Hasta La Gadget!

With the Samsung Galaxy Camera 2, users will be taking the original – especially well-done – Galaxy Camera experience and getting an upgrade in a few key places. While you’ll … Continue reading

This week a patent application for a next-generation Samsung smartphone device has appeared ready for imminent implementation. This device is not expressly linked to the Samsung Galaxy or Samsung Note … Continue reading

Samsung isn’t off to a great start for 2014 – during its first full day of trading of the new year, it lost 4.6 percent of its stock price value, which amounts to a more than $8 billion drop in market value, as reported by the Wall Street Journal. The drop is likely attributable to increasing lack of investor confidence in Samsung’s ability to continue to grow its mobile business.

Outlook for the company’s upcoming quarterly results are good – analysts estimate that they will see an increase in profit derived from their mobile business, which is the big powerhouse at the company when it comes to driving earnings. But that increase will be off the pace from the previous quarter, and the fear is that in general Samsung’s ability to continue to see increasing gains in its mobile business has come to an end.

The problem for Samsung comes from a number of developments in the mobile market over the past year. First, there’s the fact that smartphone penetration at the top-end of the market is now pretty wide-reaching, meaning there’s theoretically much less opportunity to sell high-end devices than there might have been previously.

There’s also ample price pressure making its way into the world of smartphone sales. Google’s Nexus devices continue to set examples for high quality hardware at lower, contract free prices, and now Motorola is also offering extreme value for money with the $179 Moto G, and the just-reduced Moto X at $399, a price drop made permanent earlier this week. To compete with Google and Google-owned Motorola on price, Samsung would inevitably find margins on its products lower than usual since budget devices becoming more important drives down mobile profit overall.

Samsung held a conference designed specifically to address the concerns of analysts and investors back in November last year, where it tried to reassure its backers and market watchers that it had the right plans in place to continue growth. However investors seem unconvinced. Its stock price was mostly flat coming out of that event, and both for the last day of 2013 and now the first day of 2014, price has dipped considerably.

We have recently been seeing several leaks of the Nokia Normandy handset which is supposedly Nokia’s attempts at making an Android device. Back then it was rumored that the handset was merely an experiment by Nokia to see what they could build if they were attempting to make an Android device, and that it most likely will not be released anytime soon, especially in face of Microsoft’s acquisition of the company which is expected to close this year. After all with Microsoft promoting Windows Phone, the last thing they’ll want to do is promote a competitor’s product, right? Not to mention the various “Scroogled” campaigns Microsoft has been running as of late.

Well as it turns out perhaps Nokia could still be looking to release the handset because thanks to a tweet by the ever-reliable @evleaks, he wrote that, “The reports of Normandy’s death have been greatly exaggerated.” @evleaks has been known to get most of his leaks correct, save for a one or two misses along the road, but for the most part he has been pretty spot on. This also corroborates earlier rumors that Nokia has decided to put the Normandy up for release, even in face of the deal with Microsoft. Assuming this is true, there’s no telling when Nokia would make such an announcement, but what do you guys think? Would you be interested in a Nokia Android device?

Nokia Normandy’s Death Has Been “Greatly Exaggerated” original content from Ubergizmo.

There’s no shortage of note taking applications, you can find apps from unknown startups to apps from companies like Microsoft. The company has released an updated OneNote app for Android which comes with a couple of new features. It says that this latest update is all about speed, enabling users to get more things done in less time. They have focused on making it faster to capture and access notes.

A share button for the app has been added browsers like Chrome and RSS readers through which users can instantly add “anything from anywhere” to OneNote. The app will store that content and even make it available across all of the users’ devices. Those who want to only capture what they see on the screen can simply send a screenshot to the app, it works with articles, webpages, images, videos and files. As previously mentioned, the app also supports multi-windows now, a feature that’s found on devices like the Galaxy S3. Users will be able to launch the OneNote app alongside another app and work on both at the same time. The update brings a new OneNote Recent Widget on the device’s home screen through which users will have quick and easy access to all of their recently accessed notes. They will also be able to add a page, section or notebook of their choice to the home screen. The OneNote app for Android is live now and available for download through Google Play Store.

OneNote For Android Updated With Multi-Window Support And New Widget original content from Ubergizmo.