

Samsung Galaxy Ace 2 comes back, this time it will stay for a full review

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The Samsung Galaxy Ace 2 I8160 is in our office for the second time, and this time it will stay for a full review. The Ace 2 is part of a new breed of dual-core phones – slotted above the single-cores but below last year’s flagship dual-cores. Another example of such phone would be the Sony Xperia U.

Actually, both of these phones are based on the ST-Ericsson NovaThor U8500 chipset, but the Galaxy Ace 2 has an unusual (for a dual-core) clock speed of 800MHz. On the upside, it has more RAM – 768MB – and a microSD card slot in addition to the 4GB of built-in memory. Read more »

Sony Xperia ion for AT&T made its way in front of the camera, here’s the hands-on

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The AT&T exclusive Sony Xperia ion was the talk of CES six months ago. Developed specifically with the lucrative US market in mind, the handset one ups its sibling, the Sony Xperia S on a couple of major occasions – it packs a bigger screen and offers expandable memory. Boy, were we itching to get our hands on it when we saw it break cover.

Well, here it is folks. A cool six months later, sans the flagship aura, and with an affordable $99.99 price tag, the Sony Xperia ion made it to our office. Here’s what the handset has to offer. Read more »

LG Optimus Vu drops by our office, brings its stylus with it

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The phablet market came as a bit of a surprise – no one expected the Note to sell as well as it did. Now that the class gained traction, though, the LG Optimus Vu, has big dreams for its future.

It sets itself apart with L-series styling, a 4:3 screen and comes with a nice, easy to handle stylus in the box. Read more »

The eco-friendly Samsung Galaxy Exhilarate for AT&T dropped by, here’s a hands-on

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The AT&T exclusive Samsung Galaxy Exhilarate i577 is not the first Android smartphone with eco credentials from the Korean giant. However, the LTE packing, inconspicuously looking handset offers last year’s top shelf spec sheet to go with its low price . All in all, enough to get us curious.

The Samsung Galaxy Exhilarate features a Qalcomm Snapdragon S3 chipset with two 1.2 GHz Scorpion cores, and a gig of RAM. Read more »

The Nokia heavyweight is here, we take the Lumia 900 for a spin

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Just days after the exciting Windows Phone 8 announcement we have the Lumia 900 at our doorstep.

The Nokia Lumia 900 immediately felt special with its glossy white finish and gorgeous display. Jump past the break for more. Read more »