Smartphones

LG Optimus F7 from U.S. Cellular is a $100 winner

The fact that the LG Optimus F7 is available on more than one carrier is no surprise. It's an excellent midlevel phone that's packed with quality specs, such as a vivid 4.7-inch touch screen, an 8-megapixel camera, and a dual-core CPU.

Boost Mobile announced today that the F7 will be coming to the carrier on June 27 for $299.99 off contract, and U.S. Cellular customers can already get the device for $99.99 with a two-year agreement.

All in all, despite some of its drawbacks (like its sluggish 3G speeds), I'd still recommend it … Read more

LG to mass-produce flexible displays for smartphones

LG Display is about to embark on the mass production of smartphone display panels that reportedly don't break, crack, or shatter -- because they can bend.

By the fourth quarter of this year, the electronics company plans to be supplying the flexible displays to a host of major clients, according to The Korea Times.

"We have completed the development of our first flexible displays. We will mass produce flexible displays from the fourth quarter of this year," the company told The Korea Times. "We will apply a 4.5th generation glass-cutting technology for the OLED flexible … Read more

LG Optimus F7 available on Boost Mobile, June 27

Boost Mobile announced today that it will begin offering the 4.7-inch, LG Optimus F7 on June 27 for $299.99.

The device will be equipped with a 1.5GHz dual-core Snapdragon S4 processor, Android Jelly Bean, and an 8-megapixel rear-facing camera.

We first caught wind of this smartphone back in February, when LG debuted the handset at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain.

In addition, U.S. Cellular started offering the Optimus F7 earlier this month for $99.99 with a two-year carrier agreement.

Other features include 1080p full HD video-recording capabilities, 4G LTE, a 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera, … Read more

HTC's new 5-inch Butterfly S phone takes wing

HTC has unveiled the Butterfly S at a press conference close to Taipei.

The electronics maker's latest flagship model has now officially launched in Taiwan. The HTC Butterfly S, an updated model based on the original 1080p Butterfly smartphone, comes with a 5-inch, 1080p Super LCD 3 display which is capable of supporting a 440ppi resolution on scratch-resistant glass.

<> The Butterfly S is equipped with a 2.1-megapixel camera for video calls in addition to a 4-megapixel UltraPixel camera on the back which supports HTC Zoe, software that organizes snapshots into 30-second movies.

Front-facing BoomSound stereo speakers … Read more

Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 incinerates the competition

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 will destroy your mobile processor. Not literally, of course. I'm strictly referring to its ability to render real-time graphics so fast as to make your current mobile processor -- on your phone or tablet -- embarrassingly pokey in comparison.

At a benchmarking event in San Francisco, Qualcomm allowed me and others in attendance to run a benchmarks on a reference Mobile Development Platform (MDP) tablet housing its latest Snapdragon 800 system-on-chip (SoC). The results speak for themselves; however, I should warn that these are only benchmark results (3DMark and GFXBench, specifically) and don't necessarily … Read more

Nvidia to license its graphics technology to device makers

Could Apple tap Nvidia for graphics power in its mobile devices? Maybe, now that the chipmaker has decided to license its graphics technology.

Nvidia on Tuesday said it would begin licensing its GPU cores and "visual computing" patent portfolio to device manufacturers -- a new business model for the company. The technology could appear in a full range of products from phones to supercomputers, the company said, with products likely emerging in 2015, given design and testing requirements.

"It's not practical to build silicon or systems to address every part of the expanding market," David … Read more

Preview iOS 7 using nothing more than your browser

With the curtains pulled back on the new-look iOS 7, it's only natural for users to want to get a better idea of what the changes actually mean to their daily use. People don't like change -- big or small -- especially when it comes to the tech that's used on a daily basis.

Should you not be a developer and have access to early beta builds of iOS 7, or don't want to deal with all of the bugs and issues that come from dealing with the early test builds, you can click your way … Read more

Huawei reportedly 'open' to acquiring Nokia

Huawei would consider snapping up Nokia, which could help it boost its smartphone gains in Europe and the U.S., a company executive said on Tuesday.

According to the Financial Times of London (paywall), Richard Yu, chairman of Huawei's consumer business group, said at the launch of its latest smartphone offering, the Ascend P6, in London: "We are considering these sorts of acquisitions; maybe the combination has some synergies but depends on the willingness of Nokia."

"We are open minded," Yu told reporters.

Nokia would have to be a willing participant in a buyout discussion, … Read more

Never miss the free App of the Week from the App Store again

Last summer I covered an easy-to-create recipe on IFTTT that would send an e-mail or alert of your choosing once the App Store Twitter account posted a tweet announcing the latest freebie. Since that time there have been some changes to Twitter 's API policy, and IFTTT (name based on "If this, then that") has had to change how it uses Twitter within its service.

As such, the recipe demonstrated in my post last June no longer works. While browsing through public IFTTT Recipes today I found a solution that uses posts on the App Store's official … Read more