News & Reviews:   smartphone

HTC recently announced the HTC Butterfly S for Asian markets this July. While the HTC Butterfly did offer good specs in smartphone it didn't get that much hype as it was released almost at the same time as the flagship HTC One. At the time, it was still a rather impressive smartphone. The HTC Butterfly S comes into its own with this by offering some rather high-end specs which include:

• 1.9GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 processor
• 5-inch display (1080p)
• 2GB RAM
• 16GB Storage + microSD
• BoomSound Stereo speakers
• UltraPixel rear camera (Zoe) + 2.1MP front camera (wide-angle)
• Supports Bluetooth 4.0 + IR remote control
• 3200 mAh battery
• Android 4.2 + Sense 5 UI

In a recent set of benchmark tests, Qualcomm showed off their latest Snapdragon 800 chipset, which will appear in premium smartphones later in 2013. Already, there are rumours of a Snapdragon 800 powered Samsung Galaxy S4 Plus smartphone. The benchmarks carried out by Qualcomm are impressive to say the least. According to Qualcomm, the Snapdragon 800 series will be Quad-core processors called the Krait 400 fabricated a 28nm. Each core will run at 2.3 GHz and the processor will use a new Adreno 330 GPU. The chip will also integrate a 4G LTE modem that can go up to 150 Mbps and support 802.11ac WiFi.

If you were wishing for a Samsung Galaxy S4, LG Nexus 4, Sony Xperia Z or HTC One without any contract but still at a subsidized price, then DiGi is the first telco to offer this type of deal. Covering four of the major smartphones in Malaysia, another thing setting them apart is that they all offer Google Edition versions although, we're pretty sure you won't get the Google Edition if you buy any of them except for the LG Nexus 4. While you won't be contracted for 12 or 24 months you will be signed on with a DG SmartPlan 58 but you can terminate the plan anytime without any early termination fee. In addition to this you will also get two months monthly fee waived. For more details on pricing check out the table below:

For those of you traveling overseas to the US, watch out, a species of ants native to the US are destroying electronic devices such as smartphones because they like to eat their insides. These ants are called Rasberry crazy ants and apart from wiping out other ants they like to eat electrical components, especially those inside smartphones and tablets. Small enough to fit into most smartphones or tablets (either through the ports or the jacks), these ants make things worse by releasing pheromones that attract other Rasberry crazy ants when they die. So if they make it inside your smartphone, start nibbling and get electrocuted, they'll just attract more of their smartphone guts gobbling pals.

We've all seen any number drop tests, torture tests and reliability tests from various sites, but does Samsung actually do any reliability testing of their own? Well, it appears they do, and not just in the usual rather amateurish way most other tech sites go about it. Imagine having dedicated machines to test dropping, tumbling, impact, heat and water submersion and you get an idea of how strictly Samsung tests the reliability of their smartphones.

Nokia has long been associated with Symbian as its main operating system, especially for it's feature phones. However, as of this summer in 2013, Nokia will stop shipping Symbian smartphones. The last Symbian smartphone will be Nokia's 808 PureView. Moving on from this, Nokia will only manufacture smartphones that run Microsoft Windows Phone OS.

Most of the smartphones and tablets in the market are running on ARM-based processors such as those from Qualcomm and Samsung, especially the Android systems, Intel is making big steps to try and break into the mobile market. One of the most major of which is their new Atom microarcitecture called Silvermont. While there are already a number of Intel powered smartphones and tablets (Lenovo K900, Asus FonePad, etc.), they hardly compare to the hordes of ARM based smartphones and tablets already in and coming to the market. ARM is already coming out with a number of new processors targeting both the midrange and the high performance markets so there is a lot riding on the success of Intel's Silvermont.

We fully expected this from our earlier reports but Samsung have dethroned Apple in smartphones sales for Q1 of 2013. According to analysts Samsung sold $26.62 billion worth of smartphones. While Apple have been doing quite well too at $22.95 billion this figure is lower by $7.71 billion compared to the figure reached in Q4 of 2012. Nokia followed up with $3.64 billion while LG got $2.95 billion from their smartphone sales.

A recent interview with Jo Harlow, Executive VP from Nokia may have confirmed that we will soon see Lytro-like cameras in Nokia's Cameraphones. In our earlier articles regarding Pelican Imaging's 16-lens array camera Nokia's involvement with the company hinted that they may use it, this interview just confirms it. While the interview was more about computational photography, it also dropped hints that we may soon see dual-SIM Nokia Lumia smartphones as well.

In our first smartphone view of Qualcomm's upcoming Snapdragon 800 processor, a Pantech smartphone recently got an amazing score on the AnTuTu benchmark site. Previously, the king of the AnTuTu benchmark score was the Exynos 5 Octa powered Samsung Galaxy S4 I9500 with an AnTuTu score of 27000+. The new Snapdragon 800 powered Pantech smartphone got a score of 30133, beating the S4 by an amazying 3000 point margin.