Facebook Home Android launcher was announced yesterday and there are already enough people waiting to download it on their phones. HTC even announced the First smartphone which will come with the launcher as standard, replacing the company’s own Sense UI.

Well, Facebook Home surely sounds attractive for the social network addicts, but unless you are using HTC First, we have some bad news. Facebook Home app won’t show the Android notifications. Read more »

Samsung has officially announced its partnership with Best Buy, which is one of the most popular retail stores across US. The South Korean giant is all set to install more than 1,400 Experience shops in the Best Buy and Best Buy Mobile specialty stores across the US, starting from this month.

Samsung Experience shops will allow the consumers to experience a range of smartphones, tablets, laptops, connected cameras and accessories before purchasing them. The shops will also let you know all about the devices from dedicated Samsung experts. Read more »

The Samsung Galaxy Note 8.0 is up for sale in the Samsung’s Experience Store in the UK’s Westfield Stratford City.

The model in question is the 16 GB Wi-Fi-only and will set you back £339 (around 400 Euro or $516). However waiting for April 15 and onward will let you purchase the slate with additional £20 voucher for Samsung’s Learning Hub, free use of Samsung’s Music Hub, two-month subscription to The Times, etc. Read more »

The Nokia Lumia 920 was the first phone to feature Optical Image Stabilization (OIS) and has gone through some pretty extreme tests (including being strapped to the front of a four by four and driven through a desert). Now, a post on WP7Forum.ru shows another test of the OIS, pitting the Nokia flagship against the brand new Samsung Galaxy S4.

Samsung’s flagship droid only has digital image stabilization to rely on so it’s at a disadvantage. Read more »

Good news for Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus owners. According to SamMobile, Samsung has started rolling out the Android 4.1.2 Jelly Bean update to this tablet.

The first country to receive this update is Austria, however, other regions should be getting the updates shortly. As usual, the Jelly Bean update would bring features such as Project Butter, Google Now and several other improvements under the hood. Read more »

Samsung made a big splash in the smartphone pond with the announcement of the Galaxy S4, but that doesn’t mean the company is going to stop there. The company also unveiled a plethora of accessories that expand the functionality of the beast smartphone even further. And as luck would have it we just got one of the more buzz-generating among them in our office – meet the Samsung Galaxy S4 Wireless Charging Pad.

Eager to catch up with its domestic rival LG and the traction-gaining Finns at Nokia, the Galaxy S4 sports wireless charging capability, as well. However, instead of having the feature built it (which would have made the smartphone thicker for everyone), wireless charging comes in the form of an optional accessory kit, which features a different back cover and the charging pad. Read more »

Qualcomm, designers of the highly popular Snapdragon series of chipsets plus a wide variety of wireless tech, is the fastest-growing semiconductor company according to Gartner. The two companies at the top, Intel and Samsung, were both affected by stagnation in the market in 2012.

Intel’s revenue slipped 3.1% year over year, but the company retained its leadership position for the 21st year in a row. Market share dropped a hair to 16.4% (down from 16.5%). Read more »

Samsung announced the smart and 3G/4G-enabled Galaxy Camera last August and it hit the shelves November last year. Shortly after we learned Samsung is prepping a cheaper Wi-Fi-only model.

Well, the Wi-Fi model is finally coming later this month, at least in the US, and will cost $450. Read more »

Apple’s new campus, which is being built, was estimated to cost around $3 billion to the Cupertino giant. However spending is obviously not going according to plan as the budget is said to have risen from $3 billion to $5 billion, according to a report from Bloomberg Businessweek.

This means Apple Campus 2 will be more expensive than the under construction World Trade Center complex. The Cupertino’s project was expected to be completed by 2015, but it’s apparently running behind schedule and it’s not said to open doors not earlier than 2016. The additional time would give the architects and the partners to cut the unnecessary cost, preventing the construction cost from rising even further. Read more »

BlackBerry is shutting down its BB Music service as of June 2 and will stop accepting monthly payments this month.

BlackBerry delivered the news to subscribes over email today. While there’s no sync option or way to transfer your collection to another service the company has given users a voucher code for a 30 day Rdio pass in the email. Read more »

Asus has announced the availability of the Android 4.2 Jelly Bean update for the Transformer Pad Infinity tablet series.

The update should become available for download everywhere today. We can confirm various users from the USA were able to update their Infinity tablets. Read more »

It’s now exactly 1 year since Instagram launched on Android and the popular photo sharing social network has decided to celebrate the occasion with a post on its blog.

According to the developers’ statistics, after the first 12 months of availability droid users account for nearly half of all Instagram users. Read more »

After Samsung, it’s Google’s turn to part ways with the WebKit rendering engine. Google has announced Blink, a new rendering engine based on the existing WebKit.

The WebKit engine has been part of the Chromium project ever since the first Chrome browser was released and has also been the basis of Android’s stock browser. Now, however, Google feels the current WebKit has become too bloated, with several features such as the multi-process architecture being duplicated, since Google has its own version for them. Read more »

Mozilla has announced that it has been working with Samsung to create a brand new next generation web browser engine. Called the Servo, the new engine is designed from the grounds-up to take advantage of the new mobile hardware with multi-core, heterogenous computing architectures.

Servo is written using Rust, a new safe systems language developed by Mozilla. Rust has been development for several years now and is said to be rapidly approaching stability. Also, like C++, it is said to have efficient high-level, multi-paradigm abstractions, and offers precise control over hardware resources. Read more »

Twitter has updated the Android and iOS version of its mobile application, along with the mobile version of their website. The biggest changes are in the Android version, which gets a brand new UI that follows the new Holo UI guidelines (for most parts).

The new Twitter for Android now lets you swipe horizontally on the screen to move between the tabs on the top. This means that you can no longer swipe on an individual tweet to get quick access to tweet options. Moving between hierarchies is now accompanies by slick sliding animations where the next screen is stacked above the previous one, similar to the animation in the stock Android app drawer. Read more »