In 2008, when the Eee PC was revolutionizing the computing world and driving every manufacturer to make cheaper and smaller laptops, Sony washed its hands of the whole thing. The “race to the bottom,” the company said, would profoundly impact the industry, killing profit margins and flooding the market with cheap, terrible machines. Sony was wrong, its stance lasting about a year before joining the competition with its own VAIO W. Four years on we’re buying better laptops than ever before and, with the netbook class now more or less dead, that downward competition seems to have [...]

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HTC’s launched a new flagship handset for Mobile World Congress 2012, the HTC One X — codenamed Endeavour. Dipping into design notes from The Nokia Lumia line, the One X is a unibody device machined from white polycarbonate that uses Gorilla Glass to protect its 4.7-inch 1280×720 non-pentile Super LCD 2 display. Stunning outside appearances aside, HTC’s newest features an NVIDIA Tegra 3 quad-core processor for the Global edition and a Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 dual-core for the LTE iteration. Memory specs on the box show 1GB DDR2 and 32GB of built-in storage — 26GB of [...]

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Photos of a new LG smartphone, codenamed the X3, have been unearthed complete along with a set of mightily impressive tech specs. The 4.3 inch device will, according to Pocket-Now, come loaded with the quad-core Tegra 3 processor and a high resolution, 1280 x 720, 4.7-inch display. The purported Android 4.0 device would also boast an 8-megapixel camera and a 1.3-megapixel front-facing snapper and measure up at a super slim sub-9mm. For those worried about the damage all that power and massive screen size could do to your chances of lasting through the day, LG is also said to be included a whopping [...]

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For three weeks now, Android fans have been fidgeting impatiently. Specifically, ever since ASUS chairman Jonney Shih took the stage at last month’s AsiaD conference and teased the next-gen Transformer tablet. Though he only gave us a quick glimpse, he recited a laundry list of specs: a 10.1-inch display, 8.3mm-thick body, mini-HDMI output, microSD slot and an update to Ice Cream Sandwich by the end of the year, if not sooner. Not to mention, it’ll be the first tablet packing NVIDIA’s hot-off-the-presses Tegra 3 SoC, making it the first-ever quad-core tablet. We knew this: we’d [...]

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Color us skeptical on this one, but rumors are coming down the pipeline about an HTC phone called the Edge. It’s supposedly going to be the first Tegra 3-powered smartphone. According to Pocketnow, the device will supposedly offer a quad-core 1.5GHz CPU, 4.7-inch 720p HD display, 1GB of RAM, an 8MP rear camera with f/2.2 lens and Beats Audio. Curiously, no LTE capability was mentioned specifically, though 21Mbps HSPA+ appears to be good to go, and there’s a slight possibility of Sense 4.0 being included — which given its proposed launch window of late Q1 / early Q2 2012, wouldn’t [...]

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Fancy a glimpse of the future? That little psychedelic beauty on the right is ARM’s brand new Cortex-A7 processor. Its spec sheet might not seem so colorful at first glance, because it doesn’t really do things any faster than existing high-end smartphone processors. However, this UK-based manufacturer isn’t known for bumping its gums, so it pays to look a little deeper. For a start, the Cortex-A7 is built using a 28nm process that makes it five times smaller and more efficient than the current-gen Cortex-A8. It’s also cheap enough to power sub-$100 handsets, so we could [...]

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Pre-orders for the iPhone 4S only began shipping this week, but a handful of early owners have already taken Apple’s first A5-based smartphone for a test run, and they’ve got the benchmarks to prove it. The results, obtained by AnandTech, are hardly what we’d call shocking. In terms of Javascript performance (pictured above), the 4S measures up rather nicely against the Tegra 2-based Honeycomb competition, while out-dueling the iPhone 4 in overall CPU muscle. Geekbench results, meanwhile, clock the 4S at around 800MHz, with a score of 623. That’s about 25 percent lower [...]

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If you’re looking for a tablet and don’t fancy an iPad, then Android is the way to go. (Don’t know what an Android tablet is? Check out: what is an Android tablet?) There are other options out there; Windows 7 tablets are available, the BlackBerry PlayBook is on sale now and the HP TouchPad has come and gone in a flurry of £99 panic-buying. But Android 3.0 is currently the main OS rival to the iPad, and the products are creeping onto the shelves one by one. Follow our tablets channel: @TR_Tablets We’ve gone from zero Android tablets to stacks of the things in a very short [...]

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With the Samsung Galaxy S2 still winning accolades all over the shop, it was natural that Samsung was going to capitalise on this technology and release another version of the smartphone – albeit one that’s specs aren’t quite as impressive. Enter the Samsung Galaxy R; a fine addition to Samsung’s portfolio and one that tries to copy much of what the S2 delivers. After checking out the phone at IFA 2011, we did notice some differences between the Galaxy R and its bedfellow. For a start it is not as light or as thin as the S2 – the chassis has a touch more bulk (at 0.04 inches) [...]

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ASUS’ Eee Pad Slider is fast becoming just as mythical as the flying horse the company’s named after. We’ve had several encounters with potential release windows for the slate, only to see it continually creep back into fall. Well, judging by a recent report from Notebook Italia and the tab’s new product page, it looks like we may actually see a September launch for the 10.1-incher — in Italy. Contrary to prior rumors, the company will be offering the Slider in two storage configurations — 16GB and 32GB at potential €479 and €599 price points overseas, while [...]

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