The 2013 Mac Pro is a beautiful piece of tech and when it was announced we were quite pessimistic about its prospects of down-the-road upgrades and how repairable it would be. Thankfully, the iFixit team has proven them wrong by giving the Mac Pro its usual teardown treatment.

In its teardown iFixit has found out that the Mac Pro isn’t too hard to disassemble and once you do, you can easily replace the RAM and fill the four slots with SDRAM of your choosing. Read more »

One of the biggest selling points of Android over iOS is the fact that there are more free apps available in the Play Store than the App Store. Sure, with free apps there are in-app advertisements and the occasional annoying pop-ups that users need to withstand. However, most people seem willing to deal with it, considering the growing popularity of Android. Now, new research from analytics firm, Distimo, indicates that this strategy is working, because a whopping 98% of all Google Play Store revenue comes from in-app purchases of free titles.

What about the the other 2%? Well that is divided equally between paid only apps and in-app purchases within paid applications. What kind of apps are people most likely to spend money on? Games. 90% of gaming revenue is made from in-app purchases. Read more »

A press image of a yet to be announced LG wearable device made the rounds on Twitter, unsurprisingly thanks to @evleaks. Dubbed LG Lifeband Touch, the gadget is likely to break cover during CES 2014 next week.

The leaked press shot of the LG Lifeband Touch appears less than a week after a word arrived about the Korean manufacturer’s alleged plans to release wearable devices called G-Arch and G-Health. Read more »

LG has officially unveiled the second edition of their Pocket Photo printer. The new generation Pocket Photo is a lot slimmer and is shaping up as a nice companion for customizing, printing and sharing images on the go.

The South Korean manufacturer will be showing the Pocket Photo 2 at the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on January 7. Read more »

LG has announced new models of Tab-Book 2, Ultra PC and All-in-One (AIO) PC. The devices will be officially unveiled at CES 2014 next year.

The Tab-Book 2 is 11.6-inch tablet with a sliding keyboard underneath the FullHD display. The device runs Windows 8.1 on Intel Core i5 processor. Read more »

After treating us to a mighty good Samsung Galaxy S4 concept last year, the folks from Rozetked repeated the exercise with the yet to be announced Galaxy S5. A hands-on video showcasing a concept of Samsung’s next generation smartphone flagship made the rounds on YouTube.

The Samsung Galaxy S5 concept is based on rumors which have been circulating around the web. Read more »

The Oppo N1 is the first smartphone offered with CyanogenMod out of the box. It’s a great milestone for the CyanogenMod team and we have installed the custom Android ROM on the N1 to see what the experience is like.

Currently, the CyanogenMod 10.2 version is available for the N1, which is based on Android 4.3 Jelly Bean. However, Oppo and the CyanogenMod team promise that version 11 will be out soon. Read more »

The Wall Street Journal reports that Google and Audi plan to announce a partnership for car infotainment systems running on Android. The two companies will reveal their joint plans at CES 2014, which kicks off next week.

The in-car entertainment system in question would run from hardware that’s built into the car’s dashboard and won’t be relying that much on the owner’s smartphone. Read more »

The quarterfinal clashes in the Smartphone Champions League are now over and they certainly were an amazing spectacle. The four games got over 270,000 votes, which is by far the highest we have seen in a single matchday.

Two of the four manufacturers remained in the competition concluded their participation at the quarterfinal stage, while Nokia continued to be the dominant force with its Lumia lineup getting the whooping three spots in the semifinals. Read more »

After showcasing the massive 85-inch 4K or UHDTV earlier this year, Samsung is upping the ante with a positively gargantuan 110-inch version. Featuring the same framed floating panel design, the new 110-inch model goes on sale today in China, Middle East and a few European countries.

The 110-inch behemoth is the largest of its kind and at 2.6m width and 1.8m height, it’s bigger than a king-size bed. The 110-inch model will have all the features of the (comparatively) smaller 85-inch model. Read more »

The NSA fiasco in the US continues and has now reached a whole new level. According to the latest report on NSA’s Tailored Access Operations (TAO) unit by Spiegel, the NSA has been intercepting new devices such as computers and hard drives and planting them with tracking devices before they are delivered to customers.

Devices that were intercepted were modified with special software or hardware the provided a backdoor for NSA and allowed them to spy on the user of the device. The list of hardware companies whose products were compromised included storage companies such as Seagate and Western Digital, networking companies like Cisco and Juniper Networks and hardware OEMs like Dell, Samsung and Huawei. Read more »

According to a report in Korean media, Samsung has sold 40 million tablets in 2013. The number falls right in line with the manufacturer’s expectations which were revealed during an analyst day in November.

Samsung has reportedly sold 12 million tablets over the past three months alone. Read more »

The original Tomb Raider game was a milestone in the world of gaming. You could say it singlehandedly created the third person action, adventure genre and made it what it is today. Even today, it remains a benchmark in terms of level design and masterfully combining action, platforming and puzzle solving elements all in one game.

Seventeen years after the original game debuted on the PC and consoles, Eidos (now Square Enix Inc) has ported the game over to iOS. The mobile version features the complete first game, along with the extra levels found in the 1998 re-release, Tomb Raider: Unfinished Business. Let’s see how good this port is. Read more »

Hot on the heels of its Xperia Z1 and Z Ultra siblings, the Wi-Fi-only Sony Xperia Tablet Z got treated to an update to Android 4.3 Jelly Bean. Carrying the model number 10.4.B.0.577, the new OS version is now seeding to devices around the world.

With a size of 792MB, the update for the Sony Xperia Tablet Z is quite substantial. Read more »

We are now at the Quarterfinals stage of the Smartphone Champions League and things are really heating up! Only 8 out of 32 participants are now left and every one had to go through tough battles to get here. And four of those will be one step closer to the Winner’s podium after today’s games complete.

We have some high rollers as well as a few surprises entries here and there. The Nokia Lumia 1020 which stands up against the Samsung Galaxy S III, then there are the LG Nexus 5 vs Sony Xperia SP, HTC One vs Nokia Lumia 520 and the Sony Xperia Z1 vs Nokia Lumia 1520. Read more »