RIM has refreshed the Curve series with two new types of Curves – the QWERTY 9360 and the QWERTY-less touch-based 9380. Today we have the QWERTY fella at our office.
As usual we spent some times taking a few quick shots, unboxing and user interface demo video.
As the current flasghip of the company, we were more than interested to put the HTC Rezound battery through its paces. After all, the device packs a monster spec sheet, coupled with some serious multimedia credentials. A battery to match the aforementioned is more than essential – it is simply mandatory.
The Rezound packs a 1620mAh battery – certainly not the largest we’ve seen in an Android device. The battery will have to deal with a dual-core CPU and, most importantly, an HD screen. It surely has a difficult task ahead of it.
At the BlackBerry Innovation Forum, RIM showcased a the much awaited update for their PlayBook tablet. It will add three new system apps – an email client, a calendar and a phonebook.
In case you weren’t aware, the BlackBerry PlayBook launched without those apps over half an year ago but they are coming – better late than never.
Ever since the Nokia Lumia 800 went on sale, there were sporadic reports that the smartphone battery life is less than stellar. Nokia obviously did some investigation on the matter and they found that the poor battery life wasn’t caused by software glitches, but rather by the user behavior.
So the Finns will be releasing a couple of updates over the next couple of months, which should improve the battery performance as a whole. The first update will come in December and will focus on the power efficiency of the device, while the second will come in January 2012 and will tweak the charging of the 1450 mAh battery.
Google has removed several popular peer to peer file sharing sites, including The Pirate Bay, isoHunt, 4Shared and Torrentreactor from its instant and autocomplete search. The search provider aims to prevent the distribution of pirated content with that move.
This means that you will need to type in the full name of the blacklisted sites manually for the results to come out. It’s not a complete ban, but the move should, in theory, reduce the traffic that those sites are getting.
The chipset of the upcoming Sony Ericsson LT22i Nypon smartphone made its first public appearance as several demo videos appeared. The ST-Ericsson NovaThor U8500 chipset comes with a couple of Cortex-A9 cores, clocked at 1GHz and a Mali-400MP GPU.
Unsurprisingly, it was shown to run the latest version of Android – 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. Presumably, ICS will be the OS of choice for the Sony Ericsson Nypon, when it comes out next year.
HTC came up with an official statement about the S3 Graphics acquisition, after the ITC ruling the other day. The Taiwanese were hoping to use S3 Graphics patent portfolio to gain leverage in their ongoing patent battle with Apple, but the US ITC cleared the iPhone manufacturer of infringing any of the S3 Graphics-owned patents.
So with the main reason for the deal gone, HTC is reconsidering going through with it. The company said that it was disappointed at the outcome of the ruling and while S3 Graphics will appeal against it, the acquisition is now hanging in the balance.
Gather around, HTC fans! The Taiwanese company just released a cool video about the smartphone evolution over the past 13 years and it’s really a joy for the geek’s eyes.
The Taiwanese company talks about the important events (in its own view) that lead to the smartphone as we know it today. It’s really amazing to see just how little time it took for stuff like touchscreen, 3G and GPS to go from zero to standard equipment.
The other day we reported a curious bug in the UK versions of Galaxy Nexus, which caused the device to change the volume on its own due to interference with radio frequencies on the 900MHz band. Although it is widely believed that the fault lies in the hardware (probably due to poor EMI shielding) Google has now come out and said that they will be issuing a software update for it.
Here is the full statement from Google regarding the matter:
Be careful not to cut yourself – the new Motorola RAZR XT910 droid is 7.1mm sharp. We got it out of its box gently to rummage around and then played with the RAZR itself. The Kevlar coating on the turned out to be much more pleasant than we thought and the high-res SuperAMOLED screen does look impressive.
But first things first – the box contents are what you would expect (charger, USB cable, etc.). The interesting accessories, like the Lapdock 500 that turns the RAZR into a 14″ Android netbook, are sold separately. Even without those, however, the Motorola RAZR is an impressive piece of kit.
Eager to have a piece of the quad-core Tegra 3 tablet action, are we? In that case you’d be glad to know that you can book your Asus Transformer Prime by pre-ordering it through the company’s website right now.
The offer only applies to residents of Canada and US, for now as the pre-orders aren’t recorded by Asus themselves, but by some of their sales partners. Prices start at $499, which buys you a 32GB version of the slate.
Realism in gaming has been a goal of many a game developer for a long time. Advancements in graphics, surround sound and force feedback have all been steps towards better drawing a player into the gaming experience, but as of late we’ve seen some bold new attempts, trying to take this concept to the the next level.
Some of you might have caught UK TV series The Gadget Show’s Battlefield 3 simulator, which married a host of different technologies together to try and place the player in the game environment, making it one of the most impressive FPS (first-person shooter) experiences ever.
Samsung is ready to have a second go at updating the Galaxy Tab 10.1 to Android 3.2 this time everything should go smoothly. The original update that went out last week left some people without Wi-Fi (pretty bad if you have the Wi-Fi only model) and had other issues too. Installing this through Samsung Kies should fix the problem.
People who still have Internet connectivity should be getting notifications that the Over-The-Air update is available.
Our LG Optimus 2X got its Android 2.3.4 update at the start of this month and we’ve playing with it ever since. And since the LG former flagship is once again becoming a smartphone many are considering (this time due to the lower price, not top functionality), we thought we might give you a rundown of the improvements we noticed.
The truth is, Gingerbread is by far not as major an update as Froyo was and the Optimus 2X doesn’t feel like a completely different phone after you get it – the overall experience is similar. However, you are free to disagree with us if the updated bits and pieces were just the one bothering you.
Samsung’s latest ad for their Galaxy S II strikes hard at Apple fans as if the South Korean manufacturers wants to get even for the latest patent infringement cases Apple won in Germany. The scenario in the video is played out in front of an apparent Apple store that will open in 9 hours and, most likely, start selling a new iPhone.
Apparently, according to Samsung Apple’s die-hard fans consist of hipster, “creative” folk and they line up in wait of the new iDevice – which, as you can imagine, is prime material for abuse in a comic form.
Hot or Not: Android M, iOS 9 and Watch OS 2.0
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