Nokia has unveiled its next big device,  the “first ever pure touch smartphone”, the N9 at the Nokia Connection event in Singapore. By “pure touch smartphone,” what the Espoo phone manufacturer means is that this is the first smartphone in the world that has no front-facing buttons. Small wonder that Nokia is promoting it with the line: “all it takes is a swipe.” That is all it literally takes to operate this smartphone which is powered by MeeGo and has an interface that s...

Remember the early days of Android? When we had not even seen a proper device running the OS? All the talk then was of an open operating system that would not cost the earth and would still deliver a very good experience to the user, who would not need to invest a stackful to get a decent smartphone experience. Cut to June 2011, and suddenly every Android supporter is talking not in terms of what their operating system can do but in terms of hardware specifications – dual core processors, cameras, and the l...

There was a time when booking in advance was largely the preserve of Bollywood blockbusters, but of late gadgets have joined the pre-booking bandwagon. The latest to enter the category is Nokia’s next touch and type E Series device, the E6. Those wanting to book the device can do so by (take a deep breath, folks) heading to www.nokia.co.in/E6, filling an online form, indicating their preferred Nokia Priority store, and after being called by aforementioned store (a feat that we are told will be accomplis...

LG seems to have been bitten by the gaming bug. At an event to showcase its new monitors, the company revealed that it is planning to boost awareness about its monitors in India by opening gaming zones in the country, where people could play videogames on these monitors.  The company expects to have eight to ten gaming zones up and running in different Indian cities by the end of the year. LG says that these gaming zones will be opened in collaboration with two other partners, which it did not name. We are o...

We have been speculating on the date of its arrival for a while now, but now we have the absolute clincher. RIM will be launching the BlackBerry PlayBook in India on June 22, as per an advertisement in a leading daily. Booking for the tablet is now open, although it is a bit on the tedious side – you need to SMS “PLAYBOOK” along with your pin code to 56070 to get the address of the nearest store where you can “initiate advance booking.” Those who do so will get a couple of PlayBo...

If imitation is indeed the best form of flattery, then a number of app developers would be feeling immensely gratified about the announcements Apple made  at the WWDC some hours ago. For, almost new feature that was announced was accompanied by whispers and tweets of “well, this is just like (name of software)” and while some of the claims were a trifle over the top, there was more than a grain of truth in some others. While mentioning each and every one of them would not really be possible (hey,...

Apple has just announced that its iWork productivity apps, are now available for both the iPhone and the iPod touch. In the past, these were available only for the iPad. Originally available for the Mac OS platform and later rejigged to run on iOS, iWork comprises the standard office suite collection of apps – a word processor (Pages), a spreadsheet (Numbers) and a presentation tool (Keynote). All of course, laden with Apple’s interface wizardry and features, inbcluding support for MS Office and A...

One of the departments where Android has tended to lag behind iOS is the onscreen keyboard. Notwithstanding Gingerbread’s tweak to the default and numerous worthies like Better Keyboard (our favourite so far), typing on an Android touchscreen is a bit like…well, let’s put it this way, one of the reasons we are such huge fans of  the Motorola Milestone and the HTC Desire Z is that they save us from the need of hammering away on those onscreen keys. However, the latest version of SwiftKey, wh...

The folks at Nokia India are clearly in no mood to fade quietly into the smartphone night. They might have been losing market share, but of late, they have been showing a willingness to throw a few punches at the opposition. First there was the WhatsApp-backed “Drop the Pin” jab at RIM, and today, on the very day that the Apple iPhone went on sale in Indian stores (Aircel and Airtel have huge front page ads in many newspapers), Nokia flashed an ad in newspapers with a simple line – iDoalotmo...

This is not a rumour, ladies and gentlemen. We have just received a press release from Aircel confirming what we had been speculating upon – the iPhone 4 will be coming to India on May 27! The phone will be available for both postpaid and prepaid users.  We are not going to potter about the specs of the phone as those are more than well-known (retina display, 5MP camera, thousands of apps, etc., etc.). What really interests us is the fact that the phone is going to be reverse subsidised, once again jus...

It made news, and heck, the Guinness Book of World Records, as the world’s first smartphone with a dual core processor. And it is also LG’s boldest step into the high-end smartphone segment in recent times, with respectable hardware built around aforementioned chip, leading many to predict that it would emerge as a contender (to quote Brando, Marlon) among the many high-profile devices – the Galaxy S2 and the iPhone 4, to mention just two – that are expected in the Indian market in the com...

We bet a lot of people who complain about products taking their own time to reach Indian shores will just love to hear this – Team Biondi and Rockstar Game’s highly anticipated and acclaimed cops and criminals game, L.A. Noire, is now available in India, within a few days of its international launch. The game, which in best Rockstar Games tradition (hey, these are the same gents and ladies who gave us the famous – and notorious – GTA series) has been attracting a fair bit of attention ...