The HTC Windows Phone 8S has arrived at the UK scene and is already available in several stores (both real and online). The phone aims to provide affordable entry into the tile-filled world of Windows Phone 8.
The best deal at the moment is offered by Three UK - you can grab the 8S for £180 off contract or free with a two-year contract starting from £17/month. This is for the Atlantic Blue model. Deliveries start Monday, December 10.
Clove UK also carry the HTC 8S but they have put a £225 price tag on it. Expansys UK and Amazon UK both have it at £240. That's for the Blue model again, though Expansys has the other color options on pre-order. Argos has the phone too, but at £300. We're just mentioning it in case they decide to start some promotion and cut the price significantly.
Anyway, if you prefer to get the Windows Phone 8S on contract but not on Three, you can head over to Phones4u, which has offers for Vodafone (£21/month), Orange (£28.50/month) and T-Mobile (£36/month). Carphone Warehouse also has deals for Vodafone.
Samsung has released a video showing a series of new features to be added to the Galaxy S3 smartphone. They will form part of the Premium Suite, which will be added when the phone is updated to Android 4.1.2 in the near future.
Samsung Galaxy S3 owners can look forward to another software update soon, which will bring with it improvements to the Android 4.1 Jelly Bean operating system, plus the company’s Premium Suite first seen on the Galaxy Note, which itself has been tweaked with features introduced on the Galaxy Note 2.
To give S3 owners a hint at what’s to come, Samsung has released the first of two videos demonstrating the Premium Suite’s features, which you can see below. They’re split into two sections, the first being called “contextual awareness” and the second, “enhanced features.”
Let’s look at contextual awareness first. This will include Page Buddy, where certain actions dictate what the phone does next, for example plugging in a pair of headphones will activate the music player. Contextual Menu let you re-order apps alphabetically, or by usage, while Contextual Tag instantly adds weather, date and location data, plus if it’s a snap of a friend, their name to your pictures.
Moving on to the enhanced features, it’s great to see Samsung include the split screen system from the Galaxy Note 2, where two apps can be run at the same time — a feature only possible on devices with screens as large as the S3’s. You’ll also be given the chance to set your Facebook news feed to show on the lock screen, plus the chance to share photos and videos using NFC and the S-Beam feature too. Finally, a Reader mode has been added to the Web browser, which focuses on the text by zooming in on that section.
That’s all we’ve been shown in part one of the Premium Suite video, so there’s still more to come in the near future. Samsung hasn’t said when Premium Suite will arrive, but it will be bundled in its Android 4.1.2 OS update, which has reportedly already started to seed in parts of Europe. Seeing as U.S. networks have only just got to grips with the Galaxy S3’s first Jelly Bean update, there’s little chance of this one being approved on AT&T and others just yet.
Judge Lucy Koh, overseeing the continued courtroom battle between Apple and Samsung, as once again called for the warring companies to come to an agreement.
Apple and Samsung are back in court this week, where Judge Lucy Koh can review the $1 billion worth of damages awarded to Apple in the year’s biggest tech trial, which came to its conclusion in August. The discussions have been wide-ranging, coming to a head yesterday when after three hours on the subject of the payment — which Samsung believes in excessive and Apple considers too low — Judge Koh asked “When is this case going to resolve?”
According to the Financial Times, the question was met with giggles from the courtroom gallery, however Judge Koh said “I’m not joking…I’ve said this all along, I think it’s time for global peace.” She said the court was willing to “facilitate some sort of resolution” and that an agreement would “be good for consumers and good for the industry.”
Following HTC’s recent settlement with Apple, where a mutual agreement was reached regarding patents, Samsung made it very clear it had no intention of negotiating with Apple in the same way. However, Samsung’s legal counsel is quoted as saying the company was “willing to talk” with Apple, but extended no formal invitation, preferring to leave it down to Apple to agree by saying “The ball is in their court.”
Apple CEO Tim Cook gave the impression the company had already tried to reason with Samsung, saying in an interview with Bloomberg this week “We tried every other avenue,” before heading to court “after lots of trying.” Samsung has said almost exactly the same thing in the past: “We initially proposed to negotiate with Apple instead of going to court,” the company wrote in a press release following the trial’s conclusion in the summer, “However Apple pressed on with a lawsuit and we have had little choice but to counter-sue to protect our company.”
At this stage, then, it doesn’t look like Judge Koh will get her wish, as Apple is certain to view Samsung’s half-hearted willingness to talk as too little too late — it has won once, after all — and is instead pushing for higher damages, saying the current $1 billion figure is a “slap on the wrist” and a more serious amount would help “establish a line” in and presumably, out of the courtroom.
LG Optimus 2X owners in Europe can finally breath a sigh of relief! After nearly half a year of it-will-get-it-it-won't-get-it drama, the former LG flagship finally started receiving its ICS update.
The firmware version of the update ROM is V30a. It brings the Ice Cream Sandwich sweetness, garnished with the latest LG launcher.
You can get it from the LG update tool right away. It seems, though, that the carrier-locked Optimus 2X versions will have to wait a while longer to join the fun.
LG already updated the South Korean cousin of the Optimus 2X, so it was about time for European users to get the same treatment. At this point though, it seems almost certain that ICS will be the end of the road for the first dual-core smartphone - it is highly unlikely that it will ever catch the Jelly Bean train.
Here's hoping that LG has learned a valuable lesson here and will do better with the Optimus G and the Optimus 4X HD.
The Archos Gamepad, an Android tablet with a set of physical gaming controls, has gone on sale in the UK and parts of Europe, where its competitive price could win it plenty of fans.
Remember the Archos Gamepad? It was announced in August this year, as a challenger to not only the budget 7-inch Android tablets produced by Amazon, Google and many others, but also to the handheld gaming machines sold by Sony and Nintendo. How? It meshes together both worlds by placing a set of physical gaming controls on either side of a 7-inch touchscreen. An October release was given to the Gamepad back then, but the tablet didn’t show up, causing concern it would never become a reality. The wait is over though, as the Gamepad went on sale less than 24-hours ago in the UK and parts of Europe.
Here’s the Gamepad’s specification. The 7-inch screen has a 1024 x 600 pixel resolution — that’s the same as the original Kindle Fire — while it’s powered by a 1.6GHz ARM Cortex A9 processor with a quad-core Mali 400 MP graphics processor and 1GB of RAM. There’s 8GB of onboard storage memory too, and room for another 32GB using a microSD card. Bluetooth and GPS are missing though.
There’s no rear camera either, but there is a video-call lens above the screen, plus Wi-Fi, 1080p video support and a mini-HDMI port for sending images to the big screen. In the past, Archos tablets weren’t always Google certified, but the Gamepad comes with not only Google Play installed, but Android 4.1 Jelly Bean too. This means cheap and plentiful games, a considerable advantage over its expensive rivals.
Sold out until Christmas
The gaming controls consist of two analogue thumb sticks, two shoulder buttons and 12 other keys on the front panel. By using a mapping tool, any game with virtual buttons can be adapted for use with the Gamepad, while developers have the chance to add native support for the Gamepad too.
The price for all this on the move gaming goodness? Just £130/$208 from Archos in the UK, the same price as the first Amazon Kindle Fire and £30 less than the basic Nexus 7. It’s also available in other European countries, where it has a price of 150 euros. Although Archos has a U.S. online store and the Gamepad is listed on the site, there’s no option to buy one yet.
It has been popular too, with the initial stock selling out in a few hours according to comments on Archos’ official Facebook page. The Archos Gamepad is expected to be back in stock on December 18, which will cut it very fine if it’s to make it onto Santa’s sleigh this year.
Amazon has announced that it will soon introduce two accessibility features – Explore by Touch and Voice Guide – to its standard 7-inch Kindle Fire and the 7-inch Kindle Fire HD devices. The features are already available on the company's larger tablet.
Amazon is set to improve the accessibility of its standard 7-inch Kindle Fire and 7-inch Kindle Fire HD, adding two features already available on the company’s 8.9-inch tablet.
The features, Explore by Touch and Voice Guide, will be coming some time “early next year,” the e-commerce giant said on Thursday.
Designed to help the vision-impaired navigate their way around the interface more easily, Explore by Touch feeds information to the user via audible announcements as they move their finger across the touchscreen. For example, swipe over a game and the system will read the name of it aloud. A subsequent tap will open the game or whatever it happens to be.
Voice Guide, which leverages technology from text-to-speech software company Ivona, reads aloud any action performed on the device by the user. So tap on a book and the system will read the title of the book aloud and confirm that the user has opened it.
Amazon Kindle vice president Dave Limp said in a release announcing the news that the move formed part of the company’s efforts to build on existing accessibility features for its vision-impaired customers, features that include text-to-speech, optional text coloring, adjustable font sizes and a built-in dictionary. He added that additional tools along the same lines were in the pipeline, though didn’t give any details.
Vision-impaired consumers interested in the Kindle Fire but reluctant to fork out for the pricier 8.9-inch device already equipped with Explore by Touch and Voice Guide may now be tempted to opt for one of the better-priced 7-inch options upon hearing this latest news – at least, that’s what Amazon will be hoping as it battles to rise above its rivals in the highly competitive budget-tablet market.
HTC has announced the Butterfly, another variation on the J Butterfly and Droid DNA, but again it doesn't seem destined for release in Europe and the UK.
The story of HTC’s first 1080p tablet/smartphone hybrid has taken another turn today, as the company has announced the HTC Butterfly, its third variant and one which shares the original device’s name, albeit without the letter J. It’s being described as an “international” version of the J Butterfly/Droid DNA, but does that mean it’s headed to Europe and the UK?
First, let’s look at the specification. The HTC Butterfly has the same 5-inch, 1080p Super LCD 3 screen as the other versions, along with the quad-core, 1.5GHz Snapdragon S4 processor. There’s even the much-maligned 2020mAh battery hiding beneath the non-removable rear panel too. One key difference is the Butterfly has a microSD card slot to increase the internal storage memory over the standard 16GB, a feature not seen on the Droid DNA.
Otherwise, the only difference lies with the radio. The Butterfly supports the usual GSM bands, plus WCDMA bands, which are home to the 3G network used by China Mobile. It seems then, the Butterfly is destined to fly only as far as China and other parts of Asia. We spoke to UK online retailer Clove Technology, who said there had been no word of a UK release for the Butterfly, while Pocket-lint confirms it has also had word from HTC that the phone won’t be the UK’s answer to the Droid DNA.
The Butterfly may be the phone leaked as the so-called “global version” of the Droid DNA, seen shortly after the Verizon exclusive’s announcement, and may even be the official name of the HTC Deluxe. HTC’s announcement of the Butterfly comes the day after news leaked of the mysterious HTC M7, a phone rumored to be an upgraded version of the Droid DNA, which could be the star of HTC’s Mobile World Congress line-up next year. Perhaps it’s the M7 that will be the Euro version of the Droid DNA; unless HTC has yet another version of the same phone primed for release between now and then.
