According to a 30-day survey conducted by Nielsen, games is the most popular category of apps downloaded and used in the US on mobile phones. 64% of the users that were asked said they played games on their phones, with 60% using weather apps and 56% using social networking apps. Also, 93% said that they wouldn’t mind spending their money for a game, as compared to 87% for apps in the entertainment category and 84% for productivity.

On an average, users spend 7.8 hours playing games on their phones. iOS users spend the maximum amount of time, clocking at 14.7 hours while Android users come second with 9.3 hours. Those with BlackBerries, Windows Mobile/Phone devices and feature phones spend less than under 5 hours each Read more »

LG has just announced the launch of Optimus 3D in South Korea. This is not actually the news here, but thanks to this press release we learned a few other tasty bits about the device.

We finally get to see the list of the free full games to come pre-installed with the Optimus 3D plus the titles to be available at half price. Read more »

Those iPhone 5 (or 4S) rumors just aren’t going to stop until Steve Jobs finally steps on stage and reveals the next best iOS smartphone. Today ‘s issue of Rumorland daily talks about the size and weight of the upcoming iPhone and speculates on the reason why it missed on its usual July refresh cycle.

Apparently, Apple is going to try and squeeze its next smartphone into an even slimmer shell that weighs less than the iPhone 4. However, this has resulted in a number of complications in the manufacturing process, which might be the reason why the iPhone 5 is late. Read more »

After leaking last week, the HTC Sensation first update will hardly surprise anyone now, but the news today is it’s now being officially pushed to the smartphone. If you have a European Sensation you can get the 27MB worth of bug-fixes and patches right away without the need for connecting your Sensation to a computer.

Unfortunately this is not the bootloader-unlocking update that most Sensation owners have been waiting for, nor is it the one that brings its Android version up to 2.3.4. Read more »

Yesterday the chip-maker Texas Instruments announced that their OMAP4 mobile chipset is the first to receive the Netflix HD certification. And before you rush to any conclusions, you should know this doesn’t mean that this will be the only chipset compatible with the app.

Instead, the certification comes to show that Netflix believes that OMAP4 is the best-optimized chipset for its service allowing streaming of up to 1080p 30fps multi-standard videos. Also, it offers similar performance with a lower load and thus less power consumption and improved multi-tasking. Read more »

The Tegra 2 platform was quite a success for NVIDIA, finding its way to a dozen of smartphones and tablets and it even became the standard hardware platform for Android Honeycomb. But the company is certainly not going to stop there. We already know that its successor, codenamed Kal-El, will come later this year with a quad-core CPU on board, but now we also got some details about the version after that, codenamed Wayne.

The 28nm NVIDIA Wayne will be commercially available as Tegra 4 and will actually come in two flavors. The less powerful one will sport “at least 24-core” CUDA-enabled GPU, which resembles contemporary GPU architecture and a quad-core CPU, clocked at least 1.5GHz. According to NVIDIA that should be enough to provide at least 10x the computing power of the currently available Tegra 2 chipset. Read more »

The LG Optimus 3D has just started selling in the UK and along with it are coming some exclusive 3D games for it, courtesy of Gameloft.

You will now be able to play popular titles such as Asphalt 6, N.O.V.A. 2 and Let’s Golf 2 in all their three dimensional glory on the Optimus 3D’s glasses-free 3D display. And that’s not all Read more »

When Nokia announced the N9 last month, they claimed it to be the fastest cameraphone on the market. But before Nokia came up with the N9, HTC had already called dibs on that title for their Sensation. Also, when Nokia did the cameraphone time comparison, they seemed to have left out the Sensation for some reason, so we never really found out which one is faster. Until now.

The guys over at stuff-review.com decided it was time to settle the matter once and for all so they took out their trusty stopwatch and timed the HTC Sensation to see how it compares with the figures of the N9 that Nokia published and guess what, the Sensation won. Read more »

Samsung has been offering its Gravity line of phones with T-Mobile in the United States for several years now. The devices have been known as affordable, no nonsense feature phones with sliding QWERTY keyboard, mostly oriented towards the younger users who have a thing for text messaging. The latest member of the Gravity family is no different than its predecessors, except one major feature – it is now an Android running smartphone.

The Samsung Gravity SMART does not have a mind-blowing spec sheet Read more »

You don’t offten see a mobile concept as elaborate as this one. The Rimini UI/device combo is a refreshing breeze in the current attrition warefare led by the major mobile OS’s. Though the concept will hardly see daylight in a real product, it is evident a lot of thought has went into creating this interface system that’s unlike any other. Meet the Project Rimino.

Created by designer Amid Moradganjeh as part of his Master’s Thesis, the Project Rimino describes a minimalist mobile device that reacts to human interaction more intuitively than anything I’ve seen before. Read more »

With the hundreds of different Android devices out there, there will always be those who feel they’ve been left out in the cold when the device they bought last year is stuck on last year’s firmware whilst everyone around them appears to be running the latest and greatest.

For owners of the Motorola Milestone XT720 on US regional carrier Cincinnati Bell, its been tough. Read more »

The boys in the labs down at Google HQ have been tinkering and tweaking recently and on Thursday released the latest iteration of Google search for BlackBerry webkit 6.0 devices (obviously this means you’re running BB OS 6 or higher).

Assuming you’re the browsing type you might have already noticed the improvements they’ve brought to the table in the past two days, but in case you haven’t, there are four aspects that Google have focused on. Read more »

Yesterday BGR received an open letter by an anonymous high-level RIM employee, address to Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie, CEOs of RIM. The employee pulled no punches as he (or she) outlined everything that is currently wrong with RIM and the reason they are losing so badly to Apple and Google.

Among the things that the employee addressed the first was about BlackBerry devices lagging behind Apple’s when it comes to user experience. He also noted that Android devices lacked when it comes to simplicity and elegance and that BlackBerry has the opportunity to build something new and “uniquely BlackBerry” with QNX platform. Read more »

The N950 is the beautifully crafted, but sadly developer only counterpart to Nokia’s latest commercially available MeeGo device, the N9. Running MeeGo Harmattan, the video below gives a detailed look at the UI, along with the dialer, contacts, web browsing, Facebook, the camera settings, turn by turn navigation and a whole host more.

This expansive 17 minute video (in Thai) will get you better acquainted with the device you just can’t have. Read more »

A new Samsung droid is heading to Sprint – the Samsung Conquer 4G packs a 1GHz processor, Android 2.3 Gingerbread and 4G connectivity (WiMAX). The phone was temporarily available on one the Samsung websites but they’ve pulled it down for some reason.

Fear not, Google cache remembers all you need to know about the Conquer 4G. It packs a 3.5″ HVGA screen and a 3.2MP main camera with LED flash (plus a 1.3MP front-facing camera). There’s a shutter key as well. Read more »