Recently, we got a chance to spend a tiny bit of quality time with the Amazon Fire Phone at an AT&T press event in New York City. The retail giant’s first ever smartphone is now available in the United States for $199 with a two-year contract or $649 outright.

The Amazon Fire Phone’s specs include Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 SoC, 2GB of RAM, 32GB or 64GB of non-expandable memory, and 4.7” 720p LCD display. Read more »

Sony is the leading supplier of smartphone and tablet camera sensors and it will be expanding production with a 35 billion yen ($345 million) investment. The sensors will be based on Sony’s stacked CMOS design (like Exmor RS).

The increased production will come from two factories (located on the island of Kyushu) and will represent a 13% jump in overall production by August 2015. Read more »

T-Mobile is the first US-based carrier which has confirmed that it will sell the new Nokia Lumia 530. The handset was officially unveiled mere hours ago.

In the magenta carrier’s portfolio it will serve as the successor to the Lumia 521, which itself was TMo’s own version of the best selling Lumia 520 – the new device’s international predecessor. Read more »

Samsung’s marketing team is probably large enough to populate the Allure of the Seas ocean cruise ship and its members certainly don’t lack inspiration. None of ads we’ve seen recently, however, comes close to company’s promo spot for the Association of Surfing Professionals, which it is sponsoring.

The product per second ratio is pretty low compared to the standard norm of Samsung ad spots, but that’s intentional, as the video’s mission is to inspire you. Its tagline is “Every day is day one” and stands behind the message that whether you’re a pro or a rookie, hopping on the surfboard and riding a wave is as exciting as your first day. Read more »

Xiaomi let reporters fondle its new flagship, the Mi 4, so now we have the first benchmark score and several photos from the 13MP camera.

Also, hands-on photos show off two of the custom backs for the Xiaomi Mi 4 – wood and stone. Read more »

The newly-announced Nokia Lumia 530 will be in stores next month but here’s your first chance to see more of the device in the official hands-on video. The video touts the 530′s colorful back panels that can be changed on a whim and the many apps Windows Phone 8.1.

Focusing on apps is no surprise, “Nokia” is really a division of Microsoft now and Windows Phone is its growing smartphone ecosystem. Read more »

Chinese smartphone manufacturer Xiaomi, who just unveiled its latest Mi4 smartphone, has outed a fitness band to go with its new flagship for the unheard of price of CNY 79, or $13.

The new Mi Band will track your movement and sleeping patterns, wake you up based on your sleep cycle via vibrating alarms, and is also water resistant with an IP67 rating. Read more »

We’ve been all about QHD screens in the past couple of months, ever since the latest tech wave has had LG and Oppo at the forefront of the high-res display arms race by being among the first manufacturers to tout 1440p flagships.

But who gets the first-place medal? LG claims that it takes the prize on Twitter, but Oppo has its own say in the matter. Read more »

The QHD titan duo is up next in our traditional weekend battle. It’s the LG G3 vs. the Oppo Find 7, which are now transferring their rivalry in our blog, after their fight in our extended versus review is over.

So now, it’s up to you to decide which one is the better one in five key categories. Let’s start with the aesthetics of the two flagships. Read more »

Leaked slides of what looks to be internal presentation material about the rumored Nvidia Shield tablet and game controller have made it online. Now we know that Nvidia will announce the devices on July 22 and will release them on July 29 in the US and on August 14 in Europe.

Recently, a leaked product image showed us how the Nvidia Shield tablet would look like. Today, we get tons of further details about the long rumored tablet and gaming controller by the company. Read more »

Nokia’s latest Lumia offering has hit our offices, and we’ll be giving you a quick tour of the Nokia Lumia 930 before it gets whisked away for our comprehensive review.

The Lumia 930 is the international variant of the Nokia Lumia Icon released in the US for Verizon earlier this year, and is one of the first devices to sport Microsoft’s new Windows Phone 8.1 update out of box.

The Lumia 930 sports a 5-inch 1080p AMOLED of Nokia’s ClearBlack variety, which we unfortunately found to color shift severely towards red/blue when viewed from different angles – a problem that we’ve also seen in past Nokia AMOLEDs. The chipset is of the MSM8974 Snapdragon 800 variety, with four 2.2GHz Krait 400 cores, and an Adreno 330 GPU. There’s 2GB of RAM on board alongside 32GB of non-expandable storage, all powered by a 2420mAh battery. Read more »

The HTC One (E8) launched first in China to great acclaim but HTC has just now released the first Chinese ad for the dual-SIM version of the flagship. The video is not for the regular One (E8) – instead it touts “HTC One Fashion Edition” if we can believe Google Translate.

Not sure what’s “fashion” about it though, it’s still a polycarbonate body available in Black, White, Red and Blue as the regular version. Read more »

The Nokia Lumia 930 is starring in a new advertisement accenting in its wireless charging capabilities. The ad is posted by the UK branch of the company and displays the Lumia 930 in various environments doing its wireless charging thing with the DC-50 portable wireless charger.

It’s not really surprising that the ad is coming from UK, considering the phone comes with the accessory as a bonus in the country. You also get the MD-12 Wireless speakers if get the smartphone in Britain. Read more »

The Samsung Galaxy11 commercial series has been one of the most impressive in the mobile world, or at least as far as number of celebrities involved is concerned. The videos that tell the story of aliens attacking the earth, who agree to spare our planet if we beat them at a game of football.

So Samsung gathered the most attack-minded team that you’ve ever seen (seriously, there are zero defenders in the squad), equipped them with a bunch of Galaxy gear and sent them to fight for us. It was probably Franz Beckenbauer’s job to teach some of the 12 field players selected to tackle. Read more »

The BlackBerry Passport, which the company’s CEO recently unveiled, rocks a square 4.5″ QHD display cropped to 1:1. This gives it a resolution of 1,440 x 1,440 pixels and anxiety that some Android apps (which BlackBerry OS can run) will look visually unpleasing. As n4bb.com found out, that’s not the case.

The Passport has been snapped in the wild to be running a couple of Android apps, which scaled perfectly on its 1:1 display. Since the company debuted the squared display concept on BlackBerry 10 devices with the Q10, we doubt that native apps will experience any issues. Read more »