The annual BrandZ study by market research agency Millward Brown has named Apple the top global brand for a second straight year.

The BrandZ report lists Apple’s brand value for 2012 at just under $183 billion, representing a 19% year-over-year increase. Read more »

In our review of the HTC Evo 4G LTE, we noted that the Sprint Wireless exclusive smartphone one ups its AT&T relative – the HTC One X, on a couple of instances. The bigger, 2000 mAh battery is one of the Evo features, which is certain to make the owners of its polycarbonate bodied relative jealous.

We already put the HTC One X for AT&T through its paces in our battery test, and came quite impressed with what we saw. Naturally, the expectations towards the Evo ran even higher, given its larger battery. Hit the break to find out how it did. Read more »

Ten years ago sci-fi movie Minority Report, starring Tom Cruise, showed a mesmerizing new way of controlling software interfaces – by waving your hands and making gestures in the air in front of the monitor (a giant monitor wall in the case of the movie). Well, we’ve all seen Kinect and what it has done to home gaming but we are yet to witness the next revolution – commanding your run-of-the mill Windows or Mac OS computer with similar hand gestures in the air.

Well, meet this tiny USB gizmo, made by a company called Leap Motion, that promises to enable just that – and it’s just $70. They’ve got a great video to prove their point. Let’s hope that the real product delivers on the promises. Read more »

ST-Ericsson and Samsung officially unveiled what many already suspected – Samsung is using NovaThor chipsets for more than the Galaxy S Advance. The other two phones that make use of the platform are the pico-projector packing I8530 Galaxy Beam and the mid-range dual-core droid, the Galaxy Ace 2 (which just went on sale in the UK and Germany, by the way).

The Samsung I8530 Galaxy Beam packs a NovaThor U8500 with its two Cortex-A9 cores clocked at 1GHz and a Mali-400 GPU. Read more »

If you’ve been eyeing the recently released HTC One series, then you might be interested to see how they look on the inside.

This HTC One S teardown video lets you take a peak at whats behind that gorgeous 4.3″ Super AMOLED. Read more »

Samsung, the official partner for the 2012 Summer Olympics, has gotten famous football player David Beckham to promote their Galaxy Note.

In the new video that they released, we see Beckham kicking footballs at drums to the tune of Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’. Read more »

We have seen Nokia talk about the 808 PureView camera before. We have also seen a sample video shot on the 808 PureView. Now we have a video shot entirely on the 808 PureView, where Nokia’s team of engineers who worked on the phone talk about their experience.

While most of what we see in the video is something we have already read before, the important thing here is that video has been shot on the phone itself. As you can expect, the video quality is really good for a phone. So good, in fact, that after a certain point you completely forget that the video has been shot on a phone and only pay attention to what the people in the video are saying. Read more »

As most of you probably know by now, the HTC One X for AT&T packs a different chipset than its NVIDIA Tegra 3 rocking, global sibling. A Qualcomm made, Snapdragon S4 chipset with two CPU cores is the reason for the US available HTC One X’s LTE connectivity.

This means that testing out the battery life of the two HTC One X versions is the perfect showdown of the battery efficiency, which the latest and greatest Qualcomm and NVIDIA chipsets offer. Read on to find out which one came on top. Read more »

You must be aware by now that Samsung is the official sponsor of the 2012 Summer Olympics to be held later this year in July in London. Now we have come across a picture of this rather attractive special edition Galaxy Note being sold in the UK.

Called the Galaxy Note Olympic Edition, the phone comes with a special back cover. The one pictured here is the Great Britain version that comes with a glossy black cover with the Union Flag on it. Read more »

After the Nokia Lumia 800 survived a mini ice age, we get to see if the Lumia 900 is going to pass the nail-to-the screen test.

Granted, this is not an industry standard test, but the guys over at TechCraver decided to give it a whirl anyways to see how much the Lumia 900′s screen can handle. And by the looks of it, it can take a lot of punishment. Read more »

We are no strangers to seeing Android devices being rooted ahead of their launch and the upcoming Galaxy S III is no different. The root comes courtesy Android developer Chainfire and you will be able to find more details regarding the root on his post on xda-developers forum.

Chainfire gives special credit to Samsung for this root. Apparently, the whole process was a piece of cake compared to some of the other devices, including previous Galaxy models. It seems Samsung has made it very easy for developers to unlock and root the phone. Read more »

The Panasonic Eluga DL1 lays claim to be among the thinnest of Android smartphones out there and it couples it with being IP57 certified meaning it can swim in a meter of water for as long as an hour and it’s also dust-proof as well.

Apart from being ultra durable and slender, it offers a dual-core 1 GHz processor, an 8 MP camera and a 4.3″ 540 x 960 display among other things. Read more »

The arrival of the AT&T exclusive, LTE enabled Samsung Focus 2 to the market is hardly a surprise, given the fact that the competition on the US market is already sporting LTE connectivity. However, in order to avoid clashing with the likes of the Nokia Lumia 900 and HTC Titan II, the Korean creation undercuts both in terms of price and specs.

The Samsung Focus 2 (unsurprisingly) features a single-core, Scorpion CPU, clocked at 1.4GHz, and Adreno 205 GPU. Read more »

LG came out public today, detailing a new concept for their custom UI skin to be used on their upcoming IceCream Sandwich smartphones. The company issued a lengthy press release that makes a lot of promising and does little in terms of actual demonstrations.

The key new features include a QuickMemo integration throughout the UI and enhanced lockscreen functionality. As any smiling South Korean girl would tell you (ok, not on their Samsung shift, they won’t), these innovations would certainly provide a more upscale user experience.

LG actually have prepared a nice little list of all the changes they’ve implemented and I’m sure you’re dying to read it (if you are not here just for the girls). So here it is along with another shot of this nice looking gal. Read more »

Starting today, Google is introducing its latest gen search technology. Moving away from keyword indexing, the Knowledge graph makes a transition to a world of entities, nodes and relationships. As they put it, Google will now try and search for “things, not strings”.

In the past 2 years Google has been working on the information database for the project and not it’s gathered “more than 3.5 billion facts about and relationships between these different objects”. In simple words, Google will recognize ambiguous search strings by understanding they might mean several things and it will adjust your search results based on your choice of topic. Still sounds vague? Well, watch this video that will hopefully explain it better than me. Read more »