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 »

We have some good news and some bad news for Xiaomi fans. The good news is that the company has finally started expanding market availability and now sells its phones in Hong Kong, too. Now for the bad news – it’s still hard to get one as 200,000 Xiaomi Mi-2S units sold out in just 45 seconds.

Xiaomi is also planning to bring its smartphones to Taiwan, but it will have to start making bigger batches to meet the demand. Read more »

Sony took down its online store in Europe for maintenance for a little while and put it back online this Sunday. To apologize for any inconvenience, Sony is giving you a 10% discount code.

The code should work on all European versions of the Sony Store, but if you want to use it you’d better be quick, it’s valid only until tomorrow. Read more »

LG Display is estimated to receive some 30% of its business from tech giant Apple, and has recorded its weakest profit since Q2 of last year.

That’s why when the division posted its rather poor Q1 results, analysts suspected that the lower orders from the Cupertino giant it to blame. Many saw the slowing demand for Apple’s iPhone’s and iPad’s as the main reason for the shrinking profits. Read more »

The smartphone market is rapidly growing and according to the latest innovation, blind people will soon be able to receive SMS’s and emails on their smartphones, which automatically converts text into Braille patterns.

The smartphone for the blind will be based on an innovative touch screen that is capable of elevating and depressing to create readable text from the content it receives. Read more »

The Nokia Lumia 520 is the cheapest smartphone of the Lumia range in existence and Nokia dubs it as the “The more fun smartphone”. But for how long can the “fun” last? Our extensive battery test comes into play to answer this very question.

For the money, the Lumia 520 isn’t a badly spec’d phone. It is built around a 4″ display and features a 1GHz dual-core Krait processor with Adreno 305 graphics on Snapdragon S4 Plus platform (MSM8227). Read more »

Oppo’s latest software update for the Find 5, codenamed Project Firefly, adds some really impressive software enhancements to the user interface of Oppo’s 5-inch 1080p flagship.

The eye candy-rich update includes new fullscreen widgets with nifty effects like a camera stream showing all your latest photos taken and allowing to snap a picture right from your homescreen, as well as weather effects on your icons. Read more »

Jolla Chairman Antti Saarnio revealed today that the company’s first device running the new Sailfish OS is going to debut in May.

Furthermore, the company will set up a “pre-sales” campaign, allowing fans to register and buy the phone before it being officially available. Jolla promises that those who join in on the Kickstarter-like campaign will get something “unique” on their devices. Read more »

Good news, Oppo Find 5 users. If you were hoping for an official CyanogenMod ROM, you got it.

The CyanogenMod 10.1 based on Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean is now available for the Oppo Find 5, though it’s not without its fair share of bugs. 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 »

Samsung Galaxy S4 does not feature FM radio and that’s surely a bummer for many. We were so used with the FM radio receiver on Samsung phones that we noticed its absence only when we got the latest flagship in our hands.

But what’s the reason to make Samsung drop its long-running tradition? Hi-Tech.Mail.Ru got an official statement from Samsung on the matter. Read more »

The Samsung Galaxy Ace 3 is rumored to hit in late May or early June and while there’s not much known about the mid-range droid, data from GLBenchmark gives us some info on the screen, OS and chipset.

The Galaxy Ace 3 is expected to have a 4” screen and GLBenchmark reports WVGA resolution. That would put it on par with the Galaxy S III mini with 233ppi pixel density. Read more »

The Sony Xperia Z is a tough device – water and dust resistant – so how tough can it be to take apart if you need to repair it? Well, Rounded.com, a spare parts supplier, has a video walking you through the process.

You’ll need a scraping tool, a Phillips 1.5×45 screwdriver, a pincet, a hair drier and a suction cup. Read more »

AT&T is offering a limited HTC One Developer Edition with unlocked bootloader and it is already available on pre-order. However, even if if you’ve decided to get the regular HTC One from AT&T and want to get its bootloader unlocked, there’s nothing to worry about.

A guy over the XDA Developers forums managed to get his hands on the AT&T’s HTC One a few days before the official launch on April 19 and confirmed the device’s bootloader is unlockable via the official HTCDev online tool. 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 »