The smartphone industry is, slowly but surely, edging users away from the makers of standalone camera brands, with some of the biggest names in photography space forced to develop new strategies in order to adapt to the changing face of technology. You only have to look at Nokia's impressive 41-megapixel Lumia 1020 to realize just how much we value that lens on the rear side of our handsets nowadays, and in an attempt to cash in on the obsession with high-quality smartphone snappers, Sony looks to be prepping a lens attachment for both Android and Apple handsets.
Google only recently announced its new Chromecast streaming device, which, in a nutshell, attempts to turn your normal, run-of-the-mill HDTV into a modern, all-singing Smart TV. While the concept is great and the price - at just $35 - is even better, the streaming is options are somewhat limited, and besides Netflix, you can only really push content from YouTube or the Play Store. Of course, it won't always be this way, and we expect many other such services to bring support for Chromecast at some point in the future, but if you're the impatient kind and don't wish to wait for the updates, there's a little CyanogenMod tweak soon-to-be available that will let you stream from essentially any app.
It’s a no-brainer that loyal Samsung fans have September 4th penciled down in their diaries for quite some time, which is the rumored Galaxy Note 3 release date. We are getting to that time of the year when we are about to see product announcement and launch events happening from a number of large players in the technology scene, with Samsung being one of the biggest. It's widely expected that the South Korean electronics giant will introduce us to the third-generation Galaxy Note on the 4th of September but, like a lot of others, it's the potential specifications of the purported device that has whet our appetites.
Until Apple see fit to release of the next generation iPhone, which may be sooner than you think, the iPhone 5 is the hottest competition from the iOS camp for the Android flagships, the HTC One and the Samsung Galaxy S4. For this reason, if anyone is wanting to pick up an iPhone 5 in the coming weeks, you may want to think on it just a little bit. From my experience with both the HTC One and the iPhone 5, both are incredibly capable devices, but there is certainly enough differences to bring you 10 reasons which top the One above the 5. These can be found in the video embedded at the end of this post.
Every time Samsung drops a new flagship smartphone, the company seems to go that extra mile in ensuring that it packs some dazzling new features to entice the consumer market once more. In the case of the latest and greatest Galaxy S4, the South Korean outfit introduced Air Gesture, a smart little implementation which allows certain features to be controlled using basic hand movements above the device. Now, thanks to the great minds over at XDA-Developers, this kind of thing can be performed on a number of devices. Air Swiper is the name, and although, at this early stage, it's by no means without its flaws, it's definitely worth giving a shot.
It was back towards the end of June that Facebook announced some significant new implementations to Instagram for iOS and Android, bringing both apps up to version 4.0 with the introduction of a new, Vine-like video feature, also known as Instagram Video. Over the past six weeks, users have taken to the new feature like a duck to water, and now, version 4.1 is upon us. The update, which once again spans both iOS and Android, offers different alterations to each, with the most notable being an auto-straightening feature in the iOS iteration. Catch the full details after the break.
WhatsApp is one of the most popular cross-platform messaging apps and today, the company has delivered a solid update for the main platforms. The changes, which span iOS, Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry OS and Symbian, include a new feature which allows you to record and send a message with just one tap, making the whole service just that little bit more pleasurable. You can catch all of the details after the break!
Earlier on this year, there was much talk of Google making the jump from Android 4.2.x Jelly Bean to version 5.0, named Android Key Lime Pie. But soon after, it was revealed that there would be a stop-gap in the form of Android 4.3 Jelly Bean and thus, the blogosphere has focused its attentions towards this rather incremental release. With the search giant now having begun rolling 4.3 out to a number of stock Android smartphones and tablets, the Key Lime Pie patrol has resumed once again, and over on Google’s Chromium bug tracker, what looks to be a bug report of an unknown, future build has manifested.
Despite having improved dramatically in terms of overall usability during the course of the last year thanks to that Project Butter update with Jelly Bean 4.1, Android's malware situation remains very much its achilles heel. It seems that scarcely a week goes by without some kind of outbreak or discovery by a security firm, and today, a worrying security hole has been discovered.
Late last week, it emerged that the Galaxy Note 3, along with - possibly - a Samsung-made smart watch, named Galaxy Gear, could finally be shown off to the world at a special event to be held on September 4th. Given that the date has changed frequently over the past couple of months, we were slightly apprehensive in counting our chickens, but the South Korean outfit has just handed out invitations to another Unpacked event on that very date. The company will also be holding another event the following day that will see some other product launches, and although a smart watch would perhaps be a long shot, the press is sure to speculate from here on out.
