Alcatel brought out a trio of thin and light Android smartphones in the Idol line. The Alcatel One Touch Idol Alpha is the aluminum-clad leader of three with unibody design and attractive transparent elements for design and notification purposes. Then the Idol S follows close behind with a 4.7″ 720p screen dual and 8MP / 1080p camera. The Idol Mini brings up the rear with a thin and light design – 7.4mm thick, 96g – and a dual-SIM option.

Our hands-on impressions of the three follow after the break. Read more »

It’s just been three days since Samsung officially unveiled the Galaxy Note 3 at IFA in Berlin and the phone has already been put through a review process. Hi-Tech.Mail.Ru managed to get their hands on a review unit and promptly put up a quick review of the device.

The review is in Russian so we have to depend on Google Translate’s translation skills to glean any information off it. There is still a lot of other information that doesn’t require translation, such as product photos, screenshots, benchmark scores and camera samples. Read more »

LG had some trouble with the first public promotion of the G2 in Korea, but then most of its other promo efforts have been quite the success.

The latest LG G2 promo involved a flash mob which took over the main street of Kyiv, Ukraine. Read more »

LG made a lot of fuss with the “learning from you” campaign, saying how much the company listened to its customers when designing the LG G2. Well, one of the most common wishes among users is a decent battery life, let’s see if LG delivered.

The relatively thin (8.9mm) body of the G2 with a curved back must not have made it easy – the battery has a stepped design to make the most of the internal volume and it worked, the phone packs a beefy 3,000mAh battery. Read more »

The features that Samsung has baked into the TouchWiz user interface on the Galaxy Note 3 are so many that the company has issued a 16-minute official hands-on video just so they can go over the key ones. However, on that video there is one really innovative feature missing. And it’s awesome – that’s Multi Vision.

Multi Vision on the Samsung Galaxy Note 3 allows you to stack up several devices and get a bigger resulting screen area for your content. But really? It’s sounds way cooler than it’s useful, because… you know… who has four of these just lying around? Read more »

One of the headlines that has come out of IFA 2013 so far is the announcement of the Samsung Galaxy Note 3. It sports a plethora of new software features and awesome integration options with the just announced Galaxy Gear smartwatch.

So, in order to familiarize potential Note 3 owners with some of its new software tricks, Samsung has made a lengthy hands-on video of the phablet. Read more »

The Sony Xperia Z Ultra is the middle sibling between the Xperia Tablet Z and the Xperia Z1 with its big (even by phablet standards) 6.4″ screen. Combine that with a powerful Snapdragon 800 chipset and an extra slim 6.5mm body and you get one monster of a device, but also a bit of a battery nightmare.

Still, the Z Ultra packs a 3,050mAh battery, which is quite a feat – all that at a respectable thinness. Read more »

When it first came out a couple of years ago, the original Samsung Galaxy Note was welcomed with mixed feeling and reactions. Back then nobody would have thought that today we would be cheering the third installment in the lineup with an even bigger screen. Well times change, and in this industry, times literally flee.

But this time around, the Note 3 is not the only option. You see, Samsung may have opened people’s minds to the phablet realm, but it also inspired a lot of companies to launch rival products. Nothing wrong in that of course, as it leads us to this post where we pit the Galaxy Note 3 versus the LG G Pro and the Acer Liquid S2, with the latter being another fresh announcement off the IFA 2013 floor as well. Read more »

The high-end smartphone spectrum has never been this charming, as we have the freshly announced Sony Xperia Z1 rivaling the newborn LG G2 and the still hot Samsung Galaxy S4. Each of them is nothing short of a powerhouse and each of them has enough charisma to charm the birds out of the trees.

In fact, it’s the Sony Xperia Z1 that will capture them best while doing so. With its 20.7MP G Lens camera with Exmor RS sensor and an updated 5″ full HD Triluminos display with the X-Reality display engine it is the replacement the Xperia Z deserved to get. The same can be easily said for the other two rivals as well – the LG G2 and the Samsung Galaxy S4 are both the high-tech pinnacles of their respective makers. Read more »

2K and Lucid games have joined forced to release 2K Drive exclusively to iOS devices.

The new racing game for mobiles features some 25 licenced cars, as well as multiplayer connectivity and social networking integration. Read more »

HTC has partnered with up-and-coming UK designer David Koma to release a special edition of the HTC One mini smartphone.

Only 10 units of the handset will be ever produced, and can only be won as prizes in an exclusive Twitter competition, organized by HTC. Read more »

Nokia these days has become notorious for mocking its competitors, especially Samsung, at every opportunity they can find. The most recent example was when they parked a truck with a Lumia 1020 ad mocking the Samsung Galaxy S4 Zoom right behind it in the UK.

The latest stab comes in the form of a Twitter image uploaded by Nokia’s German account. The image depicts a Samsung Galaxy S4 broken in half over a red background with a caption ‘Have a break, have a…’. If it’s not clear already, the image is supposed to mock the new Android 4.4 Kit Kat that was announced by Google a couple of days ago. Read more »

Yesterday, Samsung took the wraps off the Galaxy Note 3 smartphone at IFA in Berlin. The company’s latest flagship comes packed with features, as is usual for a Samsung smartphone, and there is a whole bunch of new stuff to go alone with the stuff we have already seen in the past.

To show off all the new features of the Galaxy Note 3, Samsung has now released a fairly lengthy six and half minute long video that goes through each of them. Let’s talk about them briefly before we get to the video. Read more »

Samsung Galaxy Note 3 is the third device running on the Qualcomm’s latest and greatest Snapdragon 800 chipset we meet. It is powered by a quad-core 2.3GHz Krait 400 processor, an Adreno 330 graphics and has 3GB of RAM. It also packs a 1080p display, so we can easily compare the performance of the new chipset to the old generation processors.

We’ve managed to run a few tests after the announcement in Berlin. Here is how the Galaxy Note 3 stacks against the competition. Read more »

Day after day, Oppo continues to tease its upcoming N1 cameraphone. Today, the company released the second teaser video, which strongly suggests the Oppo N1 is going to flaunt an aluminum body.

The video shows what seems to be an Oppo factory, where the build process of the N1 takes place. In it, we get a short glimpse of the phone’s back panel. Notably, it features two cutouts – one for its alleged 12MP camera and one for the LED flash. Read more »