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Samsung Galaxy Note notable reviews and ‘Start Here’ center

These are the Samsung Galaxy Note reviews you’ll ever want to read, watch or listen to. By the time you finish reading and watching all these videos and reviews, you’ll be the local expert on all things Galaxy Note. That’s bound to be enough to decide whether you want to go hands-on on the phablet or not.

Let’s dig in!

Video Reviews and other kinds of eye-candy

Looking for a quick in-and-out video review of the Galaxy Note? Los Angeles times gets it right in just 2.5 minutes. The video covers enough to push you off the fence.

Fell in Samsung’s backyard? Then set aside half an hour for this video review. You can sort of listen to it in the background if you don’t actually have 30 minutes to watch it. For the impatient: Browsing capabilities shown starting at 22 minutes. With a phablet this big, all that counts is browsing, right?

You just can’t wait to see what gaming is like on the Samsung Note, can you? Oh, you can… Okay. Anyway, this video takes you through a few popular Android games.

Would you read instead?

Dominating first impressions of the Galaxy Note’s smartphone/tablet bridging form is its monstrous and vibrant 5.3-inch 1280 x 800p HD Super AMOLED display.

T3′s Luke Johnson gives a rather favorable quick glance. There is no need for anything else than his review to know if you’ll dip more than your big toe in the pool.

[...] you probably won’t be surprised to hear that I consider the Note more of a shrunken-down tablet than an outsized phone, in spite of its ability to take calls.

The Verge delivers on pictures, digs elbow deep into the guts of the software and generally leaves no stone unturned. I absolutely love reading their pieces, this Samsung Galaxy Note (AT&T LTE) review is no exception.

Data, Hacks, ROMs and Tricks

You want to know everything, eh? Alright then.

Official technical specifications here, the unofficial wiki provides even more information. More, in fact, than any normal human being can do anything with.

Lesser known features, tricks in video format for budding Note wizards.

Samsung Galaxy Note N7000 User Manual (all 192 pages of the PDF) for those looking for some obscure tidbit of information.

I hope you find what you are looking for.

Renders of Motorola’s first Intel-based Android phone surfaces, seems viable

Pocketnow‘s Evan Blass brings the news on some new pictures and bits of information about Motorola’s first attempt at putting together an Android smartphone that isn’t based on an ARM CPU.

Of course it doesn’t mean much to those of you, who can’t care less about the kind of processor your touch-screen enabled device runs on. For everyone else, this is kind of big news.

Intel has been trying to put its foot in the door of the mobile market for a while, hurling dead doves at the window, mostly. This time, however, it seems to be alive. Not because it hasn’t failed yet, but because this time it’s almost as good as the competition. Almost might just be enough for the chip-maker giant. Once near the performance and consumption figures of ARM cpus, the company can use its vast human and monetary resources to gradually sand out a product that beats others’.

Unfortunately no exact details have surfaced yet, but the pictures and that it’s going to bear an Intel Medfield CPU mean it isn’t going to be just another Android Ice Cream Sandwich phone. If you’ve seen a netbook before, you’ve seen the granddaddy of the Medfield CPU in action. Having that kind of computing power in a phone isn’t ground-breaking, but there’s more where it comes from.

The 32nm litography used to manufacture these chips allows the final product to draw less than 3.5 watts of power while decoding HD video, 2.5 while idling. Intel works towards an iteration that pulls 2.6 and 2 watts respectively, according to the information available to engadget.com.

The alleged new Motorola smartphone will run Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich and Motorola’s own User Interface, MotoBlur, on top of it.

According to Evan, the camera of the phone is expected to do the lion’s share of the work when it comes to selling the phone. Instant on and 15 frame/second burst capture are just two of the features expected to describe the rear-facing shooter.

I’d wait until the Mobile World Congress with my guess on the price.

Story and Picture from Pocketnow.com. Thank you!

Nokia Lumia 610 may become the budget phone you wanted

Since Nokia took the bow before Microsoft, budget phone users have been looking for their shovels to bury the company. In the light of recent events, it would be quite an unfortunate accident indeed.

Techradar’s Gareth Beavis reports that Nokia prepares to launch not one but three new phones at the upcoming Mobile World Congress 2012 in Barcelona.

Why is the Lumia 610 any more interesting than the other two? Because it has every opportunity to meet demand in a market segment Nokia left in the mud when it joined hands with Microsoft. It’s Nokia’s chance to make things right with customers who supported the company when it scrambled for a way out of bankruptcy.

It’ll run the latest Windows Phone operating system, which most likely will include a clause for value-segment smartphones. The current iteration — 7.5 Mango — requires smartphones to jump a couple fences before getting authorized as Windows Phones. Screen resolution, CPU performance, a dedicated shutter button for the camera are among the requirements an inexpensive smartphone can’t deliver on.

If Microsoft loosens its grip on the strings, Nokia’s Lumia 610 can become the first truly popular Windows phone since the software company released Windows Phone 7.0 to prove it has no intentions to leave the mobile market. Microsoft and Nokia desperately need a popular people’s phone. Microsoft needs it to gain traction against twelve-a-dozen Android smartphones, Nokia to not sink like a greased boulder.

Gareth predicts that the phone is going to sell as PAYG-only. It’s short for pay-as-you-go and describes pre-paid phones with no monthly-contract of any sort. If he is right — I can’t see why he wouldn’t be — and Nokia can wedge the 610 between the 199 GBP Lumia 710 and 100 GBP single-core, low-resolution Android phones, it has the potential to become a hit. Especially where Nokia phones were selling exceptionally well before smartphones pushed cells aside.

via Pocket-lint.com
source techradar.com

Got an Android Phone? Great! (You’re Also Being Followed)

“…we’ve seen the client on Blackberries, Nokias and more…”, says Trevor Eckhart in the introduction of the video he made about Carrier IQ.

What’s Carrier IQ? It’s a piece of software found on more than a hundred million smartphones around the world. It’s main directive is to record data on the phone the carriers can use to debug dropped calls and whatnot. Matter of fact is, this code records everything. From pressed keys to what you search for on the Internet, even with HTTPS enabled. Spooky.

Just to be clear, this isn’t a malware or virus infection on these phones. CIQ can be found on basically any factory default android device (and then some more).

As you might have heard, Echkart received legal threats from Carrier IQ for calling their program a ‘rootkit’, a legal threat they’ve backed out of by now allowing him to continue his work.

If I said I don’t think I’m affected by the problem I would be overlooking some risk factors. I have a cheap android device and my fiancee uses an HTC Desire. I’m betting both come with CIQ and record everything we do. Great.

via Wired

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