The hotly anticipated BlackBerry Messenger for Android and iOS that was officially announced by BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins, back at the company’s annual Live 2013 conference is a step closer to its official release as the app is now in its beta testing stages.
The cross-platform version of the upcoming instant messenger is available to a number of developers and beta users to test the app on their Android and iOS devices.
A South Korean version of the water-resistant Samsung Galaxy S4 Active called SHV-E470S popped up in GFXBench scores and wouldn’t you know it, it packs a Snapdragon 800 chipset and not the Snapdragon 600 that the international version has.
At this point this should come as no surprise – we saw a Snapdragon 800-powered Galaxy S4, a Snapdragon 600 Note II, dual-mode S4 and S4 mini, Samsung is trying out all the combinations.
From China comes a camera module pictured in the wild, which is said to belong to the Rumorland-inhabiting “cheaper” iPhone 5C (C for color).
While the image doesn’t come with specifics it is believed to be the same 8 MP unit as the one on the current iPhone 5 and has blue glass up front.
Madfinger Games, developers of popular mobile games such as Shadowgun and Dead Trigger, have released a PC port of their Shadowgun: Deadzone game, as well as a Facebook version.
The PC works like any other Windows game. You download the installer, run it, create an account or log into an existing one and you are ready to play the game, except this time on a large high resolution monitor with a keyboard and mouse. The latter especially makes a big difference and makes shooting down enemies a lot easier. It also gives you almost an unfair advantage over other players, most of whom are playing on iOS and Android devices.
It’s been a few days since the second generation ASUS Nexus 7 hit the shelves, so we promptly got our hands on the hot hardware. The successor of the most popular slate in the Android realm is currently available in the United States with an entry-level price tag of $229.
The new Nexus 7 is everything a tablet sequel should be. It is more powerful, thinner, lighter, and better put together. It also comes with a brand new Android version to boot .
The Sony Xperia ZR is the little brother of the Xperia Z and Xperia ZL, and boasts pretty much every key specification they have. The major is the 4.55″ 720p display, which should be kinder to the equally large 2300 mAh battery inside the phone.
Identical chipsets and batteries plus a smaller screen of lower resolution give the Xperia ZR every chance of beating its premium rivals.
Google has teamed up with Starbucks to provide a free Wi-Fi hotspot in all of the chain’s 7000 coffee shops around the USA. The search giant promises that once the update has finished, customers will be able to enjoy the web at speeds “up to 10x faster than before”.
And if a particular Starbucks coffee shop happens to be in the few areas where Google has its Fiber service set up, the speed bump will be up to 100 times.
The Sony Xperia Z Ultra is not only an enormous 6.4″ beast of a phablet but it also belongs to a very exclusive group of devices that have the Snapdragon 800 chipset up and running. We got our hands on the device once again and this time we even managed to run a few synthetic benchmarks and see how much of a performance update you are actually getting.
The device should be very zippy courtesy of four Krait 400 cores clocked way up at 2.2 GHz and 2 gigs of RAM. The graphics are dealt with by the latest Adreno 330 GPU, which we’ve heard does a pretty good job.
The first annual customer satisfaction survey from the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) shows a pair of Samsung devices just beating the three most recent Apple smartphones.
The most recent Galaxy S4 flagship was not included because the study was done prior to its release.
Gameloft has released a new trailer for its upcoming Asphalt 8: Airborne game. The game was featured at the Google Android event last week to show the capabilities of the new Nexus 7 in terms of graphics performance.
And in this trailer you can see some of the game’s glorious graphics, including some in-game footage. That’s a result of the brand new physics engine the game is boasting.
Developers of the OpenSignal app for Android have used their vast user base to measure the level of fragmentation of Google’s mobile operating system. This year, more than 682,000 devices have been surveyed, almost 11,868 of which were distinct Android devices.
In comparison, in 2012 OpenSignal’s report saw just 3,997 distinct Android devices. Those are huge numbers for sure, and they also make for some interesting revelations. One of them is that a 47.5% of the devices are Samsung-made, which is no surprise considering the company’s recent performances.
Yesterday we told you that Samsung tweaks the GPU performance of the octa-core Galaxy S4 in order to achieve higher benchmark scores. It was proven both by tests and internal code pointing to specific benchmarks such as Quadrant, AnTuTu, Linpack and GLBenchmark.
Today Samsung issued a response to those allegations.
We’ve been down this road before so take this with a pinch of salt. A Windows RT tablet by Nokia showed up in GFXBench scores. The device carried the model name RX-114, RX-108 was a model name associated with Nokia tablet early this year (maybe this Tegra 3-powered tablet).
The benchmark reported a resolution of 1371 x 771 pixels for the screen, presumably a minor error with the real resolution being 1368 x 768, the standard 10.1″ Windows RT tablet resolution.
If you have used the Amazon Kindle app on iOS, you’d have noticed that there is no way to actually search and purchase books from within the app itself and you would have to do that from Amazon’s website whereas the same is completely possible from Apple’s own iBookstore.
Apple charges 30 percent of in-app purchases for all the apps on the App Store, an amount Amazon would have to pay if they enabled purchasing Kindle books through their app. This is something they wanted to avoid, which is why there was no option to purchase books in the iOS app. That is until now, in a way.
Microsoft has updated the web version of the SkyDrive service with several useful new features. First of all, the site now has support for high DPI displays, such as the Retina display, which means it will now show high DPI versions of images you have uploaded whenever it detects one of these devices.
The site now also has full support for GIF files. Although you could upload GIFs to the service previously they weren’t animated when you viewed them, which has now been fixed.
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