Hasta La Gadget!

Samsung has announced a new special edition of the Galaxy Note 10.1 LTE tablet. The special edition doesn’t get any new or fancy hardware or even any special accessories. The tablet simply gets a special color exterior in garnet red.

Samsung calls the color garnet red, most of us would just say maroon. Samsung has been particularly infatuated with garnet red of late. In late January the electronics maker offered a garnet red version of the Galaxy Tab 2 7.0 tablet.

Samsung says that this red color will be particularly popular with female college students who covet fashion items. The garnet red version of the tablet will launch on February 14 in Korea with the promise of a global launch at a later date. There is no specific timeframe noted for the garnet red version of the tablet to land in other countries.

Other than the red color, the tablet has the same hardware under the hood as previous versions of the tablet. The 10.1-inch screen has a resolution of 1280 x 800 and the processor is a Samsung Exynos quad core running at 1.4 GHz. The tablet features a microSD card slot for storage expansion and an integrated S-Pen.

[via Samsung]

Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 LTE gets a garnet red exterior is written by Shane McGlaun & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

The results from the latest Arbitron Mobile US smartphone panel have been published and show that iPhone users spend more time playing mobile games than Android users. According to the survey results, 85.7% of iPhone users played mobile gaming apps during December of 2012. The survey shows that 76% of Android users played games during the same month.

The survey also shows that iPhone users access game apps more often with an average of 151.5 sessions monthly compared to the 94.6 sessions a month average by Android users. Gamers in the survey panel spent an average of 12 hours and 23 minutes playing games on the iPhone. Android users in the panel spent an average of eight hours and 4 minutes playing games.

Arbitron says that mobile gamers make up 78.8% of its US panel. That group of gamers spent 594.1 minutes using game apps making games the most popular function on smartphones. The second most popular activity for smartphone users on the panel was social networking with 477 minutes spent with social networking apps during the month.

Users in the survey group spent 447.9 minutes messaging during December, 447.8 minutes browsing the web, and 418.6 minutes making phone calls. The survey also looked at the most popular games by platform and found that Words With Friends was the most popular on both Android and iPhones. Rounding out the top five games for iPhone users were Scramble With Friends, Temple Run, The Simpsons: Tapped Out, and Draw Something. Rounding out the top five for Android gamers was Angry Birds Star Wars, Scramble With Friends, Drag Racing, and Fruit Ninja.

iPhone users spend more time playing games than Android users is written by Shane McGlaun & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Opera is celebrating the news that it’s hit the 300 million monthly user milestone with a big announcement. It’s going to dump Presto, the current Opera rendering engine, in favor of WebKit. The company gave the impression that it’s exhausted after swimming against the tide of an internet designed to work for Chrome and Safari for so long. Instead, the firm will devote its considerable resources toward “innovation and polish” on its browser products. Opera’s already hinted at its future by demonstrating Ice, its WebKit-based experiment for iOS and Android devices, which it’ll be showing off in more detail at MWC later this month.

Filed under: Internet, Software, Mobile

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Source: Opera, (2)

Android 4.2.2 began arriving on an assortment of Nexus devices yesterday with “performance and stability” improvements listed as the only changes, but Android Police dug into Google’s change logs and compiled a list of small tweaks. With the update on board, Play Store downloads now display the time left to their completion, and Android Debug Bridge security is shored-up with the addition of a whitelist. Now, WiFi and Bluetooth tiles can be toggled by a long press in the notification Quick Settings. The release also makes hardware play a tone when it begins to charge wirelessly with less than 95% juice left, and uses new low battery and cord-free charging chimes for the Nexus 4. Reports about possible Bluetooth fixes are mixed according to Android Police, and a reference to patching them up hasn’t been spotted just yet. If you’d like to take a look at Mountain View’s code commits, give the neighboring source link a jab.

Filed under: Mobile, Google

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Source: Android Police (1), (2)

We do know that BlackBerry has ceased operations in Japan and will no longer support it in that part of the world, but there is another device in the ascendant – the Apple iPhone, of course. In fact, Apple is now the leader in the Japanese smartphone market for the first time ever, as in the fourth quarter of 2012, the Apple iPhone managed to hold 16% of the Japanese market, meaning it has conquered 15% of the smartphone pie in the Land of the Rising Sun. Of course, Apple did overtake Sharp in the past before, but they were duly overtaken shortly afterwards.

Both home grown LG and Samsung, too, have increased their market share in Japan as well for 2012, marking the first time ever that foreign brands where smartphones are concerned have exceeded 50% for the first time. Chinese manufacturer Huawei also experienced good times by tripling its market share, while local manufacturers such as Sharp and Fujitsu saw a decline in their market share at just 14% overall. You’d notice that the BlackBerry does not feature at all, and Windows Phone? That’s but a dream still.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Apple Launching The iPhone 5S In June [Rumor], Apple Maps Blamed for Poor Bushfire Response in Australia,