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Nokia will light London up to celebrate the Lumia 800 – promises the biggest light show in UK ever

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Nokia is planning to hold a huge event to celebrate the birth of their first Windows Phone smartphone. The company sent out invitations for a huge light show that will use the Millbank Tower on the Thames as a screen.

On November 28 Nokia will be employing 16 projectors, 800 windows, 200 workmen and 3 D3 servers to create “the biggest video-mapping project ever attempted in the UK” . The star of the show will be deadmau5 DJ, who will play an exclusive set to the backdrop of an amazing 4D animation. Read more »

A leaked Samsung Galaxy Nexus ad says it will hit Verizon on November 29, to cost $199.99

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The Samsung Galaxy Nexus is one of the hottest devices of the season, so it’s understandable that its arrival to America is hotly anticipated. And thanks to a leaked ad, we know its price and, possibly its exact launch date.

The price bit is more certain as it appears on the ad itself. At $199.99 the LTE-packing Samsung Galaxy Nexus will be $100 cheaper than previously expected, which will probably make it even better of a Christmas present. Read more »

BlackBerry Curve 9360 stops by, makes a trick for the camera [VIDEO]

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RIM has refreshed the Curve series with two new types of Curves – the QWERTY 9360 and the QWERTY-less touch-based 9380. Today we have the QWERTY fella at our office.

As usual we spent some times taking a few quick shots, unboxing and user interface demo video. Read more »

HTC Rezound enters our battery test track, see if it can Beats its way out [TEST]

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As the current flasghip of the company, we were more than interested to put the HTC Rezound battery through its paces. After all, the device packs a monster spec sheet, coupled with some serious multimedia credentials. A battery to match the aforementioned is more than essential – it is simply mandatory.

The Rezound packs a 1620mAh battery – certainly not the largest we’ve seen in an Android device. The battery will have to deal with a dual-core CPU and, most importantly, an HD screen. It surely has a difficult task ahead of it. Read more »

Nokia promises two battery-related updates for the Lumia 800 in the next two months

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Ever since the Nokia Lumia 800 went on sale, there were sporadic reports that the smartphone battery life is less than stellar. Nokia obviously did some investigation on the matter and they found that the poor battery life wasn’t caused by software glitches, but rather by the user behavior.

So the Finns will be releasing a couple of updates over the next couple of months, which should improve the battery performance as a whole. The first update will come in December and will focus on the power efficiency of the device, while the second will come in January 2012 and will tweak the charging of the 1450 mAh battery. Read more »

ST-Ericsson NovaThor U8500 chipset demoed on video, will power Sony Ericsson’s upcoming Nypon smartphone

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The chipset of the upcoming Sony Ericsson LT22i Nypon smartphone made its first public appearance as several demo videos appeared. The ST-Ericsson NovaThor U8500 chipset comes with a couple of Cortex-A9 cores, clocked at 1GHz and a Mali-400MP GPU.

Unsurprisingly, it was shown to run the latest version of Android – 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. Presumably, ICS will be the OS of choice for the Sony Ericsson Nypon, when it comes out next year. Read more »

HTC tells its quietly brilliant story, fills your hearts with fond memories [VIDEO]

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Gather around, HTC fans! The Taiwanese company just released a cool video about the smartphone evolution over the past 13 years and it’s really a joy for the geek’s eyes.

The Taiwanese company talks about the important events (in its own view) that lead to the smartphone as we know it today. It’s really amazing to see just how little time it took for stuff like touchscreen, 3G and GPS to go from zero to standard equipment. Read more »

Google promises a fix for the Galaxy Nexus volume control bug, says it will come with a software update

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The other day we reported a curious bug in the UK versions of Galaxy Nexus, which caused the device to change the volume on its own due to interference with radio frequencies on the 900MHz band. Although it is widely believed that the fault lies in the hardware (probably due to poor EMI shielding) Google has now come out and said that they will be issuing a software update for it.

Here is the full statement from Google regarding the matter: Read more »

Unboxing the Motorola RAZR – 7.1mm of Kevlar, Gorilla Glass and Android [VIDEO]

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Be careful not to cut yourself – the new Motorola RAZR XT910 droid is 7.1mm sharp. We got it out of its box gently to rummage around and then played with the RAZR itself. The Kevlar coating on the turned out to be much more pleasant than we thought and the high-res SuperAMOLED screen does look impressive.

But first things first – the box contents are what you would expect (charger, USB cable, etc.). The interesting accessories, like the Lapdock 500 that turns the RAZR into a 14″ Android netbook, are sold separately. Even without those, however, the Motorola RAZR is an impressive piece of kit. Read more »

LG Optimus 2X Gingerbread update brings a speedier browser, smoother UI and little else [TEST]

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Our LG Optimus 2X got its Android 2.3.4 update at the start of this month and we’ve playing with it ever since. And since the LG former flagship is once again becoming a smartphone many are considering (this time due to the lower price, not top functionality), we thought we might give you a rundown of the improvements we noticed.

The truth is, Gingerbread is by far not as major an update as Froyo was and the Optimus 2X doesn’t feel like a completely different phone after you get it – the overall experience is similar. However, you are free to disagree with us if the updated bits and pieces were just the one bothering you. Read more »

HTC loses S3 patents leverage, as ITC clears Apple of patent infringing

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Apple has scored a point in their ongoing court match against HTC. The US International Trade Commission has ruled that the Cupertino-based company doesn’t infringe any of the HTC-owned patents.

Earlier, ITC declared that Apple was, in fact, violating some of the patents that HTC acquired with its purchase of S3 Graphics. However, it was OS X, rather than iOS, which was found in the wrong and Apple has obviously done enough to fix that. Read more »

HTC HD2 gets an Android 4.0 AOSP port, other stare in disbelief

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You may have already forgotten all about the HTC HD2, but the hacking community clearly hasn’t. The Windows Mobile (that’s BC in Microsoft speak) smartphone got its lifetime extended way beyond what its manufacturer expected thanks to the efforts of some indie developers, who keep porting the latest versions of Android to it.

Now, the HTC HD2 is even ready to run the latest Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, long before most Android smartphones can do so. An HD2 ROM based on the AOSP release of Ice Cream Sandwich is available for download and you can try it right now. Read more »

Apple iPhone 4S becomes the second most popular cameraphone on Flickr, sets its sight on the iPhone 4

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The iPhone 4S has just become the second most popular cameraphone among Flickr users. Hardly a shocker, we can imagine as its predecessor is still the most popular camera on Flickr and that the 4S is miles ahead of it in terms of photo capabilities.

It only took just over a month for the iPhone 4S to go that far, so we can imagine it will be overtaking the iPhone 4 in no time. The iPhone 4S, which we found to be the most capable 8MP smartphone currently around, already has almost half the user base of the iPhone 4, so it’s probably just a Christmas shopping spree away from overtaking it. Read more »

Google’s Dan Morrill confirms USB Mass Storage in Ice Cream Sandwich, not present in Galaxy Nexus, however

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Ever since people have gotten their hands on the Galaxy Nexus, we have been hearing reports of the device not supporting the USB Mass Storage (UMS) protocol that allows you to mount the internal memory on your computer. Since this is the first Ice Cream Sandwich device, this peculiarity was attributed to the OS lacking the particular feature. But as Google engineer Dan Morrill explains, that is not the case.

As it happens, Ice Cream Sandwich does support UMS, it’s just that the Galaxy Nexus doesn’t. Instead, it uses MTP or Media Transfer Protocol, which is natively supported on Windows and commonly used by devices such as media players to sync with Windows Media Player. Read more »

HTC Radar put through our battery test, makes it the first Windows Phone to do so [TEST]

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So far we’ve put five smartphones through our new battery test, but the HTC Radar is the first to fight under the WP flag. The Mango-running smartphone will give us the first indication on how the Microsoft platform fares against its competitors in terms of power efficiency.

The HTC Radar comes with a 1520 mAh battery and a 3.8″ LCD screen, so it had a reasonable fighting chance. In fact it is one of the most favorable battery-to-screen-estate ratios we’ve seen so far in our test. Read more »