Google set to release Maps for iOS tonight

Those tired of Apple’s self-built mapping solution for iOS are in for a treat tonight. According to All Things D, Google is set to release the long awaited Google Maps for iOS as early as tonight. Representatives from Google and Apple have yet to confirm the news. Here’s hoping Google Maps for iOS will bring all the features we’ve come to expect with the Android version of Google Maps, including turn-by-turn guided navigation, as all mapping solutions for iOS 6 to date have been less than stellar.

Samsung Tells World to Get Ready For Something New at CES 2013

There have been a ton of rumors flying around lately about the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) happening in Las Vegas January 8th through 11th, 2013. Much speculation has been made about what Samsung intends to unveil during the show. The tech giant has recently added further fuel to the rumor fire with the release of a teaser trailer warning the world to “get ready” for “something new” at CES 2013.
Many reports will have you believe that Samsung plans to unveil their new flagship smartphone called the Samsung Galaxy S4. This is unlikely considering the Galaxy S3 was only released earlier this year and sales are still going strong with plans to update the phone to Android 4.2 in Q1 2013. What is possible is this rumor confused reports of Samsung’s intent to showcase their fully working 4.99 inch HD Super AMOLED 1080p display with 441 ppi which will make it among the best displays on the market. It is expected that this will be the display for the future Galaxy S4 phone for which Samsung will probably hold a separate reveal for in late spring, like it did for the S3.
Super AMOLED is the term Samsung uses to describe its AMOLED displays that include a touch digitizer and offers superior viewing in sunlight. Samsung especially uses these displays since they happen to be one of the main AMOLED panel manufacturers.
Samsung could also go a step further and introduce a device that takes advantage of their flexible AMOLED displays which is made on film instead of glass and which they claim is “thinner, lighter and unbreakable“. The device could be the rumored Gakaxy S4 but it could also be a whole new phone or tablet. The flexible displays were shown off as prototypes at last year’s CES but the tech manufacturer has yet to make full use of the technology.
Yet more reports have Samsung working with the same branding teams that helped develop the brands for Nike and Starbucks in an effort to reboot their entire brand and refresh their image. They are expected to their new branding strategy at CES 2013 also. This is possibly further evidence that a new phone from the existing Galaxy S line won’t be featured at the show this January. CES 2013 is still a month away, so until then it’s all just speculation and rumors.

Samsung’s Galaxy S IV Could Feature Unbreakable Display

It’s inevitable these days for rumors to emerge long before a product is announced, let alone released onto the market. Samsung have been no stranger to this and the Galaxy S III had a bajillion rumors attached to it before it finally arrived in May. Of course, the Galaxy S IV will be no different and the rumors are just now starting to get interesting. Earlier in the week we brought you news of “Project J” along with some other upcoming devices.
Thanks to Reuters we now know that Project J is definitely the internal name for the new Galaxy S phone, and is named as such in honor of JK Shin, mobile division chief at Samsung. We’ve heard a couple of things surrounding the Galaxy S IV and they keep on cropping up again and again. There’s of course the rumored 5.0″ Full HD Display (1920 x 1080), a quad-core Cortex A15 CPU and a 13MP Camera. It’s fairly obvious at this point that Samsung will be bringing a Full HD packing phone to market, after all HTC have already hit the US market with their Full HD beast with the Droid DNA.
“We believe preparations for volume manufacturing of unbreakable plastic substrate displays continue. All in all, we could see a strong products push in the high-end in the first half, followed by other releases.” says Nicholas Gaudois, an Analyst with a 5-star rating from Thomson Reuters. The main advantage that Samsung has over everybody else is that Samsung are the leading manufacturer of OLED displays, which can replace glass with plastic substrates. Making it a lot easier to produce more resilient displays. Add this to the fact that Samsung have been advancing development of their flexible OLED panels and they’re in a a good position to make some of the first unbreakable displays on the market.
While the Galaxy S IV is unlikely to catch the flexible display train it could well come with a new OLED screen that we’ve not seen before. After all, the Galaxy S III’s display was a stunner but, with its PenTile arrangement, it was more of the same. Samsung’s main differentiator between Apple is not only the sizes of their displays but also the high-resolution panels. At 441 ppi a 1080p Display at 5.0″ would blow the iPhone 5′s “retina” display out of the water that packs just 326 ppi.

With over a million downloads, Microsoft’s Bing translator app comes to Windows Phone 8

One of the most popular and useful mobile apps out there on the Windows Phone platform is the Bing Translator app. This free service combines augmented reality with the phone’s camera and speech & text translation, helping anyone better navigate the world. And now it’s available on the newest version of the Windows mobile operating system.

Starting today, those with Windows Phone 8 devices can download the app from the App Store marketplace and begin translating whatever they want until their heart’s content. The app uses a translator “lens” whenever you launch your camera, which will enable you to access the “camera mode translation functionality” easily. Seven different languages are supported, including German, American English, British English, Spanish, French, Italian, and Chinese.

Here’s a behind-the-scenes look at the app:

There have been over a million downloads of this app before its release to Windows Phone 8 and will surely be added to the slew of new devices coming out on the market as more people (hopefully) use the devices.

China blocks Google Search, Gmail and Drive

All Google domains locked down

China blocked all Google web domains throughout the country for long periods on Friday, the search giant has said.

Google Search, Gmail, Google Drive and all other web products were largely blacked out and, in a statement to Bloomberg and Reuters, Google said it had "checked and there's nothing wrong on our end."

Google's own Transparency Report website, which shows usage levels around the world, showed a sharp decline to Google sites in China on Friday. The country has censored Google before, during a stand-off in 2010, but has never taken the drastic step of blocking the popular Gmail email service too.The outage left countless users without access to email throughout the nation and could be a watershed moment for the issue of web censorship in China, according to one watchdog.

GreatFire.org posted on Twitter: "One step closer to fully separating the Chinanet from the Internet."

Protests

In an article on its own site, the group also wrote: "We've argued before that the authorities didn't dare to fully block Gmail since it has too many users already. Fully blocking Google goes much further. According to Alexa, it's the Top 5 most used website in China.

"Never before have so many people been affected by a decision to block a website. If Google stays blocked, many more people in China will become aware of the extent of censorship. How will they react? Will there be protests?"

GreatFire.org also said that VPN servers (which allow users to circumnavigate in-country restrictions) have also been targeted.

Android 4.2 Comes with Higher Security Features!

ZTE-made Sprint Flash coming soon, packing a 4.5-inch screen, 12MP camera and 1.5GHz dual-core CPU for $130

We can’t blame you for forgetting about the ZTE Flash which we first caught at the end of July. The device is apparently launching soon, offering quite a bang for the buck.

The upcoming phone will be called Sprint Flash (rather than ZTE Flash), featuring a 4.5-inch screen (most likely 720p HD), 12-megapixel camera on the back, while dual-core processor clocked at 1.5GHz will run the show. Moreover, it is said that we should also expect preloaded Ice Cream Sandwich, 1GB of RAM, 8GB of internal storage and a 1,730mAh battery.

When it comes to the release date, the rumor is that Sprint will unveil the Flash during the first half of November, so it’s either next week or the week after that. Stay tuned as we bring you more…

Firefox Forces Secure HTTPS Connections for Some Domains

While HSTS has been supported since Firefox 4, Mozilla is now following Google's lead to implement a preloaded list of websites that are contacted using HTTPS by default:

"Our preload list has been seeded with entries from Chrome’s list of a similar function," wrote Mozilla's David Keeler in a blog post. "To build our preload list, a request is sent to every host. Only if a host responds with a valid HSTS header with an appropriately large max-age value (currently 10886400, which is eighteen weeks) do we include it in our list. We also see if the includeSubdomains value for the entry on Chrome’s list is the same as what we receive in the response header (if they do not match, we use the one we receive)."

The approach is designed to mitigate a potential vulnerability that would allow an attacker to prevent a browser from securely connecting to a site via HSTS. With forced HSTS, the browser will never connect to an included website via an insecure (HTTP) protocol.

Users of Google Chrome can go a step further and control individual sites via the interface at chrome://net-internals/#hsts, which enables users to add or delete HSTS websites.

Google's Official Nexus 4 Smartphone Pictures Arrive

Following the announcement of the Nexus 4 smartphone, Google has released the first images of the device.

Running on Jelly Bean 4.2, the Nexus 4 will be powered by a quad-core processor, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon S4 Pro and 2GB of RAM. Its screen measures in at 4.7 inches with a 1,280 x 768 pixel resolution, an 8-megapixel camera situated at the device's rear, a 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera, as well as 3G support, wireless charging and NFC.

The LG-built Nexus 4 will launch in the U.S. and UK on November 13, where it will sell contract-free for $299

Intel Releases 20 nm, 240 GB Solid State Drive

The new drives uses 20 nm MLC flash that is manufactured at IMFT, Intel's flash joint-venture with Micron. The 335 is offered as a 240 GB SSD with a 6 Gbps SATA interface that delivers sustained sequential read speeds of up to 500 MBps and write speeds of up to 450 MBps.

According to Intel, the 2.5-inch, 9.5 mm drive achieves up to 42,000 read IOPS and 52,000 write IOPS. The average power consumption is 350 mW in operation and the reliability is rated at 1.2 million hours MTBF.

"The Intel SSD 335 uses Hi-K/metal gate planar cell technology, which overcomes NAND process scaling constraints to deliver the smallest-area NAND cell and die in the industry," said Rob Crooke, Intel vice president and general manager for the Intel Non-Volatile Memory Solutions Group, in a prepared statement. "By pushing technology constraints and using process innovation, Intel can continue to progress SSD technology and pass along savings to our customers."

Zuckerberg: No Facebook Phone, Confirms Search Engine

Zuckerberg talks Facebook stock, the rumored smartphone, and the company's search engine efforts.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg made an appearance at the TechCrunch Disrupt event in San Francisco, talking about the company's mobile strategy and vision. It was the first time he had made a public appearance since Facebook went into IPO mode back in May, acknowledging that the networking giant's public offering – which is now selling for around half the initial $38 price – isn't performing as hoped. "The performance of the stock has obviously been disappointing," Zuckerberg said. Investors have reportedly been concerned about the company's ability to increase revenue and make money from the social website's growing mobile audience. But Zuckerberg points out that Facebook has big opportunities in both mobile and search, and that the company's mobile approach has been one of its most "misunderstood" traits thus far. "I think it's easy for folks to underestimate how fundamentally good mobile is for us," Zuckerberg said in an on-stage interview, adding that more people have phones than PCs, and that they engage with the site more on their mobile devices, as much as six out of seven days a week. "We already see mobile users are more likely to be daily active users," he said. "We think we're going to make more money on mobile than on the desktop." So does that mean Facebook may produce its own smartphone? Absolutely not. "It's so clearly the wrong strategy for us," he said. "We're going in the opposite direction [from companies that are building their own phones, such as Google and Apple]. We want to build a system that's as deeply integrated as possible into every device people use." During the interview, Zuckerberg also touched on rumors that the social website was building its own search engine. He said that Facebook is currently doing 1 billion queries a day – mostly people searches, but also searches for company brand pages and applications -- "and we’re not even trying." He said the company is in the perfect position to get serious about a search engine, and in fact there's a team already working on it.

"I think Facebook is uniquely positioned to answer a lot of queries people have," he said. "Like, 'What sushi restaurants have my friends gone to in New York in the last six months and liked? I know there's a big opportunity there and we just need to go and do that." People want answers to their queries, not a pile of results to sift through, he added. "Search engines are really evolving to give you a set of answers, ‘I have a specific question, answer this question for me,'" he said. What Facebook has that Google doesn't – and likely never will – is all the data provided by Facebook users. This is why Google has integrated Google+ into its search algorithms to produce more personal results. Google Now is an attempt to get even more personal, pulling from the user's Calendar, location and other details to offer a more personal pool of results. Zuckerberg also talked about some of the "missteps" Facebook has taken over the years, including jumping on the HTML5 bandwagon rather than focusing on native apps. He made it perfectly clear that Facebook remains optimistic about the web-based platform, but taking that route has caused the company's mobile strategy to suffer. "But we're coming out of that," the said. "The [new] iOS app is out and the [new] Android will be out soon."

iPhone 5: when will you get it?

The new iPhone 5 has been launched, but that's only half the story - you want to know when and where you can get your iPaws all over the handset. Well, the iPhone 5 launch date has been set for September 21, and pre-ordering begins on September 14. We've spoken to all the networks to find out which will be stocking the new iPhone, and if it will feature any fancy new features we may not have seen.

Vodafone

Surprise, surprise Vodafone will be stocking the iPhone 5 in all its capacity (16GB, 32GB, 64GB) and colour (black and white) options - shocker we know - and interestingly the big red has it available on 12 and 24 month pay monthly plans. In terms of 24 month contracts, its "flagship" (and most expensive) tariff is the £47 per month Red Data plan, giving you a free 16GB iPhone 5, unlimited calls and texts, plus 2GB of internet, which Vodafone has confirmed will cover you for Facetime over 3G. You can pay as little as £33 per month over two years, but that will only get you 600 minutes, unlimited texts and a paltry 500MB of data, plus you'll need to shell out £149 for the 16GB iPhone 5. There's also a 24 month plan for £25 per month, but this doesn't include Facetime over 3G in the 100MB of internet you get, plus you will need to fork out big money for the handset. Opt for a 12 month plan and you'll be paying an eye-wateringly high price for your shorter contract, with Vodafone demanding as much as £349 if you plump for the 16GB iPhone at £36 per month.

O2

O2 seems to have been a little slow of the mark with its iPhone 5 pre-order page, showing off the tariffs it has available, all of which offer unlimited texts and calls plus 1GB of data, but at varying prices. As the allowance is the same at each price band, which starts at £26 per month and raises all the way to £63, we expect some heavily subsidised iPhones to go with them, however O2 is yet to release its handset prices. Update: TechRadar has spoken to O2, who said it is just making sure everything is correct before it puts the pre-order page life. We should know the full details soon. O2 will also be offering the new iPhone 5 on its Pay & Go Go Go plan with 75 minutes, 500 texts and 100MB of data: £10 a month, then every 3 months your tariff gets better and better. After 3 months everything doubles, except the price. And after 9 months you get unlimited texts. Once again O2 has failed to provide us with handset prices for its PAYG deal – so watch this space. "We're celebrating the fifth year of working with Apple in style," said Ronan Dunne, Chief Executive of O2 in the UK. "We're looking forward to bringing the new iPhone 5 to everyone very soon, whether they're already on O2 or not."

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The iPhone Evolution – iPhone 5 is here

The new iPhone is here and once again we prepared a chart to show you how much it’s better than its predecessors. You’ve heard it will come with a bigger screen, improved positioning (with inclusion of Glonass), better front-facing camera, support for LTE connectivity and a brand new A6 processor. And while we don’t have A6′s GHz count, we’re pretty confident Apple will make sure everything works as smoothly as possible.

But I said it enough. Here’s the new chart – and, if you need a bigger version, you can get it from here.

IBM z Processors Climb to 5.5 GHz

The core of IBM's venerable mainframe architecture, the z196 chip, is currently shipping as a 5.2 GHz quad-core processor. The next product generation will apparently climb to 5.5 GHz, according to a report published earlier this month by the Wall Street Journal.
There was no clock speed information on the next Power chip, currently called Power7+. Power7 runs at up to 4.14 GHz today and IBM says that the next generation will be 10 to 20 percent faster and it is more than likely that a slight upward adjustment of the clock speed will arrive as well.
IBM's zEnterprise servers have a starting configuration price point of about $75,000 for the z114 (up to 14 processors at 3.8 GHz) and scale into the hundreds of thousands of dollars for z196 systems with 24 processors/96 cores. A single 5.2 GHz quad-core z196 processor, called central processing complex (CPC) is rated at a power consumption of about 300 watts.
In comparison, a 4.14 GHz Power7 chip is rated at 190 watts thermal design power.

DRAM Prices Continue to Decline

MarketWatch reported that DRAM prices have just hit a new five-month low. According to DRAMeXchange, a 4GB DDR3 chip module sold for $18.75 last week and may drop to $18 this week.

Typically, there is a seasonal uptick in DRAM pricing in the September time frame due to increased demand from PC makers that are preparing for the Christmas season. However, there appears to be little to no increased demand, which could be caused by high inventory levels.

While there was no information how much inventory there is, there are implications that Windows 8 has not jumpstarted PC manufacturing enough to stimulate DRAM demand. At this time, DRAM prices are still falling and customers looking to upgrade the memory in their PCs may get even better deals toward the end of the year.

Samsung Said to Be Prepping Android 4.0 Galaxy S Camera

Samsung has had a rough couple of days but it seems the company isn't going to let last week's billion dollar ruling in Apple's favor mess with its plans for IFA. Rumor has it the company is preparing to announce a brand new Galaxy device and, despite the company's tendency to double up on product lines (we can't be the only ones puzzled by the Galaxy Tab 10.1 and Galaxy Note 10.1) this is unlike anything the company has released before.

GSMArena reports that Samsung is working on a Galaxy S III-based point-and-shoot camera. Dubbed the Samsung Galaxy S Camera, the device features a 4.8-inch SuperAMOLED screen and is based on Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. GSMArena says this information comes from a tipster that has proven reliable on previous occasions. It's described as a Galaxy S III glued to the back of a point-and-shoot with the resulting device measuring roughly one and a half or two times as thick as the GSIII.

Set for an IFA unveiling, GSMArena's source says the camera will pack both WiFi and 3G connectivity, as well as a 16-megapixel sensor and a 10x zoom. Other than this, details were a bit scarce, but with IFA kicking off later this week, we're hoping to learn more soon. Samsung is scheduled to debut the Galaxy Note 2 at its Unpacked event tomorrow, and the Galaxy S Camera is apparently going to be shown alongside the 5.5-inch phone/tablet.

Apple Wins $1 Billion Patent Damages From Samsung In US Court

Apple wins big – but Samsung will appeal

Samsung products found to have violated Apple patents included the Samsung Galaxy Tab and Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablets and such smartphone models as the Captivate, the Galaxy S line, the Fascinate and the Epic 4 G. In the case of most patents, the jury ruled that Samsung’s infringement of them was “willful.” If the jury verdict is upheld after the inevitable appeals, the $1.05 billion damages award has the potential to take a significant bite out of Samsung’s cash reserves, which totaled $23.8 billion (£15bn) according to its second quarter earnings report released on July 27. The verdict was handed down by a jury in US District Court for the Northern District of California in San Jose after a three-week trial and three days of deliberations. Neither Samsung or Apple representatives spoke to reporters after the verdict, but Samsung issued a statement. “Today’s verdict should not be viewed as a win for Apple, but as a loss for the American consumer. It will lead to fewer choices, less innovation, and potentially higher prices,” Samsung’s statement said. “It is unfortunate that patent law can be manipulated to give one company a monopoly over rectangles with rounded corners, or technology that is being improved every day by Samsung and other companies.” The statement also asserted that “this is not the final word in this case,” while not specifically stating whether Samsung plans to appeal these verdicts. However, Samsung noted that some of the rulings and appeals other Apple patent lawsuits in the US and in courts overseas have actually gone against Apple.Only this week, a South Korean court penalised both companies. Apple sued Samsung over multiple infringements of its patents on the iPhone smartphone and the iPad tablet computer, seeking at least $2.5 billion in damages.

But during the trial, Samsung made counterclaims that Apple infringed on some of its patents and also tried to invalidate some Apple patents by arguing that they were based on “prior art,” meaning that the innovations Apple believed were unique were already on the market. Apple, on the other hand, presented evidence that it claimed showed Samsung was obviously copying its design for the iPhone. Its lawyers produced several Samsung smartphones released before the iPhone came out in 2007 that were of various shapes and sizes, but that after the iPhone came out, new Samsung smartphones began looking more like the iPhone. Apple also introduced a 132-page internal Samsung document itemising multiple features of the iPhone and noting how Samsung models in development at the time fell short of the design of the iPhone. After the verdict was read, US District Judge Lucy Koh asked the jury to reconsider apparent inconsistencies in two of the verdicts where the jury found that Samsung had not infringed on an Apple patent, but awarded damages anyway. The jury reduced the damages in those two verdicts to zero. The change reduced the final damages award to $1,049,343,540. The Apple vs. Samsung case has been closely watched by many in the Silicon Valley technology community because of its implications for competition in the multi-billion dollar mobile device market. Samsung and Apple are the first and second best selling smartphone vendors in the market, respectively, according to figures from the research firm IDC. In the second quarter of 2012, Samsung smartphone sales jumped by 173 percent over the second quarter of 2011 to 50.2 million units. Apple’s sales grew by 27.5 percent to 26 million units. The next two vendors on the list, Nokia and HTC, both suffered double-digit sales declines as customers gravitated to the top-selling Samsung and Apple devices. Apple, however, holds a substantial lead in the sale of tablets according to a report from IHS. In the fourth quarter, Apple held a 62 percent share of the global tablet market, with Samsung’s Galaxy Tab line a distant second at 6.4 percent.

Introducing the World’s first ever Linux Ultrabook, the Ultralap 430

So you are shopping around for an Ultrabook when it hits you that there really are no decent machines on the market running a Linux distro out of the box. Logic dictates then that you buy a Windows machine, install a new OS on it, and live happily ever after dual-booting two different however practical operating systems. The question is, why has nobody released a Linux Ultrabook yet which runs an open-source distro out of the box?

Introducing the ZaReason Ultralap 430, the first ever Linux powered Ultrabook, which has some decent hardware behind it and something rather unique; ZaReason will install any open-source operating system you like on it. That means that (as taken from the official ZaReason website) Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, Kubuntu 12.04 LTS, Edubuntu 12.04 LTS, Debian 6, Linux Mint 13, Fedora 17 or any other open-source distro can be installed on your machine, seemingly bringing an end to one of the fun parts of developing and running custom computers; installing a new OS on a brand new machine.

Keeping in line with current Intel hardware requirements for current 2012 generation Ultrabooks, the Ultralap 430 runs Intel Core Ivy Bridge processors (Core i3 as standard, can be upgraded to Core i5) and rocks two USB 3.0 ports. Other features include a 3.5mm headphone socket, a Kensington lock port, a HDMI port and a 3-in-1 card reader, supporting SD, MMC and MS.

Overall the ZaReason Ultralap looks like a very decent machine, and a tempting purchase all round. Prices start at $899.00 in the US however expect that price to balloon if upgrading parts, of which RAM (standard 4GB) and processor (standard core i3) should be on your list of to-dos.

Verizon Samsung Galaxy S III is able to be unlocked

The folks at xda-developers have a knack with Android devices and have cracked open yet another locked down handset. The latest to fall is the Galaxy S III on Verizon, which is one of the only S III models in the US to ship with a locked boot loader.

The ability to unlock the boot loader will now let S III owners replace the stock Verizon ROM with one from individual developers. To unlock your boot loader, you’ll want to head to xda-developers and follow the instructions in this post. You’ll need a Mac or Linux box to do the unlocking, which may be a deterrent for Windows users. Now that the boot loader has been unlocked look for an explosion of ROMs compatible with the handset.

Google Play Tightens Developer Rules

Google recently updated its developer content policies in order to clean up Google Play – the app and media hub for all Android devices. Google Play has branched out to include music, books, movies, TV shows, and of course apps. However, Google Play’s biggest problem is that there are many rouge apps out there – repeat, copies or spam apps. Google hopes by updating the developer agreement they can begin to clean up Google Play’s app market.

According to Mashable Google sent an email to the developer community explaining that Google Play was in the process of policy changes in order to “crack down on shady behavior in the Android market.” Some of Google Play’s new policies tackle issues such as advertisement, payment for apps and spam. Google indicated that all payment for apps must be done through Google’s own payment system. Another change tries to eliminate duplicated or “copycat” apps. The new policy states, “don’t pretend to be someone else, and don’t represent that your app is authorized by or produced by another company or organization if that is not the case.” The next big change to Google’s policy directly takes on spamming and viruses. Google’s previous policy asked developers to avoid “dangerous products,” but the new policy takes that a step further by defining exactly what they. The new policy reads, “don’t transmit viruses, worms, defects, Trojan horses, malware, or any other items that may introduce security vulnerabilities to or harm user devices, applications, or personal data.” This additional step declares in no uncertain terms that Google Play will no longer play host to apps or programs that can harm their users’ devices. Google Play has become clogged with much content that the company does not want to be responsible for. In addition to enforcing these guidelines on new apps, Google will apply the new terms for existing apps in order to clean the clutter that has already formed. If developers have not complied with the new terms within 30 days of receiving their notification from Google, their app will be at risk of deletion. With these additions to Google Play Android users can feel safer downloading apps in the future and Google Play should be easier to navigate through with less clutter and spam.

Acer CloudMobile coming to the UK in early September

The Acer CloudMobile Android smartphone, which was announced back in February, will finally be available in early September. That’s at least in the UK with Expansys already accepting preorders, asking 289.99 GBP (about $454) for the unlocked device. Specs wise, we’re talking about the best smartphone Acer has ever made. It comes with a 4.3-inch HD screen, 1.5GHz dual-core processor, 1GB of RAM, 8-megapixel rear camera with LED flash, HSPA and Wi-Fi connectivity, DLNA, GPS, Dolby Sound technology and a microSD expansion slot. If all this sounds cool to you, hit this link to preorder your CloudMobile device. Hopefully the rest of Europe will follow shortly…

Acer CloudMobile: 4.3 inch 720p Android 4.1 smartphone that won a design award

Ask someone, anyone, about which companies are synonymous with the word design, and you’d be hard pressed to hear a single person mention Acer. Things can change though, and the Acer CloudMobile might be the start of a new era for the company. It won the 2012 iF design award, which isn’t really saying much, but we’ll give Acer the benefit of the doubt. Their new smartphone will ship in Q3 of this year running Android 4.1, it’ll have a 4.3 inch 720p resolution screen, and from the pair of photos we have of the device it looks like it isn’t going to feature any hardware buttons on the front. There’s not too many details about what’s under the hood, we’ll likely hear that at Mobile World Congress later this month, but don’t be surprised to find out that it’s running a typical dual core Qualcomm Snapdragon chip with 1 GB of RAM on board.

The bigger question is what’s Acer going to do to Android? That design award that their phone won was was due to the fact that it looks pretty. There’s only so much being pretty will take you in smartphone land however. If people can’t use your device, then forget about it, no one is going to buy it. We’re hoping Acer will ship the CloudMobile with stock Android, but we know that’s not going to be the case. All we can do is click our red shoes together with our eyes closed and wait and see what happens.

Featured: Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 7.0 Student Edition Is Now Available At Best Buy

The trending topic nowadays is the Student Version of the Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 2 7.0 tablet. The device was launched a couple of months ago, though the student version took some time to become available. The Student Version promises to bring some extra accessories that would be useful for the students who are just going back to school. There hasn’t been any modifications in the slate, all the features and the hardware remains same. In addition to the tablet, Samsung would be giving away a free keyboard as well as a USB dongle. It was anticipated that the device would hit the shelves of the stores by August 19th. An user over at Android Forums has claimed that he has been able to get the device earlier than the release date. The device he bought was from Best Buy and apparently it has started shipping out the product. Additionally, the user has also uploaded a video of Unboxing of the product. With these proofs in hand, we can surely say that you should check out the Best Buy Shop near you and if you are lucky, you’d get your hands on this shiny tablet.

More iPhone 5 Parts Leaked From China

Leaked iPhone parts photo confirms a few previous rumors.

Late July and early August have been busy times for the iPhone 5 rumor mill. With the September announcement inching closer and closer, more photos and videos appear, detailing everything there is to know about the upcoming device. By now, we'd say it is petty safe to assume the new iPhone will be sporting a longer screen, capable of displaying 5 rows of icons on the home screen as opposed to the current 4. Now, another leaked photo is making its rounds from Chinese forum iColorOS. If the photo turns out to be real, it could prove to be a clear confirmation of the information reported from the previous video released by iPhone parts manufacturer ETrade. In addition to confirming screen dimensions and design, the photo also backs up some other rumors, such as a new micro-SIM card slot and smaller home buttons. With all of the rumors buzzing about, we can now paint a possible picture of what's to come: a longer, stronger scratch-resistant screen, miniaturized dock connector, 5 rows on the home screen, two-tone metal casing and updated speaker arrangement. However, if history has shown us anything it's that we can never be too sure. We'll just have to wait until the rumored September 12th announcement to find out. Until then, expect more rumors and leaks to generate additional buzz.