BlackBerry’s BBM messaging platform has leaked for Android today on the XDA Developers forums. The app itself, while functioning, is pretty much useless as it fails to register with BBM servers and thus still doesn’t do anything.

The app is reported to currently be able of running only on whitelisted devices, which we presume are dev units inside the BlackBerry HQ. Read more »

We’re still several days away from the September 20 iPhone 5s/5c global release date, but dedicated customers are already out camping in front of some stores such as the Tokyo Ginza Apple, where looming typhoon warnings cleared the streets. In turns out, in Japan not even extremely bad weather can scare away the people willing to be among the first to buy one of the new iPhones.

fortunately for these dedicated would-be iPhone owners, the Apple staff was kind enough to open their doors early and bring the customers inside until the threat had passed. Read more »

Jolla just announced that its Sailfish OS has reached two-fold compatibility with Android – it can run Android apps but also the OS itself can run on Android phones. This is major news as it solves the two big problems facing any upstart OS – it’s difficult to get hardware manufacturers to make devices for it and difficult to get devs to make apps for it.

By the looks of it, if a maker wishes to have a spin, it could put Sailfish on a phone or tablet that was designed with Android in mind. Read more »

It has been nearly two years since Apple debuted its virtual personal assistant Siri on the iPhone 4S and ever since the service has been labeled as Beta. As of September 18 that’ll be no more and Siri will finally enter its first final version.

Apple’s official rollout of the final version of iOS 7 also marks Siri’s update for all devices that support it. Siri’s graduation marks a new look inspired by the major redesign of iOS 7. Gone are the fancy graphics and in is a more flat, organized way of displaying information. Read more »

Amazon seems to be close to announcing the next generation models of their Kindle Fire and Kindle Fire HD tablets as the leaks and rumors are slowly gathering steam. We have heard a few things about the Kindle Fire HD in the past, including some leaked benchmark scores that pointed towards a Snapdragon 800 SoC and 2560×1600 resolution display.

Now, evleaks has leaked a new press image of what looks like the standard Kindle Fire model. The design is slightly changed compared to the current model, mostly with respect to the bezel around the display. The current model has thinner bezels along the top and sides of the display and thicker one at the bottom when held in portrait mode. The new one has equally thick bezels surrounding the display. Read more »

A couple of days ago we wrote about the iPhone parody videos that Microsoft had uploaded on their Windows Phone YouTube channel. These amateurishly shot videos depicted two Apple engineers discussing ideas for the next iPhone with what looked like the late Steve Jobs and Jony Ive.

After almost universal negative feedback, Microsoft was quick to pull these videos from their channel but there was no official word from the company back then as to exactly why they removed them. However, the company has now revealed the reason behind the move. Read more »

The Samsung Galaxy Mega 6.3 made its way officially to the United States, so we managed to spend some quality time with the market-specific version of the phablet. The gigantic handset is offered by AT&T for $149.99 with a two-year commitment.

Sold under the model name SGH-I527, the Samsung Galaxy Mega 6.3 for AT&T sports the same hardware as its internationally available GT-I9200 sibling. Read more »

Canon has developed a brand new 35 mm full-frame high sensitivity CMOS sensor, which they first announced back in March. The new sensor allows cameras to shoot in extremely low light situations where you’d have a hard time seeing even with your naked eye.

To show off the capabilities of this new sensor, Canon shot a video of Yaeyama-hime fireflies at night in near total darkness. The ambient light that you see in the video below is less than 0.01 lux, which is practically pitch dark to human eye. Read more »

SanDisk has launched the world’s first CFast 2.0 memory card. CFast is a variation of the CompactFlash cards we usually find in high-end cameras and offers significantly faster access speeds.

The CFast 2.0 card that SanDisk launched has read speeds of around 450MB/s and write speeds of around 350MB/s. This makes it ideal for cameras that record content in resolutions as high as 4K. In fact, SanDisk claims that their CFast 2.0 card is currently the world’s fastest memory card. Read more »

Sony officially announced its latest flagship, the Xperia Z1 at the recently concluded IFA trade show in Berlin. The cameraphone is yet to launch globally, but it looks like someone has managed to grab a unit and even give it a teardown treatment.

The disassembled images of the Xperia Z1 show that the smartphone sports a back cover that is quite similar to the Xperia Z. Read more »

Sharp is yet to announce the AQUOS SHL23 in Japan but someone has managed to get their hands on a device and run some benchmarks. And not only did the device run them well but also managed to top the charts.

What we have here is the benchmark score from Basemark X, which is a gruelling GPU benchmark for mobile devices. The AQUOS SHL23 running the Snapdragon 800 processor blazed straight to the top of the chart with a score of 13.1, narrowly beating the LG G2 that runs on the same processor. Read more »

Microsoft joined the Apple-bashing bandwagon after the launch of the new iPhone 5c and the iPhone 5s. Their new series of videos released on YouTube were aimed to purely make fun of the new iPhones without any promotion of their own products.

The videos titled ‘A fly on the wall in Cupertino’ show two Apple employees brainstorming with what looks like Steve Jobs and Jony Ive, discussing ideas for their next iPhone. They talk about making the new phone in various color, the choice to go with plastic and the fingerprint scanner. Read more »

The Samsung Galaxy Note 3 is finally here and boy are we excited. It’s the best thing to happen digital notepads in recent times and something of an Android icon in the making.

If you’re up to date with your smartphone news the Galaxy Note 3 is a pretty huge deal and currently the very best Samsung can offer. It’s the first smartphone to bring 3 GB of RAM and microUSB 3.0 to the table, rocks the latest and greatest in computing power thanks to the Snapdragon 800 and Exynos 5 Octa chipset selection, and is one hell of a productivity tool. Read more »

Now that you’ve taken a sneak peak at our Sony Xperia Z1 still camera, it’s time to treat yourself to some video samples. As you’d imagine, the 20.7MP Exmor RS camera doesn’t break a sweat at shooting 1080p videos. In fact we were slightly disappointed to find out that those 4K recording rumors didn’t pan out, but there are not a lot of screens that support that yet, so it’s unclear how big a loss that is.

Sony has updated its camera software to suit the larger, 1/2.3″ image sensor and allows you to shoot videos in Superior, Manual and HDR modes (among others). We’ve given these three a go and here are the results. Read more »

If you’ve been following us on Facebook today, you know that we have the Sony Xperia Z1 (as well as another high roller, but we’ll talk about it later) on the premises. The 20.7MP camera that the Z1 boasts was making headlines long before the phone itself was made official at the IFA.

Sony promises the Xperia Z1 is Android’s worthy answer to the Nokia Lumia 1020 and its 41MP PureView sensor. We are yet to get answer this, but for now we are hard at work on the Z1′s preview. Don’t worry, the review is coming shortly, too. Read more »