News

Samsung Galaxy Note 8.0 now available to buy from the Samsung Experience store in London

Samsung Mobile UK has today announced that customers in the UK are now able to buy the Galaxy Note 8.0 from the Samsung Experience Store at Westfield Stratford City with other channels to follow. Ultra portable thanks to its 8″ screen size, the Galaxy Note 8.0 comes pre-loaded with a suite of new content and services worth over £60, at no extra cost to the customer*.

The new mid-size tablet, together with a suite of intuitive features and an evolved S Pen, gives you the ease of using a traditional pen and paper with speed, efficiency and accuracy. Features include a suite of S Note templates and tools that allow you to create, edit, manage and share documents, as well as seamless multi-tasking thanks to Quick Command, continuous text input and Multi-Window View which means the portable 8″ screen can be split and used to access a number of live applications at the same time.

A range of S-Pen apps, including Paper Artist and Photo Note, mean you can be creative wherever you are, whether on the commute to work, on holiday or sat on your living room sofa. The new Reading Mode makes it easier to read e-books, magazines and newspapers as you can optimise the settings to create the most comfortable reading experience, plus you can annotate, highlight, cut and paste text.

A New Nexus 7 inbound?

Rumour has it the next generation of Nexus 7 would still be from Asus and would likely come with a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor instead of the current NVIDIA Tegra processor. A new report from Reuters confirms a lot of the speculation. According to their sources, the new Nexus 7 will again be made by Asus and will launch in July of this year. Furthermore, the new tablet will be coming with the Qualcomm Snapdragon instead of NVIDIA tech. Here’s a quote with more info,

Quote:

The latest version will have a higher screen resolution, a thinner bezel design and adopt Qualcomm’s chip in place of Nvidia Corp’s Tegra 3, which was used in the first Nexus 7s released last year, the sources said, declining to be identified because they are not authorized to speak to the media.
In a blow to Nvidia, Google weighed both U.S. chipmakers’ processors but finally decided on Qualcomm’s for power reasons, one of the sources added.

If this report turns out to be accurate, it probably doesn’t come as a surprise. NVIDIA is great at making powerful processors and GPUs but Qualcomm is just flat out better at building a more power efficient product right now. Additionally, there is speculation Google is planning a price drop for the tablet to just £149.99(ish). Right now their pricing plans are in flux and they may stick with their current plan, but if there is a price drop it will likely be an attempt to increase sales of the Nexus 7 to put even more market pressure on Amazon and Apple. Here’s another quote with more of the details:

What? No chargers from O2

O2 will extend its “Chargers out of the Box” environmental initiative to the flagship HTC One mobile handset. This is the first time a network and manufacturer have collaborated to sell a flagship smartphone without the charging unit.

The all new HTC One will be sold with a USB-to-micro-USB cable, which can be used with existing chargers that have a USB input or with a PC USB slot. Any customers who need to buy a standalone charger unit can do so in-store or online at a discounted price.

In October 2012, O2 and HTC created a pilot scheme in which an HTC handset was sold charger-free. Of all customers buying the handset, 82% did so without taking the handset. The success of the pilot has given both businesses the confidence to apply the initiative more widely.

Looking for a bargain SIM free smartphone? Here’s some beauties

The guys over at Expansys dropped me a line today to let us know they have a great selection of bargain SIM free smartphones ranging from just under £200 and all under the £300 mark. If you fancy some phone shopping check out the links below:

A look at the American BlackBerry Z10 launch

Posted by: James

Samsung Galaxy S4 UK processor clarified

This one’s just clearing up a wee bit of confusion that may have been surrounding the Samsung Galaxy S4. Just to clarify in case you were not aware the device will have a quad-core processor not an octa-core as originally expected.

Expansys have the SGS4 up for pre-order if you fancy picking up one SIM free – and it looks to be a real monster!

You can catch the full specs of the Samsung Galaxy S4 below.

My Star Wars role

Just a few hours ago you may have seen news that Star Trek legend and actor William Shatner will appear with a role in the new Star Wars Episode VII. This is something of a turn around after Shatner went on record calling director JJ Abrams a ‘pig’ for hogging both Star Wars and Star Trek.

I am finally pleased to announce that I too will have a role in the up coming Star Wars movie playing the part of a Astromech Droid called UR-DooDoo.

Sadly it wont be the first time that a Star Wars movie was full of Shat.

Posted by: Matt

HTC’s new head of EMEA

HTC has just appointed a new head of EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa), Phil Blair. Philip was previously product director for Europe Previous roles as Head of Handset Commercialisation at Orange, and as a consultant with PA Consulting.

HTC, a global leader in smartphone innovation, has today announced the appointment of Phil Blair as its new Head of EMEA. Previously Vice President of Product and Operations for the region, Phil has been with the company since it launched in EMEA in 2005 and has worked closely with Florian Seiche as co-founder during that time to grow the business to where it is today. Replacing Florian, who has made the decision to leave the company, Phil will be responsible for leading HTC’s strategic growth across EMEA, in addition to heading up the UK arm of the business. Phil’s depth of experience in the smartphone market, intrinsic understanding of mobile products and long-standing relationships with key industry partners put him in a strong position to create new opportunities for the business, taking HTC into its next phase of growth. We would like to thank Florian for his commitment to the company and to wish him well in his future endeavours.

Posted by: Matt

Metal Gear Solid 5: Ground Zeroes/Phantom Pain announced

Metal Gear Solid is one of the best and longest standing gaming series and has a huge fan base to boot, so you would imagine that the announcement from GDC 2013 has got the community all excited.

As you will see In the title there are Im fact two separate titles for what initially seemed to be one game, but Konami have moved to quash the rumour mill by announcing that there are two separate games that make up to Metal Gear Solid 5, named Ground Zeroes and Phantom Pain – this is definitely an interesting decision from Kojima productions but i imagine they will pull it off with very few hitches as Kojima himself is a perfectionist.

Sony Xperia Tablet Z expected in stock mid May

Expansys dropped me a line today to let us know that the Xperia Tablet Z is (hopefully) going to be in stock with them on May 17th – although these dates do change sometimes.

Pricing is not yet confirmed but there will be a range of devices including a 4G variant.

More news as we get it.

Posted by: James