android
Samsung announces Gingerbread powered Samsung Galaxy Pocket
Samsung Korea has just announced a smartphone they claim is affordable enough for everybody. The Samsung Galaxy Pocket fulfils their goals of providing customers with a variety of smart devices designed to fulfil their needs. The Galaxy Pocket which is 11.98mm slim, weighing in at 97g and featuring a 2.8” display is small and still ensures a comfortable viewing of content and images. We are still unsure when the device will go up on sale but if you are looking for an affordable and decent looking Android device, this might be it.
Samsung has applied an upgraded TouchWiz to the device to make navigation and menu transitions smoother. The Pocket comes with an 832MHz processor and the 2.8” screen is a QVGA 240×320 TN LCD. It comes loaded with Android Gingerbread and a 2MP rear camera with fixed focus. It is capable of recording QVGA @15fps and video playback is WVGA@30fps. It also will have Bluetooth 3.0, USB 2.0 and Wi-Fi capability, besides that it does have an accelerometer with 3GB of internal and a microSD slot for up to 32GB of memory. All the features will be powered by a Li-ion 1,200mAh battery which sounds like it will be more than enough for this compact Android phone.
Samsung has input Samsung Apps, its native Social Hub as well as Samsung Kies as part of their valued added service. According to Samsung, regardless of what a consumer might want from them, it is their duty to deliver and this seems to be a legitimate business strategy as iPhone has made a niche market a large market and since Samsung who believe in diversity will not restrict themselves, making a phone for everybody with different needs and wants seems to be a better plan in their opinion.
The Fairphone 2 was first unveiled in June earlier this year, where this particular handset carried a modular design while featuring majority of its components that have been sourced from conflict-free mines. It seems that this particular handset that you can purchase with a clear conscience has begun to ship to those who happen to live across Europe.
Fairphone announced in a blog post, “It’s been almost two years in the making, and some of the earliest buyers have been patiently waiting since July to receive their new phones. As community manager, I want to personally welcome the new batch of Fairphone owners to our community.” The initial 1,000 units are tipped to ship this month, before the other pre-orders follow in January 2016.
In terms of hardware specifications, the Fairphone 2 will run on a Snapdragon 801 chipset, has a 5″ 1080p screen with Gorilla Glass 3 protection, 2GB of RAM, an 8MP camera, with Android 5.1 Lollipop in tow. It will be a dual SIM capable handset with a microSD memory card slot and plays nice with 4G LTE networks, retailing for approximately €525 a pop.
It looks like the upcoming flagship model from Xiaomi will feature NFC support, at least based on a document that was released by China UnionPay. Just in case you are scratching your head and wondering who China UnionPay is, they happen to be the only domestic payment gateway supplier and card organization, and hence, to see them offer detailed support concerning the newly released NFC-based payment system points to the very real possibility of the upcoming Xiaomi Mi 5 featuring NFC capability.
After all, the Xiaomi Mi 3 was also mentioned on the list, which so happens to feature NFC, and there is no mention of the Xiaomi Mi 4 which does not come with NFC. Still, such a new payment system would be the ideal tool to see the reintroduction of NFC to the flagship model.
OnePlus did make an announcement in the previous month that the Ceramic variant of the OnePlus X will be released on November 24. True to their word, they did exactly that – although only a pitiful number of units were made available, and not only that, this was through a charity auction. Thankfully for the rest of the masses who are on the lookout for this device, it has gone on sale officially already.
Needless to say, this particular variant is available only by an invitation, although do bear in mind that standard OnePlus X invites are not good here – you will still need to snag yourself a specific Ceramic variant invite before you make a purchase. OnePlus is also on the lookout to offer additional methods of picking up this smartphone, although no further details were revealed.
The OnePlus X Ceramic will be available only in select markets, where among them include Europe, India, and Hong Kong. To date, we do know that OnePlus had made only 10,000 units of the handset available. A case of the early bird getting the proverbial worm here?