Xiaomi has just challenged its fans to a selfie contest over on its official forum. The Chinese company wants to see how much you love to take selfies. And to reward you, it’s offering three prizes: a Mi Box set top box, a Mi Camera Lens accessory for your smartphone, and a Mi Bunny mascot, in the 30cm iteration (which you can see in the photo below this paragraph).

All you have to do is go to this forum thread and post a selfie of you or your friends. The image should (obviously) include your face or your friends’ faces, but also things related to Xiaomi and MIUI, its Android overlay. So for example you can hold a Xiaomi product or a piece of paper on which you’ve written the company’s name. Read more »

As most of you surely know Microsoft organized an event on January 21 to showcase the progress and innovations in Windows 10 and beyond. The conference was quite interesting and gave answers to a lot of pressing questions, especially regarding the new OS on mobile device and the new unified application ecosystem. After a few encouragements from the speakers apparently a lot more people got excited about the new insider program and Microsoft was happy to announce that over 170 000 new registrations were received for the program in the two days after the event.

Windows 10 is truly a major upgrade over previous versions and Microsoft made that abundantly clear not only through the wide array of exciting new announcements and the emerging One Windows ideology, but also through the new open development process with in-depth user-engagement along the way. A big part of that is Microsoft’s new “Insider program”. Read more »

Microsoft’s Project HoloLens came out of nowhere – no one expected the company to join the VR/AR headset race, but Microsoft deemed it important enough to close its Windows 10 even with it. The headset promises both artificial reality (AR), overlaying virtual objects on the real world, and virtual reality (VR), which replaces the real world completely.

This futuristic piece of tech packs a lot of advanced functionality, but this infographic will give you a digestible look at how it works. Read more »

Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 810 has come under fire with reports that it will be delayed because overheats, though both Qualcomm and LG (which launched the first S810-powered phone) refute those claims. What can we expect from this chip?

After all, it’s based on ARM’s CPU cores not a Qualcomm custom design. Well, the GPU is a custom design and GFX Bench gives us a taste of what it is capable of. Read more »

With Windows 10 Skype will be making the transition from an important app to a part of the OS itself, both on phones and on the desktop. The new app will sync its contact book with that of your phone and your email, which will let you stay in touch even if your friends are using an Android or an Apple product.

Microsoft doesn’t quite make it clear how that will work, but on phones the app will handle SMS messages as well as its own Skype messages. Read more »

Microsoft’s event was packed with new announcements and there just wasn’t enough time for details. Project Spartan is the new default browser for Windows 10 and it’s a universal app – it will run on PCs, tablets, phones and the Xbox.

In a post on its developers network, Microsoft has detailed some of the highlights of Spartan. Read more »

Samsung is currently working on its next smartwatch. It will be called Orbis, and it will be round, unlike any of the Korean company’s previous offerings in this space. And today we get a pretty big list of rumored features for this wearable.

The following information reportedly comes from reliable and trustworthy sources. That said, even if everything you’ll read here was true at one point, keep in mind that gadget development plans do sometimes change, so the finished product may be different. Read more »

Microsoft has confirmed that its Lumia Camera will be the stock camera app on the upcoming Windows 10.

This means that all Windows Phone 8.1 devices are going to be using the camera suite when the Windows 10 update launches for their phones – and that’s not a bad thing at all. Read more »

Oppo has been trying to bring something truly innovative to the smartphone world for some time. Among its main accomplishments is the rotating camera, which debuted with the Oppo N1 and went motor-driven on the Oppo N3, something which the company is genuinely proud of.

In a recent commercial, showcasing the N3′s key feature, a crowd of tourists is wreaking havoc in an art gallery, breaking sculptures and stumbling upon other people. Read more »

Google has quietly expanded the availability of the Nexus 9 tablet and the Chromecast to two new countries. The lucky winners are New Zealand and Taiwan. Residents of both can head to the Play Store if they want to grab a unit.

The new Nexus 9 is one of the few tablets around with Nvidia’s Tegra K1 chipset with the custom Denver CPU core. Even Nvidia’s own Shield tablet uses the more common Cortex-A15 core. Read more »

Sci-fi has always had a thing for virtual reality, and it appears that is not just fiction writers. In real life we’re slowly inching our way there, trying to get the augmented kind working properly at this point. With the Google Glass project on hold, Microsoft is up to offer an alternative with its HoloLens.

And a great alternative at that, if you judge by the response its promotional video is receiving on YouTube. Read more »

Just over a couple of months after the company entered into a new partnership with Microsoft, Dropbox has announced that its cloud storage app is now available for Windows phones and tablets.

The company is claiming that the new apps will offer all the standard features, which means that you can use them to automatically back up your photos to the cloud storage service, mark files as favorites so you can access them even while offline, as well as access both your personal and work accounts at once. Read more »

Just a day after updating Chrome for iOS, Google has announced the release of Chrome 40 for Android, bringing in an updated page info and content settings UI, as well as several bug fixes and performance improvements.

Although the release doesn’t bring along any groundbreaking feature, there are, however, some useful additions, including a new bookmarks manager, larger address bar with overflow button for devices running Android Lollipop, close all tabs shortcut for tablets, as well as a new zoom and view/copy URL behavior. Read more »

It’s no secret that developers prefer iOS and Android when it comes to making applications and services for the mobile platform. While this is great for users on these platforms (which, let’s face it, are the majority of the smartphone users out there) it leaves people on BlackBerry or Windows Phone devices out in the cold.

To be honest, there’s not much you can do about that. I mean, it’s not as if you can just force developers to create apps for BlackBerry and Windows. But that’s exactly what BlackBerry CEO John Chen thinks should happen. Read more »

Kim Dotcom, controversial founder of the online file sharing service Mega, has announced a new service called MegaChat. MegaChat is a video calling service that competes with Skype and integrates within the Mega service within your web browser.

The main draw of MegaChat is that it is end-to-end encrypted. This is unlike Skype, which has in the past revealed to have allowed the NSA to monitor communications. MegaChat also does not require installing an application and can be accessed from within your web browser. It also uses Mega’s file sharing feature to securely share encrypted files over the video chat. Read more »