Samsung is teasing a website-slash-service, which will launch as design.samsung.com. The video teaser shows a lot of Samsung design ques like the nature inspired Galaxy S3 body, which we’re seeing molded from liquid polycarbonate.

The website will launch on March 27 and will have Samsung-inspired design sections by the looks of the video. “Make it meaningful” looks to be the title of the project. Read more »

With its latest flagship, the Galaxy S5, Samsung decided to ramp up the health tracker angle, so much so that they included a heart rate sensor – the first of its kind on a mainstream smartphone.

In certain countries this qualifies it to be considered as a medical device, and Samsung’s home country of Korea is among them. Read more »

In a rare interview with the Sunday Times Sir Jony Ive, considered by many to be the mind behind the bulk of iconic Apple product designs, says “we’re surrounded by anonymous, poorly made objects”.

He then goes on to say that “it’s tempting to think it’s because the people who use them don’t care – just like the people who made them.”. Apple’s VP says Apple’s design is “not just about aesthetics” and that “it’s a victory for purity, integrity – for giving a damn.” Read more »

The latest piece of tech developed by Chinese smartphone chip manufacturer MediaTek involves a new proximity pairing technology that aims to compete with NFC.

The technology will do away with the traditional antenna and RF chip used by NFC, and instead detect the presence of nearby devices through the use of a special capacitor touch ICs for touchscreens, combined with data from the smartphone’s proximity and gravity sensor. Read more »

SanDisk has announced the availability of the world’s first 128GB microSD a few weeks ago at the MWC in Barcelona. It is the world’s highest capacity microSDXC card. But is your device even accepting 128GB memory cards?

Well, if you own a WP8-running Nokia Lumia 1520, then you can insert and use such card. Read more »

It looks like pico projectors on smartphones are going to be able to up their imaging game.

That is, thanks to Texas Instruments’ new 0.3” TRP DLP Pico chipset. Read more »

Images of Nokia’s first Android phone, the Nokia X, have surfaced, and they show the handset in all of its taken apart glory.

The images get pretty detailed, check them out after the jump. Read more »

A couple of benchmark results which have surfaced from Huawei’s new home-made octa-core Kirin 920 processor, showing some serious horsepower under the hood.

The upcoming processor from the Chinese smartphone company that features four Cortex-A7 cores and four Cortex-A15 cores, beats out Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 801 in the AnTuTu benchmark. Read more »

Microsoft will be giving game developers a closer look at the next version of its graphics API set on March 20 at Game Developer Conference or GDC. Microsoft didn’t reveal much about it right now and all we know for sure is that AMD, Intel, NVIDIA and Qualcomm are onboard with it right now.

But while Microsoft did not reveal much on its website, the GDC schedule for the DirectX event does give a good hint at what we can expect. According to the description, it seems DirectX 12 will offer lower-level access to hardware, similar to AMD’s Mantle API. Having low-level access to your hardware means you are able to get the most out of it and make better use of it. Read more »

We already know that the Nvidia Tegra K1 GPU is crazy fast and today a batch of benchmarks prooves that the chipset’s 64-bit CPU is also no slouch.

More specifically, the dual-core version of the Tegra K1 chip has appeared in the AnTuTu database scoring more than Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 805 chipset, which packs four Krait 450 cores. In fact, it scored almost 10,000 points more than the Snapdragon 800. Read more »

At a Morgan Stanley conference when asked by analyst James Fawcett about the puts and takes of sapphire versus glass Senior Vice President at Corning (the company that makes Gorilla Glass) Tony Tripeny has a lengthy response.

The question came in regards to “one large handset and device maker” looking into sapphire for its devices. That maker is Apple and as we know the company is heavily investing into sapphire and will probably use the material for the displays of its upcoming smartphones and, possibly, smartwatch. In defense of its Gorilla Glass the Corning exec had this to say. Read more »

Samsung is a wiz at making great videos and commercials and the company is certainly going to spare no effort in promoting its latest flagship. The Koreans have uploaded yet another promo video for the Galaxy S5 flagship.

The video is almost 4 minutes long and goes through everything Samsung thinks you need to know about the gadget. From the new body materials and colors to the new camera with a larger 1/2.6″ sensor (compared to the 1/3.06″ of old), the phase-detection auto-focus that’s supposed to be the quickest on any smartphone, the IP67 dust and water protection, the fitness and wellness apps and sensors, the fingerprint scanner, the lot. Read more »

MediaTek is a name we’ve been hearing quite often – a company that’s riding the smartphone expansion by providing capable chipsets for low to mid-range phones. We sat down with Jeffrey Ju, US General Manager of the Smartphone Busines, about the company’s plans of breaking into the high-end.

MediaTek has no intentions of developing a custom processor core like some of its competition is doing (notably Qualcomm, but also NVIDIA). Read more »

Allwinner is a chipset maker you’ve perhaps ran into when looking for Android-powered media players or affordable tablets (even HP has one). While its chipsets were never associated with performance, the new Allwinner UltraOcta A80 is poised to change that.

The A80 uses ARM’s big.LITTLE setup with four Cortex-A15 and four Cortex-A7 cores. Read more »

February 24 – what an eventful day! First we got a bunch of Nokia phones running on Android Jelly Bean, then Sony unleashed the next-generation flagship – Xperia Z2. Later HTC premiered two interesting Desire smartphones and finally, Samsung outed the Galaxy S5.

Yesterday was also the day Qualcomm announced the new Snapdragon 801 chipset. And then came the confusion. What is MSM8974AB, what is MSM8974AC, which phone runs on Snapdragon 801, is it Xperia Z2, is it Galaxy S5? Let’s clear all this mess up. Read more »