In Other News: 15/03/2013.

• Google's Larry Page has confirmed that 'Android is the most used mobile operating system in the world: we have a global partnership of over 60 manufacturers; more than 750 million devices have been activated globally; and 25 billion apps have now been downloaded from Google Play.' The LittleGreenRobot is still on to hit 1 billion device activations by the end of this year!
  Via AndroidCentral.

• Microsoft had a big Outlook and Hotmail outage yesterday which knocked SkyDrive, Hotmail, and Outlook offline temporarily. Microsoft tried to update its data centre firmware and the regular process "resulted in a rapid and substantial temperature spike in the data centre" for some unspecified reason! That is why your email was down for 16 hours yesterday!
  Via TheVerge.

• MoDaCo are reporting that HTC's brand new HTC One handset will have some trouble if you unlock your bootloader. There are apps like the Calculator, Flashlight, Ringtone Trimmer and Sound Recorder, all of which are installed after a factory reset from a pre-loaded directory. But, when when the bootloader is unlocked this directory gets wiped so these apps are permanently vanished! Just take that into account until HTC fix the issues!
  Via MoDaCo.

• Nintendo have been found guilty of infringing a 3D patent which lets you experience 3D without glasses, which is owned by Seijiro Tomita. The federal jury in New York fined Nintendo $30.2 million in compensatory damages.
  Via Reuters.

• Samsung announced a new 'GamePad' accessory yesterday for their smartphones which can support phones which have screens from 4 - 6.3". Many people have taken this specific 6.3" maximum to mean that the Galaxy Note III will be that size! Seems plausible to us!
  Via UnwiredView.

• Samsung is now also China's biggest smartphone manufacturer with 17.7% of the market, about 4% better off than Lenovo!
  Via Cellular-News.

• Nokia have confirmed updates will be rolling out to each of the Lumia 920's, 820's and the 620's. Theupdates are basically bug fixes and optimisations for everything from camera image quality through to touchscreen responsiveness! For more details check out Nokia's site here!
  Via UnwiredView.

• Verizon has approved update 9.16.6 for the Motorola Droid Razr HD and the Razr Maxx HD! The update fixes lots of bugs and you can find more details over on Android Police here!

And finally, if you're a UK resident and you're looking to stand out in the smartphone crowd then Asus' Padfone 2 is now available from CarphoneWarehouse. To be fair the deals aren't too unreasonable; for example you can snag a free Padfone and the tablet dock for as little as £33 a month, otherwise you can reduce the monthly outlay by paying upfront for the dockable device! Check out the website here for full details!
Via Eurodroid.

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16/10/2012: Microsoft announces price for Surface tablets, Padfone 2 announced, Apple iPad Mini event and more!

Microsoft announces prices for Surface tablets!

    Microsoft has revealed the prices for their upcoming Surface tablets that will be running Windows RT. The company has also offered up the prices for its Touch Cover read on past the jump for the full low down! Ohh, the video above is the company's new advert for the tablets, it's quite cool!

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15/10/2012: Asus Padfone 2 leaks again, Samsung resumes Galaxy S3 updates, LG confirms their update schedule and perhaps a Sony Nexus?

Is this Asus' Padfone 2?!

   The Twitter page @EVleaks is starting to make quite a name for itself in the phone community, because the people behind it are getting quite a few scoops on the news before it happens. Over the weekend the site posted a few more cheeky snaps of Asus' new Padfone.

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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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17/09/2012

Is there a PadFone 2 on the way?

   The Asus PadFone... The phone/tablet mash up that I and numerous other said we'd get because it's such a good idea. The original PadFone was no slouch though; it had the dual-core Snapdragon S4 chipset running the show and everything was good if a little mid-range.

    Of the rumours are to be believed then the PadFone 2 should kick things up a notch with the inclusion of a quad-core Snapdragon S4 Pro. An AnTuTu benchmark result shows a device that’s generally on the level of Samsung's Exynos 4 Quad figures! 

   At the moment we know very little about the whole device apart from the odd bit of speculation. It's been thrown around that we might be seeing 2Gb's of RAM and better resolution screens, but we'll probably have to wait until the start of next year before anything concrete comes out!

   It would be great to see a hugely powerful and genuinely impress device come out of the PadFone project and just like last time I would love to own one!

In other news:

• Cloud storage company Box has announced they are rolling out Box Accelerator. This is a service which has been launched today and it promises 10x faster upload speeds than before. They're able to do this thanks to new network infrastructure that spreads upload hubs across the globe. This has been so efficient in testing that an independent review marks the service as comfortably faster than; Dropbox, Microsoft’s SkyDrive, and Google Drive.

• If you're a Tesco mobile customer then we've got good news for you if you like everything with an 'i' in front of it's name. Tesco has released an 'register your interest page' for the iPhone 5! If you want to show your interest head over here and you might have one in your hands relatively soon!

• Just in case anyone doubted the appeal of Apple's new iPhone 5 then you should see some of these stats! In the first 24 hours of pre-orders the company sold over 2m units. For those of you talented with numbers you'll instantly know that that's more than 23 units a second or 1,389 a minute, that's why the delivery time slipped after a while ladies and gentlemen! That also reinforces AT&T's statement which said it was their most successful iPhone launch ever!

• Amazon has quietly outed a maps API to compete with Google's solution. The API was sneeked out during the companies Kindle Fire HD release and it's looking like a year of Google Maps challengers. Now you've got Bing maps, iOS maps, Amazon apps, but there's still a place in our heart for Ordance Survey maps!

• Smartphones and tablets have officially overtaken PCs as major consumer of DRAM chips.

• Microsoft have confirmed the price range for their Surface tablets; they will be anywhere from $300-$700 depending on whether you opt for a RT version or full Windows experience!

And finally, is the a new upcoming smartphone from HP running... Android?!?! This is relatively easy to fake by the way, but after last weeks announcement HP is getting back in the game it could be a very well placed teaser! As you can see there's ICS at the moment and a nice little lovely 1366 x 720 pixel resolution display with 1.5GHz on each of its Snapdragon CPU cores. So what do you think? Real or fake?

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