While the launch of the new Sony Xperia Z1 flagship is still a week away in most markets, some enthusiastic early developers in China have already figured out a way to gain root access to the device.

The process is surprisingly simple and involves using the tool found at 360-Root, connecting your Xperia Z1 via USB, and clicking the ‘Root’ button. The tool is all in Chinese, but you can’t really get it wrong. Read more »

A recently published report by software security company Symantec shows that August has seen a peak of fraudulent apps for Android being submitted to the Google Play Store.

In fact, close to 1,000 scam apps have been published in August alone, which in total have been downloaded “at least” 8,500 times as per Google Play’s own statistic. However, Symantec says that this number is actually close to 10,000 as the statistics aren’t always showing the latest data. Read more »

A new keyboard interface designed for tablets aims to let you type easier and quicker by automatically repositioning the keyboard under your fingers, wherever they may be on the screen.

This is helpful because you no longer have to locate the row of buttons where you usually rest your fingers on traditional hardware keyboards, allowing you to type more intuitively. Read more »

Meet the PayPal Beacon, a USB dongle, powered by Bluetooth Low Energy that will await PayPal customers in participating stores, recognize their PayPal identity by pairing to their smartphone’s PayPal app as they walk in and even let them automatically pay for their goods, no hands required.

The first participating stores are Booker, Erply, Leaf, Leapset, Micros, NCR, PayPal Here, Revel, ShopKeep, TouchBistro and Vend, but more are expected to crop up as 100 developers are poised to get the dongle and API early. The PayPal Beacon is expected to become wide-spread starting Q4 of this year. Read more »

The fact that featurephones are rapidly losing popularity hasn’t prevented Google from revamping its Gmail application for these phones in order to improve the performance and user experience.

Accordingly, Google is rolling out a new update that brings a new look that’s faster and easier to use. 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 »

Here’s something interesting – ever wondered how much apps the average global smartphone user downloads? Do you want do dig deeper – how much of that average consists of free and how much of paid apps? Well here’s a statistic that gives us some clue.

According to data, collected by Statista using Google’s Our Mobile Planet initiative the global smartphone user downloads an average of 26.2 apps, of which 20.6 are free (like Facebook, WhatsApp, Google Search, Google Maps, etc.). The information is accurate as of March 2013. 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 »

BlackBerry had promised us a version of its popular BlackBerry Messenger or BBM service for Android and iOS devices quite a while ago now. While we are yet to see the final version release on either platform, someone managed to get their hands on a beta and has a uploaded a video for our viewing pleasure.

As you can see from the image above, BBM for Android looks nothing like any other Android app. Instead of adopting the look of the platform, BlackBerry has decided to instead port over the look of BB10, which is why the BBM for Android looks exactly the way it does on BB10, complete with the tabs on the bottom and screens on the side. Read more »

Google’s Gmail, YouTube and Google Play services apps are the top downloaded Android apps from the Play Store with Maps and Facebook following. The five apps have an install base between 500 million and 1 billion each.

The information has been gathered by tech blog Digital Inspiration, which has used data from the Play Store. The graph above shows the average user rating of an app (blue bars) as well as the total number of users that have left a rating for said apps (orange line). Read more »

According to the latest report from ABI research, Android smartphone app revenues are expected to reach $6.8 billion – nearly twice more than last years numbers.

While that may sound like a lot, that’s only about 60% of the total posted by iOS – the clear leader in app revenue amongst all mobile OS’s. Read more »

Shazam, the popular song identification app, has just been updated to version 4.0 for Android.

The latest version promises faster song recognition, as well as a completely new user interface with large screen optimizations for tablets. Read more »

You may or may not know this but Nokia is behind the maps in most in-car navigation systems (4 out of 5 cars, claims the company) and today Nokia is introducing HERE Auto, which brings their mapping and smartphone prowess to the car.

Here Auto is Nokia’s offline navigation solution – turn by turn voice guided navigation for 95 countries (in 2D and 3D, with street level and satellite images). There’s an SDK too, so HERE Auto functionality can be extended with music and social networking apps. Read more »

We all know Samsung is working on a smartwatch that would be announced at the IFA event in Berlin next month along with the Galaxy Note III. Samsung themselves have confirmed both devices. But we are yet to get a glimpse of what either devices will look like.

While we haven’t made much progress on that front, we do have what looks like legit screenshots of the Galaxy Gear application that would control the smartwatch. The app is supposedly responsible for letting you pair your smartphone with the watch using NFC, personalize it using different clock faces and even send compatible applications over. Read more »

Motorola has posted the kernel source code for its latest Moto X smartphone, as required by the Android license agreement.

Source codes are available for all three Moto X device variants, the XT1053, XT1056, and XT1058, and allow you play around with the kernels as you please. Read more »