News

ZTE Tania–Price drop just £199

It might not have even started shipping yet, but the price of the ZTE Tania has just been reduced, at Clove by £50, in preparation for the first stock due in next week, commencing 20th Feb.

Now just £199 inclusive of VAT the Tania is without doubt one of the best bargains on the market at the moment.

Key features of the Tania include:

• Windows Phone 7.5
• 1GHz processor
• 4.3 inch display
• 5 megapixel camera with auto focus & flash
• 4GB Internal Memory
• WiFi 802.11b/g/n
• 3G/HSPA

For more information or to order this exceptionally priced handset just CLICK HERE.

Posted by: James

New BBM Music Offer Means Free Music for You

The BBM Music team has been very busy over the last few months launching  BBM-connected social music service in eight different countries around the world. RIM are excited that BBM Music is now available for download in Canada, the United States, Mexico, United Kingdom, Spain, Italy, Netherlands and Australia – with more regions still to come, so stay tuned! If you haven’t yet tried BBM Music, RIM are even more excited to let you know that in the month of February 2012, you can download BBM Music FREE for up to 4 months in Canada or the US, or FREE for up to 6 months in the UK, Spain & Italy.

Along with the free trials, RIM have added some new features to BBM Music v1.1.

You can see the features below:

Toshiba AT200 arrives

Carphone Warehouse has put the Toshiba AT200, also known as the Toshiba Excite X10, up for sale. The 7.7mm 10 inch tablet houses a 1.2GHz TI OMAP 4430 processor, 1GB of RAM, a 5 megapixel rear camera, a front facing camera and comes in configurations of either 16GB or 32GB. This one’s still running Honeycomb, unfortunately, but Toshiba assures us that it will be getting the upgrade to Android 4.0+ sometime down the line. Pricing is £399 and £449 for the 16GB and 32GB configurations, respectively. Deliver to the mainland and store are free, but you’ll have to wait until February 15th to find it in-stores. Get started here and here.

Full specs after the below:

HTC Sensation XE in White will be launching the week commencing 20th February

Clove dropped us a word this morning that the HTC Sensation XE White will be launching the week commencing 20^th February, priced at £340 (£408 inc. VAT).

Features of HTC Sensation XE with Beats Audio:

• Android 2.3 Gingerbread
• 1.5GHz processor
• 4.3" QHD Super LCD capacitive touch screen
• 8MP camera, dual LED flash and VGA front camera
• 1080p HD video recording
• 4Gb eMMC ROM, 768Mb RAM, plus microSD storage
• 160 grams
• 1730 mAh battery
• Complete with urBeats in-ear headphones in the box

Posted by: James

HTC Sensation’s range receiving ICS in March, Confirmed

The awesome HTC Sensation range are about to get even better, rumours and news from the HTC camp are that the Sensation, XE and XL are getting ICS, Android 4.0 by early March.

No news on which carriers will see this first but as usual I would expect those lucky enough to have unlocked units would see the first serving followed by locked units to each respective carrier.

Other handsets are soon to follow on from this but this is the first official notification on certain models. The update coincides with the launch of the carrier available locked Sensation in White.  

Posted by: Paul

Good news – Google releases Chrome for Android, Bad news – ICS 4.0 only

Google labs have been busy and have released a beta version of chrome for Android, that’s the good news, the bad news is that it’s only available for handsets running ICS/4.0 software and at the time or writing that’s limited to you lucky people with a Galaxy Nexus.

The first version is (apparently) “just like” the desktop version, browsing is a great user experience and runs very quickly, the latter being more to do with connection speed I would guess.

Another great feature is that anyone using Chrome Sync will also get their bookmarks synced on the android version too, how cool is that?

Standby if you have a high spec android running the latest version as updates are imminent, especially those handsets with fast processors. HTC have put a list of handsets up on their Facebook page that will receive ICS in Q1. Others will surely follow soon.

Posted by: Paul

BlackBerry DevCon – live streaming of keynote speech

BlackBerry’s European Developer Conference begins in Amsterdam today!
The live stream of the keynote speech from DevCon will be accessible via the following link at 9.30am UK time: Watch it here.  It will also be available to view again from the end of today for the next 30 days.

More details on DevCon can be found here.

Posted by: James

BlackBerry starting to advertise PlayBook software version 2.0 in stores

N4BB have spotted a rather nice banner advert inside a UK retail store tempting customers to check out the new PlayBook software that is due at some point this month.

As well as a slightly different UI,  PlayBook OS 2.0 will finally bring some native PIM apps with email, calendar, contacts and more.

I am certainly excited. Are you?

Posted by: James

Apps Crashing? Apparently you’re not alone

According to app data reporter/monitor Crittercism iOS crashes more apps than Android. They carried out a study in November and the first two weeks of December 2011 recording over 200 million app launches and recorded the crash data.
Now whilst the overwhelming majority where iOS launches the percentage of crashes per app were higher for iOS than Android.

One important thing to note is that the data shows different versions of both software’s and the one common thing they share is that it would appear newer version suffer more crashes in the first few weeks of launch, this would seem to point that developers are slower to update apps to work effectively with new software versions. Interesting though as they also pointed out not only could some be compatibility but some are hardware related but also dropped connections and Wi-Fi issues.

They do expect a similar pattern to occur in the first few months of Ice Cream Sandwich becoming more widespread just as the crash reports looked at iOS 5.0 and 5.1.

Do you suffer from app crashes on a regular basis?

Posted by: Paul

HTC Refocusing? You bet.

HTC, the super Taiwanese High Tech Computer company is claiming it’s lost direction last year slightly and are pulling it back in to “refocus”.

According to UK boss Phil Robertson they “ended last year with more products then they started with and tried to do too much”.

They are going to get back to making amazing hardware and adopt the “hero” approach. If this means more products similar to the iconic Hero that was loved and followed then that’s a good move.

I must admit that being a fan of HTC I found it hard to keep up last year with the large number of handsets being released, it was like the design team were on high energy drinks!. The danger of this is that the market place waits to see what your doing next and you quite often miss out to a competitor. One thing many bloggers noted is that they have moved away from is the “one piece” aluminum shells they were gaining a good name for, the last few handsets have gone down the traditional pull off back system.

So what for the future?, well as they now have the majority share in Beats Technology I am sure we can expect some more high end “music” focused handsets along with new smarter version of Sense.

I am sure HTC as a brand has a long life span and will produce many more awesome handsets, they have certainly made their mark in the last three years since own branding.

Posted by: Paul