Nokia takes a stab at the iPhone 5: Calls it boring!

   Sometimes the underdog needs something to make their products sell well. Apple used to be the underdog, they used the uniqueness of their iPhone and the lure of exclusivity from the premium price tags to convince millions of users to join their iOS army.

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02/10/2012

HTC announce the One X+.

   After a couple of leaks earlier in the week made this one of HTC's worst kept secrets in a while, the company has officially confirmed their brand spanking new One X+. 

   The comparisons to the Sensation XE have been acknowledged by HTC themselves, but it's a great attention-grabbing colour scheme and it certainly looks great to our eyes!

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The Scroll Pocket 4.

   Many people out there might have children, those children might be being asked what they want Father Christmas to bring them this year. Some might have said an MP3 player, or more specifically iPod Touch.

   But, we're more than aware, here at TheTechFella, that not every one will have a spare £250 for Apple's latest and greatest, so it's well worth having a little look at this guy from Storage Options!

   It's called the Scroll Pocket 4 and it's an interesting little prospect because it's got some nifty little features given it's price. There's Android 4.0 on board, a 4.3” 480x272p capacitive multi-touch screen, 4GB internal memory and a MicroSD card slot.

    The processor is a 1GHz Box chip unit and it's paired with 512MB of DDR3 RAM! There's also a little rear facing 0.3MP camera and a 1500mAh battery powering the whole thing!

   When you think about it this is essentially a mini tablet or a contender in the same realm as Samsung's Galaxy players, which start at £129! So when you consider the Scroll will cost you £49.99 it's a great deal!

   Even if you just use it as your MP3 and movie player for car journeys for that price you can't go wrong! This thing will definitely be on my christmas list! You can get the full details on this link!


Via TechDigest

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16/09/2012

Texas Instruments is cutting back on mobile chip productions.

   Most of you will probably have heard of TI's OMAP smartphone processors. They may even be powering your smartphone or tablet at this very moment. Unfortunately, the company has announced that they will be scaling back their mobile chip productions.

   The news comes as the market has become increasingly competitive, with NVIDIA, Samsung, Qualcomm and many others offering alternative chips. The company has said they plan to focus on embedded systems instead. 

   This news comes after the recent announcement of Motorola that they will be using Intel’s Medfield processor for the RAZR i. Motorola was and still is one of TI's biggest customers, but for the moment TI says it will continue to support its existing clients, Reuters reports.

In other news:

• It's come to light today that Apple's new Lightning connector is in fact different on each side but, as Slashgear said it must have 'must be using some sort of process to dynamically identify which pin order the cord is currently using – depending on which side is up and which is down, that is.' What this will mean for you is that it is a lot harder for 3rd parties to make connectors, so you might be paying Apple prices for your accessories for a while!

• It's been widely reported today that Google's Eric Schmidt will meet with Samsung execs in South Korea this week, just before the launch of the Nexus 7 in the country. Samsung's mobile chief confirmed the meeting today but refused to comment on the agenda. Most people are expecting it to be an attempt to boost Google's involvement in Android litigation.

• LittleBigPlanet is now available for your PS Vita!

• Google has launched a little sale to mark the 25 billionth download from the Play store. The sale items will cost you either $.25 for those of you in the US or 25p if you live in the UK.   Included in the sale are games such as Angry Birds Space Premium, Granny Smith, Draw Something, NFL Kicker 13, OfficeSuite Pro 13 and a couple more!

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24/09/2012

Intel announces it's working on dual-core and LTE!

   Intel’s is hard at work making their Medfield chips the mobile world's finest. They have LTE-capabilities and multicore versions in the pipeline. The first fruits of this labour are due before the end of this year!

   The company said Intel will be “shipping some LTE products later this year and ramping into 2013″ according to director of product marketing, Sumeet Syal. The director was speaking with TechCrunch, and he also confirmed the company is hard at work making more Android apps play nice with the x86 architecture.

   The company said for the moment we're looking only dual-core Medfield chips but in the future they are looking to create more potent quad-core Atom chipsets! Although, the company explains why they are hard at work on single-core processors at the moment:

   “You have to take a look at how many instructions per clock can the architecture handle — our belief is that others are throwing cores at the issue in terms of getting more performance.  We make that determination based on our architecture so we felt very comfortable coming out with a single core dual-threaded for our first product, and as we’re able to get more and more performance in the right implementation of the architecture we believe putting in dual-core would be the right thing for our next generation product” Sumeet Syal, Intel

A bit of Apple news:

• Apple announced this morning that they sold 5million iPhone's in the first week of the phones availability. That definitely makes Samsung's 20million Galaxy S3 sales in 100 days look a bit average!

• Apple has announced that they've updated 100million devices to iOS6 since it's launch last Thursday!

• iOS6 was jailbroken on launch day!

• If you're a disgruntled iOS6 user and you simply must have Google Maps back there's a nice little hack to bring it back! But, it's still being worked on because it has a tendency to crash! In the meantime why not just use a browser alternative such as Nokia Maps or even the on-line version of Google Maps?

In other news:

• Netflix for Android has had a nice little overhaul which makes it look like a more tablet optimised app! It's a nice little update and well worth a download if you use the service!

• Nintendo's upcoming Wii U console will be region locked! So wait until it's available in your region instead of trying to get one early because otherwise you'll be importing games too!

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Samsung Galaxy S3 update rolling out and Samsung announces all devices getting Jelly Bean

   The Samsung Galaxy S3 is one of the hottest phones of the year selling over 20 million units in the first couple of months since it's release. That means there's a lot of people patiently waiting for their phone to be bumped to Google's latest and greatest version of Android, Jelly Bean. 

   Samsung, to their credit, has a good history of updating their flagship Galaxy S line and the Galaxy S3 has continued this trend. Today Samsung has started rolling out Jelly Bean to Polish Galaxy S3's!!! Now this is only the start and the company has refused to comment on when it will reach either the UK or USA, but it does mean that it hopefully won't be too long before it arrives in the UK at least. Obviously with American carriers in between every software update it may well take a lot longer to arrive on your shores!

   Well done Samsung! You're the first one out the block with a big Jelly Bean update! Now hopefully we will be seeing updates to tablets, Galaxy Note's and S2's!!!

[update]

Samsung has released a full list of devices which will be getting Android 4.1.1 Jelly Bean. There's 11 phones and 4 tablets on the list and unfortunately there's some absences too!


The full list is just below:

• Galaxy Tab 2 7.0
• Galaxy Tab 2 10.1
• Galaxy Note 10.1
• Galaxy S II
• Galaxy Note
• Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus
• Galaxy S Advance
• Galaxy S II LTE
• Galaxy Music
• Galaxy Chat
• Galaxy Ace 2
• Galaxy Beam
• Galaxy Ace Plus
• Galaxy Mini II
• Galaxy S DUOS

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21/09/2012

iPhone 5 'teething problems'?

   The latest iPhone has again been greeted with huge queues in London and Tokyo today, as well as having over 2 million people pre-order and have the device shipped to their homes today, but is all as rosey as it seems? Now the title might be slightly misleading here, but those of you who have got an iPhone 5 and or iOS6 on your device will have noticed a couple of issues.

   The first of which will impact anyone with a device that will be running iOS6! You may have noticed that since the update you've lost Google Maps and it's been replace with Apple's own solution, aptly named, iOS Maps. Now, we know this is a new solution, but some of the things we've been hearing throughout the day have been nothing short of ridiculous. Lets start with Stratford-Upon-Avon, the town where Shakespeare was born, well that's not even in the maps at the moment. 

   To the right you can see for yourself how Apple's Maps see Colchester, in Essex. 

   But, there's an almost endless list of bloopers; for example Luton is apparently soon to become a popular tourist destination, having been relocated to the coast!

   Someone on the London Underground is obviously a tech fan and put this little announcement up at Hackney Wick station. (Right).

   

  

 Apple, in recent times have also been huge proponents of uniqueness and creating your own designs. But, it seems they are dismissing their own advise today after iOS6 featured one of the world's most famous clock faces, which appears to have been lifted almost straight from Switzerland. The clock itself is so important because it was originally designed by Hans Hilfiker and is described as an icon for the Swiss railway and Switzerland. The clock design is trademarked and copyrighted so Apple may well find themselves in some hot water for this slightly hippocritical blunder. The two designs are just below, in a nice side by side comparison and to quote Apple it does seem like this is a 'slavish copy' of the frequently licensed design?

 The final issue only affects the iPhone 5 and it's not so much of an issue as a feature. Basically your new 8mp camera can only take 4mp stills in low-light conditions. The reason for this is because Apple has boosted low light performance, they've had to implement 'quad-pixel oversampling' to make the pictures clearer and just better. So it's a fair trade and many of you will be a lot happier with the new pictures than the old ones.

ZTE announce the Blade III!

   Today ZTE have released details of another successor in their budget line of Blade smartphones. This time around everything gets slightly updated, but there's nothing mind blowing! We'll have to wait and see what price this phone comes in at before we jump to any conclusions though!

   The full specs include:

   

• 4 inch WVGA (800×480) 262K TFT Capacitive Touch Screen
• Weight: 130 gram
• Size: 123 mm x 63.5 mm x 10mm
• 1GHz Qualcomm MSM 7227 A processor
• Android 4.0
• Memory: ROM 4 GB, ca 2.5GB accessible to the user, RAM 512 MB
• Supports Micro SD memory card up to 32 GB
• 5.0 MP AF camera
• HD-ljud, Dual Mic
• Mobile standards: HSDPA (7.2Mbps) /UMTS/ GSM/GPRS/EDGE
• Audio standards: MP3, AAC, AAC+, midi, wav, AMR-NB
• Dolby, DLNA
• Video standards: MPEG4, H.263, H.264
• Wireless communications standards: Bluetooth™ 2.1, A2DP, GPS, WiFi 802.11 b/g/n
• Battery capacity: Li-ion1600 mAh
• FOTA (Firmware Over-the-Air) – funktion som används för att på ett smidigt sätt uppgradera smartphones
• FM radio

In other news:

• Jelly Bean has arrived for Verizon's version of the Samsung Galaxy Nexus!!!

• Both Samsung and HTC have confirmed that their flagships, the Galaxy S3 and the One X respectively, will be getting Jelly Bean updates in October!

• Nokia, has been rather scathing of Apple's new Maps today. It's not surprising given that Nokia has a very capable mapping platform which they've built up themselves!

• The US Senate today accused Microsoft of skipping out about $6.5billion worth of taxes. We'll let you know how this story progresses!

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20/09/2012

We've got a PadFone 2 on the way!!!!!

   Asus' original PadFone was one of the stand out devices from last year. Literally no one bought one but everyone thought it was a great idea! So excuse us for being quite excited about a souped-up successor!

   While we don't have any details about the device yet we've seen a lot of reported benchmark details about the phone. If these benchmarks turn out to be accurate then we'll be seeing a Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro processor, just like LG's upcoming Optimus G, topped with 2GB of RAM and Android 4.0.4 Ice Cream Sandwich.

   Mark the date, October 16th, in your diaries because we're about to see another take on the future of phones!

In other news:

• HTC have under cut Apple and Samsung with their Windows Phone 8 flagships. Clove has the 8X up for preorder at £399.99 including tax ($648), while the 8S is listed at £224.99 including tax ($364). In contrast, UK sales of the iPhone 5 kick off at £529 ($856), again including tax, while you can pick up a Galaxy S III unlocked and SIM-free for £462 ($748).

• ZTE will be announcing a phone running Firefox OS in early 2013.

• iPhone 5 16GB costs $207 to produce according to IHS iSuppli.

• T-Mobile USA names John Legere as new CEO, says hello on YouTube.

• Raspberry Pi squeezes 50% performance boost with turbo mode.

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28/08/2012

LG Optimus G becomes official!!!

   LG have been in the shadow of their South Korean rivals, Samsung, for far too long! The Optimus G might finally be the company's way out of that darkness! 

   For starters there is an insane spec sheet on this thing; there's a 1.5GHz quad-core Snapdragon S4 Pro APQ8064 running the show, 4G LTE connectivity, and LG’s futuristic application of their fully integrated touch technology that goes by the name of in-cell touch, which is the same technology Apple is expected to use in the upcoming iPhone. 

   On top of that you've got a True HD (1280 x 768 pixel resolution) IPS+ LCD and LG claims it'll be able to squeeze right up to the edge of the 3mm bezel! On the back of the device you’ll find a massive 13 megapixel camera, to compliment the 1.3 megapixel front-facing camera. The other info includes; 2GBs of RAM, a 2100MaH battery and Android 4.0 ICS!

   This is one sleek (8.45mm thick), ultra-powerful device, hopefully LG will be able to keep this one up to date on the software front!

In other news:

• Last week we reported that OnLive would be keeping their CEO, Steve Perlman, for the foreseeable future. But, it seems this week Mr. Perlman has been dismissed and the official statement from OnLive on Perlman leaving is that he is “departing to work on his myriad of other projects.” Perlman likely took his own financial beating with OnLive having to restructure.
  
  The Verge has said that while Perlman was the majority shareholder in OnLive; all his stock was wiped out when the company turned insolvent. The company used something called an Assignment for the Benefit of Creditors, and this took off all stock in the company. Reports from insiders claim that the reason Perlman left was that his employees asked for his permanent resignation before they would even consider working for the new company. Ouch!

• Sony's PS Vita is getting a firmware update to version 1.8. If you're a European reader this will bring you the option to play all PSone Classics, but the update is bitter-sweet if you live in the USA as only the following games are available to begin with;with more games cropping up each week in the USA.
  
  "Arc the Lad, Cool Boarders 2, Final Fantasy VII, Hot Shots Golf 2, Jet Moto, Syphon Filter, Tomb Raider, Twisted Metal 2, Wild Arms."

• Apple has pushed for the ban of 8 Samsung devices after last weeks bombshell. The devices include; the Galaxy S 4G, AT&T Galaxy S II (AT&T), Galaxy S2 Skyrocket, T-Mobile Galaxy S II, Galaxy S2 II Epic 4G, Galaxy S Showcase, Droid Charge, Galaxy Prevail.
  
  Thankfully most of these devices probably won't interest you but just in case they do get out there and get one ASAP before they get banned!

And finally, Engadget has got hold of a new picture and some specs for an upcoming version of the Droid Razr called the Motorola Droid Razr M 4G LTE. The only changes from the original version are Gorilla Glass 2 is added as well as a beefed up 3MP front-facing camera. Sorry it's not a Razr HD guys!

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