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Best Buy’s Apple discounts are already in effect, iPad Air 2 lineup is $100 off

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Best Buy unveiled its planned price cuts for Black Friday, but apparently it couldn’t wait until midnight and Apple products are already discounted – and some devices already running out.

The deals are available now online and will be available in stores starting 5pm. Read more »

The latest batch of Samsung Galaxy Note 4 promo videos is too cute to miss

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Samsung just released its most adorable batch of Galaxy Note 4 promo videos to date in an attempt to find “the cutest animal in the Galaxy.” The latest marketing stint by the Korean giant features a trio of rare and adorable animals – a quokka, a river otter, and a blue penguin.

The latest Note 4 promo videos arrive barely a few days after the last batch. Read more »

Moto Maker stars in Motorola’s latest Moto X ad

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Motorola is quite proud of the Moto Maker, which allows you to customize the Moto X to your liking including back cover type and color, engraving, base color and accent colors. The latest Moto X ad features the Moto Maker and the fun you get from it.

The ad shows the process of customizing the Moto X (2014) in a very funny and engaging way, while also showing the integration with Google. It allows you to sign in with your account and have the Moto X configured with your Google ID to boot. Read more »

Motorola Nexus 6 teardown reveals many screws

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Like the new Nexus 9 tablet before it, the Motorola Nexus 6 has now gone through the teardown process. This has revealed its maker’s preference for using screws to hold together its internals, as opposed to adhesive or plastic clips.

The only glue in there is holding the back cover in place, and thankfully this is a relatively mild adhesive. You won’t be able to pry open the back with just your fingernail, though. Read more »

Snapchat makes Our Stories a promotional tool for the AMAs, all sponsored by Samsung

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Tonight Snapchat took upon an interesting marketing strategy to profit from its Our Stories collaborative live stream coverage of The American Music Awards. Samsung sponsored and branded a significant part of the content from the multimedia experience and thus pioneered a whole new advertising and monetizing strategy.

The AMA Our Stories in question mixes user-generated photos and videos from the event with a number of sponsored ones, carrying the distinctive tag “Powered by Samsung Galaxy”. This demonstrates a vast new array of profit possibilities for Snapchat by using a more natural, interesting and, above all, pleasant approach to presenting paid content. This type of presentation is a lot less intrusive and could prove to be significantly more successful than the standard ads, recently introduced within the app. Read more »

Microsoft now offers the AT&T Nokia Lumia 635 for just $39, contract-free

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Microsoft has slashed the contract-free price of the AT&T’s Nokia Lumia 635 to just $39. This is probably the manufacturer’s first deal for the upcoming Black Friday.

The Nokia Lumia 635 is indeed a great offer with a 4.5″ IPS display, Snapdragon 400 chipset, a 5MP rear cam and LTE connectivity, especially at such a low price. Read more »

Moto testing out the Lollipop update for Verizon’s Moto X (2014)

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Carriers don’t have the best reputation when it comes to the speed of software updates, however, Verizon may be on track to release Android 5.0 Lollipop for its Motorola Moto X (2014) soon.

Nothing is official yet, but Motorola has invited participants in its Motorola Feedback Network to take a new software version out for a spin. Read more »

Lenovo Vibe Z2 Pro battery life test

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The Lenovo Vibe Z2 Pro is the company’s 2014 flagship and it sports a sizable 6″ display with a QHD resolution in a very sleek and compact body. A phone this large also makes room for a large battery, and the Vibe Z2 Pro comes with a 4,000mAh juice pack.

In theory, this should give it serious power autonomy but a big battery can only get you so far. The phone’s internals include a Snapdragon 801 chipset with a quad-core 2.5GHz Krait 400 CPU and 3GB of RAM, which is no longer the latest, but still pretty good in terms of efficiency. Read more »

Samsung outs a quartet of new Galaxy Note 4 promo videos

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With the holiday shopping season poised to enter its most critical phase, Samsung unsurprisingly released a quartet of new Galaxy Note 4 promo videos. As expected, each of the clips focuses of a specific feature of the Korean company’s flagship phablet.

Three of the video clips are narrated by a little boy, who describes some his family member’s pre-Note 4 smartphone troubles. Read more »

The Motorola Nexus 6 sports an LED notification light, enabled via rooting

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The Motorola Nexus 6 sports the brilliant Ambient Display feature, which allows you to take a peek at ongoing notifications without unlocking the phone. However, a clever XDA Developers member found out that the phone sports another method of letting you know of a pending notification – a hidden LED light.

The LED light is situated right below the speaker grille on top. It requires root privileges to activate and currently it shows only red, green and blue colors. Members of the community are trying various ways to make the notification light display a combination of colors, too. Read more »

Microsoft takes another swing at Apple in a Siri vs. Cortana ad

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After repeatedly bashing the MacBook Air in its Surface 3 commercials, Microsoft released yet another ad that takes a swing at Apple. The holiday themed video puts Nokia Lumia 830 side by side with Apple iPhone 6 Plus in a battle of virtual assistants.

The clip consists of showcasing Cortana’s unique features via rhetorical questions towards Siri. Read more »

Alcatel OneTouch Flash pre-orders begin in India

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The Alcatel OneTouch Flash smartphone was officially announced in Thailand back in September, and now it’s made its way to India as well. In fact, the handset is already up for pre-order at Flipkart, the subcontinent’s biggest online retailer.

The OneTouch Flash is being offered in both grey and white, the pricing being the same in both cases – INR 9,999 (that means approximately $161 or €130 at the current exchange rates). Read more »

Sony infographic is in love with the Xperia Z3 and Z3 Compact’s cameras

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Sony loves to brag about the cameras on board its mighty Xperia flagships. The latest flattery comes by means of an infographic focused on the Sony Xperia Z3 and Sony Xperia Z3 Compact cameras.

The infographic is easy to swallow as it doesn’t get boringly technical (ha, like there’s such a thing) and keeps things easy to understand and neatly visualized. For instance did you know the Xperia Z3 duo can go as high as 12,800 ISO? If you’re read our reviews then you probably did, but still. Read more »

Sony offers three free movies with Xperia Z3 devices in some markets

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With the holiday shopping season set to kick into high gear, Sony decided to sweeten up the Z3 family of Android devices even further. Going forward the company will bundle three free movies with Sony Xperia Z3, Z3 Compact, and Z3 Tablet Compact.

The trio of free movies will include “Ghostbusters,” “Captain Phillips,” and “The Amazing Spider Man 2.” Read more »

Benchmarks show some iPhone 6 and 6 Plus units have slower storage

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Flash storage for mobile devices is typically described by just its capacity, but if you’ve looked at a computer SSD you may have noticed initialisms like MLC and TLC. TLC is cheaper per gigabyte since it stores three bits per cell compared to the two of MLC, so Apple used TLC storage for some 64GB and 128GB iPhone 6 and 6 Plus units.

And it’s been nothing but headaches. First the controller in the TLC storage went haywire causing crashes, boot loops and slow speeds, now benchmarks have surfaced showing that MLC easily outperforms TLC. Read more »