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Oppo R7 battery life test

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Oppo R7 is quite an interesting smartphone, which upgrades on the super thin Oppo R5. The new R7 brings back the 3.5mm jack and adds extra battery capacity at the price of 1.4mm of extra thickness. We also get dual-SIM connectivity, a microSD expansion slot, a higher-res selfie camera and enhanced rear snapper this time around.

The Oppo R7 keeps the same key hardware specs – a 5″ AMOLED 1080p display, the same Snapdragon 615 chip, this time around with 3GB of RAM, and runs on the aging Android KitKat. The older Oppo R5 returned a disappointing endurance rating and we hope Oppo managed to fix this issue for the successor. Read more »

Sony launches First Flight crowdfunding platform for its own inventions

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Sony announced today its own crowdfunding platform called First Flight. It looks a lot like Kickstarter, but isn’t just another replica. In fact First Flight has entirely different concept – it’s Sony’s hope to repair some of its struggling businesses.

Sony PlayStation 4 might be doing great, but we can’t say the same for the Xperia lineup which has become somewhat of a run-of-the-mill job. With First Flight Sony will be able to achieve to major things free of charge – learn the interest towards certain product ahead of re;ease and cut its losses in case of poor market reception for a given product. Read more »

Sprint makes fun of AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon in new ad

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David Beckham is the star of Sprint’s latest video ad, which focuses on the carrier’s unlimited plan. The video takes an interesting approach, ridiculing the other three US major carriers’ tariffs.

Sprint All-In Wireless promo shows David Beckham getting confused in AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon stores and finally he founds his unlimited plan without small print and hidden taxes in Sprint’s store. Read more »

Project Spartan renamed to Edge in latest Windows build

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Project Spartan was the work-in-progress name for the upcoming Microsoft web browser, which should replace the old-school Internet Explorer in Windows 10. The company has already revealed its official name – Edge – a while back.

As of the latest Windows 10 Preview build released a few hours ago, Project Spartan app is finally renamed to Edge and brings a plethora of improvements. Read more »

Apple discontinues the original iPad mini

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Apple quietly removed the first iPad mini slate from its official online store. The original model came out in late 2012, contradicting previous Apple public statements that the smaller tablets are useless.

Followed by the highly popular iPad mini 2 with Retina display and iPad mini 3 with Touch ID, the original mini slate was and still is quite a decent position due to its lower price and current iOS version. Read more »

Check this infographic about the Tablet Evolution

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The Apple iPad may have reopened the tablet market, but it surely wasn’t the first one to come. Many have tried before but none quite succeeded. The guys over Mobile Madhouse made an infographic on The Evolution of the Tablet and you can learn what was before the iPad.

As it turns out Apple didn’t make the first ever slate, but the company has a good track record of taking niche gadgets and turning them mainstream and earn good money doing it. Read more »

Xiaomi Mi Note Bamboo Edition gets a price cut

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Xiaomi Mi Note went official in January and hit the shelves soon after. Three months later Xiaomi introduced a Natural Bamboo Edition with a rear panel made out of bamboo.

The regular edition of the Mi Note is priced at CNY 1,999 (€290), while the Bamboo Edition was more expensive at CNY 2,299 (€330). Well, this is no more – Xiaomi decided to lower the price of the Natural Bamboo Edition now. Read more »

Xiaomi Mi 4i battery life test

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Xiaomi Mi 4i turned out quite an interesting smartphone, a worthy alternate of the original Mi 4. The new Mi 4i model changes the design, keeps the 5″ screen and 13MP great camera, but comes running on the Snapdragon 615 chip. There is a beefy 3,120 mAh battery, which should keep the Mi 4i up for days.

The MIUI v.6, just like before, offers Performance and Balanced power modes. The Performance mode allows the phone to use all processor cores, while the Balanced limits the CPU usage in order to save battery. Throughout our tests – call, video, browser and standby we used the Balanced mode, as any MIUI users will do most of the time. We tried switching to Performance and re-test the device, but we noticed just minor differences in the results. Read more »

Microsoft to retire the modern Skype app on July 7

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Microsoft announced today it is going to retire the modern version of the Skype app for Windows. As Windows 10 launch comes closer it makes sense for Microsoft to unify the user experience across its core apps.

As part of this process Microsoft has been working to optimize its desktop app equally well for touch and for mouse/keyboard input. Those efforts basically rendered the modern Skype app obsolete. Read more »

Xiaomi Yi Camera Night Vision Edition goes official

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Xiaomi announced its third camera today – the Yi Camera Night Vision Edition. It has the same design as the original Yi Camera, and has nothing to do with the Yi Sport/ Mi Sport Action Camera we saw a few months back.

The new Yi Camera Night Vision has a 940mm infra-red camera sensor and so it doesn’t need any kind of artificial light. Besides the new sensor, the rest of the functionality remains the same – it snaps pictures, records HD video (probably with 20fps) and is Wi-Fi-enabled and can stream live picture. Read more »

YotaPhone 2 price in Russia gets a significant cut

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YotaPhone 2 is among the most interesting and innovative smartphones on the market today. It offers a dual-display configuration with a front 5″ 1080p AMOLED screen and a rear 4.7″ e-paper always-on panel. There is also a Snapdragon 801 chip to power everything, 32GB storage and very good 8MP rear snapper as we’ve concluded in our review.

The YotaPhone 2 costs as much as any other competitive flagship, though its launch price ins Russia went even higher due to the unstable currency. Well, this is changing today as Yota Devices cut the price of the YotaPhone 2 with 17%. Read more »

Windows 10 kicks off on July 29

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Microsoft announced today the official availability of the upcoming Windows 10 – July 29. That’s less than two months from now, which means Microsoft has nothing left to do but polish a few edges.

Windows 10 will introduce universal apps, Cortana, Microsoft Edge browser to replace the Internet Explorer, new Office 2016 included in Windows 10 for free, Xbox Live app and integration, new multimedia apps, among others. Read more »

Microsoft Lumia 435 and Lumia 532 battery life test

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Microsoft Lumia 435 and Lumia 532 are among the most affordable smartphones out there. Both devices are quite similar – they pack 4″ WVGA screens, run on Snapdragon 200 chips with 1GB RAM, offer 8 gigs of internal expandable storage and basic camera departments.

The Lumia 435 comes with a dual-core Cortex-A7 processor and 2MP cam, while the Lumia 532 model packs a quad-core Cortex-A7 CPU and 5MP snapper. Both run on Windows Phone 8.1 with Update 1 and are powered by 1,560 mAh batteries. Read more »

LG G Watch R now costs just $99 on AT&T

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AT&T cut off $200 from the price of the LG G Watch R smartwatch today and you can now have it for just $99. The offer is available via the AT&T online store, but you can opt for picking up the watch in-store.

LG G Watch R runs on Android Wear and features a P-OLED circular display, elegant sport looks and a beefy 410 mAh battery. It supports smartphones running on Android 4.3 or later. Read more »

Apple is going to release the native Watch SDK during WWDC

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Apple Watch was announced last September and went on sale this April. However stock quantities are very limited, and even waiting times are down, it is still hard to purchase one.

Many apps now support the Apple Watch, but since there is no official SDK, those apps actually run on the iPhone and transmit the data wirelessly. This often makes the Apple Watch lag, stutter or even crash, as we reported in our Apple Watch review. Read more »