Hasta La Gadget!

You may have already read our Sony Xperia Z Ultra hands-on last week, but since then we’ve also been able to spend a tiny bit more time with a pre-production unit (with firmware build 14.1.B.1.277). Instead of going over again how hilariously large this 6.4-inch, pen-friendly phone is, this time we’ll focus on some early benchmark results, camera performance and Sony’s very own UX features.

As you’ll see after the break, many of the benchmark scores aren’t too far off from what we saw on the MDP phone with the same Snapdragon 800 SoC, and the final units should be optimized with higher numbers. While we didn’t manage to get CF-Bench and Quadrant running on the phone, the higher-than-before 3DMark score did cheer us up, meaning either Sony or Qualcomm’s managed to fine tune the latter’s new Adreno 330 GPU.

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile, Sony

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During Ford’s Trend Conference at the company’s headquarters in Dearborn, Michigan, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak sat in during a panel about driving distractions in vehicles and what solutions we could see in the future to limit these distractions in the car. Are touchscreens in the dashboard really the way to go? Do wearables like Google

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Integrated with NVIDIA’s upcoming handheld gaming device SHIELD, Parrot’s AR.Drone 2.0 brings on a rather unique set of abilities. Here with the final release iteration of SHIELD, we’ve gotten the opportunity to take the AR.Drone 2.0 out for a spin – again. While we’ve seen this device combo in action before, and even got the

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After the official product shot leaked in late May, we knew it wouldn’t be long before Huawei’s Ascend W2 makes an official appearance. Well, today’s the day, but as the company’s second-ever Windows Phone device, the W2’s appearance at Mobile Asia Expo was surprisingly low key. According to the spec sheet at Huawei’s booth, this affordable phone comes with a 4.3-inch 800 x 480 display (looked like IPS to us) and a 1.4GHz dual-core Qualcomm MSM8230 SoC (same as the W1 but faster) with 512MB RAM. There’s 8GB of built-in storage along with microSD expansion — the slot is located next to the removable 1,700mAh battery plus full-size SIM slot, all underneath the red or yellow back cover.

Even though Huawei doesn’t hide the fact that the W2 is a low-cost device, it’s actually not too shabby. Most notably, the three usual soft keys are color backlit and will match your desired theme in Windows Phone 8. As a bonus, the touchscreen has a glove mode — as featured on several other more recent Huawei phones — for the cold winter days. There’s still no price or date announced just yet, but since this particular model packs a TD-SCDMA radio for China Mobile, folks outside China will have to wait for the WCDMA variant. For now, we have a hands-on video for you after the break.

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile

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A lot of the discussion going on at during Ford‘s Trends conference today has been amount smart devices and how they can all integrate and communicate with one another. During a panel discussion, Ford’s John Viera and Andrew Hoffman of the University of Michigan discussed what the future might bring as far as smart devices

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