New Nokia Lumia 1020 Review.

Nokia Lumia 1020 leaked ahead of New York launch
Nokia Lumia 1020 is 41Mp smartphone with Pro Cam app

Previously thought to be the Lumia EOS, the Lumia 1020 has been leaked by evleaks prior to next week's press event in New York. The render shows the Lumia 1020 for AT&T sporting Windows Phone 8. See also: Group test: what's the best Windows phone?

The Lumia 1020 will be arriving with a 41Mp rear facing PureView camera and a Carl Zeiss lens similar to that of the Nokia 808 PureView. This can been leaked and essentially confirmed by Nokia itself with its '41 million reasons' blog post on the event.

Unfortunately is seems the smartphone looks almost identical to previous models such as the Lumia 920 and Lumia 925. It's round the back that the device looks different with the huge camera strapped on.

The leaked render shows the inclusion of a Nokia Pro Cam app which is believed to offer 11x digital zoom, anti-shake, and manual focus features. This makes sense as you're going to want to control that impressive camera properly.
With advanced camera technology the Nokia Lumia 1020 will take on devices such as Samsung's Galaxy S4 Zoom which is the only 'smartphone' with optical zoom.

Supposed specifications for the Lumia 1020 include an OLED screen with a 768x1280 resolution, 32GB of internal storage, no microSD card slot, a polycarbonate body.

We'll be bringing you live coverage of next week's Nokia event in New York so stay tuned for all the news, specs, release date, price and features for the Lumia

Karbonn Titanium S9 Price details and features.

Karbonn launches the Titanium S9 ahead of Micromax Canvas 4 announcement

Karbonn has launched the Titanium S9 that boasts of a 5.5-inch 720p display priced at Rs. 19,990 running on Android 4.2 Jelly Bean.

Karbonn has added yet another large display, quad-core powered smartphone to its portfolio - the Karbonn Titanium S9. The announcement of the Karbonn Titanium S9 just ahead of the launch of the Micromax Canvas 4, which will be unveiled to the public on Monday.

Priced at Rs. 19,990, the Titanium S9 has a 5.5-inch IPS display with a 1280x720 pixel resolution. It has a 1.2GHz quad-core processor coupled with 1GB of RAM. It houses a 13MP autofocus rear camera with a flash and 5MP front facing camera. It has 16GB of built-in storage expandable via a microSD card. The S9 has dual-SIM capabilities and has a 2600mAh battery under the hood.

Shashin Devsare, Executive Director, Karbonn said “The Karbonn Titanium S9 is the most exciting revolution to have come from Karbonn till date. The launch of the device initiates our foray into the HD IPS smartphone category wherein we seek to satiate the consumer needs with the best-in-class technological innovations. We understand the emergent needs of consumers of smartphone devices which look brilliant and work effortlessly. Thus in this regard, our product innovation is geared towards creating an eco-system of mobile devices which bring the best of smartphone experience to them.”

This isn’t the first time Karbonn will launch a device a smartphone around the same time as Micromax to garner some attention. In the past we have seen the launch of the Titanium S5 timed to take on the Canvas HD and the Karbonn Smart A111 timed to take on the Canvas 2 A110.

There is very little information available about what the Canvas 4 will bring to the table, but the way Micromax is promoting it on social media; we think they have some grand unveiling up their sleeves.

With the launch of the Titanium S9, Karbonn aims to take on the sub-Rs.20,000 smartphone market. All the big names aren’t present in this price bracket but it is nice to see Karbonn (and Micromax, if the device is similarly priced), to take on the big name smartphone makers in India. 

Google's latest Android 4"Ice Cream Sandwich OS to the Samsung Galaxy Wave S8500 Review.

The hacking community is constantly engaged in pushing hardware farther

than it can go. The latest example of their efforts is a “working port of

Google’s latest Android 4 “Ice Cream Sandwich OS to the Samsung Galaxy

Wave S8500.

The hacking community is constantly engaged in pushing hardware farther than it can go. The latest example of their efforts is a “working port of Google’s latest Android 4 “Ice Cream Sandwich OS to the Samsung Galaxy Wave S8500.

This project clearly shows the strength of community in that this port possible thanks to the effort of many. While this project was undertaken by one person, but built on the effort of many hackers, the developer got funded for purchasing his Wave device through donations from others.

Currently the only the Samsung Wave S8500 is supported by this custom Android ROM, however the developer’s secondary target is to port it to the Wave II S8530 as well. Both these phones have been around for quite a while now, and are available at quite a good price considering their specifications.

The Samsung Wave S8500 was the first phone to feature Samsung’s own Bada operating system, but still has decent specifications (3.3” 480×800 screen, 5MP camera with 720p video recording support, 1 GHz Cortex-A8 processor). The only issue was that the phone runs Samsung bada, the uncertainty surrounding the future of that OS means that bada devices aren’t as popular as they might be based on hardware specs and price.

This gives Wave-owners a fresh breath of hope for their bada-devices by giving them the possibility of using an alternate OS.

You can find out more about the ROM, how to download it, how to install it, what works and what doesn’t at the developer’s website.

BlackBerry has announced the release of the latest BlackBerry SDK 10.2

BlackBerry has announced the release of the latest BlackBerry SDK 10.2
which now allows users to run Android 4.2 apps.

BlackBerry is now on a fast sprint towards developing its software platform, where the BlackBerry SDK 10.2 already seems to be on its way. The beta update for this software platform brings some of the much awaited features. Some of these include the ability to run Android 4.2.2 apps and updates to the Adobe AIR3.5 run time environment, which now has Stage3D available for acceleration of OpenGL graphics.

According the BlackBerry developer blog, there are also some more updates to the BlackBerry 10 Native SDK, while the HTML5 contributions from BlackBerry will also be coming in a future Apache Cordova release. While the updates have been released for Dev Alpha devices and are also available in the simulator, Android 4.2 testing is not supported in the simulator for the time being.

The latest update to the SDK can be downloaded from here. The release notes and known issues can be accessed from here. There are also newer Eclipse plugin tools available which will now allow you to target for newer Android SDK API levels. Simulator testing is something which is yet to come however in the coming months. While this is certainly exciting for the developers, it is even more interesting for the users, who will get to use the latest Android apps developed for the newer platforms.

Some of the other highlights of the additions to the latest native SDK include MiraCast support, Flurry Analytics supports and the newest QNX Momentics IDE. More details for the same can be accessed at the Native SDK release notes