The upgrade to Android 4.4 KitKat hasn’t only added some cool new features to Samsung’s best phones — it’s cleaned up their reputations too, according to a new report. Ars Technica ran the Galaxy S4 and Galaxy Note 3 through a gamut of tests to compare their performance before and after the update, and the …
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BARCELONA, Spain — In the smallest meeting room at Mobile World Congress — hidden up some stairs behind the Ericsson stand — James Atkins is planning a scrappy insurgency against the “oil tankers” of the smartphone business. It’s his first MWC as Chief Marketing Officer of Kazam, the London-based phone maker he started with fellow HTC alumnus Michael Coombes in …
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BARCELONA, Spain — Ford’s smartening up its new cars with an app that helps you find a parking space. Parkopedia lets you search among 15 million spaces across Europe, showing which car parks have free spaces and listing how much they cost. It covers 3,000 towns and cities in 20 countries across the continent. The carmaker’s AppLink system, which is …
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BARCELONA, Spain — Hard to believe it’s only day 2 of Mobile World Congress, which already feels like it’s been going on for months. The CNET team is now fluent in Catalan, cannot remember any food that isn’t tapas, and has renounced all other religions for that of Lionel Messi. With most of the main announcements out of the way, …
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BARCELONA, Spain — There’s a vast number of new phone accessories here at Mobile World Congress — cases, clips, and camera widgets galore — but I’m willing to bet I don’t see a more lavish or expensive one than this. German company Avantgarde Acoustics is here showing off its new Zero 1 speaker, which as the headline gleefully informs you, …
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BARCELONA, Spain — Garmin’s teamed up with Sony for a killer feature so far missing from smartwatches: navigation. The Garmin Xperia Edition app for Sony smartphones has an extension for the Japanese company’s Smart Watch 2. It means you can set yourself a route for a relaxing walk or an invigorating run and not have to keep looking at your …
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Jolla, the Finnish phone company founded by Nokia refugees, is ready to roll out the full, “commercially ready” 1.0 version of its Sailfish software. The attractive OS can run Android apps and you’ll soon be able to try it out on your Android phone by downloading a launcher that mimics the Sailfish interface. Sailfish started life as MeeGo, once the …
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Fledgling UK-based mobile maker Kazam — formed last year by two former HTC execs — has conjured up more reasonably priced Android phones. Its new Thunder 2 brings 4G LTE, while the Trooper 2 tweaks the company’s midrange options. Fully embracing Samsung’s “a phone for every price and screen size” philosophy, Kazam has three designs — Thunder, Trooper and the …
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4G’s been super-pricey, but superfast megabytes should start to cost you less in 2014. That’s no use if you still need a high-end phone to slurp down the data, so Samsung’s busting out a budget-looking blower called the Galaxy Core LTE. LTE is the official name for the UK’s brand of 4G, and the Core LTE will be rocking up …
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Apple has acknowledged there’s an annoying bug in its iOS 7 mobile software that causes devices to shut down apparently at random and has pledged to fix it. The most viewed report on Apple’s official user forum concerns this issue. It has over 250 posts describing iPhone users’ black-screen woes, going back to September when iOS 7 first appeared. “We …
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