Amid the reports of the iPhone 5S' hardware and specs, there have also been some rumors about the Cupertino company adding a bit of color to the line.
Though the rumored budget iPhone 5C has been tied to a few different variations in hue, we haven't seen much in the way of actual evidence the same was true of the iPhone 5S... until Friday.
Gold standard
French site MacBoutic uncovered some leaked production photos of a new iPhone 5S complete with a gold shell.
It's certainly tough to verify the validity of the gold case considering there are no logos or markings visible anywhere on the device, however, the fact that the entire piece is gold gives some credence to the idea this hasn't been developed by a third party.
iPhone 5S looking regal (credit: MacBoutic)
There were leaked images of colored iPhone 5S SIM trays earlier this year, which could also help hint this fabled device is one step closer to reality.
Gold would certainly fit in with the recent switch to metallic cases Apple made with the iPhone 5, and even if gold isn't that bombastic a color, a third, more "luxurious" option could be very appealing to the iFaithful.
In the land of exclusive carrier deals though, one has to wonder if this rumored gold iPhone 5S will be available everywhere.
Starting August 23 you can go to an AT&T store and pick up (or at least try out) a Motorola Moto X. The Woven black and woven white models will go for $199.99 for 16 GB and $249.99 for a 32 gig model with a two-year subscription. With AT&T's Next you can go for a lease where it's $27 a month for the 16 GB and $32 per month for the 32 GB model.
Devices that have been customized online using the Moto Maker service can expect their devices to ship on August 23 with a lucky few registered users getting it earlier on August 19.
Major AT&T stores (read not all) will have a customization table (like the one in the image) which will let you see the Moto X in its different varieties.
For a limited time AT&T will include a free Motorola Skip accessory with all orders placed via the Moto Maker. Skip is a wearable accessory, which lets you bypass the Moto X's lockscreen just by tapping the phone against it.
And here's an AT&T video teasing the upcoming Motorola Moto X launch.
HTC One was announced way back in February and launched in March, but the Verizon users were initially left out of the fun. Nearly four months later Verizon and HTC announced the One flagship will hit Verizon's network this summer.
And the great new is the wait if over and it's finally happening! HTC One will become available through Verizon's online and retails stores on August 22. It will cost $199.99 with a two-year contract with the Big Red.
Currently Verizon isn't taking pre-orders, but we guess it will start in a few days. You can keep an eye on this page to make sure you are among the first to reserve your LTE-capable HTC One for Verizon.
Alcatel has been doing mid-range and budget smartphones for quite a while but it seems the manufacturer is readying a phablet that'll challenge the big league's competitors.
The Russian blogger Eldar Murtazin has snapped a shot of an Alcatel official presentation showing the One Touch Scribe Pro and its specs. The phablet has a "massive" 6.0-inch display of unknown resolution and runs on a quad-core 1.5GHz processor. The Scribe Pro also sports a 13MP camera, a 3400 mAh battery, dual-SIM support, a stylus plus an interesting flip cover with hidden LED screen.
Murtazin says Alcatel One Touch Scribe Pro will be released in Hong Kong this month and will cost $300. If true we hope Alcatel will launch the phablet soon in other markets too.
There is a second phone below the Scribe Pro that we haven't seen yet - the One Touch Idol mini. It runs on a dual-core 1.2GHz processor and comes with a 4.3" IPS display. The original OT Idol features a 4.66-inch IPS display.
We hope we learn more about the upcoming Alcatel smartphones at the IFA expo in Berlin next month.
Meizu is getting ready to launch its new flagship - the Meizu MX3. It has already sent invitations for an event on September 2 in Beijing, China.
There is no further official information on the event, but there are a few rumors and leaks on the Meizu MX3, so we bet we'll get to see it unveiled there.
The Meizu MX3 has already leaked via a render image showing what the phone will look like. It’s also rumored to pack a 5.1" 1080p display and to be powered by Samsung's Exynos 5 Octa chipset. The rest of the alleged specs include 2GB of RAM, a 13MP camera and Flyme OS 3.0 that is based on Android 4.2 Jelly Bean.
We've already met with the Meizu's first generation flagships - the MX and MX 4-core and we really liked them. We are thrilled to see what's Meizu has prepared for us and hope this time around the company will try and make the smartphone available globally.
It is all but certain that Apple will be unveiling two new iPhone models, iPhone 5S and iPhone 5C, on September 10. Both devices have been leaked numerous times and have provided us some valuable information and now, we have an interesting prediction from a popular analyst, who claims that Apple will be launching a 128 GB model of iPhone 5S.
According to KGI analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, Apple will also be selling its iPhone 5S with a whopping 128 GB of storage. If the predictions from the analyst, who has been quite accurate in the past, turn out to be true, then iPhone 5S will be the second Apple product after iPad 4 to feature the massive storage capacity.
The 128 GB model of the iPhone 5S would cost $499 (on contract) under the Apple's current pricing scheme.
Ming-Chi Kuo also expects the upcoming iPhone to be powered by a new A7 chip that features 1 GB of LPDDR3 RAM. The latest chip is said to be built on the ARMv8 architecture and will be 20% more energy efficient than previous A6 SoC.
The analyst also confirms that the iPhone 5S will indeed house an upgraded camera with bright F/2.0 aperture and dual-LED flash. This means that the iPhone 5S camera should have better low-light performance than the previous models.
Lastly, Apple is also expected to unveil a gold color option for the iPhone 5S in addition to the classical Black and White paintjobs.
Canonical has now been pledged over $10.3 million to create its Ubuntu Edge superphone, surpassing the unofficial crowd-funding record set by the Pebble smartwatch on Kickstarter.
The Edge is currently at $10,346,221 (around £6.6m, AU$11.3m) - but all that will be for nought if it doesn't manage to nab another $21,653,779 in the next six days to take it up to its insane $32 million target (£20.4m, AU$35m).
More blips!
Don't need money, don't take fame, don't need no credit card to ride the Blips train.
Stay ahead of the game with these top football-related apps
As legendary Liverpool manager Bill Shankly once said: "some people believe football is a matter of life and death - it is much, much more important than that."
That sentiment will ring true for any football fan, from those who stand on freezing terraces on Tuesday nights to those glued to the television every Saturday afternoon.
We've rounded up our top ten football apps for iPhone, which will help you enjoy football even more.
Whether it's following your team, enjoying the finest goals from around the world or passing those hollow days between games, these are the best football apps for your iPhone.
1. Sky Sports Live Football Score Centre - free
Every Saturday, millions of people around the UK spend their afternoon feverishly staring at their TV, watching four grey-haired men from Sky Sports watch football.
US readers may find this a bizarre phenomenon, but if your team is in action, it's essential viewing.
Unfortunately, Saturday afternoons often have other dubious functions such as family, shopping and kids. If this sounds familiar, try Sky Sports Score Centre, which puts Jeff Stelling and his silver-haired gang in your pocket, with up-to-the-minute action from every game from the Premier League and Serie A to the Evo-Stick League, with team line-ups, live commentary and stats.
The ESPN goals app proved particularly popular last season, not least because it allowed speedy access to clips of goals at no cost.
Thos clip rights were snapped up by The SUn and The Times this year, and to check out the critical moments of Premier League games this you will need a subscription to climb over the newspaper paywall.
It's an interesting additional content idea, and it will be fascinating to see if it soars like a young Alan Shearer, or tanks like Stan Collymore's career in Spain.
If you take your football more seriously than those halfwits in the pub who spout half-baked observations based on tired cliches, FourFourTwo Stats Zone is the app for you.
It offers full analysis of all the Premier League games, from the basic shot count and possession to full pass maps and work rates of the players.
It's not just a pool of meaningless information for football geeks, as it can also be used for evil, adding insight to your fantasy football teams, weekend sports betting and pub trivia.
A game for true football fans, Football Manager Handheld 2013 is a portable port of the classic PC game, which has sapped millions of collective hours from our youth.
It's made with footy-mad commuters in mind, and while it's lighter on the options, it retains all the compulsive enjoyment of its fully-featured predecessors.
The best thing about it isn't the breadth of teams or smooth learning curve, both of which are excellent, but that it can be picked up and put down easily, making it ideal for short journeys to work.
The game that took the world by storm last year, New Star Soccer is one of the best footy simulators out there. You command the career of an up-and-coming player who has to battle the conflicting interests of playing the modern game with gambling, sponsor commitments and high-maintenance girlfriends.
If it sounds like a grown up version of The Sims, that's because it is, but you get to score 40-yard wonder-strikes and enjoy your character having a better life than you.
So you've been dragged away for the weekend, the biggest game of the season is live on Sky Sports, and you're not sure what's worse: missing the turning point in the title chase or that you pay for Sky Sports and you're stuck in a rainy caravan in Morecombe.
Sky Go is the essential app for any iOS rocking Sky Sports subscriber, and it lets you watch the game live on your iPhone. We'd urge you to tweet the hashtag '#winning' but you might miss a goal.
The App Store is filled with footy games which let you flick and swipe balls into the net with varying degrees of majesty, but Score does it best.
Why? Because each of the wonder goals hammered home by your index digit are reenactments of the finest strikes in international football history.
Eagled-eyed gamers will spot them from the tournaments of yesteryear, from Michael Owen's mazy England goal that humbled Argentina in '98 to Dennis Bergkamp's dreamy volley in '96.
The game's made better by the rating system of the goals, and you need to get them perfect to unlock the next set; think Angry Birds does football and you're there.
TeamStream is a news and information service from US sporting giant The Bleacher Report that lets you choose your favourite teams and then scrapes stories and tweets from around the web.
It's a good looking one-stop-shop for football news, although it tends to work better for the bigger clubs.
The Beeb has just released its official sports app, which puts all the latest football news at your fingertips. Not only is it great for following the fascinating soap opera of football, but it also has live text commentary of the biggest games from the BBC's world-renowned team of journalists.
It's also fully customisable, so you can filter football stories from the vastly less important rugby, tennis and athletics news.
You're in a strange city and it's almost the lunchtime kick-off - time to find a pub. Leaving it up to your mate who reckons "he knows somewhere nearby" is a sure-fire recipe for missing the first half or ending up in a friendly local Millwall hangout.
Leave nothing to chance with MatchPint, which find the games on TV and tells you which pubs are showing them, offering reviews of the establishment in question and even guiding you there using Google Maps.
It's one of many apps that do similar things, but the simple interface and multitude of users make it a top-scorer in our eyes.
Football Week is the essential weekly magazine for fans, made by Future Publishing, the parent company of TechRadar in partnership with the Press Association.
It's a brand-new digital magazine only available on iPad, which has previews of all the weekend's Premiership matches, with in-depth features and live coverage of the action.
It has the quality of a magazine, the interactive features of an app and the immediacy of a website. What's more, you can get the first five issues free.
If we had to sum up this week in sounds, we'd choose two. One would be a sad clown playing an out of tune piano being thrown down a stairwell, and the other would be a high-pitched whooshing sound.
The sad clown noise comes from Blackberry, the once-proud smartphone giant that's just put itself up for sale.
The official phrase is that a special committee will "explore strategic alternatives to enhance value and increase scale", but realistically Blackberry is standing on the high street offering three pairs of socks for a pound.
How did it come to this? Gareth Beavis knows: "If you don't move with the times, you'll be overtaken and consumed by technological vultures feasting on the juciest bits of your once-cutting-edge carcass." We know, we know, that's pretty dark. You should have seen the stories he wrote in primary school.
It's easy to blame the iPhone for Blackberry's demise, but the problems go back further: the 2002 Quark combined calling and email, and while it was "the future" it was "also the company's downfall".
"The mantra 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it' must have been emblazoned on the walls," says Beavis: RIM (as it was then known) "eschewed 3G, took ages to add cameras or Wi-Fi to its devices and even managed to mess up the touchscreen when it finally tried to rival the iPhone with the Blackberry Storm."
Blackberry is a company packed with talent, but all too often its timing sucks.
Going steady or falling apart?
It's not that Apple is in trouble, it's that the world is impatient
Guess who else is supposedly in trouble? That's right: Apple, because nothing says "disaster" like being the most valuable technology company in the world. But there is trouble in paradise.
The board is getting jittery and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison reckons history will repeat - "we saw Apple with Steve Jobs, we saw Apple without Steve Jobs," he says. But billionaire investor Carl Icahn says Apple is "extremely undervalued."
Who to believe? Kate Solomon agrees that "Jobs is a tough act to follow," but Tim Cook should ignore calls to do something fast. "No," Solomon counsels. "Do something great." It's not that Apple is in trouble, it's that the world is impatient.
"Like you, I want magic," Solomon says. "At any tech launch, I'm hoping for something that will cause my eyes to widen and an involuntary "Oh wow!" to slip out. I want it to do something useful, I want it to work perfectly, I want it to look gorgeous and I want it to be awesome. And hey, that's going to take a bit of time."
Something else that's taken a bit of time is Windows 8.1, but it's nearly done now and you'll be able to get it in October. The cunningly named Windows 8.1 will hit Windows Update in October, and Microsoft hopes it'll boost interest in Windows 8 systems.
And the high-pitched whooshing sound? That's Elon Musk's Hyperloop, which may be the future of travel, a billionaire's folly or a really effective way of turning humans into pink mist.
As Michelle Fitzsimmons explains: "One day years from now you may find yourself sitting snugly in a tube, hurtling from San Francisco to Los Angeles at 800 miles an hour."
There's just one problem with Musk's idea. He isn't going to build it. He's too busy exploring space and stuff, "so don't expect to be whizzing down tubes to visit your granny any time soon," says Duncan Geere. "But by the time you're a granny? Don't rule it out."
The long-awaited Nokia Lumia Amber update is rolling out for all Windows Phone 8-powered Nokia Lumia phones. The update is built on top of the WP8 GDR2 update from Microsoft, but has some exclusive features, developed by Nokia.
This includes a brand new camera app, the Smart Camera. This app launched with the Lumia 925 and will now be available to all other WP8 Lumia phones. The high-end devices – Lumia 920, 925 and 928 – will also get the Pro Camera app, which was introduced with the Lumia 1020.
It's not just apps either – the Amber update brings better noise reduction, better color rendering, better exposure metering and improved autofocus to the whole WP8 range, while the Lumia 920 will also get its ISO setting ceiling pushed from 800 to 3,200.
The Nokia Lumia Amber update will allow you to install a number of cool apps, too (that are not themselves part of the update). The Nokia Video Trimmer and Nokia Video Upload will help you edit and share videos that you've captured with your Lumia phone.
The Nokia HERE suite can be updated, once Amber is installed. The new version allows for easier map updates, only downloading the changes in a map instead of downloading the whole thing (this saves time and data).
Additionally, the new Nokia Glance Screen brings a clock and notifications to the lockscreen. Unfortunately, the Lumia 520 and Lumia 625 will miss out on this feature.
The Amber update also enables a couple of new gestures – double-tap the screen in standby to wake the phone (ala Nokia N9) and flip-to-mute-ringer.
There's also the FM radio, which will be enabled on all but the Lumia 620. The new Storage Check tool will show you how much storage is used for apps, media files and the system should you need to clear up some space (and you might, on Lumias with no microSD card slot).
Here's how to install the update – go to Settings and hit Phone update. It's a simple process, but if you need help you can watch this video.
The update will be rolled out in stages depending on the model and country. The Nokia Lumia 920 and Lumia 820 will be getting it first, along with US models 928, 810, 521. Nokia expects to complete the rollout for the 920, 820, 720, 620 and 520 by the end of September.
You can check if the update is available for your phone and country here.
Apple has released the iOS 7 beta 6 to developers. The latest beta comes just a week after Apple released beta 5 and oddly near the end of the week when usually the betas are released on Monday.
The general consensus is that the update was released in a hurry to patch some major bug in the previous update. Apple's changelog mention that the new update addresses an issue with iTunes in the Cloud "where some purchases may download or play unexpected items".
The update is now available to download as an OTA download or through Apple's Developer Center.
