Android 4.3 leaks having been trickling through for the past few months and the latest one apparently reveals the updated OS running on a Samsung Galaxy Nexus.
Google is yet to unleash a new version of its Android operating system this year and while Key Lime Pie no longer seems to be next in line after Android 4.2 the search giant failed to announce the much talked about Android 4.3 Jelly Bean last month at its annual IO event.
A new report out of Bluetooth SIG now seems to suggest the Android 4.3 update is almost ready to roll out as the Galaxy Nexus has been put through its paces to ensure it still meets the various Bluetooth standards.
Ready yet?
Although the report doesn't specifically say which version of Android the Galaxy Nexus is running, the folks over at Android Geeks reckon it's being reassessed by Bluetooth SIG purely due to the fact it's about to receive the Android 4.3 upgrade.
The Google Nexus 7 has also recently been spotted passing through the same tests, which seems to suggest the search engine is tooling up its homegrown devices ahead of an impending launch.
In terms of an Android 4.3 release date it's still not clear, and with rumours suggesting Android 5.0 Key Lime Pie will be with us before the end of the year Google may want to get a shift on - unless, that is, it's decided against 4.3 and these devices are actually running version 5.
Sony Xperia ZU a.k.a. "Togari" is the rumored 6.44" phablet coming on June 25 with a Snapdragon 800 chipset and Android 4.2.2. The new version of Android will reportedly bring a slightly tweaked Sony UI.
Here are some screenshots that are allegedly from the updated software. We tried to match them with screenshots from our Xperia Z review and aside from minor cosmetic changes the UI is mostly the same.
Xperia UI on Android 4.2
Same UI elements in the current Android 4.1.2 software
The app drawer with slight tweaks
The current app drawer
A few more screenshots of the new UI
Well, Sony's custom UI is still one of the closest to stock Android. We have to wonder what will happen to the new lockscreen - will it have Android 4.2's widgets or the fancy 3D effect of Sony? Unfortunately, the leaked screenshots don't give the answer to that question but the official announcement of the ZU might just do it.
The Sony Xperia M has had its price revealed in the UK and Germany.
The single SIM variant of the handset is available for preorder in Germany from Cyberport.de for €239, while the dual-SIM version is listed at notebooksbilliger.de for €299. The difference seems a bit too big so we assume the latter price is slightly off, though.
In the UK, Handtec has the single-SIM model for £227.99, but it is currently listed as out of stock. Meanwhile, Carphone Warehouse has the M pegged for an August 2013, which coincides with the Q3 launch frame given by Sony on announcement.
The Sony Xperia M was revealed last week by Sony. Besides offering dual-SIM and single-SIM models, is a midrange handset with a 4-inch display of FWVGA resolution, dual-core 1 GHz Krait processor, 4 GB of expandable storage and 1 GB of RAM. It'll run Android 4.1 out of box, and it also has a slew of connectivity features which include NFC, and a 5MP shooter with front-facer.
BBM on iOS and Android attracts celebrities like Lewis Hamilton to BBM Channels
When BlackBerry architect Gary Klassen first came up with the idea for what became BlackBerry Messenger, his colleagues at what was then Research In Motion didn't understand why anyone would need anything except mobile email. Even his wife wasn't impressed.
"The first time I brought BBM home, I put two devices down on the table and I said to my wife 'watch!'. I typed in a message on one phone and it showed up on the other and she just looked at me and said 'couldn't you do that before?' I said 'no, no, it's different this time!' She wasn't convinced - but now my whole family uses BBM."
There has been one recent defector, Klassen joked. "My nephew bought an iPhone and he was ostracised from his community." But he'll be able to come back into the fold in the summer when BBM comes to iOS and Android phones.
Mobile is different
Klassen has been behind plenty of BlackBerry successes. He's worked on a wide range of BlackBerry products, from the 'old-skool' software all the way to BlackBerry 10.
He helped build the first ever colour BlackBerry phone before working on IM integration with services such as Yahoo Messenger, then moving on to work on HTML email. He even created the first version of the famous BlackBerry 'splat' to tell you when you had new messages.
In 2005 he came up with the idea of creating a mobile-only instant messaging system - an idea that didn't make sense to everyone.
"BBM was a bit of an underdog when it started. Not everybody believed in it; how could we compete against the incumbents such as MSN and ICQ? When we were working with Yahoo we could only do what the other clients did, but with this we would control both ends of the connection, so we could do a lot more.
"We experimented with all kinds of stuff that we thought were good ideas and found out they weren't. In a mobile environment certainty and reliability have so much more importance, and a sense of presence is different on mobile."
Showing whether someone was available to read and reply to your messages turned out to be a whole new challenge, and one that initially presented a few hurdles:
"There was a study in a college where they gave the students mobile IM and at the end of the study they were surprised to find that the students were really distressed by it, they didn't want to have anything to do with it." Klassen says, "Appearing online and available, when I'm not, causes stress."
The BBM team solved that by marking when a message had been delivered to the other person, so you knew the system was reliable, and marking when a message was read so you know whether you could expect to get a reply.
"When we added those Ds and Rs, we changed the paradigm," Klassen told us. "If I know the end point is another mobile, I get the implications. It becomes socially acceptable if I don't reply because I'm busy or I'm on a bus. And it doesn't rely on me changing a setting or the network being able to decide whether I'm available."
Generally, BBM users do reply pretty quickly. VP of software product management and ecosystem Andrew Bocking told us that BBM users spend about 90 minutes a day in BBM "and around half of the users read messages that are sent to them within 20 seconds."
Klassen and the BBM team knew they had a hit on their hands when the service started spreading virally inside the company. Despite the doubters who pointed out that they already had instant email, when Klassen showed off BBM, people started using it - even though he thought it wasn't ready.
"I wrote down the URL and in three days there were hundreds of people using it. Half the parts that we thought were essential didn't work but they could still use it, and they did."
And once it became popular, other employees had to join in to stay connected. "If someone on a team didn't want to use it, they found they had to because the team had started planning their monthly lunches on it," Klassen remembers.
He doesn't claim to have had a grand vision for BBM from day one, and certainly not a cross-platform one. "With technology, often we look back and say 'that's why we built it, we built it for this or that' - but sometimes you don't. The way that BBM came about was that we built something and we listened carefully to what stuck with the users."
Giving in or spreading out?
BBM has always been one of the selling points for BlackBerry, so is bringing it to iOS and Android an admission of failure? CEO Thorsten Heins said repeatedly at BlackBerry Live that taking BBM cross-platform now is a vote of confidence in how good BlackBerry 10 is and how many features it has beyond BBM.
As Bocking pointed out to TechRadar, it could be an advert for BlackBerry. "Going cross-platform; think about what an opportunity that creates for people to experience BlackBerry Messenger and get a taste for BlackBerry. We can turn 60 million BBM users into advocates on social networks."
Klassen agrees that it's far easier for people to see the appeal of BBM once they've used it. "There are people, when I talk about Ds and Rs, who have stories about what that has meant to them. If I talk to someone who hasn't used it before, their eyes glaze over. They don't understand the benefit and it's hard to explain that you get addicted to looking for the R until you've experienced it.
"We're giving people the opportunity to experience it and then they can ask themselves 'what is it about this that I like?' And then maybe they'll ask 'why is somebody in my community [who's using a BlackBerry] able to communicate so much more effectively?'"
But there is another reason. With BBM Channels launching, BlackBerry needs to have as many users as possible for brands to sign up to their channels so BlackBerry can earn money from things like sponsored invitations.
As Bocking explains, "Extending [across other mobile platforms] grows the audience, and a large base is critical to have the mass to monetise any service.
"Going cross-platform is an acknowledgement this is a heterogeneous environment we are living in, and by supporting our services across those platforms we can support our customers, [something] they've asked for."
That means BBM has to be as good on iOS and Android devices as it is on BlackBerrys. It will start with text and images but voice and video chat will come later. "We want feature parity so we can build a highly engaged audience on the platform," says Bocking.
And Klassen told us that includes core features. "We can implement the same user interface and we can tell you when a message has been delivered. Those things will be built in, so we can give you the same confidence you're looking for when you send a message."
BBM isn't coming to Windows Phone this summer, but that's not because Microsoft is the competition, says Bocking. "Our users have been focused on asking for iOS and Android; we have not been hearing requests for Windows Phone.
"I won't say that will never happen. It's a matter of is there interest from our users, if they are asking for it. Equally, we don't have plans for a web-based client, but we'll be listening to what our users want."
Safari on OS X and iOS. Shared features but different interfaces that are optimised for each device
"A picture is worth a thousand words" is an overused phrase, but one with more than a kernel of truth.
With that in mind, how much can an entire visual language tell us about an object, or provide insight into its creators? In Apple's case, with its revisions to iOS and to OS X, plenty.
At WWDC's 2013 keynote, Apple unveiled the long-rumoured, radical iOS overhaul. Apple's mobile operating system retains links to its past, but the difference is stark: it is to iOS 6 what OS X was to Mac OS 9 - familiarity amidst sweeping change. Additionally, we saw peeks of the revamped OS X, changes to which were subtler.
iOS 7 looks wildly different from its predecessor
Aesthetics are subjective. Depending on who you talk to, Apple's revisions are the best or worst things they've ever seen, wildly daring or oddly conservative, innovative or derivative, or somewhere between those extremes.
Yet whatever you think of them from a subjective standpoint, they showcase how this version of Apple thinks, how it differs from its rivals, and how it's unafraid to break from its own past.
On both the Mac and mobile sides of things, textures were primarily notable by their absence. Jokes were made about having 'run out of felt' regarding the now relatively stark Game Center, and similarly about the lack of wood and leather textures in iBooks and Calendar.
Apple showed in both OS X and iOS a newfound desire for coherence across an entire operating system. This is something that's arguably been missing since at least the days of Mac OS 8, shortly before brushed metal reared its ugly head, leading to Apple's unhealthy obsession with using real-world analogues in its applications.
Boom. No more leather stitching. And potential coherence at last for OS X
But there was another major change that made Apple's revamps stand out: Apple is seemingly no longer trying to force the same visual language across OS X and iOS.
Calendar and Safari look radically different on each system, even if they share data and certain concepts, such as Safari's iCloud tabs and Reading List.
Perhaps this is a sign Apple recognises iOS doesn't need visual cues from the desktop in order for users to understand how to use certain apps; regardless, it points at Apple now valuing usability and appropriateness over unnecessary cross-platform visual consistency.
By contrast, Microsoft, despite having arguably led the way in terms of stripped-back touchscreen interfaces, continues to believe the best approach is to smash two disparate systems together - a situation Apple was perhaps in danger of heading towards itself.
Newfound confidence
Thinking freely, it's possible to consider Apple's new visual language as metaphor for the company's collective state of mind. There's Apple's existing care about fine details, but also a greater interest in efficiency and the aforementioned fixation on coherence, presumably driven by Jony Ive. There's also a playfulness and a desire for intrigue in iOS that had been lacking as the platform became - in many people's eyes - stale.
But mostly, there's a newfound confidence. This is an Apple that makes lighthearted jokes of its prior obsession with textures.
It's unafraid to make radical change, when it feels the time is right, trusting in the usability of the final product to retain users when some familiarity (be it textures on OS X or various interface elements on iOS) is lost.
It's arguable an ability for major change has always been within Apple, but of late the company had seemed tentative, cautious of stepping out from under the shadow of its founder and also the huge impact Scott Forstall made in terms of how its software appeared.
These updates, then, represent a company refresh, not just a splash of new paint on some operating systems. Apple feels new and reinvigorated, throwing off the shackles of its recent past. What's important now is Apple rapidly iterate, using this newfound momentum to push on to greater things, lest it again find itself charged with treading water.
Samsung officially announced its latest cameraphone running Android and it's called the Galaxy S4 Zoom. It's basically a hybrid between the Galaxy S4 mini and the Galaxy Camera, combining solid smartphone functionality with the versatility of a zoom lens and a proper flash.
The Samsung Galaxy S4 Zoom built around a 4.3" Super AMOLED display with a resolution of 960x540 pixels and Corning Gorilla Glass 3 for protection. Under the hood the smartphone sports a 1.5GHz dual-core processor and 1.5GB of RAM. The hybrid has a footprint similar to the Galaxy S4 mini, but is notably thicker at 125.5x63.5x15.4 mm.
It's also notably heavier at 208g, but that was to be expected given the much larger camera module and the proper grip.
The key selling point of the Samsung Galaxy S4 Zoom though, is its camera, which has 16MP sensor, a 10x zoom and a xenon flash. It's capable of 10x optical zoom, which is less than the 21x zoom of the Galaxy Camera, but has nicely sounding 24mm wide lens, which we believe is more important.
Samsung Galaxy S4 Zoom official photos
The Galaxy S4 Zoom is capable of 1080p video recording @ 30fps (and 720p@60fps) and on paper sounds to be a promising snapper. The smartphone runs Android 4.2.2 with Samsung's TouchWiz coating on top.
Samsung Galaxy S4 Zoom official photos
The battery has 2330mAh, so it should be able to take you through a day of smartphone usage and calls even if you do more than the occasional photo.
Since we had the chance to play with the Samsung Galaxy S4 Zoom, we bring you a few live photos of the device.
Samsung Galaxy S4 Zoom
The internal memory is 8GB, expandable by up to 64GB via the hot-swappable microSD card slot. Connectivity options include Wi-Fi a/b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.0 LE and A-GPS. The Samsung S4 Zoom will be able to make phone calls and supports 3G with HSPA and even LTE connectivity.
Overt your eyes children, this could scare you for life
The Samsung Galaxy S4 Zoom has been officially unveiled and while its existence is no surprise considering the amount of rumours which have been circulating, the sheer number of Galaxy S4 branded handsets Samsung seems to be forcing on the world is a little more alarming.
