Nokia Lumia 800 Spotted at the FCC, Torn to Pieces

Finnish mobile phone maker Nokia is gearing up for pushing the recently launched Lumia 800 smartphone to more markets than those which got a taste of it back in November. Thus, the company got the handset through FCC testing, and the results already came out.  The Windows Phone device has been torn to pieces by the Federal Communication Commission, and all of its internals brought to light for us to have a look at.  The mobile phone has just received the necessary approvals from the feds, though this does not confirm a near release in the United States.  However, it does bring it closer to the North American market, which certainly sounds great for enthusiasts.  The FCC also unveiled the user manual for Nokia’s Lumia...

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Unannounced Nokia Phone Spotted in Microsoft Video Ad

Windows Phone comes with a series of integrated Microsoft services, and making use of them is easy.  The Redmond-based software giant seems determined to underline that as often as it can, and has put up a video to show how Windows Live can be easily accessed straight from a Windows Phone.  The demo, however, is made on a Nokia device that apparently differs from the Lumia 800 and Lumia 710 devices that have been already released.  No specific info on what this device would be emerged, but some suggest that it might actually be the Lumia 900 that has been long rumored before.  You can see specific Nokia apps listed on the device at a specific point in the video embedded above, clearly showing a handset from the Finnish company.  A glimpse at the phone's back shows...

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Intel Medfield SoC Includes Special Hardware Tweaks for the Android OS

Intel’s collaboration with Google seems to have led to more than just an x86 port of the Android operating system, as the chip maker has recently confirmed that its upcoming Medfield SoC will include a series of hardware optimizations specifically designed for this mobile OS. In a meeting with the Technology Review website, where Intel has presented to the publication a Medfield-running tablet and smartphone, the chip maker also talked a little bit about the SoC’s Android optimizations. The most important of these cover Web browsing and a series of Android apps, but some dedicated imaging processing circuits were also thrown into the mix. These come in part from a Dutch image-processing company called Silicon Hive, which Intel has acquired...

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Nokia Lumia 800 Battery Update to Arrive on January 18th

Finnish mobile phone maker Nokia is gearing up for the release of a software update for its Lumia 800 devices to fix a series of issues with the model's battery, and it appears that it will push it out on January 18th.  The company already confirmed plans to deliver the software update to its users, but did not offer specific info on when that might happen until now.  However, a recent post on plaffo suggests that Nokia has already started to inform users on the availability of this update starting with the said date.  This means that Nokia Lumia 800 users will still have to wait for about four more weeks before being able to benefit from the said enhancement. Even so, the good news is that it is coming, and that it will deliver...

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Android Is Finally Coming Back to Linux Kernel

Tim Bird in collaboration with many Linaro and individual developers, including Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman, announced the beginning of the Android Mainlining Project, to include Android's patches and features into the mainline Linux kernel.  As many of you know, the Android drivers were no longer accepted in the mainline Linux kernel, starting with Linux kernel 2.6.33, as announced by Greg Kroah-Hartman back in spring 2010. However, it appears that Greg Kroah-Hartman himself will include the Android drivers into his development branch for the upcoming Linux kernel 3.3, making it boot on Android devices without being patched. "At the recent kernel summit in Prague, there was a discussion about re-evaluating some of the...

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AMD May Prepare 8-Core Phenom II X8 Processors

It seems like AMD’s Phenom brand is not yet ready to pass into oblivion, as it now seems like the chip maker is preparing a new series of eight-core CPUs that will use this moniker. The chips have popped up in the support list of some Jetway and ECS motherboards , and according to Xbit Labs these will be based on the Bulldozer architecture. Four models are mentioned in the documents provided by the two mobo makers, three featuring a 95W TDP while the fourth fits inside a 125W thermal envelope. Clock speeds vary between 2.4GHz and 3.0GHz, but there’s no mention of Turbo Core or other AMD technologies that will be supported by these CPUs. Keeping the Phenom around is definitely good news for all the nostalgics out there, but what I would like...

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Firmware 4.0.2.A.0.62 Now Ready for Xperia Handsets

Sony Ericsson's Xperia devices should soon get a taste of a software update, and it appears that the build is already prepared for shipping.  A new firmware is ready for Xperia handsets, namely software version number 4.0.2.A.0.62, the PTCRB site unveils.  Unfortunately, this is not the Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich platform update that users might have been waiting for.  Instead, it is only a maintenance update, aimed at delivering a series of bug fixes for Sony Ericsson Xperia arc and arc S, Xperia neo and neo V, and Xperia PLAY handsets. The software is expected to be pushed to all devices in the MENA (Middle East North Africa) region, but no specific info on when it will start to emerge has been unveiled so far. According...

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Samsung Galaxy S III Concept Device Emerges

Samsung already has two successful Galaxy S devices available on shelves, and the company is expected to launch new ones as soon as next year.  Following Galaxy S and Galaxy S II, the next flagship Android model from the handset vendor is expected to be the Samsung Galaxy S III.  The phone was rumored before, but no specific info on it has emerged to date. However, we can now make an idea of what the handset might look like when released, courtesy of a series of images coming from “Samsung Phones Owners’ Club” group on VKontakte.ru.  Make no mistake about it, the device in these images is not the real Galaxy S III, but merely the result of an enthusiast's imagination.  Nevertheless, this does not mean that the smartphone...

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Nokia N9 UI Tweak Enables Landscape Mode

Nokia N9 can easily prove a great device, even if it has some drawbacks. One of them is the inability to show its three screens in landscape mode.  Luckily, a N9Tweak application that resolves this issue has just emerged, and the MeeGo-based handset can now deliver its appealing capabilities in more ways than before.  Not only would the tweak turn the three screens to landscape mode, but it will also enable users to easily switch from one to another via horizontal swipes.  To benefit from these features, you will have to download the aforementioned N9Tweak, launch it and activate landscape through typing in L, and then enter the “rootme” password. You can find more info on the application on maemo.org. You can have a look at the manner in which landscape mode works on Nokia...

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Samsung Galaxy S II DUOS Announced in China

Shortly after announcing two new Galaxy family smartphones with dual-SIM support, the Galaxy Y DUOS and Galaxy Y Pro DUOS, Samsung officially introduce a new dual-SIM smartphone, the Galaxy S II DUOS. However, Samsung Galaxy S II DUOS will be launched in China with support for CDMA2000 and GSM bands. For the time being, it’s unclear if the smartphone will be released in other countries as well. Anyway, the Galaxy S II DUOS is equipped with a 4.52-inch WVGA Super AMOLED Plus capacitive touchscreen and a dual core 1.2 GHz Exynos processor. There’s also an 8-megapixel camera on back, which features LED flash and full HD (1080p) video recording. Other highlights of the phone include 16GB onboard memory, microSD card slot for memory expansion,...

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8-Core Sandy Bridge-E Performance Leaked by Intel

The first quarter of 2012 will mark the transition of the Sandy Bridge-E architecture into the server space in the form of the Xeon E5 series of CPUs, and a recent series of leaked Intel slides have come to detail the performance of this platform in comparison with Westmere-EP. The new Xeon E5 chips are also known under the code name of Sandy Bridge-EP and feature a series of changes when compared with the desktop version of these CPUs. These include support for up to eight processing cores, which can run a maximum of sixteen threads thanks to Intel’s Hyper-Threading technology, up to 20 MB of L3 cache memory, as well as the presence of dual QuickPath Interconnect (QPI) links. The latter feature was added to the specs list in order to enable...

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iPhone 5: More Storage, Battery Life, Speed Thanks to Anobit

Apple’s $500 million acquisition of NAND Flash designer Anobit will translate into a number of key improvements for the next generation of iPhones, including increased storage capacity, faster access of music and video, a slimmer design, and perhaps even a slimmer price tag. All this according to an analysis by InventHelp, whose technology publication churned up a piece that looks at five key improvements that we can expect to see in the iPhone 5, thanks to Apple’s acquisition of Israeli tech firm, Anobit. The first bullet point is battery life. This will be improved, says InventHelp, mostly because “Anobit’s core speciality is increasing multi-level flash cell performance [and] both single-level and multi-level flash memory are efficient...

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Bricked Nexus S with Ice Cream Sandwich Can Now Be Recovered

A few days ago, Google started to push out the Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich OS to its Nexus S users, causing a lot of issues on many devices, including rendering some of them unusable.  Those who have tried to install the new OS flavor and ended up with a bricked Nexus S instead, have now the possibility to fix their devices, and get them back online.  An unofficial tool for that is available for download, courtesy of XDA-Developers member AdamOutler.  Called Unbreakable Resurrector, the application has just been upgraded with support for Nexus S devices that have been affected by the recent roll-out.  The major drawback here is that you will need to run the tool on Linux, preferably on Ubuntu. The said recovery tool,...

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Nokia Answers Symbian Belle Questions, Explains Name Change

It appears that Nokia received overwhelming feedback after the official announcement that confirmed Symbian Belle update will be released in February 2012.  For this reason and others, the company came forward with some explanations for why the company decided to swap the name of the operating system and the reason behind its delay. Vesa Jutila, head of Symbian Product Marketing at Nokia, is the person that explains why the Finnish handset maker decided to name its latest version of Symbian, Nokia Belle: “We are still using Symbian Belle with some audiences like developers but now we also have the flexibility of using Nokia Belle when referring to our greatest and latest Symbian software update. We are really looking forward to making...

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Zalman Outs CNPS10X Optoma Multi-Platform CPU Cooler

Cooling specialist Zalman has just announced the introduction of a new CPU cooler, dubbed the CNPS10X Optoma, featuring direct touch heatpipes and support for a wide range of processors from both AMD’s and Intel’s camps. The cooler itself is designed as a pretty standard tower heatsink, with four U-shaped copper heatpipes that are destined to draw the heat away from the CPU and into a large aluminum fin array, topped by a 120mm fan. Like most other fans used for today's coolers, this one also is PWM controlled and its speed varies between 1000 and 1700 RPM, depending on the CPU temperature. According to Zalman, the noise level should never go above 28dBA, while, at the minimum rotation speed supported, this generates only 17dBA of noise,...

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