Tablets with keyboards – everybody’s doing it. The best-known of them is the Microsoft Surface and we’re due for a new one soon. The Microsoft Surface Pro 4 will reportedly feature a razor-thin bezel like the new Dell XPS 13 laptop.

The top and side bezels are said to be close to invisible, while the bottom one will be thicker. The hardware Windows key (which was on the right in the Surface Pro 3) may be moving back to the bottom or getting dropped altogether.

The bezels may not be fixed either. Take this with a grain of salt since it’s pretty odd, but apparently the Surface Pro 4 display will switch between 13″ (when docked) and 12″ (when used as a tablet). This is dubbed Smart Frame.

The most likely explanation is that edge pixels are turned off to artificially create a thicker bezel and make the tablet easier to hold. It sounds clever, perhaps even necessary if the Surface Pro screen really has bezels as thin as this rumor claims.

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Samsung announced today a new rugged smartphone – the Galaxy Active Neo. It’s a Japan exclusive, but is expected to go international in few months.

The Galaxy Active Neo is a mid-range device with a 4.5″ WVGA (480p) display and powered by the Snapdragon 410 chip – quad-core 1.2GHz Cortex-A53 CPU, Adreno 306 GPU and 2GB of RAM.

The Active Neo packs an 8MP rear snapper and a 2MP selfie shooter, 16GB expandable storage and 2,200 mAh battery. Its connectivity package includes LTE, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.1 and NFC, while the OS in charge is Android 5.1 Lollipop.

As it is an ‘Active’ phone, this means you’ll get IP68 certification – that’s dust and water resistance up to 1.5 meter and 30 minutes, plus MIL-STD-810G certification for salt and sea water, dust, humidity, rain, vibration, solar radiation, transport and thermal shock resistance. It can withstand 2 tons of load and survive a drop on concrete from 1.5 meters.

NTT DoCoMo will be offering the smartphones starting November for JPY 20,000 or €150. There is a good chance the phone makes it to other markets later on.

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Phone calls haven’t changed much since Alexander Graham Bell. Sure, mobile phones dropped the wires, but it’s still two people using their voices and ears. What if you could use an image or a map instead? That’s just what Vodafone Call+ lets you do.

You can send a picture or a location for your friend’s phone to display while it’s ringing. That way people will know why you’re calling before they pick up. You can send more stuff during the call too, including stream live video.

Message+ is the texting companion to Call+. It combines text messages in a threaded view and does group chat to boot. The app also lets you send fun stickers, photos, location, voice messages. You can extend Message+ functionality with add-ons.

Note that Call+ is not a Wi-Fi calling solution, calls go through Vodafone’s network and standard charges apply. You will need a data connection for the multimedia features to work though. Same goes for Message+ – texts are sent though SMS, multimedia through an Internet connection.

You can grab Vodafone Call+ and Message+ (it’s a single download) from the Google Play Store. By the way, if you have an Android Wear smartwatch you can use it check notifications from the…

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Few devices have been getting quite as much attention lately as the Lumia 950 and 950 XL and we can definitely understand why. A new proper flagship in the Windows realm has been long overdue and fans are understandably excited. The duo should be officially released on October 8, which is still a few days away, but that hasn’t stopped at least a couple of retailers from leaking details about said smartphones.

Today, however, a Russian online store by the name of Bayon might have officially become the first one to offer pre-orders on both models. This confirms the specs sheets for the duo yet again and also gives us some perspective on the Russian pricing.

Interestingly enough, there is one extra detail revealed – the 950 XL seems to be available in Dark Blue, as well as the classic Black and White colors. The smaller Lumia 950 is listed for 56,990 rubles ($865), while the bigger XL one goes for 62,990 rubles ($956). That is quite a hefty price to pay, but it is also worth noting that we are talking about the dual-SIM variant here and also local Russian prices for handsets do tend to be slightly higher than most other places.

However, the numbers aren’t that much off, compared to what we have seen from a recent Spanish leak – €749 ($838) and €659 ($738), respectively for the dual-SIM Lumia 950 XL and Lumia 950. As for the specs, the Lumia 950 and Lumia 950 XL have a 5.2″ and 5.7″ displays, both at QHD resolution, 3GB of RAM and 32GB of expandable memory. The first has a more powerful Snapdragon 810 chipset and a 3,300mAh battery, while smaller Lumia 950 has a slightly less powerful Snapdragon 808 chip and a smaller 3,000mAh battery. Both phones will share a 20MP PureView camera with triple-LED flash.

Interestingly both the Lumia 950 and Lumia 950 XL have USB Type-C cables and Microsoft plans to use the combined data-transfer and video out capabilities of the new connector along with the Windows 10 Continuum feature to turn the handsets into portable desktops.

Source 1(in Russian) | Source 2(in Russian) |…

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After recently launching the Moto X Play in India, Motorola has begun teasing the Moto X Style on its Twitter account. We have two tweets for now, neither confirming the release date and one just saying coming very soon.

Motorola recently announced the Moto X Play in India, which has just become available for purchase. The Moto X Style is the bigger and more accomplished brother, with a 5.7-inch QHD display, Snapdragon 808, 3GB RAM, 21 megapixel camera, and stock Android 5.1 Lollipop. Although Moto Maker is not available in India, Motorola will likely offer the Style in various pre-configured color and material options as with previous generations of Moto X.

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Huawei Honor 6 is now getting the Android 5.1.1 Lollipop, enhanced with the new EMUI 3.1 launcher. The first country to get the new firmware is India, but oddly the update is now available via the OTA service just yet.

Huawei has uploaded the ROM on the official Huawei India website, so you can download it from there and update it manually. Just few people reported for OTA notifications. The file is 1.3GB big, so in case you’ll do the update manually, you should free at least 3GB on your phone.

There is no official changelog for the new firmware, but it will upgrade your KitKat up to the latest Lollipop and bring some traces of Material design, lots of under-the-hood optimizations, better security and switch to ART runtime for better performance.

Huawei Honor 4C and Honor 4X already got the update – in case you’ve missed the news you can found the ROMs over the source link. Now it’s turn for the Honor 6. Other markets should be getting the update very soon and hopefully the OTA release is just around the corner, too.

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An official-looking press render of the upcoming entry-level Microsoft Lumia 550 smartphone has been leaked, courtesy of the usually reliable leakster @evleaks.

The device has already been the subject of several leaks in the past, with the most recent leak showing the smartphone in four color versions – white, red, blue, and black.

Specs-wise, the Lumia 550 is said to be powered by a Snapdragon 210 SoC and sport a 4.7-inch 720p AMOLED touchscreen. It is expected to come with 1GB RAM and 8GB expandable internal memory, and pack in a 1,905 mAh battery. In terms of camera, the Windows 10 Mobile-powered device is said to feature a 5MP rear unit and a 2MP front shooter.

The handset, along with the high-end Lumia 950 and 950 XL, is expected to be made official at the company’s October 6 event next week.

Via 1…

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It’s how the saying goes. And you know, it’s not about Apple and the iPhone at all. It’s where the industry has been heading for a while now. In the race for screen size and processing power, the major makers’ flagships are like pro athletes finishing within milliseconds of each other…

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If the LG V10 that was announced a few hours ago seems interesting to you, and you live in the US, here’s some important information.

We already know which carriers will offer the new smartphone through their stores, online and offline. So if you like to get your handsets from carriers, this is for you.

AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon will all sell LG’s latest phablet at some point in the near future. Unfortunately neither company has mentioned an actual release time frame for the V10, or anything about pricing. All of this information should come out later.

Verizon will get an exclusive color version of the V10, dubbed Luxe White. If you want this hue, you’ll have to pick Big Red as your carrier. AT&T and T-Mobile haven’t announced any such exclusive arrangements.

The LG V10 has a secondary ticker screen above its main display, and it comes with two 5 MP front-facing cameras, to allow for outstanding selfies as well as group selfies (or “groufies”).

The phone features a 5.7-inch QHD main touchscreen, a 2.1-inch 1,040×160 secondary display, a 16 MP rear camera with OIS, laser autofocus, and LED flash, 4GB of RAM, 64GB of expandable storage, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 808 SoC at the helm, and a 3,000 mAh battery. It runs Android 5.1.1…

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Samsung has teased its upcoming Galaxy View tablet last month during its IFA event. This is going to be the company’s biggest mobile device yet, as it’s so far been rumored to sport a whopping 18.4-inch touchscreen. That is, if the Galaxy View turns out to be the tablet with the model number SM-T670.

Today the T670 was spotted at GFXBench, which means that its specs have once again been confirmed, through the benchmark’s info listing.

The device apparently has an 18.5-inch 1080p touchscreen, a 2 MP front camera, no rear camera, 2GB of RAM, 32GB of storage, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, GPS, and it’s powered by an unidentified Samsung Exynos 7 Octa chipset. This comes with a CPU sporting four Cortex-A57 cores and four Cortex-A53 cores, and the maximum clock speed seems to be 1.6 GHz. The GPU is a Mali-T720. The prototype that’s been benchmarked was running Android 5.1.1 Lollipop at the time.

The lack of a rear camera seems surprising at first, but imagine how odd it would be to actually take pictures with an 18-inch tablet. The Galaxy View will allegedly be targeted at businesses and the education market, as well as consumers – in this case as a device for the living room. Since the Galaxy View has recently been Bluetooth certified, it should be announced soon.

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