Samsung today announced its REX series of feature phones, which intend to take on Nokia’s Asha range. Unlike Nokia, which calls its Asha full-touch devices smartphones, Samsung correctly calls its REX series as smart feature phones, considering it is based entirely on Java. While some of the phones in the series, especially the REX 90, share design cues with Samsung’s Galaxy S III and feel very premium for its price, there is no real reason for the products to exist apart from having something in ...

Exactly two years ago, on February 11, 2011, Nokia’s newly appointed CEO, Stephen Elop shocked the world by announcing Nokia’s partnership with Microsoft to make smartphones running on Windows Phone operating system. The announcement was preceded by the now famous “burning platform memo” Elop sent to Nokia employees, which essentially meant tough times were here for the company and it would ditch its own MeeGo and Symbian smartphone platforms in favor of Microsoft’s struggling Wi...

BlackBerry, formerly RIM, is set to launch its first BlackBerry 10 (BB10) smartphone in India later this month. India is one of the few countries where the BlackBerry Z10 is being launched in the first wave, even before the US where it is expected to be launched sometime in March. This is the first major product launch by BlackBerry in almost two years and in a way the company’s betting its future on it. I believe that BlackBerry 10 has a better chance of succeeding in India than Windows Phone, purely i...

Tonight will be Thorstein Heins’ proverbial judgement day. The CEO of BlackBerry-maker Research In Motion (RIM) will finally unveil what the company has been promising for almost two years – a new operating system built from the ground up, which would finally give RIM an answer to the iPhone 5, roughly six years after Apple launched it. Most analysts, industry watchers and tech commentators are quite optimistic about BlackBerry 10, the new platform, but that amounts to nothing if it does not click...

After a year in the wilderness, RIM is all set to come out all guns blazing with its latest operating system – BlackBerry 10, and a smartphone that will run the new OS, which is rumored to be the BlackBerry Z10.  For the last year we’ve had a pretty good idea what the OS has in store for us through numerous BlackBerry Jam events that have been held throughout the globe and the numerous ‘Dev Alpha’ devices RIM has handed out to developers. This allows us to paint a fairly clear picture on what to ...

When Microsoft first announced Windows Phone 8 late last year, it seemed to tick all the right boxes. It supported multitasking, it was finally compatible with multi-core processors, microSD card slots and everything users wanted to hear in terms of hardware support. Microsoft even added a ‘Kid’s Corner’ that allowed users to create a zone for their kids to play with their device without giving them access to everything. Yet, Windows Phone 8 is far from what I was expecting. After using a Wi...

The biggest consumer technology show on the planet wound up last week and while we recovered from our extensive coverage from CES 2013 it gave us ample time to look back and analyze the best of the show that will be relevant to India in the coming months. Yes, our list of top 10 gadgets from CES might have devices like the Oculus Rift or the Yota Phone that probably won’t launch here, but we believe these would trickle down in some form or other. We can see a homegrown brand replicate the Yota Phone con...

The consumer tech world was set abuzz earlier this week after WSJ reported that Apple was planning to launch a cheaper iPhone later this year. The report was followed by another from Shanghai Evening News that interviewed Apple’s Phil Schiller that indicated a denial of the earlier WSJ report. But then Apple reached out to the newspaper and had them revisit Schiller’s quote, which made it sound as if Apple was confirming the existence of a cheaper iPhone. Apple rarely comments on rumors and media ...

With the advent of modern day iDevice compliant dock speakers, people often blindly opt for the simpler solution rather than look at their daily needs. There is a vast difference between an iPod dock from say a standard 2.1 PC speaker and the difference becomes even more obvious when we delve into the 5.1 channel surround sound. People often mistake an iPod dock for a 2.1 Speaker substitute. While this can work at times if we take a look at some of the more expensive docks, 90 percent of times chances are the...

Last month Nokia launched its maps for iPhone and iPad under the HERE brand. The idea behind the launch was a brilliant one – offer navigation services to iPhone users that won’t just make them familiar with the Nokia brand but also improve Nokia’s own maps with many more people using them than just a handful of Lumia users. The thing with maps is the more number of users, the better the data gets over a period of time. With no competition whatsoever, Nokia could have owned the iOS navigatio...

Facebook today announced an update to its Messenger app for Android that will enable users to join the online messaging service without having a Facebook account or an email address. The new Messenger app will be rolled out in India, Indonesia, Venezuela, Australia and South Africa initially and will be followed soon by other countries. Users will be able to join Facebook Messenger by just giving their name and phone number, which suggests Facebook is targeting first-time online users who do not have a Facebo...

Pre-orders for the iPad mini have gone live moments ago in a number of countries but most people are still bewildered about Apple’s move of discontinuing the ‘new’ iPad that was launched only earlier this year in favor of another ‘new’ iPad but has retained the iPad 2, which is already more than a year old. The fourth-generation iPad has minor changes over the model it replaces and will be casually called the iPad 4 in the market just like the previous generation iPad was called ...