News

BlackBerry demo social sharing with NFC

NFC is one of those features that more and more smartphones are coming with. However, at this moment in time it is not a feature that we can use in everyday life.

At the BlackBerry stand at Mobile World Congress RIM have set up some ‘Like Stations’ which enable visitors with NFC enabled phones to share information via Facebook or Twitter.

This goes to show how easy and quick using NFC can be and it is only a matter of time until we see NFC smart tags appearing more frequently.

You can see a brief demo below courtesy of RIM.

Nokia 808 full specs

With this mornings announcement of the 808 from Nokia I thought it was pretty important to let you have the full specifications as soon as we could.

Clearly the 41 mega pixel camera sensor is what is generating the hype this morning. What is surprising is that the device is running Symbian Belle, something that at the press event Nokia didn’t make a big fuss of. I didn’t even realise they were going to release any more Symbian devices what with their focus being on Windows Phone and S40 for the lower end of the market.

Either way this new 808 looks to be pretty nice and the 41MP Carl Zeiss camera certainly will take mobile photography to the next level.

You can see the full specs below:

Nokia announce three new Series 40 devices at MWC

At Mobile World Congress this morning Nokia have announced the Nokia Asha 202,203 and 302 targeting the lower end smartphone market.

The touch screen Asha 202 and 203 come with free downloads of 40 games from EA games.

The 302 comes with a QWERTY keyboard, and a 1GHz processor. FaceBook and Whatsapp come preloaded on the device allowing for communication straight out of the box.

The Asha 302 now comes with Microsoft Exchange support for the first time.

More details and specifications when we have them.

Posted by: James

Pre order the HTC One X, One S and One V from Clove

Clove dropped us a line last night to let us know that yesterdays newly announced Android 4.0 devices from HTC are available to pre order on their site.

You can click the below links to get your order in early.

HTC One X – Due Thursday 5th April: Priced £410 (£492 inc.VAT)

HTC One S – Due Thursday 5th April: Priced £375 (£450 inc.VAT)

HTC One V – Due Thursday 26th April: Priced £220 (£264 inc. VAT)

I suspect these devices may be quite popular!

Posted by: James

HTC One Series – Full Specs

Following on from our previous post where we brought you the press release from HTC’s Mobile World Congress event you can find below the full specifications of the Three ‘One Series’ devices announced.

As I said earlier, I had hands on time with all three handsets this week and what stunners they all are. They look good, feel good and perform fast.

What do you think? We would love to hear your comments either on our forum or via the Facebook plug-in at the base of the post.

You can see full specs below:

MWC Starts Tomorrow

As the title says, Mobile World Congress (MWC) gets underway in Barcelona tomorrow so we can expect plenty of news and press releases over the next week or so as the mobile industry gears up to making announcements about the products that are going to be hitting the market this year.

There are events taking place in the UK as well as other countries too relating to the events taking place in Barcelona. We’ve already been attending such events here in London over the past week and we’ll be kicking off our MWC news cycle later on today once some embargos have been lifted! 😉

We can certainly expect plenty from HTC, Sony Ericsson and Samsung to name just a few but there will be no shortage of announcements so keep your eyes peeled!

Posted by: Matt

Viewsonic set to impress at MWC 2012

Viewsonic is really going all out this year for Mobile World Congress 2012. They are bringing five new Android devices and one Windows tablet to the table at the press event this year. One of the devices, a new smartphone, uses the same Retina display that is in the iPhone.

Here is a breakdown on what we know about the phones’ specs:
ViewPhone 4s – (This one looks like an Apple lawsuit waiting to happen.)

• Android 4.0/ICS
• 3.5 screen with 640×960 pixel Retina display

Nexus Tablet may start production in April

Late last year speculation was running rampant after Google chairman Eric Schmidt made the comment that Google was planning to, “market a tablet of the highest quality.” Immediately the dream of a Nexus tablet was spawned and Android and tablet fans began frothing at the mouth. Some of the earlier speculation pegged the device as a 7-inch Nexus-branded device that will run Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich and compete with the Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet at the $199 price point in the States. Today there are some new rumours regarding this mythic device. Here’s a quote with some more details,

Quote:

…DisplaySearch analyst Richard Shim stoked the fire, noting that the Google slate will enter production in April and the initial run will yield between 1.5 million and 2 million units. Shim also said that the Nexus Tablet will feature a high-resolution 1,280 x 800-pixel 7-inch display, besting Amazon’s 1,024 x 600-pixel panel. “I don’t know how they plan on marketing it,” Shim said. “If it’s going to be a premium device, or if it’s going to be a Kindle Fire type competitor.” April production could mean the tablet will launch as soon as the second quarter this year.

Hmmm… if this turns out to be true, we could see a Nexus tablet in mid-to-late 2012. The question still remains, would Google really be willing to "bite the hands that feed it" and potentially push some OEMs out of the Android Tablet market by making it too tough to compete with a Nexus branded tablet? Share your reasoning.

Posted by: Gareth

It’s not Tegra 3, it’s 4-Plus-1

NVIDIA wants to make sure that consumers get the full skinny on their new Tegra 3 chip’s architecture. Sometime last year we did an article sharing that the Tegra 3 is actually a 5 core chip, rather than just a quad-core chip. It has 4 primary cores for running intensive calculations, but also has a 5th "shadow-core" (which has also been called the "ninja-core" by NVIDIA). This 5th core is designed to handle easy to calculate and mundane tasks to free up battery life and improve over-all efficiency. Previously, their in-house name for this architecture was "Variable Symmetrical Multiprocessing", but that is rather a mouth-full to share as marketing speak. So, to make things easier, they came up with the simple alias, 4-PLUS-1.

You can see below the quote from NVIDIA’s press post:

Fujitsu announce some insane specs

Fujitsu are set to make their debut in the phone market later this year. According to the Unwired View, Fujitsu’s handset will come packing a Nvidia 1.6GHz Tegra 3 processor – a quad-core chipset, a 4.6in screen (no further details there unfortunately), a 13.1MP camera, a fingerprint sensor, Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, as well as "long battery life" and some kind of water and dust resistant finish. Yes, that was a 13.1mp camera!

It’s at a stage where anything can happen in the world of mobiles, as for a company like Fujitsu to make any sort of dent in the market they have to arrive guns blasting. Unless of course they want to take the market slowly, easing in at the bottom of the market like HTC did and ZTE are currently doing. There are concerns with specs like this. That CPU is going to really require a long life battery just to get you through to a day of heavy use.

At any rate, this looks to be one to watch and has the potential of blowing a few members of the competition out of the water!

Posted by: Gareth