After receiving great feedback from media, bloggers and booth-goers at CES on Xperia Z’s design, we sat down recently with Sony designers, Tom Waldner and David de Léon. They shared insight into the creative direction and inspiration behind the hardware and User Interface design of our Xperia Z smartphone…

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Tom Waldner – Head of Creative Product Design – Sony Mobile

“With Xperia Z, our goal was to create a smartphone that has a unique design expression, whilst at the same time is easy to understand. In other words, a balance of design that is beautiful and logical and  appeals to your emotions and reason. We use smartphones in all areas of our life and they are becoming deeply integrated into our behavior and society. Xperia Z is the first of our products to have the new theme we are calling “OmniBalance design”. Omni means “all” or “everywhere” – it represents the omnipresence and the multitude of smartphone uses.  This principle of OmniBalance is embodied in the design execution – a minimalistic form where only the essentials remain, with balance and symmetry throughout. It is essentially a plate of glass that has the edges and corners softened and strengthened in an encasing frame.

We focused on emphasizing the display experience; the aim is to avoid detracting from what you are really interested in – your photos, videos, movies, games on the amazing display. The idea is that Xperia Z, while standing out as a beautiful product, is comfortable to use in all situations, blends into the overall experience, and emphasizes the vibrancy of whatever might be on the screen. We want you to notice the design, but it’s when you don’t that you really appreciate it…

We also know that details matter. So, we precisely crafted each part of Xperia Z with highest-spec materials – for example, durable tempered glass for the front and the back, and aluminum keys allowed for precise detailing. The screen glass is glued directly to the body to eliminate a layer of air, bringing the display closer to the lens for added touch sensitivity, improved image and smaller size.”

So it is more than a possibility that the Samsung Galaxy S4 will be launched this year, and according to information revealed not too long ago, it is possible that the Galaxy S4 for AT&T could be going by the model number SGH-i337, which is why we found it interesting that a couple of photos uploaded onto Google+ had its EXIF data revealed which showed that the photo was taken by that device! The photos have since been removed from Google+, suggesting that perhaps there is some validity to those claims after all. The photos themselves, as you can see in the image above, aren’t exactly crystal clear so it’s a bit hard to gauge the capabilities of the Galaxy S4′s camera right now. It also appears to have been taken at a lower resolution, which seems odd given that the rumors suggest a 13MP camera on the Galaxy S4.

Now, this is definitely an interesting bit of news. Are we looking at a potentially large typo here, or could it be that China Mobile is first off the blocks to make the world aware of a new and upcoming Nokia flagship that will continue the Lumia 920’s legacy? Only time will tell whether it is the truth or not, but we do know that China Mobile has already listed the Nokia Lumia 1000 on their site, and some speculate that this could very well be the Nokia Lumia EOS or the Catwalk.

Not all smartphones are created equal, but when we use one, we do expect it to have decent performance most of the time without choking or freezing, especially after it has one of the more recent system updates running. Well, we are rather disappointed to report that the LG Nexus 4 that runs on the Android 4.2 Jelly Bean operating system does have its fair share of flaws, where some users have reported that the camera app will freeze and stop working altogether, causing the shutter button to be unable to shoot any more photos.

Don’t you hate it when you download apps on your iPhone 5 only to find out that the developer has not bothered updating the app to comply with the iPhone 5′s 4″ display? While the black iPhone 5 might not be such as issue, since the black letterboxing is kind of hidden, but on white iPhone 5s this can get pretty ugly. Either way you’re in luck because if you have recently jailbroken your iPhone 5, a tweak called FullForce will basically take iPhone 4/4S apps and stretches it to fit the iPhone 5′s display. This app is developed by famed iOS developer, Ryan Petrich, and basically what it does is that it detects when an app launch is not optimized for the 4″ display and prompts you if you want to enable to tweak. This can be enabled or disabled at will which is good because not all apps will look good stretched, but based on the screenshot above, it looks like the tweak does a pretty decent job!

Another day closer to Valentine’s Day this coming February 14th, and we are presented with a spanking new color for a device which I am quite sure many ladies would not mind owning – a pink colored version of the Samsung Galaxy Note 2 that has done gangbusters ever since it was released. Of course, one thing that most folks would ask

Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd, today launched the Samsung GALAXY Express, a feature-rich multimedia powerhouse that makes 4G LTE’s dazzlingly fast network accessible to everyone. The GALAXY Express offers great performance, connectivity, easy usability and a superior battery to enhance life’s everyday pleasures.

• The GALAXY Express is a value-driven 4G LTE smartphone, designed for the young social explorer. Faster multimedia
streaming and downloads mean less waiting time and more enjoyment! Internet browsing is super-fast, and video and
text chat sessions flawlessly stable and reliable via the 4G LTE network.

Nokia was an early mover in the tablet space – in 2007, years before the iPad burst onto the scene, it was unboxing its N800 Internet Tablet (which looks more like a phablet by today’s enormo-phone standards). But these days the Finnish high-end and low-end mobile maker does not play with slates — at least, not yet. That could

Acer looks to make a mark in the entry level tablet stakes with the Iconia B1, but how much tablet does £99 actually buy?

A whole lot of plastic. That's what £99 buys. And sadly that's one of the biggest downers on the new Acer Iconia B1. But, we'll come to that shortly. When the Iconia B1 was first announced, the biggest

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The U.K.’s smallest mobile network operator, Three, has committed to offering 4G/LTE technology at the same price as 3G — i.e. with no upgrade fee – when it’s able to add 4G to its network later this year. Three has not specified when that will happen but it’s not likely to be before September, which is when the

What you see above is an image from a Dutch e-tailer site that depicts what could very well be the Asus MeMo Pad 10. Yes sir, while the device has not been officially announced and released just yet, pre-orders are already being taken for what is obviously an Android-powered tablet that clocks in at 10-inches in terms of size. The Asus MeMo Pad 10 is said to come with a quad-core 1.2GHz NVIDIA Tegra 3 processor which should pack more than enough processing muscle to handle any game or app you throw at it, in addition to a 1,280 x 800 resolution display, 1GB RAM, 16GB of internal memory, a microSD memory card slot for expansion purposes, a 5-megapixel camera at the back, and Android 4.1 Jelly Bean right out of the box.

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So Motorola has gotten a spanking new smartphone in the pipeline, and they sure as heck seem to have pretty good plans for it. The latest rumors to come fresh from the folks over at Phone Arena point to two main points that ought to make the upcoming Motorola X phone to be quite the player in the Android-powered smartphone market when it arrives – one, it will be equipped with a Sony Exmor camera sensor that has done pretty well for itself in Sony smartphones, and the other would be the rather phenomenal battery life.

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BlackBerry vowed to pull out all the stops to get BlackBerry 10 noticed -- and the company certainly isn't holding back with its promised Super Bowl spot. The ad claims that it's easier to show what the Z10 can't do in 30 seconds than what it can, and goes to extremes that include setting a man on fire and giving him elephant legs. We do still get a glance (or rather, Peek) at the phone itself, thankfully. Does the commercial make us want to drop everything for a Z10? Not necessarily, but we'll likely remember what we saw.

Linux and Unix users might be pleased to know that work on an Android port of Wine has started. Those who were attending the Free and Open Source Software Developers European Meeting (FOSDEM) in Brussels had the opportunity to see Wine on Android in action, despite the fact that the port is still in the very early stages of development. How early are we talking? To give you an idea, today we were shown Wine running on an emulated version of Android.

It goes without saying at this point that the demo ran very, very slow, so don’t expect to see

BLU has some big plans to shake up the smartphone space, today introducing a new line of smartphones that come complete with NVIDIA Tegra 3 processors. The new series is called Quattro, and though it may not sound like anything special, one of the big draws of the line will be that the phones are offered unlocked at a rather inexpensive price. There are three devices in all: the Quattro 4.5, Quattro 4.5 HD, and Quattro 5.7 HD.

As you might have guessed, those numbers in the device names reference the screen size. With the Quattro 4.5 HD,

We recently saw benchmark filings for the GT-B9150 and it looks like several other Samsung devices have been benchmarked. This latest GLBenchmark discovery includes five additional Samsung devices, including one that is also a 9150. Though, just to clarify, this latest is the GT-I9150 (and GT-I9152) as opposed to the GT-B9150.

That said, lets begin the list of five with that model. The GT-I9150 is described as being a device with a 1.2GHz Broadcom BCM28155 processor, VideoCore IV GPU and a qHD display with a resolution of 960 x 540. The GT-I9150,

Google originally released the Android 4.2.1 code into the AOSP (Android Open Source Project) back in late-November and coming a bit more recently, it looks like they have since dropped in some updated code. And by updated, we mean two newly tagged files. The files are showing as android-4.2.1_r1.1 and android-4.2.1_r1.2.

The r1.1 file shows as being build JOP40F and the r1.2 file shows as being build JOP40G. The interesting part here, the JOP40G build was expected to arrive as Android 4.2.2. That aside though, to follow up on the remaining