Moto X+1: here’s our wish list

I would hesitate to call the Moto X a success story. By the usual definition we tie to “successful” smartphones, the Moto X does not apply. Motorola hasn’t sold tens of millions of Moto Xs like Samsung does with the Galaxy S series every year. And it didn’t help pull Motorola out of quarter after quarter of revenue losses like the One M8 has done for HTC.Still, I wouldn’t consider the Moto X a failure either – not by a long shot. It was easily one of the most intriguing ...

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Last chance: Huawei Ascend Mate2 4G LTE giveaway

How much do we love you guys? For the fourth week in a row now, we’re running a smartphone-themed giveaway, letting you not just get expert opinions and up-to-date news from your visits here at Pocketnow, but also have the chance to score some pretty nice hardware.While our summer of giveaways didn’t officially get started until the beginning of July, back in late June this whole movement found its inspiration when we hooked a lucky Pocketnow reader up with

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Could it be that the iPhone 6 Apple logo won’t glow after all?

Most of Apple’s iPhone 6 rumors have focused on the company making some interesting additions to its future smartphone. Some rumors claim that we’ll finally see new technologies like NFC make it to the final design, and others believe that the carved logo will also allow for Apple to bring it’s famous “Mac-glowing” logo to its iPhone line-up. Sadly at this point anything can happen, and ...

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Yet another Galaxy S5 variant expected: Snapdragon 805, but no quad HD display

We’re pretty much done with the Galaxy S5 by this point, right? We got the GS5 proper, we got the GS5 Active, we got the GS5 mini, and those lucky folks in South Korea even got the tricked-out GS5 LTE-A “Prime” edition. But surely, that must be it, right? Anything from here on out’s going to be something new like a Galaxy Alpha or Galaxy F, and in just a couple weeks, it’s going to be Note ...

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Samsung Galaxy Alpha rumors deliver new launch date, spec rundown

For a minute there, it really looked like we were just about to get Samsung’s Galaxy Alpha. At least, there was this barrage of leaks introducing us to the phone over a very short time span, going back just a couple weeks, and rumors of an August launch quickly zeroed-in on a very early date: Monday, August 4. Well, the Alpha may still be nearly within reach, but the latest gossip has the phone arriving just ...

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BBM beta for Windows Phone goes public

As much as we struggle to keep BlackBerry alive in our feeds, the company isn’t doing the best job in helping us reach that goal. BlackBerry is more of an uncertainty than it is the aspiring line of products that most of us drooled for in the past. That said, BBM has been doing a decent job in gaining some cross-platform glory, and the next frontier is ...

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HTC’s new J Butterfly is the waterproof One (M8) you always wanted

HTC has been on a roll of positive results this year, something that we’ve all wanted to happen as this is one of the last remaining smartphone pioneers of our time. The HTC One (M8), and the legacy left by last year’s HTC One have been ...

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HTC anticipates Q3 sales slump

Going back more than a year now, HTC’s been struggling to pull in revenue. Despite impressive devices like the One M8 and the original One before it, the company’s having a difficult time turning glowing reviews into sales, and correspondingly, income. After a rocky end to 2013 and a bumpy start to 2014, things finally looked like they might be getting back on track, and earlier this month we saw HTC reveal quarterly figures ...

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Why Sony’s seven-month Xperia Z-series cycle isn’t all bad

I remember a time when I was switching phones every other week. Literally.I would buy a phone without a contract from an AT&T or Verizon store (or my place of employment), use it for a week or two, then turn around and sell it to the highest bidder on Craigslist. In most cases, I would trade the new phone for a slightly older phone plus some cash. Then I would sell the phone I had just received through the trade for its full value, thus walking away with more money than I had put into the original phone.It’s not like I was making money hand over fist, but I was playing my cards ...

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Samsung’s smartphone sales are down; lowest profits in two years

You’d think that the world’s biggest smartphone maker is having a blast with the launch of devices like the Galaxy S5, but that’s actually far from the truth. Samsung’s quarter results are in, and instead of making its investors happy, it turns out that the company is actually doing as bad as it had forecasted. Samsung warned its investors that the “weak demand” for smartphones and its increase in marketing expenses ...

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Qi wireless charging is about to get a lot better

When it comes to wireless charging on smartphones, tablets, and (soon) smartwatches, there’s only one standard we really care about: Qi from the Wireless Power Consortium. Sure, there are those companies who would really like us to use the PMA standard, but the support just isn’t where it needs to be: in the hardware of the majority of phones with wireless charging, coming from our favorite ...

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Hundreds of Beats employees lose their jobs after Apple acquisition

Some of us are still trying to understand Apple’s purpose for acquiring Beats music a couple of weeks ago. Some speculate that Apple is in search of better music accessories, others feel that the company wants a better edge to compete with music streaming, and others even feel this is a

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Samsung’s partnership with Oculus VR brings familiar HW to new Rift dev kit

This may be pushing the limits of what counts as smartphone news, but bear with us for a moment: Samsung and Oculus VR have been partnering up for work on what’s promising to be a real virtual reality renaissance. We know Oculus itself has been thinking about Android compatibility since its early days, and more recently the company has been helping Samsung develop the technology it’s using for its own Gear VR headset ...

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Verizon launches sapphire-screened Kyocera Brigadier

Kyocera’s Brigadier first leaked back in the spring, and at the time, there wasn’t much reason to be excited about it. The phone seemed like it would just be the latest in a long series of ruggedized Androids that may offer exceptional durability, but with little in the way of real stand-out features, nor high-end specs. And so we largely forgot about the phone until it popped back on our radar earlier this week, as a source leaked some Verizon documentation to us that identified the ...

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