Lucian ArmasuSenior Writer

There has been quite an uproar over HTC announcing that its One X and One X+ flagships from 2012 won’t be receiving any updates anymore, and for good reason. Its latest update was Android 4.2.2, which arrived more than a year ago. I find it unacceptable that we’re not getting updates at the very least […]

It turns out Mobile Kepler is not just the most advanced mobile GPU by far thanks to its full OpenGL 4.4 API support, but according to a recent GFXBench benchmak, it’s also the fastest GPU, and not just compared to other mobile GPUs like the ones we find in Nexus 5 or iPhone 5S and […]

Although the previous Intel Atom architecture was only 32-bit and had some hard limitations baked in it, the new one supports both 32-bit and the 64-bit extensions, just like Intel’s other chips, although for the very first versions of this architecture, the 64-bit extension seems to have been disabled (probably to save cost, and because […]

Sony said last year that it’s not going to focus on the US market for a while, but it seems they have plans to return to the US market soon, and also has big plans for 2015 to sell up to 80 million smartphones, as it “puts more resources into the U.S. and Chinese markets.” Sony […]

Lenovo is the world’s largest PC manufacturer right now, who’s also taken a lot of interest in making Android tablets and phones lately, but its president has arrived at the conclusion that Android will never work combined with Windows. That’s actually not very different from what I’ve already said. “I don’t see it [Intel’s Android on […]

Qualcomm has recently announced 4 chips that’s going to use in 2014 (they may still launch new ones towards the end of the year, though): Snapdragon 410, Snapdragon 802, Snapdragon 805, and Snapdragon 602A. Snapdragon 410 This chip is composed of a 64-bit quad-core 1.2 Ghz Cortex A53 CPU, which is the successor of the quad-core […]

Sony has recently announced the PlayStation Now project, which is a way for Sony to stream PlayStation games to people on TVs, tablets and even smartphones. However, apparently there’s a catch: you need a DualShock 3 controller in order to play these games. For the PS4 and the PSVita, you can obviously use their own […]

Qualcomm has revealed to a Japanese publication that the first devices with its new Snapdragon 805 chip will start appearing in May this year. That sounds like it should be ready just in time for some new flagships such as the Galaxy S5 and HTC One Plus (or whatever HTC’s new flagship will be called). […]

The year 2014 should be the year of 4GB of RAM inside high-end mobile devices, and it’s not by coincidence that we’re also going to see the first 64-bit chips to support that much memory this year. Nvidia has apparently made a new Tegra Note 7 reference tablet that comes with the new Tegra K1 […]

So far we’ve only really seen low-end sub-$300 Chromebooks (if you don’t count the first-gen Atom-based Chromebooks that had terrible performance and cost $400 or more, that is) and the one and only Chromebook Pixel that costs something like $1,300 or more. There hasn’t really been a mid-range option that offers not just a good […]

It seems Sony’s almost entire 2014 line-up is getting leaked, and after we got some rumors about the Sony Sirius smartphone flagship, it’s now turn for their high-end tablet, called “Castor”, which seems like the successor to the Xperia Z tablet. The tablet will apparently come with many of the same specs as the Sirius […]

PowerVR Series6 is Imagination’s new unified shader and OpenGL ES 3.0 compatible GPU architecture, and was launched last year, and most famously used in the iPhone 5S, iPad Air and iPad Mini. This year at CES, they’ve just launched the improved PowerVR Series6XT, which should be roughly 50 percent more powerful than the previous series […]

The 4k TVs, or rather the UHD TVs (if you want to be really accurate about it), are coming, but RCA is going to do more than just launch some regular UHD TVs. It’s going to launch some with the Android TV platform (formerly known as Google TV), which apparently is going to come out […]

Google has just announced the Open Automotive Alliance, which is formed mainly of some car partners but also component suppliers like Nvidia (and of course, Google). It’s meant to do what the Open Handset Alliance has done for the mobile market, and that is to bring manufacturers with different goals and opinions under the same […]

Around here, we’ve always thought Android has the potential to one day power most of the world’s computing devices, but from the outside that’s also been quite hard to believe (maybe because they didn’t want to believe it). Gartner is starting to confirm some of those predictions, saying that Android will run on 1.1 billion […]

It seems All-in-Ones are starting to get increasingly popular, at least with manufacturers like Lenovo, who has just announced its ThinkVision AIO at CES. The ThinkVision is a 28″ AIO with a 3840 x 2160 resolution (UHD, or the so called “4k” resolution), that will be powered by a Tegra 4 chip and cost $1,200. […]

It’s no secret that Intel has found little success in the mobile market, considering they are typically behind in performance/price/battery life ratio compared to ARM chips, and their Atom chips are also typically a generation behind in both CPU and GPU performance, too. Therefore, OEMs have no reason to pick Intel over any of the […]

Qualcomm wasn’t about to just let Samsung and Nvidia own that portion of the tablet market that is stylus-enabled. Samsung has been the dominant player in the stylus market for years, because they were the only ones to make pens that actually worked accurately enough to be useful for handwriting and drawing on a tablet. […]

Here’s some good news in early 2014 about the whole NSA mass spying situation – companies that are building ultra-secure smartphones are starting to pop-up, because now they will have a substantial market of people, not just from government officials, who I’m sure will take their mobile conversations’ security a lot more seriously from now […]

Mediatek has been on a roll lately, especially since not only have many of the other chip makers (with the exception of Qualcomm), almost given up on the high-end chip market (Nvidia, Samsung, TI), but the low-end market has also been completely ignored by the better known chip makers. This allowed Mediatek to become entrenched […]

Finally, we’re going to see an open source video codec take over the web and video streaming. Google has just announced a huge list of important hardware partners that will be adopting the open source VP9 video codec in 2014 and 2015, which includes: ARM, Broadcom, Intel, LG, Marvell, MediaTek, Nvidia, Panasonic, Philips, Qualcomm, RealTek, Samsung, […]

The 12.2″ Galaxy Note tablet from Samsung has been rumored for almost a year, but this year we may finally see it, and soon, too. What we don’t know so far, though, is any of its specs. According to a new rumor, the 12.2″ Galaxy Note Pro will arrive with a Snapdragon 800 and 3GB […]

It was only a matter of time before smartphones started hurting every camera maker in the industry, and according to a new report from Reuters, only the 3 big ones will survive, mostly thanks to their entrenched branding:  “Only those who have a strong brand and are competitive on price will last — and only […]

According to Digi-Wo, a website that has released many Sony leaks before, Sony will be releasing a new flagship called Sirius at CES about a week from now, and they are also preparing another one codenamed Canopus for May, next year. The Sirius model is apparently arriving with a Snapdragon 800 processor (could be a […]

Several companies and organizations have started to work on projects that are trying to emulate the human brain, and all are doing it in different ways. One of the companies working on this sort of project is Qualcomm, who’s trying to develop a neuromorphic processor, that doesn’t need any programming or instructions, and it can […]

Chromebooks started showing up a few years ago, but they were never more than a very niche product. They really started taking off about a year and a half ago with the ARM-based Samsung Chromebook, which stayed as #1 bestseller in Amazon’s computer category for a whole year. Part of what made that Chromebook so […]

We may be about to experience the “phablet” effect, but this time in tablets, rather than phones. According to new leaks, Samsung is going to unveil not one, but two 12.2″ tablets with a 2560×1600 resolution. For people who thought that 10.1″ tablets are a little too crammed, especially if you want to use them with […]

XiaoMi has some very popular products in China, but part of that popularity is due to their own artificial scarcity strategy of releasing new models only for a short period of time. But as any company that wants to grow bigger, that strategy can only work for so long if it’s the only strategy employed […]

Canonical has just released a method for dual-booting Ubuntu Touch and Android on your phone. You’ll be able to flash Ubuntu Touch on the phone, but you’ll need to use Ubuntu on your desktop PC, and you’ll need to be able to use command lines. For this reason, Canonical recommends only people who are developers […]

Jolla is a company that was formed by former Nokia employees in Finland, soon after Nokia announced it’s going to kill its Meego operating system, and go with Windows Phone 7 instead. What came out of that is Jolla’s Sailfish OS, that is being used on the phone being launched now. Sailfish OS is based […]

New leaks point to some benchmarks of a Huawei Honor 3C that managed to reach a pretty impressive score for its $160 price range (the 2GB version being benchmarked). The AnTuTu score below shows that its performance is somewhere between Nexus 4 and Galaxy S3. I don’t think benchmarks are as reliable as they used to […]

LTE is rapidly becoming a big market in China, where Huawei is from, so it’s no surprise that they intend to adopt the latest LTE technology (Cat 6) into their chips as soon as possible, and not let competitors like Qualcomm take too much of the market before they do. Huawei is also selling a […]

Qualcomm has enjoyed quite a smooth ride over the past few years, especially since they started integrating LTE into their SoC’s, which has had a huge effect on Qualcomm’s sales in LTE-based markets, but also in other markets because of the free publicity and popularity that Qualcomm’s chips received in the press. While I think […]

Asus has been launching hybrid notebooks with Android for almost 3 years now, and they’ve been quite great at the time. If anything, it’s the software and Android’s less than ideal UX for tablets (which I think is still a problem), that have kept those devices from flying off the shelves. The fact that Google […]

We’re fast approaching the end of Moore’s Law – at least as it was originally described (doubling the number of transistors in the same space, every 18-24 months), because we’re getting close to having only a fewatoms per transistor. So it makes sense that we won’t be able to make transistors smaller than one or […]

The ROM Manager, Koush’ very popular app for managing and installing custom roms, has been pulled from the Play Store by Google, because apparently Koush was still using Paypal for in-app purchases, instead of Google Wallet. Google introduced in-app purchases with Google Wallet 2 years ago, so it’s not like he had an excuse about […]

Whatsapp is already one of the most popular ways to communicate with friends on mobile devices, especially when you’re talking cross-platform communication. Today they’re announcing that they’ve reached a new milestone of 400 million active users (meaning the users are using it at least once every month), which is up 100 million from just 4 […]

T-mobile might’ve just sparked a revolution in the US with its “un-carrier” strategy – a revolution for how carriers are going to sell the devices on their network in the future. Instead of continuing to sell devices on contract, and subsidize a good chunk of the price, carriers may be looking to sell them off-contract, […]

Privacy is the word of the year, according to Dictionary.com, which comes as no surprise after all the NSA revelations (one of the latest being that they’re tracking you through cookies), the requests for reforming privacy laws, but also as part of a bigger trend towards taking back the privacy of our communications with apps […]

There used to be a time when stock Android devices could be narrowed down to a single Nexus device coming out every 12 months. Starting with this year, the number of options seems to have multiplied dramatically. This year alone we’ve got: HTC One GPE, Galaxy S4 GPE, Nexus 7, Nexus 5, LG G Pad […]

The Oppo Find 7 phablet has been rumored before to come with a 2.5k resolution (2560×1440), but now it has been officially confirmed that it will have a 5.7″ screen with a 2560×1440 resolution, which resolves to 515 PPI. Hopefully Oppo can increase the battery size, too, to make sure it has battery life that is […]

Samsung is trying to get all of its bases covered, and it’s now said to try and address the elderly market, too, with devices that are a little more optimized for this market. The first device for this is going to be the Samsung Galaxy Core Advance, which is actually not supposed to be that much […]

You can check the bill of materials of smartphones and tablets over the years, and you’ll notice the component price drops by about 30 percent every year, which means the same component will cost half as much two years later, and only a quarter of the original price, four years later (or four times that […]

Sony Xperia E has been one of the better low-end 120-140 euro smartphones in Europe (Moto G is more like 180-200 euro in Europe, in comparison). It didn’t have much, but other than the 512 MB of RAM, I thought it had the absolute minimum amount of specs for what an Android phone should have […]

According to Google, “every touch-based mobile browser, across platforms, has an artificial ~300ms delay between you tapping a thing on the screen and the browser considering it a click”. Google has managed to remove this huge 300ms delay for mobile-optimized websites in the beta version of Chrome for Android, version 32, but this improvement will of […]

According to Bloomberg, Google is “considering designing its own server processors using technology from ARM.” This move could endanger a big portion of Intel’s revenue in the future, as Google alone accounts for almost 5 percent of it. Google is one of Intel’s biggest customers right now, considering just how many servers Google has and how […]

Android has given not just big phone makers an opportunity to sell even more phones, but also small companies an opportunity to become strong rivals to the big players in the market. One such company is the Indian-based Micromax, that was created only 5 years ago, and yet in this short amount of time it […]

Android smartphone cameras have been criticized for a long time. No one really knows why Android devices keep having bad cameras overall (at least until more recently), but two main reasons for that could be that 1) Android OEM’s just cared more about spec bullet lists, so it was more important to them to say […]

We’ve already seen devices coming to market and using the Qi wireless charging standard, and there’s also the Power 2.0 standard, but soon we’re about to see a third one, called the Rezence standard, from the Alliance for Wireless Power (A4WP). These consortiums know that there’s a lot of money to be gained from licensing their […]

Even though Google greatly improved the photo editor in the Gallery app on the Nexus 5, it seems that going forward, that app is going to be replaced with Google+ Photos. This comes from both Google’s mission to get users to use Google+ more, but also from the many requests of Android users asking for the […]

The Federal Patent Court in Germany, a country that’s usually very friendly towards patents, has invalidated Microsoft’s FAT patent, which was by far the most important weapon in Microsoft’s arsenal against Android OEMs, especially after Barnes & Noble almost destroyed their other “important” patents that they were using against Android manufacturers, in their lawsuit with […]

We’ve heard rumors of a Galaxy Tab 3 Lite recently, and now we are getting some rumors about its specs, too, although they’re nothing to write home about, unless this tablet will cost something like $99, which given Samsung’s recent chase after increased profits, seems very unlikely. The Galaxy Tab 3 Lite tablet will come […]

The LG G2 isn’t exactly one of the smaller phones around, and I think LG knew that from the beginning, too. Although they’ve tried to make the bezels as small as possible, the phone itself with its 5.2″ screen still ended up a little too big for most people. A new rumor says that LG […]

Qualcomm may soon jump on the 64-bit chip bandwagon, too, according to a new report that says they are working not only on ARMv8 chips, but also on octa-core chips (which are presumably also based on the 64-bit ARMv8 architecture). However, you shouldn’t get your hopes up too much because these chips probably won’t arrive […]

The LG G2 has been one of the most successful LG flagships, however, according to a new report, it’s still significantly less than what LG expected. The LG G2 sales have barely broken 600,000 in South Korea, which is only about 10 percent more than what the Optimus G Pro sold early this year in […]

The old Electronic Communications Privacy Act is a 25 year old law that covers privacy online, but unfortunately it was written at a time when the Internet wasn’t exactly very popular (it was in its early days), and it gives less privacy for online communications than you would get in the real world for phone calls […]

Sprint may have received quite a bit of criticism for offering the Nexus 5 for $100 more than Google’s Play Store pricing, and now they’re working to redress some of those complaints, by adding unlimited talk and text, along with 1 GB of data, all free for 12 months, if you buy the Nexus 5 […]

Over the past 2 years or so, Android has managed to maintain its market share in US at around 50% or so. It has gone down as low as 45% in some seasons, or as high as 55% in others, but overall it has remained around 50-52%, with Apple at around 40 percent (although this […]

Pantech has just revealed another one of this smartphones from the “Secrete” series, called Secrete Up, that comes with a fingerprint sensor and side-snooping protection (harder to see what’s on the screen from the side) as its special features. It also has a 5.6″ 1080p screen, Snapdragon 800, 2 GB of RAM, 16 GB of storage, […]

Samsung and LG are both working on a big change to their touch panels, that will reduce the cost of the panels by 30% (especially for flexible displays). They intend to replace the indium tin oxide touch panels with metal mesh ones. This has several other benefits besides the much lower cost, too, such as making […]