Microsoft has just released their financial results for the quarter ending in June and it appears that all is rosy at Redmond. The company recorded its highest ever revenue – $17.37 billion, which is 8% higher than Q2 of 2010.

Profits rose by the amazing 30% over the same period of last year and reached $5.87 billion. Just about every division of the company had a good quarter, but the Entertainment & Devices division is certainly the most impressive with its 30% growth in revenue, driven by the hugely successful Xbox 360. Read more »

The Viber application that won the hearts of over 12 million iOS users has now landed on the Android Market, doing just about everyone involved a favor. Android users now have another way to make free calls and send free messages (data charges not counting), iOS users can do that with a lot larger portion of their contact list and Viber gets more users. And now that we had a day or so to play with the app we bring you our take on it.

To get started with Viber you need to go to the Android Market from either you phone or your desktop browser and install the free app. You then go through a quick activation process, where you enter your phone number (the only ID you would need) and then wait for an SMS to arrive, containing your activation code. Read more »

Sony Ericsson Xperia PLAY has just got a nice FPS exclusive among the rest of the droids. EA has launched Battlefield: Bad Company 2 for Xperia PLAY via its dedicated game store.

The game has been released for the iOS gadgets since the last December and its price there has been varying between €0.79 and €2.39. Read more »

Corning has officially announced the recently released Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 comes with Gorilla Glass.

Samsung’s VP of Smartphone Product Planning flatters the Gorilla Glass: “GALAXY Tab 10.1 is recognized for its high-end technology and amazing design, even among industry experts. For the GALAXY Tab 10.1, Samsung Electronics searched for the most durable, scratch-resistant glass, and again found the perfect solution with Corning Gorilla Glass.” Read more »

The original Samsung Wave (which first showcased the SuperAMOLED wonder of a display) is arguably among the best equipped smartphones out there (outside the Android and iOS camps). It’s bound to get even hotter with the release of the Bada OS 2.0.1. It will surely take some time but while you wait, you can try the beta version right now.

The beta brings a set of new features, worth having, like the new UI look, the drag-down widgets screen, the Music and Social hubs, the revamped gallery with stacked albums, the 3D cover flow-like music player, the Dolphin browser 3.0. You might remember the beta landing on the Wave II just a couple of days ago. Read more »

The global research and consulting firm Strategy Analytics has published its report on the tablet market in the second quarter of the year. Unsurprisingly, slate sales grew at an explosive rate – 15.1 million for the period, compared to just 3.5 million in Q2 of 2010.

Another conclusion drawn from the report that will hardly raise any eyebrows is that the iPad is still the device to beat, capturing a huge 61.3% market share. As Apple happily reported the other day, sales of the two versions of the iOS slate rose 6 million to a total of 9.3 million. Read more »

The world’s largest chip maker, Intel, has posted its Q2 2011 financial results and has reported that this was their 5th consecutive quarter with record revenue. The company has done great to score revenue of $13 billion, which is 1% higher than in previous quarter and 21% better than in the same quarter of last year.

However, the $3 billion dollar profit is 7% lower than what the company achieved in Q1 of this year and only 2% higher compared to Q2 of 2011. The earnings per share have also dropped 4% sequentially to 54 cents and while this is still a 6% increase Year-on-Year, it has had a negative impact on the Intel stock (down almost 2% in the after hours trading). Read more »

Panasonic has just announced the new addition to their lineup of superzoom compacts, the FZ47 (to be known in Europe as FZ48). Carrying a 1/2.33″ 12.1 megapixel sensor the new camera has a 24x zoom range covering the 25 – 600mm range (in 35mm equivalent).

The stabilized lens is pretty bright on the wide side opening the aperture all the way to F/2.8, but at the long end you only get F/5.2 as a maximum aperture. Video recording up to 1080p resolution is a go in both MP4 and AVCHD formats and on the back you are getting a 3″ LCD of 460K dots. Read more »

Hitachi announced a new mobile IPS LCD display that also does glasses-free 3D. It’s quite a beast at 4.5″ and 720p resolution (1280 x 720 pixels) and it uses lenticular technology to create the stereoscopic effect, which allows it to be brighter when displaying 3D images.

Hitachi say that typical glasses-free 3D displays (that use a parallax barrier) have their brightness cut in half when showing 3D content. Not so with their new display – it’s actually brighter in 3D mode. Read more »

A few photos and some specs of an upcoming 24 megapixel Sony A77 camera surfaced and they look quite exciting. The mirrorless camera with Electronic Viewfinder and Interchangeable Lens (EVIL) looks like a real beast and judging by the resolution and its reported ability to record 1080p video, it might be the most capable in its class to date.

The only thing that puzzles us a bit is its size. As far as we know, the main advantage of EVIL cameras compared to DSLR cameras is that they are way more compact and this one looks anything, but that. Read more »

Apple has launched the world’s first Thunderbolt display. This new display is mostly identical to the old 27-inch LED Cinema Display but has a couple of new additions.

The first one is the most obvious. The new Thunderbolt Display uses a Thunderbolt connector instead of a Mini DisplayPort. The Thunderbolt connectivity takes care of the display, sound as well as data transfer. Due to this the new Thunderbolt Display does not have a separate USB cable unlike the old LED Cinema Display. Read more »

Yesterday, Apple also refreshed their cheapest Mac – the Mac mini – along with the MacBook Air. The new Mac mini has the new generation of dual-core Intel Sandy Bridge processors that replaces the Core 2 Duo found on the previous generation model. There are two models now, with the base model having a 2.3GHz Intel Core i5 and the more expensive model running on a 2.5GHz Intel Core i5 and can be configured to 2.7GHz Core i5 through Apple’s online store.

The 2.3GHz model comes with 2GB of RAM whereas the 2.5GHz model comes with 4GB of RAM. Either of these can be configured to have up to 8GB of RAM. Both the models come with a 500GB 5400-rpm hard drive and both can be configured with a 750GB 7200-rpm hard drive with the 2.5GHz model also having the option to be configured with a 256GB SSD or a combination of 256GB SSD and 750GB HDD. Read more »

I am slowly starting to suspect that Apple is preparing an iPad Pro device, running proper Mac OS. Where do I get that from?

Well, here’s a mental exercise for you. I’m gonna start throwing a bunch of facts and speculations at you and then I’d like to see whether you are not getting the same gut feeling as me. I’m also gonna try and keep it short, alright?

Yesterday, at a press conference announcing Apple’s amazing quarterly results, Peter Oppenheimer, the company’s COO, briefly mentioned there will be a lot going on in the fall and hinted the company had a “future product transition” on the way.

Another bit we took from that conference is that, unsurprisingly, the iPad business is booming. iPad sales are already surpassing Macs in both numbers shipped and in revenue. Apple has a really hot product on their hands. And it makes you wonder – why don’t they expand it even further? Read more »

Facebook is a fundamental part of every SNS-offering phone these days. It’s still the most popular social network out there and has by far the largest user base of about 750M people (July 2011). So we’re not really surprised that almost every premiere smartphone OS out there is trying to dig into the hype and offer as much as it can to its users.

Sony Ericsson recently introduced a new, deeper way of integrating Facebook in their recent Xperia smartphones (Arc, Neo, Pro, Play, Mini and Ray). They call it Facebook inside Xperia and we are about to see what it’s like. Read more »

A heap of interesting AT&T rumors just came in. Reportedly, the carrier will start selling its first LTE handsets in December and the HTC Eternity, which first leaked a while ago, will be one of them.

Our tipster says that the WP7-running Eternity will be the only new HTC phone to come to AT&T this year, but it won’t be the only one to have an LTE radio. A selection of LTE-packing Android smartphones will launch alongside it in December, including at least one device from each of LG, Samsung and Sony Ericsson. Read more »