Nokia continues with the aggressive market campaign of its Windows Phone-running Lumia smartphones. The more expensive member of the duo, the Nokia Lumia 800, has just been pronounced the official smartphone of the UK X Factor talent show.

Each of the finalists got a brand new Nokia Lumia 800 and as you can you’ll see from some videos in a minute they really loved it. Given that Nokia is trying really hard to impress the younger audience, where most of the heavy smartphone users belong, you can see where this is coming from. Read more »

Sony, one of the two shareholders in the S-LCD Corporation, is reportedly considering selling its shares in the joint venture. The company TV division is having a hard time on the market recently and continues to lose money, which has made the Japanese giant consider leaving the S-LCD Corporation.

According to the reports, Sony has already started negotiations with the other shareholder in S-LCD Corp – Samsung. The Koreans currently own 51% of the joint venture and if the source has it correct, that Sony’s exit negotiations will be completed this year, will end up in control of the whole company in 2012. Read more »

Microsoft has announced a special version of the popular Firefox browser that comes with the Bing search engine. As you might guess, this version of Firefox changes the default search engine and homepage from Google to Bing.

For Mozilla, this will serve as another form of revenue. For Microsoft, this move will help boost the user base for Bing. With two of the world’s most popular web browsers using Bing as their default search engines, this could help accelerate Microsoft’s plans to take over Google as the most popular search engine. Read more »

The unpopular Google TV is back for another round with some new tricks up its sleeve. Launched exactly a year ago, Google TV failed to get the attention of buyers due to its many limitations, some of which Google intends to address in this update.

For starters, Google TV has now been updated to Android 3.1 Honeycomb. We would have praised it for running the latest version of Android had it launched a couple of weeks ago but that is no longer the case. Read more »

The HTC Radar decided to drop by for a visit today and we thought we’d shoot it on video. It’s a sleek aluminum unibody device, running on the latest version of Windows Phone – Mango.

We’ll get started with the Radar to bring you a full review. In the meantime you can check out the video below. Read more »

Undoubtedly, the Samsung Galaxy Note’s partypiece is its ability to interact with the specially designed S Pen, which as you saw in our hands-on demo from the event last night, is deeply integrated in the OS.

And if you wonder why it works so well, it’s because Samsung teamed up with Wacom, one of the biggest players in the the pen tablet market, to create the touch layer of the Galaxy Note HD screen . Read more »

In case you just couldn’t catch the live stream of last night’s Samsung event in London, where the company officially presented the Galaxy Note and Galaxy Nexus, don’t be in a chafe.

We got the whole 1-hour video here in this post, in addition to the demos of the Galaxy Nexus and the Galaxy Note we showed you last night. Read more »

Symbian Anna is about to receive a special service pack, which Nokia says is all about performance.

The Nokia N8 is first to get it, with more Symbian Anna-running devices soon to follow its lead. The service pack not only brings better performance but also address some usability issues as well as minor bug fixes. Read more »

When Microsoft started rolling out the Mango update back in September they started out slow and promised to get it out to every device that is eligible for the Mango update.

Well today, they have achieved their target and Mango is now available on 100% of the eligible Windows Phone 7 devices around the world. Read more »

With the Samsung Galaxy S II having set the benchmark for hardware among Android smartphones, people are having very high expectations from the inevitable Galaxy S III. The rumors are that it will have a quad-core processor and while they may just have been baseless assumptions before it seems more of a reality now.

Samsung has just announced that they will be launching a new Exynos processor in 2012 that will use ARM’s big.LITTLE technology. So what is this big.LITTLE technology you ask? It’s quite simple, actually. Read more »

With all the hot features of the Samsung Galaxy Note you may have forgotten that the phoneblet comes with a nifty little accessory called the S Pen. Unfortunate choice of naming aside, the S Pen might turn out to be one of the hottest features of the Galaxy Note as it adds quite a lot of extra functionality.

Samsung has included cool gesture controls that you can use with the S Pen, like making a screenshot and making notes on top of it and launching the notepad from anywhere in the interface, opening contexts menus and whatnot. The fancy stylus seems to offer pretty good response time and allows for the kind of accuracy that lets you create some pretty impressive sketches right on the Note’s 5.3″ HD Super AMOLED screen. Read more »

When the Samsung Galaxy Nexus was announced last week, giving us the first taste of Android Ice Cream Sandwich, many of you wanted to know if the smartphone uses its entire screen, or if the menu navigation keys are always there, taking up a part of precious screen real estate.

Well, tonight we got the chance to play with a Galaxy Nexus version that’s closer to the retail one, and we can give you the answer. Read more »

We conclude our coverage of the second day of Nokia World 2011 with a portion of benchmarks of the newly announced WP smartphones. The Nokia Lumia 800 and Lumia 710 were both present so we could check out how those 1.4Ghz Snapdragon chipsets fare.

To put their performance into perspective we threw in the HTC Radar and an HTC 7 Mozart running the Mango update into the mix. The Radar has a chipset very similar to the two Lumia smartphones, but its Scorpion CPU is clocked at 1GHz. It should show us what kind of an advantage the extra 400MHz of clock speeds actually bring. The 7 Mozart not only has a slower CPU than the two Nokia smartphones, but also a weaker GPU (Adreno 200, instead of Adreno 205) so we’ll see how much of a difference that makes. Read more »

It’s very hectic here at Nokia World. That’s why, unfortunately, we couldn’t get the opportunity to have a quick chat with Nokia CEO Stephen Elop about the direction of the company and how he sees the future of Nokia.

However, Thomas Ricker over at This is my next managed to get Elop’s point on various topics ranging from the N9 to Windows Phone 7 and Android. And he’s squeezed it all in under three minutes of densely packed footage. Here’s the interview itself. Read more »

NFC is gaining more ground and here at Nokia World, we caught a glimpse of something quite intriguing – an NFC Tag writer application for Symbian.

It allows you to quickly transfer various information and even actions to a blank, writable NFC tag. Read more »