Sony officially unveiled its latest flagship smartphone, the Xperia Z1 at its press conference at IFA, Berlin, yesterday. The cameraphone packs a punch with its Snapdragon 800 chipset clocked at 2.2 GHz along with Adreno 330 graphics and 2 GB of RAM.

We took the Xperia Z1 for a spin and the performance of the device was top notch. So, we decided to stack it up against other smartphones in the market, and here are the results. Read more »

Back in Q2, there were several analysts that predicted grim future for Samsung’s mobile division, with many worried that the Korean giant’s Galaxy S4 smartphone will suffer poor sales in Q3 2013.

The latest prognosis for Q3 however has Samsung Securities predicting some 80 million smartphone sales in Q3 2013. Read more »

In a bid to increase the hype over its upcoming camera-centric smartphone, Oppo has posted an image of the camera module, which should appear in the Oppo N1.

The module could feature a Sony CMOS sensor with optical image stabilization. There’s also talk of two camera versions – a 12 MP one with 10x optical zoom and a 15x optical zoom 16 MP one, but that seems rather far-fetched – 12MP with no optical zoom as initially rumored is what we’ll probably get. Read more »

Qualcomm has released a promo video for its latest generation processors in which the chipmaker openly mocks one of its main rivals, MediaTek. MediaTek recently announced that it’s working on the world’s first true octa-core CPU and Qualcomm is keen to prove that this is a wrong move.

The San Diego based chip manufacturer manages to show the difference between its Snapdragon line of processors against the competition in a pretty amusing Guitar Hero styled way. Read more »

A new kickstarter campaign aims to let your 3.5mm audio jack become an extra button for your Android smartphone.

You can configure the button to do a variety of configurable one-touch actions like turn on your flashlight, take a quick photo, or even start phone call/audio recording. Read more »

National Geographic’s awarded photographer Stephen Alvarez was given two Nokia Lumia 1020s as his only cameras on a trip to the Grand Canyon, Monument Valley, and the Colorado River. The results are more than worthy, especially when you fathom they were taken with a smartphone camera.

“What the Nokia Lumia 1020 does astounds me – these results, from a smartphone, are stunning. I have used a lot off camera phones so when I set out on this assignment I had my doubts, my doubts are gone – nothing else compares.” Read more »

This one isn’t for the faint of heart, people. You are about get to witness the Motorola Moto X being keyed, knifed and hammered on its front, back and sides in order to test out the durability of that plastic body, tapered edges and Gorilla Glass display.

The guy performing the abusive tests isn’t holding back on the Moto X and the phone could have easily turned into a nonfunctional mush. Wander what happened – check out the video after the break. Read more »

The just-leaked Oppo N1 smartphone made waves last week with a risque ad campaign, revealing it as one of the first smartphones to feature a touch sensitive rear panel.

Now, more details have come to light regarding just what you can do with the rear touch panel, including scrolling through homescreen panes and selecting screen elements. Read more »

Nothing ever escapes the custom designed opening picks at iFixit and the new Moto X is no exception. The newly released smartphone from Motorola spent some quality time at iFixit, exposing its insides for all to see.

According to iFixit, the Moto X isn’t particularly difficult to take apart, once you get past the tenacious back cover that uses a copious amount of glue to stick to the phone. The cover itself, however, is made from a nice woven fabric material that is actually see through if you look carefully. Read more »

LG G2′s 13 megapixel sensor at the back is one of the most talked about features of the smartphone – the optically stabilized camera and its ability to shoot 1080p videos at 60fps have created a buzz among the tech enthusiasts. We now have a couple of user-captured videos and photos which tell us a great deal about the G2′s main shooter.

The user sample images and videos of the LG G2 come from the administrator of OptimusForums. G2′s camera has been tested out in the outdoor conditions and you can have a look at the samples below. Read more »

In a short period of time our phones went from having Retina displays to HD displays and now Full HD displays. You might think that we don’t need any more pixels on our mobile screens but the pixel density race is far from over.

LG has just showcased a new 5.5-inch display for smartphones that has a resolution of 2,560 x 1,440, with a pixel density of 538 PPI and 430 nits of brightness. LG is calling it a ‘Quad HD’ display because it has four times the resolution of a typical 720p HD display. Read more »

Being an early adopter is not all fun and games. Although you get to use the latest and greatest technology before everybody else, you are also often the first one to face issues that someone who may buy later won’t have to deal with.

A similar situation has arisen for the owners of the new Nexus 7 tablet, which despite its excellent specs and price, isn’t free from glitches. According to the users, the tablet is facing GPS connectivity issues, where often loses connection to the satellite after a few minutes and fails to get a lock on afterwards. Read more »

Canonical’s crowd-funding project, aiming to raise $32 million in order to make its Ubuntu Edge device a reality was off to a fast start, making $2 million in the first 8 hours, but it slowed down shortly after and it seems it stands little chance it will achieve its goal by August 21.

Now with the clear mindset of making the next 14 days count Canonical is slashing the price of the Ubuntu Edge (once as high as $775) to $695, citing cut manufacturing costs as the reason. The price will remain like that for the rest of the campaign and there won’t be any more price hikes. Read more »

Motorola made a big deal of the 10MP ClearPixel camera found on the Moto X and boasted about its low light performance to anyone who would listen. So, it’s only logical for a comparison to ensue, and the Moto X has taken part in an impromptu shootout featuring the 41MP PureView camera of the Nokia Lumia 1020.

The two phones were tested with their flash units on and off, so we can compare their low-light performance as well as the quality of their flash units. Read more »

The Sony Xperia Z Ultra is not only an enormous 6.4″ beast of a phablet but it also belongs to a very exclusive group of devices that have the Snapdragon 800 chipset up and running. We got our hands on the device once again and this time we even managed to run a few synthetic benchmarks and see how much of a performance update you are actually getting.

The device should be very zippy courtesy of four Krait 400 cores clocked way up at 2.2 GHz and 2 gigs of RAM. The graphics are dealt with by the latest Adreno 330 GPU, which we’ve heard does a pretty good job. Read more »