On Monday, Sony’s vice-president announced that the Galaxy Note 8.0 would be formally announced at this year’s Mobile World Congress at the end of February. Excitement has clearly gone around the company, enough for an alleged picture of the new device, as well as its hardware specifications, to leak online via a Twitter account of Spanish language classifieds website which has not hesitated to spread the word and win its fair share of publicity.
Last year's battle of the smartphones was all about Apple and Samsung, with the iPhone 5 and Galaxy S III proving to be the handsets of choice for a large percentage of consumers. Things aren't showing any signs of being different this year, as most of the chatter has once again been centered around when Apple will announce the next-generation iPhone and when Samsung will lift the lid of the specifications of the mysterious Galaxy S IV. The latest information leak across the web suggests that Samsung will strike first blood by holding a dedicated media event on March 22nd to discuss the next Galaxy S device in the 100 million selling series.
Google's Nexus 10 tablet has hit the ground running in tablet space, with the majority of consumers and reviewers giving it the proverbial seal of approval. It features a dual core Exynos 5 processor to keep things ticking over, and while, all told, it does a fairly good job in doing so, it does struggle to cope with the 2560×1600 display. At a time when quad-core processors are ever becoming the norm, it has been suggested that Google may be planning to slap the revered tablet with a quad-core SoC later on this year.
Samsung fans have plenty to look forward to this side of the summer, and the Korean company's Vice President has stepped out and confirmed the Galaxy Note 8.0 is to be unveiled at Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2013, which commences from 25th February. Perhaps the biggest date in the tech calendar besides CES, we'll be seeing plenty of new and exciting mobile gadgetry at the big event in little over a month, and although the Galaxy S IV will not be rearing its head late next month, Samsung's VP JK Shin has noted it will be arriving 'soon'.
If you take the slightest interest in politics or current affairs, you are likely aware that President Obama is being inaugurated for his second term today, in a ceremony that will drag the attention of large crowds in Washington, DC. But if you live in any other part of America, or the world, and are not able to join Obama in person, there is a new app for iOS and Android, made by the White House itself, which makes it easy for you to celebrate this occasion.
A few decades back, likely even before some of our site’s readers were born, Walkie-Talkies conquered the world, both as war devices and later children’s toys. While no longer trendy, GroupVox is looking to bringing them back to life by adapting the same concept of two-way audio communication to Facebook.
The beauty of Android is that it’s not just limited to one specific manufacturer or operating system variant, which gives it the real edge over Apple’s iOS. The iPhone in comparison has only one company behind it, and while their work so far has been nothing sort of stellar (I am talking the sales volumes here – no judgment), the open source nature of Android and the large manufacturer support behind it makes the platform far more diverse and unique, not to mention variable. The availability of multiple OEMs not only impacts the buyers’ choices and hardware diversification, but also impacts the software side of things. How? HTC has its Sense theme, Sony came up with Timescape. Samsung favors TouchWiz and Motorola cooked up MotoBlur, just to name a few Android skins.
One of the most distinguishing features of Android, among it being open source and much rapidly developing as compared to its major competitor, iOS, is the ability to use widgets. Not only they decorate the launcher’s home screen aesthetically, but also provide much needed functionality without the need to launch the applications that they cater to themselves.
The powerful and extremely well thought of XBMC software has often been thought of as a complete media center solution for the Windows, OS X and Linux platforms, but thanks to some incredibly hard work from the people over at XBMC, it looks like we can reliably add Android to that list of supported platforms. We've been hearing about Android pre-release and nightly builds of XBMC for quite some time, so we knew it was in the works, but the team has officially announced what they call the "first end-user friendly release of XBMC for Android".
Ever wanted a Galaxy Note tablet that's a little smaller than the 10.1 offering that's currently on sale? Want to take advantage of the S Pen but the Galaxy Note smartphone just a little too small? You may be in luck.

