Nuance, the developer behind Dragon Naturally Speaking and many other voice operated technologies in consumer electronics, has created a voice-activated personal assistant which uses biometrics to uniquely identify a specific user.

This means that you’ll be able to tell your phone to do all sorts of things requiring secure identification by simply talking to your phone. Read more »

When Google introduced the Face Unlock feature in Android 4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich, it was quickly proven to be a failure due to the ease with which you could bypass it using a photograph.

With Android 4.1, Jelly Bean, Google added the option to make the user blink so as to avoid being duped by a simple photograph. But as it turns out, even that can be bypassed by using a digital image of the user and a simple trick using an image editor. Read more »

The HTC Sense 4.0 UI on the new One X was a major improvement over the previous versions of the UI. HTC had toned down some of their previous design choices, which made the UI look more polished. But the performance was still lagging behind stock Ice Cream Sandwich UI and it can be seen while scrolling through homescreens and application drawer.

Thankfully, things are about to change when the next version of Sense UI hits the One X. The folks at Geeksaber have managed to get their hands on a leaked ROM containing the Sense 4.1 update and are saying that it makes a dramatic improvement to the performance. Read more »

Well, this comes as a personal surprise to me. After publicly mocking 7-inch slates at one of Apple’s earning calls, it seems Steve Jobs after all, approved of the smaller-sized tablets. This came out as part of the evidence, presented in court in the heated Apple vs. Samsung trial.

I’ve long dismissed all rumors of a 7-inch iPad Mini (iNotepad or whatever else it may be called), based solely on this past public statement by Steve Jobs that 7-inchers were no good. Period.

Well, it seems that the good old sport might have had a change of heart in his last months. Read more »

The popular CyanogenMod ROM modding scene has officially dropped support for a wide array of devices running on the dated Snapdragon S1 chipset.

This means that devices running on the Qualcomm QSD8x50, MSM7x25, MSM7x27 and MSM7x27T SoCs will not see any builds beyond Cyanogen 7.x, which is based on Gingerbread. Or in plain words, no Ice Cream Sandwich by CyanogenMod. Read more »

Samsung launched its own mobile music service in the United States. The Samsung Music Hub will be initially available on the Galaxy S III smartphones offered by AT&T and US Cellular. Availability for the rest of the flagship’s carrier versions is yet to be announced.

The service will be offered in free and premium variations with the latter set to cost $9.99 a month. Read more »

The Jelly Bean-based CyanogenMod 10 continues its march in the Android scene and now that Google has released the stock ROM images, developers have everything needed to start porting Android 4.1 to their favorite devices.

The latest ones to start enjoying CyanogenMod 10 are the Samsung Galaxy Fit and Galaxy Mini, devices which otherwise would’ve never seen the light of Android 4.1. And the kicker is, they run it surprisingly well. Read more »

We are no strangers to seeing movie tie-in games that come out shortly after the release of a big budget movie. But recently, these games have started appearing on mobile devices as well. We saw Temple Run: Brave, The Amazing Spider-man and now The Dark Knight Rises, releasing just weeks apart from each other.

Today we will be taking a look at The Dark Knight Rises, a game based on arguably the best movie that has come out this year so far. The movie had raised everyone’s expectations sky high and managed to meet and exceed most of them. On the contrary, no one is expecting anything from the Batman game and with the history of movie tie-in games it would be a surprise if it is any good. We decided to find out if that is the case. Read more »

Carphone Warehouse will be selling two limited edition Olympic-flavored versions of the Samsung Galaxy S III. The device will be available exclusively from CW starting August 1 and the price starts from 28 quid a month from Vodafone, Orange, O2, T-Mobile, Talk Mobile and Three.

The first edition is a marble white with a Team Great Britain logo on the back and the other other one is a pebble blue decorated with the British flag on the back. Read more »

The Samsung I8530 Galaxy Beam is a fairly unique device with its built-in pico-projector. Samsung has put a big 2000mAh battery inside the smartphone, which is almost as big as the one on the Galaxy S III, and given that there’s only a dual-core processor and a smaller 4″ LCD to feed we expected it to fare quite well in our test.

We put the Galaxy Beam through our usual battery testing procedures and we are now ready to share our findings with you. Read more »

Couple of months ago we reported that HTC has released the kernel source code for the international HTC One X. Unfortunately, the AT&T version in the US was left out back then.

We’ll, you’ll be glad to know that the AT&T version has now joined the international model and both their kernel source codes are now available on HTC’s developer website. Read more »

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 »

Manufacturers are still taking their time with the official Jelly Bean updates, but the guys over at XDA-developers have been quite busy porting the latest Android distribution to various smartphones and already have quite a lot to show for their efforts.

The most recent achievement of the indie dev community is quite impressive though. The Samsung Galaxy Ace and Gio – two smartphones based on the older-gen ARMv6 CPU – got CM10 ports, which will certainly be their only chance of tasting Jelly Bean. Read more »

Virtual personal assistant app Speaktoit Assistant has just landed in the Windows Marketplace. The app has been well received on both Android where it scored 3.5 million downloads and a user rating of 4.6 and iOS (where its latest version has a rating of 4.5 stars.

The app is compatible with all smartphones running WP version 7.5 or higher and the developers will be making the first 10,000 downloads free. If you don’t make it on time, you will need to pay $0.99 to get it. Read more »

Apple has released yet another ad for the iPhone 4S highlighting the Siri functionality. And this time, they have none other than Mr. Martin Scorsese himself.

This new ad sticks to the same formula as the previous ones. The celebrity is using the Siri functionality on the iPhone 4S to manage day to day tasks such as changing appointment schedules, which highlights the ease of using just your voice to do these otherwise tedious tasks while simultaneously highlighting the conversational nature of Siri. Read more »