Along with the HTC Desire 601 and Desire 300 today, HTC also introduced a curious Bluetooth accessory, called HTC BoomBass. Now, portable Bluetooth speakers come a dime a dozen but this one is not a full-range speaker. Instead, it’s only a subwoofer, designed to amplify the bass sounds only.

The tiny subwoofer measures 64 x 64 x 64mm and HTC says it’s a great match for its range of smartphones, which have a set of already great sounding stereo speakers (BoomSound), but lack the punch you only get from proper bass. Current smartphones, featuring the said dual speakers setup are the HTC one, the HTC Desire 600 dual sim and even the just announced HTC Desire 601. Read more »

The tablet competition is as heated as ever. While Samsung is seemingly taking a break from the race by serving us with a less than competitive recent batch of tablets, we are eagerly looking around to see what the competition will have on offer in the second half of 2013. Amazon still hasn’t announced its bid but we are already seeing reports that the company’s next gen tablets will make use of some powerful hardware.

According to a report, based entirely on industry sources and eye-witness accounts, the next generation of Kindles will include three devices in three different tiers. The highest tier – the Kindle Fire HD 8.9 – will sport the impressive 2560 x 1600 pixel resolution (up from 1920 x 1200 px) and a quad-core Snapdragon 800 chipset. Read more »

Leather is certainly not your everyday choice for cellphone cases, but given the Nokia Lumia 1020 photographic background, Nokia has obviously thought it’s only natural that they pair the cameraphone with a classic-looking leather case.

While Nokia’s camera grip is certainly a mouth-watering accessory to have for a capable cameraphone, when it comes to classiness, this leather case is in a league of its own. Read more »

At today’s unveiling event of the Nokia Lumia 1020 in New York, Nokia has also announced the immediate availability of a new Imaging Software Development Kit (SDK). The new SDK would give developers a “powerful code library of exciting image manipulation tools, which will make creating the next generation of imaging apps for Windows Phone 8 devices quicker and easier. ”

The intriguing bit is that the SDK can be used for developing camera/image manipulation apps not just or Lumia phones, but for any Windows Phone 8 device. Read more »

Today Samsung has announced the Ativ Tab 3 – a tablet, utilizing an Atom CPU to runs Windows 8.

We got a chance to spend some time with the Ativ Tab 3 and we snapped lots of pics. Read more »

Today Samsung has announced the next generation of their sleek Series 9 ultrabook. The two new ultrabooks are called ATIV Book 9 Plus and ATIV Book 9 Lite respectively and both run Windows 8, as you might have guessed.

Both feature aluminium unibodies and 13.3-inch screens with touch functionality. The one on the ATIV Book 9 Plus however packs the whopping 3200 X 1800 QHD+ resolution. Read more »

Today, on the WWDC 2013 stage, Apple’s vice president Phil Shiller announced the revamped MacBook Air product family. The 11-inch and 13-inch MacBook Airs have the same chassis, but use the recently released 4th generation mobile Intel Core CPU called Haswell.

These have faster built-in graphics and have highly touted power-sipping features allowing for much longer battery life for mobile products. The MacBook Airs make good use of the new internals and will now offer up to 9h battery life for the 11.6-incher and up to 12-hour for the 13.3-incher. But that’s not all. Read more »

Today, many of us woke up to see a new update available to Angry Birds Seasons. This one is called Abra-Ca-Bacon and we already told you it was coming a week ago.

We hope you’ve watched the update’s teaser last week. If not, well, you can already have a go at the real game yourself. Today’s topic however, is the appointment of the YouTube star, iPad magician Simon Pierro as an Official Angry Birds Magician.

And the today’s release of the Abra-Ca-Bacon update more than anything warrants the release of one of the special iPad Magic videos he’s known about. Read more »

A new update to popular news-consuming application Flipboard brings about a handful of new features. Magazine curators can now make fuller standalone profiles and readers can easily find what magazines their friends have created thanks to the new Friends category in the Content Guide. But that’s not all.

Flipboard opened the magazine curation feature to iOS users some 2 months ago with v2.0 of their app, but Android users only got it last week. Read more »

Announced at the MWC 2013, the HP Slate 7 is HP’s move back to the consumer tablet market. Shying away from its own webOS, the company stakes on Android, instead.

The HP Slate 7 key selling point is not its latest high-performance hardware (or software), but rather the low asking price, which in the case of the UK is £129. In the other European countries the price should hover around €149. Read more »

I’ve watched my share of beautiful time-lapse videos and I thought those can hardly surprise me anymore, but a new experimental time-lapse project, which uses Google Street View imagery takes things to a whole new level.

The project calls the resulting videos hyperlapses and indeed, they can be amazing providing you find the right sort of scenic routes in good weather. And I do mean it, when I say “find”, because the tool lets you make your own custom hyperlapses, too. For a taste, here’s a stunning hyperlapse demo, created by the authors of the project. Read more »

The Sony Xperia L has just been announced and as usual, there’s an official promo video, showcasing the smartphone’s talents. In this case, the video is about a particular talent and it’s picture taking.

The Xperia L comes with Sony’s latest mobile Exmor RS image sensor and it can do both HDR stills and HDR videos. But best of all, it comes with a hardware camera shutter key, which is something of a rare sight these days. Read more »

Somehow last night during the announcement we missed the fact that the Galaxy S4 is the first phone to feature Corning’s Gorilla Glass 3. Yeah, I know, it’s not a big thing, but tech geeks are sometimes excited by small things like this.

The Gorilla Glass 3 was announced back at CES, earlier this year, and is marketed as having Native Damage Resistance™. Of course, that’s just a bunch of words marketing people love to use. What matters is that the new glass reportedly provides enhanced scratch resistance, reduced scratch visibility, and better retained strength once a scratch occurs. Read more »

What’s a high-tech product without some equally high-tech accessories? Samsung presented a whole suite of those, though they kinda slipped under the radar at yesterday’s show. The accessories however are worth a look on their own.

The list includes the S Band pedometer, the Game Pad, a Wireless Charging Pad / Cover, an Extra Battery Kit, plus a heart rate band sensor and a Body Scale. There are also several cases such as the S View Cover, a regular Flip Cover, a classic Pouch, the Protective Cover+. Read more »

It takes some guts to stand up to the big guy and call his work a flop. And bravery is usually to be admired. But it takes a bit more than bravery to classify the next big thing from the world’s leading smartphone manufacturer (your competitor) as #TheNextBigFlop, unless you are alright with people taking your comment for an arrogant sign of a deeply rooted inferiority complex.

Whatever the reason, HTC, or rather the PR people behind HTC Twitter account did just that by calling today’s Galaxy S4 announcement #TheNextBigFlop. Read more »