Nokia starts rolling out Symbian Belle, Mac users left out in the cold

Yesterday evening Nokia announced that users of Symbian Anna devices can now update to the newest version of the operating system, Symbian Nokia Belle (see video below). Seeing as how I got my girlfriend a pink Nokia N8 for her birthday last autumn, I told her to rush over to my place with her smartphone and a microUSB cable so we could begin the update process. It’s not that I didn’t trust her to do it herself, I just wanted to see first hand what Nokia Belle looks like on … Read more

2 days ago

Stefan Constantinescu

HTC Ville smiles for the camera … again [Said to pack a Qualcomm S4 processor inside]

HTC’s Ville is quickly becoming one of the worst kept secrets in the mobile industry. Last week a video surfaced on the internets showing off the unannounced smartphone, and while it was good enough to demonstrate how thin the Ville is, it wasn’t exactly what one would call sharp. Now though, thanks to the Chinese website ePrice, we have four new images of the Ville that are bright as day and paint a good picture of what we can expect. In short, it’s the HTC Sensation that was announced last … Read more

3 days ago

Stefan Constantinescu

Apple’s Vice President of iPhone and iPod engineering leaves the company

David Tupman, another Apple employee who not many people know about, has just left the company. His last title at Apple before resigning was “Vice President of iPhone and iPod engineering”, he has over 70 patents in his name, and he spent over a decade at what is now considered the world’s biggest smartphone vendor. Now people leave companies for various reasons, so we don’t want to suggest that he got bored of Apple or didn’t agree with the where the company was going with the iPhone, but unless this … Read more

3 days ago

Stefan Constantinescu

Russian operator awards guy who used nearly half a terabyte of data in one week

As operators around the world look to curb people’s data usage by rolling out confusing pricing plans or just simply raising their rates, things are going a little bit differently in Russia. MegaFon, the third largest operator in the country, recently held a contest whereby the person who could use the most amount of data would be awarded with a 150,000 ruble ($5,000) vacation overseas. With the way temperatures have plummeted across all of Europe, Thailand looks like the place to be right now. Anyway, the winner was someone who … Read more

3 days ago

Stefan Constantinescu

Samsung hosting an event on March 22nd in France, is that when we’ll see the Galaxy S III?

Earlier this month Samsung announced that they would not be showing off the Samsung Galaxy S III at Mobile World Congress. Their reasoning was that it doesn’t make sense to announce a device so early in the year when it’s due to hit store shelves during the end of the second quarter. Some of you guys freaked out, but we tried to remind you of what happened in 2011: Samsung announced the Galaxy S II in February, it hit Europe in May, and then it finally launched in America during … Read more

3 days ago

Stefan Constantinescu

Nokia 801: Are they seriously going to release a Symbian device that looks like the Lumia 800?

It’s bad enough that the Nokia Lumia 800 looks exactly like the Nokia N9, now rumors suggest that Nokia is going to release a Symbian running device called the Nokia 801. Said smartphone is a picture perfect image of the N9 and Lumia 800, except that it has a 4 inch screen that does 640 x 360 pixels, 12 megapixel camera, and will be the first Symbian device that can record 1080p video. Under the hood there’s a 1.4 GHz processor paired up with 512 MB of RAM, though we … Read more

3 days ago

Stefan Constantinescu

HTC: Our Q1 2012 revenues are going to be down by about 36%, we just have to keep on hustlin’

With hindsight we can pinpoint the exact day when HTC’s demise began: April 12, 2011. That’s the day that the HTC Sensation was announced, the device that on paper was better than Samsung’s Galaxy S II, but in reality was an incredibly disappointing pile of plastic, metal, and glass. Two quarters after the Sensation hit the market, the Taiwanese handset vendor posted their first profit decline in two years. That slump is only going to continue according to Reuters, who reports that HTC is expecting revenues to be up to … Read more

4 days ago

Stefan Constantinescu

Apple A5 has custom noise canceling circuitry on the actual chip itself

One key difference between smartphones running Android and the Apple iPhone is that the former depends on processors from the likes of Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, or NVIDIA, while the latter builds their processors in-house. Now this wasn’t always the case. The first few iPhones used off the shelf chips designed and manufactured by Samsung, but starting with the iPhone 4S, which has the A5 chip inside, things began to change. When the folks at EE|Times took a look at the die plan (think of it like the blueprint) of the … Read more

4 days ago

Stefan Constantinescu

Leak: ASUS TF300T found in Taiwan, is this the Transformer Prime successor?

A little over a year ago, at CES 2011, ASUS announced an Android tablet called the Transformer. What made it special was that you could dock it into a keyboard and essentially use it as a laptop. The first Transformer hit the Asian market in March, and one month later it showed up in both Europe and America. It had the model number TF101. Several months later, in November, ASUS announced the successor: the Transformer Prime. Same idea as the older model, but now with a much better industrial design … Read more

4 days ago

Stefan Constantinescu

LightSquared caught trying to bribe a senator from Iowa

LightSquared is a wireless operator run by a hedge fund. Chances are you haven’t heard of them because, well … their network hasn’t actually launched yet. They’ve been wanting to build a wireless network for about 18 months now, but the problem is that the spectrum they want to use to build said network sits way too close to the spectrum that GPS devices use to get a signal from the satellites up in space. Early testing showed that GPS receivers within a 20 mile radius of a LightSquared cell … Read more

4 days ago

Stefan Constantinescu

Dish Network is asking the FCC to ignore AT&T’s attempts to interfere with their network

Dish Network owns 40 MHz of of spectrum in the 2 GHz band that they want to use to build an LTE-Advanced network. Before they can do that though, they need to get the green light from the FCC. Why? Because that spectrum was meant to be used for a satellite based network, not a terrestrial one, à la those that a traditional operator would build. This obviously has AT&T’s panties in a bunch since they don’t want more competition. In fact, they even wrote a letter to the FCC … Read more