Latest Articles
360-degree video. Next to the holodeck, it really is the holy grail of next-generation viewing. The possibilities are seemingly endless - can you imagine a 360-degree video drone copter buzzing around a basketball arena or providing live coverage of a protest in a foreign land? A submarine wading through the depths, giving you the complete ability to pan around the undersea world? And unlike 3D or other crazy video tech, you don't even need a special TV - just a way to control the current area of focus in the video. You could even play it back on a smartphone, couldn't you?
It seems we're awash in fitness and activity trackers of late, and Kickstarter has been home to a number of such devices in the past year. FlyFit, another such product, just surpassed its $90,000 funding goal this morning, so backers should hopefully be seeing a product at some point.
Looking to pick up a 2013 Nexus 7 on the cheap? If you head [ebay id="121265127023" text="on over to eBay Daily Deals"], you'll find a refurb in 32GB trim for just $190, $10 less than the previous lowest we've seen.
Update: Developer Wanam has confirmed on Twitter that the code responsible for the "boosting" behavior has been removed in the Android 4.4 ROMs for both the Note 3 and Galaxy S4.
Update: Motorola Senior Director of Software Management David Schuster has confirmed that wide rollout of the update will begin tomorrow morning.
According to Marques Brownlee, voice to text dictation is coming to the desktop version of Google Docs. Check out these screenshots allegedly showing the feature in action, below.
At this year's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, three Android smartphone unveilings really did stand above the rest: Sony's Xperia Z2, LG's G Pro 2, and Samsung's Galaxy S5.
Samsung unveiled literally three smartwatches at MWC this year. If that tells you anything, it should be this: the company is desperate to make a wearable product stick in the marketplace. It will do anything to whittle down the form factor, price point, and functionality consumers are most responsive to. And thus, we now have 3 Gear devices to choose from - the Gear 2, the Gear 2 Neo, and the Gear Fit - Samsung is taking its shotgun approach to the smartphone market and inundating you with wearable choices, hopefully enough choices that you will actually choose to buy one
Whether you like it or not, there's little doubting that the Galaxy S5 was the star of the show at this year's Mobile World Congress. Samsung had the largest press event, the most crowded booth, and the most hype built up leading into the show. It doesn't matter if it's still plastic, if it's still running TouchWiz, or that it's still arguably one of the uglier flagship devices on the market - this phone obviously matters a lot. Samsung is going to sell tens of millions of these things a matter of months after they launch, and because of that, we're taking a special focus on the S5 during our MWC coverage.
When I saw the prototype YotaPhone last year at CES 2013, I was legitimately impressed with the concept - a smartphone with a standard, full-color display on the front, and a black and white e-ink panel on the back. The applications, functional and aesthetic alike, were not difficult to see.
I've long had no issue admitting my inability to get excited about Sony's smartphone products. Often, they're too late to market here in the US, have specifications that while competitive are rarely groundbreaking, and really do very little on the software feature front. When I saw the Xperia Z1 at IFA last year, I just wasn't all that impressed - Sony's flagship still suffered from ridiculous screen viewing angle issues, and the UI felt almost no different from what Sony shipped with Ice Cream Sandwich.
You've probably read by now that Nokia's making Android phones. Sort of. And I'm sure there are all sorts of analysts, experts, and other people trying to scream at you collectively that this means something. Nokia's changing directions. Nokia's making Android a backup if the Microsoft merger doesn't go through. Nokia's Android is going to finally end Google's dominance in the world of cheap smartphones!
Nokia unveiled its long-awaited Android-powered phone today, but in something of a twist, it turned out to be not just one device, but three! As expected, the Nokia X, X+, and XL all run software based on the Android Open Source Project, but that software looks very little like Android in most respects. Like Amazon's Fire OS, Nokia's "X" Android fork eschews all of Google's various products and services in favor of a heavily modified user experience and custom app ecosystem.
I honestly think the YotaPhone was one of the coolest smartphone innovations of 2013, and while I wouldn't exactly be the first in line to buy a device from an unproven OEM, Yota Devices has once again piqued my curiosity with their announcement of the "next generation" YotaPhone here at MWC.
Snapdragon 800, you say? Old hat, dear readers. Meet Snapdragon 801 - it's the Snapdragon 800 you've come to know and love, plus one. With Qualcomm's flagship mobile chip having had over a year since its announcement at CES 2013 - and no definitive successor in sight - it seems the world's #1 ARM chip vendor thought it would be wise to give the 800 a bit of a facelift for the first half of 2013.
LG's latest and largest handset was announced ahead of MWC last week in Korea, but for most of the world Barcelona will have marked its public debut. LG's rather unabashed Note competitor is back again this year, although the spec sheet won't exactly blow most people away - a 5.9" HD IPS panel, quad-core Snapdragon 800, 3GB of RAM, 13MP rear camera with OIS, and 3200mAh removable battery get high marks for high-end components, but do little to separate the G Pro 2 from a growing pack of mega-sized phones.
