It’s hard to say it was unexpected, but it still came as a shock when earlier today Nokia announced it’s selling its Devices & Services division to Microsoft. The announcement of this move caused a tsunami across the internets and we’ve seen countless comments by fellow tech journalists, industry analysts, past and current Nokia employees and regular users alike.

Even though Nokia held a dedicated live press conference in Finland to announce the move, there are many burning questions that weren’t answered and currently are subject to interpretation. What will happen to the Nokia phone brand, will Stephen Elop replace Ballmer as Microsoft CEO, what current and ex-Nokia employees think of the deal, how will the deal affect other Windows Phone makers, what does the deal mean for the WP platform itself and what will become of Nokia? Well, by going through all the available information, hopefully, we have some of the answers here now. Read more »

Sony’s QX detachable lens modules should be unveiled tomorrow at the company’s IFA event, but what they look like will not be a surprise – with today’s leak, virtually all press images of both models have leaked.

Besides looks, the images give out some of the vital specs and reveal a new way to attach the module to an Xperia Z1 (Honami). Read more »

Oppo has outed yet another piece of the N1 cameraphone puzzle. In a tweet, the Chinese phonemaker has revealed that their upcoming Oppo N1 will sport a 5.9″ display.

This will put the phone right against the likes of the yet-to-be announced Samsung Galaxy Note III, which too is rumored to pack a similarly sized display. However, the Oppo N1 will probably be more about advanced camera performance, as the latest teaser hinted. Read more »

Along with the HTC Desire 601 and Desire 300 today, HTC also introduced a curious Bluetooth accessory, called HTC BoomBass. Now, portable Bluetooth speakers come a dime a dozen but this one is not a full-range speaker. Instead, it’s only a subwoofer, designed to amplify the bass sounds only.

The tiny subwoofer measures 64 x 64 x 64mm and HTC says it’s a great match for its range of smartphones, which have a set of already great sounding stereo speakers (BoomSound), but lack the punch you only get from proper bass. Current smartphones, featuring the said dual speakers setup are the HTC one, the HTC Desire 600 dual sim and even the just announced HTC Desire 601. Read more »

BlackBerry had promised us a version of its popular BlackBerry Messenger or BBM service for Android and iOS devices quite a while ago now. While we are yet to see the final version release on either platform, someone managed to get their hands on a beta and has a uploaded a video for our viewing pleasure.

As you can see from the image above, BBM for Android looks nothing like any other Android app. Instead of adopting the look of the platform, BlackBerry has decided to instead port over the look of BB10, which is why the BBM for Android looks exactly the way it does on BB10, complete with the tabs on the bottom and screens on the side. Read more »

LG G2 flagship is the second smartphone powered by the latest Snapdragon 800 chipset we are examining today. Its four Krait 400 cores are clocked with 100 MHz higher than those on Sony’s Xperia Z Ultra at 2.26 GHz.

Other than the higher CPU clock, the LG G2 packs the same Adreno 330 graphics and 2GB of RAM. We noticed the LG G2 has 1.81 GB of RAM available, while the Xperia Z Ultra offers 1.76 GB RAM to the Android OS. Because the smartphones share the RAM with the GPU, this means Sony has made 50MB more RAM available to the Adreno 330 than LG. Read more »

Sony Xperia Z Ultra is the first device running on the Qualcomm’s latest and greatest Snapdragon 800 chipset we meet. It is powered by a quad-core 2.2GHz Krait 400 processor, an Adreno 330 graphics and has 2GB of RAM.

The Xperia Z Ultra, like the most flagships out there, is packing a 1080p display, so we can easily compare the performance of the new chipset to the old generation processors. Read more »

Dice+, the universal board game controller has been officially announced. With Dice+ you can bring back the real social interaction to the digital gaming arena that most of us enjoy.

The Bluetooth enabled controller that comes with a built-in gyroscopic motion detector interacts with smart devices and combines the physical touch and feel of the game dice. Read more »

Sony has unveiled two portable battery chargers that are now available for the Indian market.

The portable chargers in question are the CP-F5 and CP-F10L, which sport a battery capacity of 5,000mAh and 10,000mAh respectively. Read more »

For some time now Nokia has been going all out in its ads mocking a number of its competitors with the main argument being photography. The latest stunt involved the all-mighty 41 MP sensor in the Lumia 1020.

Nokia’s latest endeavor to boast its cameraphone supreme comes at the expense of Samsung’s own Galaxy S4 Zoom. Read more »

Google’s Gmail, YouTube and Google Play services apps are the top downloaded Android apps from the Play Store with Maps and Facebook following. The five apps have an install base between 500 million and 1 billion each.

The information has been gathered by tech blog Digital Inspiration, which has used data from the Play Store. The graph above shows the average user rating of an app (blue bars) as well as the total number of users that have left a rating for said apps (orange line). Read more »

The pre-IFA festivities from Acer continue, as the company has just announced the DA241HL, a 24″ Android-powered all-in-one featuring a quad-core Tegra 3 processor.

The AiO operates on the Android 4.2 build, which allows you to enjoy the latest games and apps in all their glory on the fullHD 24-inch display. Read more »

Acer is on a roll with new announcements at the IFA (which is actually yet to start). Among the long range of products they announced today is the Acer T272HUL monitor.

First of all, the T272HUL has a 27-inch WQHD VA panel, which means it has a resolution of 2,560×1,440, which is four times the resolution of a 720p panel. Secondly, it is a touchscreen panel with 10 point mult-touch support, so it will work great with Windows 8. Read more »

If you have been around over the last few days, you probably know that we’ve been hard at work, putting the Sony Xperia Z Ultra monster of a phablet through its paces. And while the review is still some way off from being complete, we though you might enjoy some photos coming from the camera of the device.

It’s a bit early to pass any final verdict at this point, as we need to do some more shooting before we are ready for that, so we’ll just let you enjoy the shots. Read more »

Acer announced the Aspire R7 notebook a few months back with the unique Ezel hinge that allowed it to be folded in various ways and be used as a notebook or a tablet. Acer is now updating the Aspire R7 at IFA with some new hardware features to keep it up to date.

First of all, the Aspire R7 gets the latest generation Intel Core series processor, commonly known as the Haswell series. It also features up to 12GB of RAM and 1TB hard drive (or 256GB SSD) for storage, along with a backlit keyboard and Windows 8.1. Read more »