Mobile Devices, Tablets & Phones News - Page 304

"They love the display. They love the camera for FaceTime. They love that they can connect anywhere they go on Wi-Fi or cellular. They love iPad's legendary all day battery life. And they love all of the amazing apps optimized for iPad." Apple says that the iPad accounts for 91 percent of the tablet web traffic.

In June, Apple say they sold more iPads than any PC maker shipped PCs. Bragging about how the iPad is great in education, they are now announcing the latest version of iBooks Author.

Now Tim Cook has moved onto the business sector saying that "almost every company in the Fortune 500 is now testing or deploying iPad, and we're seeing a similar success in smaller business." "We've got some really cool stuff to show you, and to do that I'd like to welcome Phil back up on the stage."

Today is another big day for Apple as not only are they currently the only website authorized to host the new Iron Man 3 trailer, but it's a day where all techies around the world will sitting at their desk waiting to hear what the company has up their sleeve this time. Judging by the rumor mill for the past six months, it looks like we're going to be hearing about Apple's iPad mini.

Apple's event is set to kick off at 10 a.m. PDT and normally, you'd have to be sitting at your desk following a handful of live-blogs from outlets who were lucky enough to receive an invite to the event. Apparently this isn't just any normal event as Apple will be live-streaming the event for Apple TV owners, iOS device owners and users of Apple's Safari browser.

The following URLs should go live once the event begins at 10 a.m. PDT:

Playing games on iOS and Android have been as common as checking your Facebook or Twitter as nearly everyone with a smartphone and some spare time have played at least one game on their device. For those who take their gaming a little more serious, on-screen controls aren't ideal, especially when it comes to first-person shooters like Gameloft's N.O.V.A. series. PowerA's MOGA will finally give gamers the control they want when they game on their mobile device, and best of all, it's available right now.

The MOGA Mobile Gaming System is compatible with only Android devices right now running Android 2.3 and above and will house your Android device of choice within the top bracket, which may be a familiar angle for you Nintendo DS & 3DS owners.

The MOGA uses bluetooth to connect to your Android device, features dual-analog sticks, four face buttons, two shoulder buttons and a start and select button. It also already has some serious developer support as big-name game developers like Gameloft, SEGA, Atari and Namco Bandai have already updated games like N.O.V.A. 3, Sonic CD and Dungeon Hunter 3. The MOGA Pivot app will allow users of the controller to find games that have been optimized in one easy location.

Well, HTC is about to get a whole lot more awesome with the release of their "DLX" smartphone, which is headed to Verizon. We heard about this last week as the J Butterfly which is headed to the Japanese market.

HTC's DLX is the company's 5-inch smartphone, which sports a 1080p display. Along with its awesome high-res display, we're pleasured to see Qualcomm's Snapdragon S4 quad-core processor clocked at 1.5GHz, 1.5GB of RAM, 1.5GB of internal storage, a 12-megapixel rear-facing camera, and 2,500mAh battery.

Software wise, something else great to see is that the DLX will come with Android 4.1 Jelly Bean out of the box. The above specs are according to the smartphone's spec sheet, but the pictures from today's report point to 2GB of RAM, which could spice things up just a bit. DLX is also 4G LTE-capable, and should be on Verizon in the near future.

Google didn't have the day they wanted to yesterday, seeing their shares drop around 10% within under an hour of their earnings report hitting the market. But, during the Mountain View-based company's Q3 2012 earnings call, CEO Larry Page plugged their recently-announced Chromebook, as well as the Nexus 7.

Page told the assembled investors, press and analysts on the call that they should "all run out and buy the Nexus 7 for $199". Page stated:

I switch between my Nexus phone, Nexus 7 tablet and my new Chromebook that we just announced today many times a day.

Samsung Galaxy S III owners in the US have probably been wondering when their flagship smartphone would be getting the amazing Android 4.1 Jelly Bean OS, but there's some good news and unfortunately, some bad news.

The good news is that it's on its way and will arrive in the coming months, the bad news is that you'll still have to wait for those "coming months". Samsung would most likely be trapped from releasing it by the carriers, where they'll each have to finalize the update before shipping it to the public.

The update to the US Galaxy S III will bring over the usual Jelly Bean goodness like Project Butter and Google Now, and some new TouchWiz-based enhancements such as Blocking Mode, Easy Mode and a few new camera settings.

Japanese site Blog of Mobile have published images what they're claiming to be Chinese device maker Huawei's Ascend W1 Windows Phone 8 smartphone. The usual blurry images are included, but it looks to sport a bright polycarbonate body like Nokia's Lumia smartphones, as well as HTC's Windows Phone 8X and 8S.

Huawei's Ascend W1 is rumored to pack a 4-inch WVGA (800x480) display, a 1.2GHz dual-core processor, 5-megapixel rear-facing camera, VGA front-facing camera, 512MB of RAM, 4GB of internal storage and a 2000mAh battery.

It won't come close to beating most 4- to 5-inch phones, but it will give the entry-level Windows Phone 8 market something to look at when in the market for a WP8-based device.

Google and ASUS' Jelly Bean-powered Nexus 7 tablet has now become the all-time best-selling Android tablet in the UK, just three months after its release. The news comes from mobile retailer Carphone Warehouse. Graham Stapleton, chief commercial officer at Carphone Warehouse says:

It's impressive that this product is our biggest selling Android tablet, and it will be really interesting to see if other manufacturers will follow suit with smaller tablets over the coming months to spice up the Christmas period.

At its low price tag, it has little to no competition and consumers have been loving it. Amazon's Kindle Fire HD will go on sale in the European markets soon which should give Google some competition. Apple's new iPad mini will be announced next week which should also put pressure on Google's 7-inch tablet. Stapleton adds:

Another iFixit teardown is here, this time for Apple's seventh-generation iPod Nano. The teardown notes just how much work Apple's engineers put into the new iPod Nano to make it as thin as it is, with the teardown also noting that the battery has a rating of 0.8Wh, double the rating of the previous-gen Nano.

The teardown notes that the battery, Lightning connector and volume controls are all soldered directly to the logic board itself with the button cable and headphone jack attached, too. The LCD and digitizer glass aren't fused together, which will allow those two components to be replaced individually, if they were to fail.

iFixit found components from Apple, Broadcom (Bluetooth + FM Radio), NXP Semiconductors, Toshiba (NAND flash) and Texas Instruments (touchscreen controller). The teardown team found the seventh-generation iPod Nano very difficult to repair because of the amount of components soldered directly to the board. They've noted that the battery is particularly difficult to replace. Apple's devices are not really repair-friendly, but in order to get these devices increasingly thinner, we're only going to see more of this type of design.

I've got to admit, I wasn't that excited about Microsoft's Surface tablet when we first started hearing about it, but now that it's nearly here and we have found out more on Microsoft's iPad competitor, I'm beginning to get genuinely excited.

But, how does it fare in terms of specifications against the competition? Namely Apple's third-gen iPad and Samsung's pen-toting Galaxy Note 10.1 tablet? AllThingsD have made a great little chart comparing the tablets against each other, which you can see below.

So the new Surface tablet sports a 10.6-inch 1366x760-pixel screen, compared to the iPad's 9.7-inch 2048x1536 "Retina" display, the Surface loses out in resolution, but enjoys its slightly bigger and wider display. Surface only sports 720p front- and rear-facing cameras which is disappointing in this 5-megapixel-plus rear-facing camera world we now live in. Processor-wise, the Surface comes with NVIDIA's T30 SoC which is a quad-core design, compared to the third-gen iPad's dual-core A5X processor and Samsung's 1.4GHz quad-core Exynos chip.