Sony Xperia A SO-04E pictures leak of FCC

We expect some new Sony Xperia handsets to launch within the next week in Japan. However, it looks like the FCC got the jump on the official announcement by publishing pictures of the SO-04E, codenamed ‘Dogo’ and heading to NTT DoCoMo. This particular model will be called the Xperia A, confirmed by DoCoMo user manual.

The handset resembles a chunkier version of the Xperia Z, albeit with non-glass back and removable 2300mAh battery. It will have a 5-inch 1080p display, 16GB storage, 2GB RAM and a 13MP Exmor RS camera and 2.2MP front camera. The Xperia2014 A will have dimensions of 139 x 71 x 7.9mm and will weigh 146g. We don’t know whether the chipset has been updated to the latest Qualcomm S600, but it shouldn’t be too long to find out now.

Samsung Galaxy S4 Benchmark Results 2014

We can say that Samsung Galaxy S4 is one of the best smartphones delivered in 2013 and there is no doubt that it will be popular. Quite similar to previous generations of Galaxy smartphone flagships this one will also bring great sale results to the company and it is interesting to see how it will go on benchmarks.

The Samsung Galaxy S4 runs a Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 quad-core chip clocked at 1.9GHz with 2GB of RAM and an Adreno 320 graphics processing unit (GPU). There are other handsets hitting the market with this chip (though few of them clocked as high as 1.9GHz), including the HTC One, Asus Padfone Infinity and LG’s Optimus G Pro (though this isn’t available in the UK yet).

According to the benchmarks the Samsung Galaxy S4 outperforms most of these and the vast majority of other Android phones. However, it’s interesting to note that the HTC One, which clocks in at 1.7GHz, actually scored higher in some tests – notably Quadrant.

Still, generally speaking it is without a doubt one of the fastest phones around and should deliver like-for-like performance with the HTC One and other Snapdragon 600 rivals, which are sitting pretty at the top of the high-performance pile at present.

The Galaxy S4 is a 4G capable phone and testing the modem chip in SpeedTest showed a fast ping of 47 milliseconds, a download speed of 18.73 megabits per second and an upload speed of 17.56 megabits per second. This is very good by home broadband standards, showing 4G has the capability to deliver a wireless mobile internet experience on a par with hard-wired solutions.

As well as general performance the Galaxy2014 S4 is looking like a good prospect for gaming, not least because of the huge, crystal clear display, but also as 3DMark, a gaming benchmark suite, cited the Galaxy20 S4 as ‘one of the most powerful devices around.You can expect to get very fast,fluid gaming from Samsung’s latest flagship.

Xperia Z getting closer for C6606/C6616 Variant

The Sony Xperia Z (C660X) may be getting closer to a launch on T-Mobile US as firmware has been certified by the PTCRB website for the C6606/C6616 variant. We expect that this model(s) will have the necessary LTE support for North America.

The C6606 SKU would most likely support LTE bands 1, 2, 4, 5 and 17. We don’t know whether the C6616 model is a different model altogether, however given the single listing on PTCRB, there may be a slight tweak to the frequency band support. Hopefully, we’ll hear some 

concrete news on a T-Mobile2014 release soon.

HTC One Red Spotted

If we could choose the best looking device we think that HTC One would take at least one of the highest places. When this device was presented we were able to see it shortly in red color but images of that version were immediately removed and we have received Stealth Black and Glacier White color for the body of this flagship. There is no doubt that the red HTC One looked great and it seams that soon we might receive it.

Now it seems that the red device wasn’t just a smartphone myth and even better, it will be available in the UK. A listing spotted on retail site Handtec shows the HTC One in red available for the princely sum to £503.99 – however the company doesn’t appear to actually have any in stock just yet.

Anyone wishing to get their mitts on the red model can register for updates but there aren’t any clues available on how long you might have to wait, nor what the vibrant shade of red might be called.

The HTC One has been knocking reviews out of the park since it was released earlier this month, giving manufacturer HTC a much-needed shot in the arm during a period of particularly heavy fiscal turbulence, and introducing new colour options for the already highly regarded smartphone is likely to increase its appear in further.

Whether or not HTC has any plans to introduce further colours for its flagship remains to be seen, but when you have a device that’s already close to perfect, improving its aesthetic is always a good option.

Here is the latest update on this subject:

The red HTC One has now been removed from Handtec’s site, but we’re sure we’ll be seeing it again soon!

New LG Optimus G smartphone on May 30

LG has a big announcement to make and May 30 is when we'll learn what it's all about! What you see here is a press invitation that the Korean company is now sending, with a picture of what appears to be a smartphone looked at from the side. Yeah, there's a butterfly wing sticking out of it as well, presumably placed there to make the invitation look prettier. Or could it actually be interpreted as a hint of some kind?

The colorful detail seen above may indicate that LG will introduce some next-gen screen technology, according to speculations. The company has been recently trying to promote the IPS-LCD screens used in its smartphones, so that presumption isn't quite as wild as it seems. 

As for the smartphone seen in the invitation, it design elements remind us of the LG Optimus G Pro, although it could be a new, visually similar model. The rumored LG Optimus G2, perhaps? Or will it be this mysterious LG smartphone that leaked not long ago? We can only guess. All we know is that the phone bound to be unveiled at the event will be a member of the LG Optimus G series, scheduled to launch in Asian markets first. That last detail there might explain why the announcement will take place in Macau.

What do you, guys, think? What will LG announce on May 30? Let us know down in the comments!

Samsung Galaxy S4 software features ?

For the past several weeks, I’ve been getting to know the Samsung Galaxy S4 a bit more from the inside and out. Now, if you read our extensive review of it, which was done by our very own Ray S., then you know that it received one of the highest scores we’ve given to any device this year – beating out even the fabled HTC One in the process! Paving the way, it seemingly set the bar in what we expect to find in the experience with a flagship device, seeing that it boasts a mind-boggling amount of new software features. Compared to its rivals, the totality of its arsenal is unmatched at the moment, but after showing the prized smartphone and demoing the cool things it can do, it makes me wonder whether the new software features are more gimmicky than anything else.

Before I dive into what I’ve personally experienced checking out this smoking new phone, we have to go back last year when Sammy introduced its Galaxy S III to the masses. Naturally, we can lament all we want about the plastic build of Sammy’s entire smartphone lineup, but that’s just something we have to live with at this point – even more that’s the design DNA that they’ve decided to stick with. Going back to the Galaxy S III, I was impressed how Samsung was so calculated in how they meticulously worked on every angle of its TouchWiz Nature UX experience. Like seriously, its list of features were unparalleled! Personally, it’s not the cleanest or slickest Android UI, but heck, its functionality was far superior than anything else that its rivals had to offer.

Being a successive device, it wasn’t totally surprising to see Samsung build upon its preexisting functions with its TouchWiz experience on the Galaxy S4. For starters, they totally revamped the camera experience, as it boasts an insane amount of neat tricks – even to the point of overwhelming us! On top of that, the new hardware under the hood helped to bring some new additions to the experience – such as air gestures, smart scroll, and air view amongst other things. During the first week showing off the cool things you can do with the handset, like waving my hand over the phone to scroll through photos, everyone seemed to be amazed by all the new ways of interaction. However, the more I played around with it, the more I questioned whether they were practical, or merely gimmicky features just there to broaden its scope.

So here are some of the things that really became more apparent the longer I used the handset:

• Air gestures can be inconsistent: Naturally, there’s always some sort of learning curve with anything new. As for myself, I have very little issue waving my hand over the display using its new air gestures to scroll up/down in the stock browser, or move through images in the gallery, but for those who tried it for the first time, they probably thought it’d be more intuitive, which resulted in many inconsistent responses. Personally, I would love to see the feature improved by being able to track my hand moment-by-moment – as opposed to doing a complete air gesture to execute a task. It's like scrolling on a resistive screen versus capacitive one.

• You can scroll up/down via air gestures, but not left/right in the browser: This one totally blows my mind! Yes, it’s great that I can eat a footlong sandwich while having the option to scroll up/down in the stock browser without having a crumb hitting it, but what’s preventing them for enabling us to scroll left/right? Oh wait, doing that permits me to move between any opened tabs! To tell you the truth, it would’ve been more useful if they just simply replaced that in favor of scrolling horizontally.

• No “pinch air gesture”: We’re certainly still far from seeing that Minority Report like experience with our smartphone UIs, but there’s no way to do pinch air gestures with the new TouchWiz Nature UX experience. Seeing that there’s a new capacitive panel on board with the Galaxy S4, which brings for the Note’s air view functionality with the aid of hovering with our finger, we thought it would’ve been possible to see “pinch air gestures.” Despite its omission, which is probably due to a combination of hardware limitations, we’re hoping to see some form of it with future versions.

• Not enough third party app support: As much as I love to show some magic hand waving tricks to random people interested in seeing the Galaxy S4, it would’ve been nice to see support for air gestures in other third party apps. Still, considering how quickly Sammy was able to expand its support of apps for its multi-window feature, we hope it’s only a matter of time before the same happens with air gestures.

• We like to blink and look away at times, so smart pause can be bothersome at times: I have this involuntary condition where I like to blink normally, or even look away briefly – like any other normal human being. However, if you have the smart pause feature on, you’ll need to constantly have your eyes affixed on the screen so the video you’re watching doesn’t spaz out every few seconds. Instead, it would’ve been nice if there were some kind of leeway before it triggers – then again, at least we can deactivate it entirely.

• Smart Scroll is nice, but again, there’s no scrolling left/right: So far, people have been mostly impressed by the S4’s Smart Scroll feature – the one that relies on eye tracking to scroll in the web browser vertically. However, the surrounding lighting conditions can hamper its operation. Now, the thing that people don’t see when I show off the feature, is that I’m slightly tilting the phone forward/back to get it to function fully. If it can track my eyes up/down, then why is it that it can’t track it left/right? This, I ponder many nights in bed.

• I want to get fit, but I need more than the phone & S Health: In its attempt to monitor our daily lives, Samsung introduced S Health with the Galaxy S4 – the one stop-shop for all your health tracking needs. As a fitness fanatic myself, I really appreciate that Sammy is tackling this new category head-on, but there’s just so much that the smartphone can do all by itself. Tracking how many steps I take is wonderful, but you’ll need to carry along a heart rate monitor in order to get an accurate calorie burn number. Well, at least they’re coming out with an assortment of accessories in the near future to give those who need precise counts.

Seriously people, that’s just a few of the things that popped up the more I played around with the Galaxy S4. Perhaps I’m just being too picky right now, but the execution of some of the new features seem a bit arcane – it kind of reminds me of scrolling in Pocket Internet Browser on the resistive touchscreen of a Windows Mobile Phone. For the moment, it might not seem as intuitive or responsive, but technology has this affinity for constant improvement, so we’re crossing our fingers for the best. When it comes down to it, though, the extensive list of features on the Galaxy S4 might seem overwhelming, but hey, they’re at least well ahead of the curve in this department. Who doesn’t want more features on a phone? Ultimately, I harken back to the question I posed at the beginning: Are these new software features ahead of the game or gimmicky?

LG Might Launch Android Tablet Later This Year

It seams that LG Android Tablet might be delivered to the market by the end of Q3 of 2013. All the way back in 2011 LG delivered Optimus Pad tablet device and it offered decent specs in all segments like display, processor, software, 3D video capturing and similar and it seams that this might be another shoot of this company on this market.

High price of the LG Optimus Pad hurt its sales globally. As a result, it failed to make an impact on the tablet market dominated by the Apple iPad, which is probably why LG didn’t even bother to release a successor to the Optimus Pad.

However, LG may be getting ready for a comeback on the tablet market, according to Korean media. In fact, the company may be working on a new LG tablet scheduled to launch before the end of Q3, 2013. Details are scarce at this time, as much as we wish it wasn’t so. Media reports don’t even mention what OS the rumored device will run, but our intuition tells us that LG will pick Android as the platform for its upcoming slate. Whether it will come in one size only, or LG will make multiple variants of its tablet is not known.

The tablet market is still dominated by Apple as its iPad lineup holds almost 40% of the market share. Samsung holds the second place with about 18% of the market, followed by Asus and Amazon with 5.5% and 3.7% respectively. Will LG manage to grab a piece of the pie with a tablet offering of its own? Only time will tell, folks.

We were able to see few other cell phone manufacturers trying to compete on the tablet market but they also failed. It is a pretty hard competition and both Samsung and Apple deliver great devices that are dominant on the market while few other companies manage to get a small share as we stated above.

Pantech Perception 2014

Pantech Perception is the latest addition to the lineup of this cell phone maker. Smartphones from this company are well known with their mid range hardware and the quite budget friendly price tag at which they are delivered to the market.

Perception has been updated with a larger 4.8” Super AMOLED display, 1.5GHz dual-core Snapdragon S4 processor, and an 8MP camera, while maintaining a 2-year contract price of $99.99. While this is a good price-point for consumers, other higher-end phones that came out last year can now be purchased for around the same price, such as the Samsung Galaxy S III ($99.99) and the Motorola DROID RAZR HD ($49.99), which makes the price of the Pantech Perception appear not as attractive.

Included in the retail package is the Pantech Perception smartphone, 2020mAh battery, wall charger with microUSB cable, and user guides.

Design:
Even though the Pantech Perception is slightly larger overall than the Samsung Galaxy S III, its corners and edges are more square and not as rounded, making it feel less comfortable in the hand when held for long periods of time. However, the overall appearance of the materials used on the Perception gives the device an attractive look, and we appreciate that the rear battery cover is matte and slightly textured, instead of being glossy and slippery.

Above the display is a standard 2MP camera, while on the left side is the volume rocker, and on the right is the power/lock key, which are easy to find since they are raised and slightly rounded from the surrounding edges. Up on top is a 3.5mm headset jack and an out-of-place microUSB port, as we believe having it near the bottom of the device would make more sense. Around on the back is the 8MP autofocus camera with LED flash, and removing the battery cover will allow access to the microSD memory card slot and 4G SIM slot.

Display:
We are glad to see that the Perception comes with a nice sized 4.8” Super AMOLED display with a resolution of 720×1280. As to be expected with Super AMOLD screens, colors are fully saturated with black-levels being pure. Text is also sharp and clear. But when used in direct sunlight, we found the screen is quite hard and hard to view.

One thing to be mindful of is that since the Perception lacks capacitive control buttons under the display, it uses on-screen soft keys, similar to the Motorola DROID RAZR HD, which does take away some of the display’s real estate (about 0.30”). Some people prefer the on-screen keys, while others like dedicated capacitive buttons – as it comes down to personal preference.

update.

With that in mind, the Pantech Perception uses a layered skin over Android, similar to what we saw last year on the Pantech Marauder. There is both a standard mode and a starter mode, depending on how comfortable you are using the device, as the starter mode has larger icons and text and quick tips to walk you through different features. The app drawer can also be changed to view your apps by different groups, alphabetically, or by downloads. There is also a nice selection of widgets, such shortcuts, calendars, clocks, photo albums, and weather.

Missing are any type of themes, which we usually see on LG and HTC devices, but you can select 3 different colors (white, green, or black) for use with the phone’s dialpad.

Naturally, the Pantech Perception does well with the included Android core apps, such as E-Mail and Gmail, contacts, and calendar. A few other apps included are Color for Facebook, Document Viewer, IMDb, NFL mobile, Real Racing 2, Shark Dash, Slacker, Verizon Tones, VZ Navigator, and Zappos.

Processor and Memory:
Running things on the Pantech Perception is a Qualcomm 1.5GHz dual-core Snapdragon S4 MSM8960 processor with 1GB of RAM. This allows the device to be plenty quick when opening apps, and there is no noticeable lag when moving between the home screens.

As you can see from the benchmark tests, the Perception does well compared to other dual-core phones, such as the LG Lucid 2, Motorola DROID RAZR M, and Samsung Galaxy S III.

We are glad to see that the Perception comes with 16GB of internal memory, though only 9.6GB is left available for use out of the box. But if you happen to need more room, you can always install a microSD memory card up to 32GB.

Internet and Connectivity:
The Perception comes equipped with a standard web browser, though you can install Chrome or Dolphin if you desire. It renders pages just fine, with kinetic scrolling and pinch-to-zoom working without a hitch.

Since the device makes use of Verizon’s 4G LTE data network, we used the Speedtest.net app and were able to get 15 Mbps downloads and 5 Mbps uploads, with a signal reception of -102dBm. Naturally, Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n and Bluetooth 4.0 is supported. We were also glad to see that the Perception comes with Global Roaming capabilities, for use with GSM 850/900/1800/1900 MHz and UMTS/HSPA 900/2100 MHz while overseas.

Call Quality:
The voice quality while using the Pantech Perception is a mixed bag. Even though voices on our end were plenty loud, they sounded “sharp and digital” instead of sounding natural. People that we called also said that we sounded more digital on their end, and they could easily tell we were using a cell phone. The 1X signal was a bit below average with only -98dBm of signal reception showing.

Battery:
Even though the 2020mAh battery on the Pantech Perception is larger in capacity than the one that came with the Pantech Breakout and Marauder, it is still a bit less than we would like to see. The specs says it can provide up to 11 hours of usage time or 11 days of standby time, but during our testing we were only able to get 8.5 hours of continuous talk time, or about 1 day of mixed usage on a full charge – meaning you’ll have to charge the device nightly.

Conclusion:
If we were back in January, the Pantech Perception would be a halfway decent mid-level smartphone for the price. But as we mentioned earlier, with higher end devices from last year being discounted down to under $100 on-contract, it is really a tough sell for the Perception. Even though we like its 4.8” 720p Super AMOLED display, overall styling, and ease of use, the poor camera quality and digital-sounding call quality is holding it back – not to mention it comes running Android Ice Cream Sandwich instead of Jelly Bean. At this point, the Samsung Galaxy S III or Motorola DROID RAZR HD can be purchased for the same or less than the Perception, yet offer a higher quality device and experience.