Hasta La Gadget!

After experiencing component shortages that caused delays, the HTC One seems to be getting back on course. Component supply issues seem to be waning, and HTC is now ready to shift production into high gear. It’s said that HTC One production will double this month compared to last month, and the output should keep growing month-to-month.

According to Focus Taiwan, president of HTC North Asia Jack Tong, said that manufacturing volume will double this month compared to April and will continue to grow into next month in order to meet “strong demand” for the company’s flagship handset, which was officially released late last month, but ended up getting on shelves before the Samsung Galaxy S 4 in some markets.

The company had a fairly negative first quarter, with revenue down to $1.45 billion, but HTC is hoping that a boost in production along with sales of the HTC One will see the company turn itself around in time to report its Q2 earnings. After all, the company saw almost a 50% drop in sales compared to the same quarter last year.

Then again, HTC can’t completely rely on the One to keep the company afloat. They have other recently-released devices out on the market, including the HTC First “Facebook phone,” which actually isn’t doing so hot on the selling floor. It’s exclusive carrier, AT&T, recently dropped the subsidy down to just $0.99 from $99 after just a month of being on the market, which is something we don’t see very often and it usually means that things are going south for the device.

The HTC One is available on AT&T and T-Mobile starting at $199, with AT&T having exclusivity for the 64GB version at $299. The phone has a 4.7-inch display with a resolution of 1920×1080, which offers you a full HD display with a super-high pixel density. Under the hood is a Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 clocked at 1,7GHz with 2GB of RAM to keep things humming along. Check out our full review to learn more about the device.

VIA: ZDNet

HTC One production to double this month is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

The white Nexus 4 is stuff that dreams are made of, and the lucky son of a gun at Android and Me, Taylor Wimberly, has one in hand. According to Wimberly’s description, it’ll be a “carbon copy” of the black Nexus 4, with the same specs and hardware wrapped into the sparkly, snow white casing. That’s not the only juicy detail to emerge from Google I/O, however, as Wimberly reports that the smartphone will debut in the Google Play Store on June 10th with Android 4.3. We’re currently unable to confirm the rumor, but a growing number of server logs add to the speculation that Android 4.3 could be around the bend. With less than a month to go, it won’t be long to know whether this one pans out, but you can be sure that we’ll be dreaming of unicorns in the meantime.

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile, Google

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Source: Android and Me

Nokia’s Lumia 928 may not have had the high-profile launch of its Lumia 925 sibling, but the Verizon LTE smartphone does have the benefit of being on sale today. Available from this morning, priced at $99.99 with a new, two-year agreement, the Verizon Lumia 928 joins the rarefied list of current smartphones offering a Xenon flash.

That means better low-light photos, with Xenons usually far stronger than the LED flashes we’re used to seeing on smartphones. You don’t miss out on a video light, either, with the Lumia 928′s focus-assist LED capable of being repurposed for illuminating during video recording.

Functionally, the new smartphone is much the same as what the Lumia 920 was offering months ago. However, it’s packaged up in a neater design, with the squared-off polycarbonate casing fitting more neatly into the hand, and yet still accommodating the PureView suspended optical system, which helps the high-end Lumia take such solid low-light photos.

There’s also a new display, versus that of the 920, with Nokia slotting in an OLED ClearBlack panel, coincidentally the same screen as on the Lumia 925. That’s topped with a layer of Gorilla Glass 2 which forms the entire edge-to-edge fascia of the smartphone.

Interestingly, if you head over to RadioShack, the Lumia 928 is going for half of Verizon’s upfront price, though you’ll still need to commit to a two-year agreement.

There’s more on the Lumia 928 in our hands-on and unboxing. We’ve also got photo samples from the 8.7-megapixel PureView camera.

Nokia Lumia 928 hands-on:

Nokia Lumia 928 lands at Verizon: Can Windows Phone and Xenon tempt you? is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

BlackBerry’s BBM client for iOS and Android, due for release this summer, will not support the iPad at launch, the company has revealed, focusing instead on smartphones. The cross-platform BlackBerry Messenger support was announced on Tuesday on the first day of BlackBerry Live, but software portfolio chief Vivek Bhardwaj confirmed to Trusted Reviews that tablet support is relatively low on the agenda.

“At this point it is iOS and Android, and that’s iOS phones running iOS 6 and higher” Bhardwaj said of the app. “Smartphone is our real focus and again it comes back to what BBM is. If you look BBM and the engagement and the activity, it’s because it is mobile, because people are on the go.”

Expanding BlackBerry Messenger support across rival platforms has been a long-rumored strategy for BlackBerry, though there’s controversy around whether the decision will now be too little, too late. BlackBerry OS has dropped a place in the worldwide smartphone OS market share league, it was announced today, with Windows Phone taking third place instead.

Whether that will mean BBM for iPhone and Android works as a gateway drug of sorts, or merely as a route for BlackBerry owners looking to leave the platform behind and yet still keep in touch with old friends on a new device, remains to be seen.

Even without a dedicated iPad version, that’s not to say iPad and iPad mini owners won’t be able to access the iPhone BBM app. However, they’ll be stuck using screen-doubling until BlackBerry gets around to coding up a tablet-specific interface, and there’s no telling when that will actually happen.

Still, there’s at least a hint that such support is in the pipeline, as well as other form-factors where BBM could roost, beyond mobile. “I think when you look at things like Smart TVs and desktops, those are definitely areas for exploration,” Bhardwaj teased.

IMAGE: BlackBerry Blog

BlackBerry: No BBM for iPad app at cross-platform launch is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Windows Phone has taken third place in the global smartphone OS shipments chart buoyed by Nokia’s Lumia successes, new figures suggest, pushing BlackBerry into fourth place, but Microsoft’s platform still languishes well behind Android and iOS. Google’s Android is the clear smartphone OS marketshare leader, according to IDC, with a claimed 75-percent of the market in Q1 2013, while Apple’s iOS has 17.3-percent.

That’s a 79.5-percent increase year-on-year for Android, while iOS managed a 6.6-percent climb from its share in Q1 2012. Microsoft saw the biggest increase, however, up 133.3-percent over the course of 12 months, to hold 3.2-percent globally.

BlackBerry OS, however, declined 35.1-percent year-on-year, down to 2.9-percent. There’s still a comfortable buffer over other platforms dwelling at the bottom of the barrel, but it suggests that BlackBerry 10 still has plenty of work to do if it’s to leverage the company back into the mainstream.

For Windows Phone, 7m units were supposedly shipped in the opening three months of this year. That’s predominantly down to Nokia devices; the Finnish company shipped 5.6m Lumia Windows Phones in the period, making it the most popular vendor for Microsoft’s mobile OS. Nokia’s expectations are high for Q2, too, with estimates of as many as 7m sales by some analysts.

In Android, Samsung dominates the segment, with 41.1-percent market share of smartphones overall. Earlier this week, Strategy Analytics estimated Samsung devices comprised 95-percent of Android smartphone sales.

“The intra-Android competition has not stifled companies from keeping Android as the cornerstone of their respective smartphone strategies,” IDC concludes, “but has upped the ante to innovate proprietary experiences.”

For Apple, it’s the company’s most impressive volume for iPhone sales, but IDC blames iOS stagnation for lower year-over-year growth than the market as a whole. That’s likely to change, it predicts, when iOS 7 debuts later in 2013.

Windows Phone comes 3rd in smartphones but Android keeps clear lead is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.