The Nokia Lumia 625 aims to bring a big screen and LTE connectivity on the cheap this September. The phone packs a 4.7″ WVGA screen (201ppi) with Nokia’s color profile and super sensitivity goodies, plus a 5MP / 1080p camera that features the Smart Camera app.

The first promo video focuses on these things and more. Read more »

The Ubuntu Edge, the dual-booting Android/Linux smartphone which was teased today in a promo video, needs a little help getting off the ground.

Canonical, the people behind Ubuntu, have launched an Indiegogo campaign to try and get a hefty $32 million to get their device to market. Read more »

In our preview of the Nokia Lumia 1020 we noticed that the camera produces photos with more saturated colors than the 808 PureView, which aimed for accurate, realistic colors. Damian Dinning – former Nokia camera guru, the man in charge of the 808 development and a fan of realistic colors in photos – says the change was made on purpose, to match the preference of the majority of users.

Juha Alakarhu, Dinning’s successor, joined in on the conversation as well. Read more »

The latest figures coming out of Asia indicate that South Korea has continued its dominance as the country with the highest global smartphone ownership, with some 73% of users polled owning smartphones.

This is close to triple the number in 2011, when the country had just 27% smartphone penetration. Read more »

The Google Nexus 7 leaks are coming in at such rate lately, that it would be a real shock if the slate doesn’t debut at the Google Android event on Wednesday. This latest piece of the puzzle is delivered by evleaks, which got hold of a photo of the profile of the new Nexus 7.

While the image itself doesn’t really reveal a great deal of new info, it lets us calculate the exact dimensions of the affordable tablet. According to the proportions shown by this image and the ones leaked earlier, the second generation Nexus 7 will measure 196x112x7.9mm. Read more »

The first Firefox OS powered smartphones – Geeksphone Keon and Peak was officially announced earlier this year and the developer designed devices are now getting a new version of the HTML 5 based Firefox OS.

Firefox OS 1.1 is now available for Keon and Peak and the users can manually upgrade their devices to the latest version of the newest OS. Read more »

The Android 4.3 system dump for the Nexus 4 from yesterday is still not perfectly ready for daily use, but it’s now much easier to install. You can follow instructions here to flash it (using any recovery) to your Nexus 4, it shouldn’t delete your data (once again, proceed at your own risk and do a backup for peace of mind).

Why would you risk it when the official update could be just days away? Android 4.3 brings few changes over 4.2.2, but they are important – and better performance is seemingly one of them. Read more »

The Sony Xperia Z Ultra was announced last month as the company’s first foray into the realm of phablets with its robust 6.5-inch screen.

Besides the new Triluminous display engine, the Z Ultra features Sony’s handwriting recognition technology, which lets you write on the display using nearly anything with tip less than 1mm in diameter. This latest video takes a closer look at exactly what does and doesn’t work as a writing device – from a set of keys to Stanley knives. Read more »

The new compact HTC One mini has just went official, and as tradition dictates, HTC has released a promo video on YouTube to mark the occasion.

The HTC One mini looks just like a minuaturized version of the HTC One flagship, all the way down to its aluminum body and UltraPixel camera (even if the Optical Image Stabilization has been stripped). Read more »

The Truecaller global phone directory, a service which finds contact details for a given name or telephone number via crowd-sourcing, has had its main database hacked according to a report by BGR. The hackers have reportedly had access to some 450GB of data, most of it not really intended for public usage.

The hack was pulled off my the Syrian Electronic Army, who claim to have the data of over a million users, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Gmail accounts. Truecaller has since released a statement refuting that any sensitive data has been compromised. Read more »

Android 4.3 cropped up on the Google Play Editions of the Samsung Galaxy S4 and HTC One first but you shouldn’t doubt that the Nexus 4 will get it too. Some already have it – one Jeff Williams apparently bought a Nexus 4 from a Google employee and to his surprise the phone was running Android 4.3 JWR66N, the same build number we saw on the Galaxy S4 GPE.

With some help, he managed to get a system dump of the phone. There’s no radio and bootloader yet (Jeff promised to get those soon), but reports say you can use TWRP to restore the dump and get it to work. Proceed with caution (and full backup) as there’s no guarantee of the result. Read more »

The HTC One mini just went official and we were lucky enough to get to handle the new diminutive handset. The One mini takes the aluminum unibody, UltraPixel camera, BoomSound stereo speakers and Android 4.2.2 with Sense 5 of the regular One and compacts them into a smaller package with a 4.3″ 720p screen.

So, how much smaller is it? It’s 5mm shorter and 5mm narrower (about 0.2″ on a side) and lighter too – 122g vs. 143g for the big One. The one thing that hasn’t changed is the thickness. Read more »

The third-generation Samsung Galaxy Note phablet will be one of the hottest devices of the Fall and naturally it is getting its fair share of leaks and rumors. Now, an alleged benchmark result of the Samsung Galaxy Note III (what seems to be coming from a Hong Kong variant) has surfaced.

The score card reveals the presence of an Exynos octa-core processor clocked at 1.9 GHz and the according to the benchmark results, the device is running on Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean. Read more »

We’ve already finished our in-depth review of the Samsung Galaxy S4 mini and it’s live on our homepage. And since we got to spend enough time with the Galaxy S4 mini, we also made it jump through the hoops of our traditional battery test routine.

The Galaxy S4 mini is powered by a 1900 mAh battery that should provide enough juice for the dual-core Snapdragon 400 chipset and the Super AMOLED qHD screen. Read more »

Which is the most popular, Windows Phone handset you ask? The Nokia Lumia 520 is after raising from fifth place a month ago according to numbers by AdDuplex. The entry-level handset holds 13.3% of the worldwide WP market, ahead of the flagship Lumia 920′s 11.8% (the 925, 928 and 1020 are too new to have made a dent).

The climb of the modest Lumia 520 was rapid – it gained percentage points by the week. Meanwhile Windows Phone 7 devices are on the way out, but still make up a significant portion of the install base. Read more »