The Mozilla team focused on the new Firefox OS at the MWC, but the stand-alone Firefox browser wasn’t neglected either. Firefox for Android version 20 was released in beta and it brings a customizable home screen, per-tab private browsing and a few other features.

Owners of old phones will be pleased to hear that Mozilla has added support for more ARMv6-based devices. The minimum requirements are now QVGA screen, 600MHz CPU and 384MB RAM. Legacy support isn’t new to Mozilla, Firefox still supports Windows XP while Microsoft stopped putting out new IE versions for XP a while ago. Read more »

Samsung were busy doing their usual thing in 2012, which basically is flooding the market with (Android) smartphones. But did you ever wonder about the exact numbers? Well, Strategy Analytics has them for you.

Samsung’s 2012 global smartphone shipments are estimated at 213,000,000 devices. In terms of share, the Koreans had 30.4% of the entire smartphone market last year. Read more »

The latest HTC flagship, the HTC One, holds inside it some impressive WiFi horsepower in the form of Broadcom’s new 5G WiFi chip.

The BCM4335 is slated to deliver more bandwidth and higher range, all at significantly lower battery costs. Read more »

The Asus MWC event yesterday brought the Padfone Infinity and the Fonepad. It wasn’t very well organized for the press, but luckily, you can watch the highlights in the comfort of your own home.

Asus tried to spice the event up with a mini magic show, but that was mostly cut out of the video. What does that say about how engaging the performance was? Read more »

A growing number of smartphones support wireless charging and we’ve seen a number of dock designs. There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of excitement about the technology among consumers though. Maybe LG’s world’s smallest wireless charging station can do something about it.

The LG WCP-300 has circular shape with a 7cm diameter (2.8”) and is based on Qi, which is the most popular wireless charging standard at the moment. The LG-built Nexus 4 supports it, as do the Optimus G Pro, Vu II and LTE2 (Nokia’s Lumia phones also use this standard). Read more »

Nokia has announced that a beta trial of its DLNA streaming app Play To will be available for Windows Phone 8-powered Nokia devices.

Like similar streaming apps, Play To lets you wirelessly share photos, music, and videos to DLNA-enabled devices, including TV’s and receivers. Read more »

One of the good things about Samsung is that the company is quick to release the source code for their Android devices shortly after the update starts rolling out to the device. This lets developers and people who like to tinker around with the software to get their hands dirty and come up with custom ROMs and such.

After the Android 4.1 Jelly Bean update started rolling out for the original Galaxy Note, it was only going to be a matter of time before the source code was released. And like clockwork, it has. Read more »

According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, Samsung’s dominance on the market for Android devices has begun to make Google executives uneasy. The latter reportedly worry that the Korean manufacturer is large enough to renegotiate its current arrangement with Google and eat into the search giant’s lucrative mobile-ad business.

Samsung has received over 10% of the latter’s revenue in the past. The company has also signaled to Google that it might demand more going forward, as Google’s revenue from mobile apps such as Google Maps and YouTube is on the rise. Read more »

It looks like the last year’s Olympic partnership between Samsung and Visa has worked out well for both sides. Today, the two companies announced a partnership to promote mobile NFC payments worldwide.

Under the terms of the partnership, Samsung will preinstall Visa’s payWave application into its upcoming NFC enabled smartphones, which means that the soon-to-be announced Samsung Galaxy S IV will likely be the first to carry the new tech. Read more »

The Nokia Lumia 520 was only announced this morning and T-Mobile USA is already claiming a piece of the action. The carrier will get a dedicated version of the phone – 521 – which differs only in the supported 3G frequencies.

The Lumia 520, or 521 in this case, is an upgrade over the current 510 – it runs Windows Phone 8 on a 1GHz dual-core Krait processor, with double the RAM (512MB), double the internal storage (8GB, there’s a microSD card slot too) and 720p video capture. You can check out our hands-on impressions from the MWC for more info. Read more »

The latest trend of dust and waterproof smartphones continues with the newly launched Cat B15. The rugged device can withstand a 1.8 meter drop and being submerged in up to one meter of water for about 30 minutes.

The Cat B15 comes with a 4″ LCD display of 480 x 800 resolution, a capacitive multi-touch screen, Gorilla glass and wet finger tracking. The smartphone is powered by a 1 GHz dual-core MediaTek MT6577 processor along with 512 MB of RAM, and features a 5 megapixel rear camera, a VGA front-facer, 4 GB of inbuilt memory with a microSD slot and runs on Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. Read more »

Facebook announced partnerships with multiple mobile operators to provide free or discounted data access for its website usage. As we already know, much of the Facebook’s usage is from the mobile devices and the Mark Zuckerberg’s company is trying to make it easier on the wallets to access it.

Facebook’s latest promotion offers you free or discounted data access on Messenger for Android, Messenger for iOS and, of course, for every platform, for which the service has been optimized. Read more »

Maps and Drive have long been one of the staples of Nokia Windows Phone devices, and today they’re being rolled as part of Nokia’s HERE cloud location service.

Also integrated are the Transit and City Lens apps, which allow for quick access to public transit information and nearby POIs in addition to the cartography and navigation features provided by Drive and Maps. However, the services will no longer bear the Nokia branding. Read more »

LG showcases its innovative Wireless Ultra High-definition transmission technology for the first time at the on-going Mobile World Congress. The latest feature for the next generation smartphones allows you to view games, movies and other smartphone essence on Ultra HD TV’s in real time, through wireless data transfer.

The transmission technology is said to deliver the multimedia contents to your televisions in a much quicker and smoother manner than any other previous content streaming system. And of course, it can transfer content of up to UltraHD resolution – that’s 4K or four times the regular 1080p FullHD. Read more »

Whilst here at LG’s booth on the MWC 2013 floor we had enough time to check out the LG Optimus G Pro from every angle.

So, the screen junkies that we are, we decided to get out the Galaxy S III and put its Super AMOLED 720p screen next to the True HD-IPS+ 1080p LCD of the G Pro. Read more »