After months of delays and anticipation, the BlackBerry Playbook will officially go on sale on the 19th of April, people. RIM threw a fancy launch party in New York City to celebrate the event, and we were among the lucky few who got a precious invitation.

The Playbook will begin its sales on April 19th with a starting price of $499.99 (it was initially promised by RIM that the price tag will be below $500) for the 16 Gb Wi-Fi only version. For those of you looking for a broadband enabled models – you will have to wait until some time in the summer. Read more »

To all of you PC gamers out there, there might be some motion inspired games coming your way in the near future. Unitycorp announced that it will start shipping its ASUS Kinect like motion sensor for PCs in Japan.

Read more »

The gap between the sci-fi future of Minority Report and our future just got a little bit smaller.

3 Live Shop takes the online shopping experience to the next level using the latest technology and techno-wizardry. Developed in partnership by B-REEL, Teenage Engineering and Isotop, the new tech allows a touchscreen wielding ’3′ sales assistant to help you with info about your potential purchase by showing you an interactive visual overlay on your own computer screen. They can drag, drop, resize, scale and rotate images and information beaming it straight to you. Read more »

Do you still remember Nokia’s HD Horizons project? It was about capturing the most beautiful places in Britain with a Nokia N8 from the air. Two weeks ago I told you about the first batch of awesome pictures taken by the popular aerial photographer Jason Hawkes.

Nokia N8 camera sample (click to enlarge)

Yesterday Nokia released 34 new breath-taking photos. You have to admit the phone did splendidly. Read more »

Okay we can’t say we are stunned since the 1GHz Galaxy S II was already blazing fast, but 1.2GHz version benchmark results are still pretty impressive. Obviously Samsung has not only managed to crank the clock speed up a notch, but they have also improved their drivers as the tested unit is 25% faster than the one we had at the office.

Apparently in their current states the Samsung I9100 Galaxy S II is about twice as good as the HTC Sensation (or Pyramid if you will) on Smartbench, where it got 3732 in productivity and 2431 in gaming and it even manages to beat it at Quadrant with the astounding 3053 points. Read more »

It’s the time of the year when companies announce their financial results for the first quarter and Google has just posted theirs. All in all it’s been a good three months for Google and Android. The company has managed to surpass last quarter’s results, while Android has been steadily and surely winning people’s hearts… and hard-earned cash.

Let’s get the numbers rolling. Google’s gross revenue for the first quarter of 2011 accounts for $8.58 billion, which is a serious 27% increase over the first quarter of 2010. Read more »

Less than a month after releasing iOS version 4.3.1, Apple is now pushing a 4.3.2 update. The update doesn’t bring anything major though, but it wouldn’t hurt to get it, since it packs the latest security fixes.

The CDMA iPhone (Verizon iPhone), while still far behind its GSM brother, got an update to version 4.2.7. It doesn’t really address the recent complaints users have with failing to connect to the 3G network, but rather includes the same security fixes as the 4.3.2 version. Read more »

Those birds are still angry, you know the ones I’m talking about. But it’s not because of lack of new content, features or platform support. Nope, Rovio is on top of that. Angry Birds will be celebrating a new Seasons edition soon, Easter, with 15 new levels. The birds will also be getting a syncing feature and will be landing on Windows Phone 7 in late May.

Easter should be a pretty important holiday for Angry Birds (what with all the eggs). We have some of the first screenshots. Read more »

We told you about this one a few days ago, guys – now we have some more facts in stock for you. The Nvidia Tegra powered Acer Iconia Tab A500 is available in the United Kingdom for £449.99 from Dixons.

I am not going to focus on the impressive specs of the device today Read more »

There is nothing particularly special about the phone you are about to see except that each unit has a unique rear panel made of real wood. Whoa, that and the unusual pebble design, I mean. It’s really something and you should definitely have a look at it, even though it will probably never make it your country (unless you live in Japan). But I have to admit its 3 minute-long ad is quite impressive.

Get your headphones on, hit the full screen mode and enjoy the video. Read more »

Several sites have just started offering a new unlock service for the iPhones out there. Requiring no jailbreak or any other tinkering of you beloved smartphone, the new service has a permanent effect, which means that you can safely update to future iOS revisions without undoing it. You will also be preserving your warranty as long as you haven’t voided it already.

The bad news? At $170 the solution is quite expensive. Also it’s unclear what dirty tricks were used for making this service a reality. Honestly, it’s the first time a similar service has been offered for the iPhone in the 3+ years of the existence of the lineup. Read more »

Microsoft is expanding StreetSide to Europe – that’s the Bing Maps equivalent to Google’s Street View. Microsoft is already mapping London and claims their service will be different from Street View in terms of privacy and scale.

Microsoft has partnered up with NAVTEQ (one of the big mapping info providers and a Nokia subsidiary) for this project, obviously one of the advantages of the deal with Nokia. StreetSide is already available in a number of US cities (and several Canadian cities) but now Microsoft has set foot in Europe. Read more »

Okay we got carried away a bit there with the title. You see the video-capable Skype for Android version really appeared online, but it seems unable to run on anything, but the HTC Thunderbolt. So unless you have purchased the LTE-packing smartphone, you will need to wait for the official version or at least another leak to experience the video-call goodies of the new droid Skype.

Anyway we got to see the first review of the application thanks to the guys at AndroidCommunity.com. Except for the addition of video-calling to other mobile users and desktop clients alike there isn’t too many updates brought by the new version. The four tabs remain as they were and work just the way they used to. Read more »

Microsoft unveiled Internet Explorer 10 – they showed it off at the MIX11 developer conference, which started yesterday at Las Vegas. They did a demo, with Windows and IE10 running on an NVIDIA Tegra platform (with ARM processor). Yup, that’s W-i-n-d-o-w-s on an ARM CPU.

The first Platform Preview of Internet Explorer 10 is available for download. Wait, didn’t I just test IE9 last month? Alright, the bigger the version number, the merrier I suppose… You can ask Google, they’ll confirm. Read more »

The Ovi Store is growing – it now sees 5 million downloads a day, nearly 8 times more than what it did an year ago. The number of apps has reached 40,000 and that numbers grows by another 1,000 each week.

The Ovi Store’s growth is mainly due to the latest Symbian^3 devices and Nokia is already looking forward to Windows Phone 7 based smartphones… Read more »