Things are not going well for netbooks. After sales started spiraling downwards, hardware makers slowly started opting out of this segment. We saw last month that Samsung could be considering dropping netbooks altogether and concentrate on Ultrabooks and now Dell has come out and announced the same.

When the company’s Inspiron Mini was found to be missing from their site, The Verge contacted Dell on the matter. This is when they learned that Dell does not plan to sell them anymore. They also said that the “thin and powerful is where it is at for us”, hinting at the growing Ultrabook segment. Read more »

Hackers and modders have already figured out ways around Apple’s encrypted servers to bring the iPhone 4S‘s previously exclusive voice assistant Siri to Apple’s older i-devices.

Now however it looks like Apple might have undergone a change of heart, or at least allowed a lapse in security. There are still no official plans from Apple to bring Siri to the iPhone 4, but there are clues in iOS 5.0.1 that could give 4 users some Siri goodness via other means. Read more »

The third member of AT&T’s rather impressive LTE lineup made it to our office. The HTC Vivid surely has presence – even when dressed in a stealthy black color scheme. With a massive 4.5″ screen and a solid metal back, the smartphone cannot help but be noticed.

Now on with a look at the spec sheet. The HTC Vivid packs Read more »

It’s been just a day since Google released the Android 4.0.3 update and the folks over at xda-developers have managed to get it working on the original Motorola Xoom already.

While this may sound like exciting news, it’s still pretty much a work in progress, which means things are not working quite as well as they should. The camera is not working and there is a green overlay from time to time. Read more »

After almost a year of officially announcing it, Sony has finally launched the PlayStation Vita. For now, however, the device is only available in Japan with US availability starting from February 22, 2012 onwards.

Sony will be selling three variants of the PS Vita in the US, the Wi-Fi-only mode, Wi-Fi+3G model and Wi-Fi+3G model with a 4GB memory card, limited edition case and ‘Little Deviants’ game and will be priced at $249.99, $299.99 and $349.99 respectively. Read more »

We caught wind of Fructel’s Bluetooth games controller not long ago, designed to give any Android device a little more gaming freedom with its dedicated gaming controls.

Well, now we’ve actually had the chance to take the Gametel games controller for a spin so we can really tell you what it’s all about. Read more »

By popular request, Sony Ericsson Xperia neo V is our newest guest at the office. It’s the same phone (even the colour) we met a few months back, but the V (as in the Roman number 5, not the alphabet letter) version comes with a downgraded camera (5MP) and the company’s latest version of Android.

Let’s start with a some live pictures: Read more »

Ainol Novo 7″ is a 7-inch tablet with Android 3.2 Honeycomb preinstalled that retails for $145 (down from $206.61) at McBub online retailer.

What you get for your money is a 7″ WVGA (800 x 480) resolution multi-touch display, a single-core Ingenic JZ4770 Xburst 1 GHz processor, 512 MB worth of RAM, 8 gig storage, 2 MP back and VGA front cameras and, most notably, Android Honeycomb 3.2 preinstalled. Read more »

It came as a bit of a surprise when it turned out that the Android Flash Player doesn’t work on the Ice Cream Sandwich-running Galaxy Nexus a few weeks back. But Adobe have been hard at work to fix that and they’ve released what could be one of the very last updates for the Android player.

Let’s hope it’s not the last update, because while the Flash Player may be working correctly for the most part, some bugs are present in this release (several of which show up only on ICS). Read more »

The extra mile Nokia is going to promote their fresh out of the factory Lumia phones is simply amazing. Their latest attempt to promote their Windows Phone 7 running Lumia smartphones includes some bizarre ingredients.

A Nokia Lumia 800? Check. A massive, solid, heavy block of ice? Check. A twist? Check. Let the fun begin. Read more »

The Kindle lineup has made Amazon proud – over a million Kindle devices are flying off their virtual shelves every week, three weeks in a row now. That includes the eInk readers, of course, but the droid tablet, the Kindle Fire, is doing very well too.

Amazon didn’t give any specific numbers, but said that the Kindle Fire was the bestselling product on all of Amazon for the 11 weeks during which it has been on sale. It’s also the most gifted and most wished for product on Amazon’s lists. Read more »

Microsoft has announced, that starting January 2012, they will slowly start updating the older version of Internet Explorer browser on Windows to whichever is the latest version the user’s computer supports. The update process will begin from Australia and Brazil and will slowly be taken to the rest of the world.

Microsoft obviously understands that having people stuck on archaic versions of IE, such as IE6 and IE7 harms not only the web browsing experience but also the web in general because the web developers then have to go through the trouble of coding for these older browsers that do not support the newer standards and features of today’s web. Read more »

One of the most unusual smartphones that you have seen just landed in our office – the Meizu MX. At its core, it’s an Android phone, but it takes a lot of design cues from the iPhone. What’s unique about it is that it’s from a Chinese company – a lot of companies have their gadgets assembled in China, but this one was also designed there.

China has all the potential to become a tech powerhouse – and the Meizu MX is probably just the first of many high-end gadgets that have an actual chance of dethroning the current top phones. Read more »

Facebook announced its Timeline feature back in September at the f8 conference and today it’s ready and available for everyone (globally) to enable, try out under cover and, finally, publish to Facebook contacts.

Timeline replaces your profile page with a reworked new one, focused on your entire Facebook activity divided into years starting with your first ever birthday. Read more »

Everyone who has read the The Da Vinci Code or has seen the movie knows what a cryptex is – an old-timey way to password protect your documents. Except today’s documents typically come in digital form, say a flash drive, rather than paper so as cool as a cryptex sounds, it’s no good to use today.

Enter the Crypteks USB – you can guess what it does just by its name. It’s not a real product yet, it’s just a concept on Kickstarter. Still, considering it has received $130,000+ in backing (well over the $12,000 goal), it seems a pretty safe bet that it will be a real product soon. Read more »