After having announced the (then-named) Windows Phone 7 Series platform at Mobile World Congress 2010, Microsoft planned a flashy New York City event in the fall of that same year to show off the first devices that would be bestowed with the Windows ecosystem's answer to Apple and Google's foray into mobile. There were a handful of devices, though one stood out to us in particular: the Samsung Focus, which seemed to have the best screen, the snappiest performance, and the most impressive thin-and-light form factor. The Focus went on to be one of the best-selling early Windows Phone 7 ...

Over the past several months, we've been seeing Samsung register trademarks for a lot of new Galaxy-series devices. By now, it seems like the company has registered more names than it could ever hope to actually use, yet they keep on coming. Is Samsung just securing them in the hopes that it might one day want to release products under these names, or could this be the sort of concealment Apple introduced with device IDs in iOS 5, where there are just too many to know what's real and what's not? In any case, we've now got three new Galaxy names to keep an eye out for. Samsung has filed for ...

When Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich was announced we were told that, like Honeycomb before it, more emphasis would be placed on the graphics processor. We even saw a new addition in the Developer section of the Settings that lets users "force GPU rendering". What is the GPU? The GPU is the Graphics Processing Unit. It's very much like the CPU, but instead of crunching numbers and taking care of tasks for the operating system and hardware, the GPU renders graphical information and puts it on the screen for you. The CPU can process graphical instructions just fine, but doing so takes time ...

Dealing with carriers can be such a pain at times, whether you're fighting over fees, trying to get a device upgrade, or dealing with network connectivity issues. That's why it's so refreshing to see one do something that's all at once unexpected, unnecessary, and seems to be motivated by little more than wanting to do right by its subscribers. We just heard yesterday that, following the phone's delay in US Customs, the HTC EVO 4G LTE was finally starting to arrive in the hands of Sprint users who had pre-ordered the device. What we didn't know then, though, is that Sprint has been ...

We've reached that point, folks. The battle for the title of "world's slimmest smartphone" is down to fights over hundredths of a millimeter- the internationally-recognized sign of a fight no one cares about anymore. In the past six months, phone makers Motorola, Huawei, and Oppo have all made the "thinnest" claim at some point. Today, Huawei's Ascend P1 S is still lording the lofty title of most-svelte over its rivals, with a thickness measurement of 6.68mm. That's just a little ways from the DROID RAZR's 7.1mm, but a far cry from the 13.9mm original RAZR that kicked off this whole ...

Remember back when the iPhone 4 first arrived, and we were expecting the white version to be available shortly after the black version hit retail? Then we learned of a short delay due to manufacturing issues, which then became a longer delay, which then became ten months. The latest smartphone to be hit with similar news of production problems with certain color options may not be from Apple, but it's definitely another high-profile model; reports indicate that Samsung is having some troubles of its own getting the Pebble Blue version of the Galaxy S III out to retailers. At first, this ...

Yesterday, we learned about a new list Sony had made available to inform its user base about upcoming Ice Cream Sandwich updates for its Android lineup. Surprisingly, though, the Xperia Play was absent from that group, raising some new questions about Sony's commitment to delivering ICS to the phone. After all, following the release of beta ICS ROMs for the Play, it seemed like Sony was very much interested in seeing the phone make the journey to Android 4.0, so we didn't know if this was just an innocent oversight, or if the company had really changed its mind about the Play. Today we get ...

3.7-inch WVGA screen, 256MB RAM, and 8GB of storage space, those are the specs of the Nokia Lumia 610 which was introduced at this year's MWC as the Finnish manufacturer's budget Windows Phone offering, though it should be even cheaper in order to compete with some low-end/mid-range/budget Android phones. If you live in the U.K. and you've got your eyes on either the cyan, magenta, white or black variants of the Lumia 610, you should prepare to welcome it in the first week of June. While there was no information made public about the contract-free (SIM-free) price, the phone should cost ...