Blackberry Messenger, or, BBM as the cool kids call it, received a warm reception when it was initially for Android, raking in over 10 million downloads within its first 24 hours.

BlackBerry has now a few new BBM features available on the Android version of their application: specifically Voice Calling and Channels. They’ve also ported over 100 new emoticons (your inner teenage girl is squealing, isn’t she?), increased the BBM group size, and added new ways to find friends within the app. Read more »

Acer has officially announced the Iconia A1-830 and B1-720 tablets. The latest additions will be showcased at the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas that kicks off on January 7.

The Acer Iconia A1-830 sports a 7.9-inch LED-backlit IPS display with a resolution of 1024 x 768 pixels. The 4:3 screen can be viewed at angles of up to 178 degrees. With 1GB of RAM, the tablet is powered by a 1.6 GHz Intel Atom Z2560 processor, which also comes with the Hyper-Threading technology. Read more »

We’ve been hearing “console-quality graphics” used to describe GPUs in mobile chipsets since the Tegra 2 but that was wishful thinking. Qualcomm is making a similar claim for its latest generation Adreno 420 GPU only this time it created cool demos to back that up.

The GPU found inside the new Snapdragon 805 uses its power for more than just rendering 3D graphics in games – Qualcomm also worked on video playback (3D and UHD) and even assisting with camera image processing. Read more »

Alicia Keys has left her position as a Global Creative Director at BlackBerry only a year after she was hired.

The singer is just a drop in the sea of employees and senior executives that BlackBerry had to let go in order to keep its losses to a minimum. In the last quarter alone, the company clocked a loss of $4.4 billion. Read more »

The Pebble is one of the most popular wearable devices, which came to life through a Kickstarter campaign. The company has announced that it has “something special” to offer at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show.

Pebble’s CEO Eric Migicovsky will be making the announcement on 6 January, a day before the CES kicks off. The keynote will begin at 11AM Pacific time and will be live streamed on the company’s website. Read more »

Polaroid has officially unveiled its Q-series of Android slates that contain three budget offerings. The Polaroid Q7 is a 7-inch slate, while Q8 and Q10 are 8-inch and 10.1-in respectively.

All the three tablets from Polaroid are powered by the latest Android operating system, the 4.4 KitKat. Read more »

Microsoft has started shipping slightly faster version of the Surface Pro 2 last month without any official announcement. The change was noticed by some customers who purchased the device recently.

How big is the change? Not much, it seems. The base model that shipped with an Intel Core i5-4200U clocked at 1.6GHz is now clocked at 1.9GHz. The more expensive 4300U model also gets an unspecified amount of clock speed boost along with Intel’s Trusted Execution Technology. Read more »

The comments section on this story is sure to turn into a flame war, but according to an online mental agility test, iPhone owners are more intelligent than Android users. Both smartphone consumer bases beat out Blackberry loyalists though, who came third in the survey.

The “Test of Wits was conducted by the British betting company, Ladbrokes. A thousand smartphone users took the multiple choice survey and iPhone users were able to complete the 7 trick questions in the quickest time possible: 94 seconds. Read more »

The Sol Republic Master Tracks sit on top of the young company’s product range. The over-ear headphones are designed and equipped to go head to head with the likes of Beats Audio’s new Studio headset, while being priced a good deal less than Dr. Dre’s offering.

Founded in 2011, Sol Republic’s popularity exploded during the 2012 London Olympics, when swimming legend Michael Phelps appeared wearing the company’s Tracks HD headphones in an American flag color scheme before going for a medal. Currently, in addition to a constantly growing number of celebrity endorsers, Sol Republic boasts a partnership with Motorola which sees its products offered in alongside the customizable Moto X. Read more »

Samsung has launched its latest NX30 interchangeable lens camera alongside its first ever “S” series lens.

The NX30 features a 20.3MP APS-C sensor capable of shooting at up to 5472 x 3648 pixels resolution, a tiltable electronic viewfinder of XGA resolution, and a 3-inch Super AMOLED swivel and touch display for looking at what you’re shooting from all angles. Read more »

With CES 2014 fast approaching, tech companies start teasing their upcoming product announcements. Samsung has also joined the bandwagon and has started spreading hints on what it’s going to be focusing at this year’s CES.

On the official Samsung Tomorrow blog, the company recalls the Galaxy Gear announcement at IFA 2013 and the smart home products that also debuted there, adding there’ll be more of the same at CES 2014. Read more »

Another interesting Windows 8.1-powered slate is coming very soon, considering ASUS has already uploaded the device’s user manual on its website. It’s the VivoTab Note 8 with IPS display, a quad-core processor and a stylus.

The VivoTab Note 8 has already passed through USA’s FCC as well, which means it will probably go official at CES in a few days. Read more »

The free Windows 8.1 update was released on October 18 and since then adoption has been growing steadily. Yet the number people who went through with the update is still less than half of Windows 8 users. Windows 7 continued to grow too and, surprisingly, so do Vista numbers.

The info comes from Net Applications and points to a combined Windows 8.x market share of 10.49% in December, breaking the 10% mark for the first time since the new generation OS was introduced. Read more »

Proudly announced nearly a year ago, Panasonic’s Toughpad 20″ 4K tablet was finally scheduled to hit the US in January. However it has suffered yet another delay in production and is now expected to start shipping in mid-February.

The Toughpad 4K tablet is priced at &pund;2,700 and arrives with Windows 8.1 Pro out of the box. The resolution produced by the 20″ display is 3840 x 2560 pixels resulting in a pixel density of 230ppi. Read more »

According to the latest browser usage data from NetApplications, Internet Explorer 11 has tripled its market share from 3.27% to 10.42%. This brings the total Internet Explorer market share to 57.91%, which is 0.45 percentage points less than what it was in the month of November.

Internet Explorer 11′s growth is at the cost of IE 10 and IE9′s and the fact that IE10 introduced automatic updates. As a result, Internet Explorer’s usage is down by 6.45 percentage points to 11.05%. Read more »