The HTC Ones were headed into double digits for the next generation after this year’s One M9, and the company has apparently decided to put an end to its confusing naming scheme. If the newly surfaced reports out of China are to be trusted, the next flagship from the struggling Taiwanese manufacturer will be named simply HTC O2.

Now, that may not be the wisest decision for the UK market, where carrier O2 might have a say on the matter. The rest of the world, however, should have no problems embracing the new name, which is also reported to deliver a proper hardware upgrade, unlike the current generation flagship.

The latest info states that the O2 will sport a 6-inch QHD display, and will be powered by a Snapdragon 820 chipset. This is where the rumor becomes contradicting, as we already know that piece of silicon is expected to make it to mass-produced devices no earlier than the beginning of next year, while the O2 is said to be arriving as early as the end of October.

The rest of the rumored O2 specs include 4GB of RAM, 64GB/128GB of built-in storage and a 3,500mAh battery. More importantly, the smartphone is said to be environmentally sealed for water and dust protection, which would be a first for HTC. All of that sounds like a dream specsheet one could conjure up, and not necessarily what HTC has on the drawing board, but we’ll give them the benefit of the doubt.

Another O2 model is claimed to be scheduled for next year, a 5-inch version with yet unannounced Snapdragon 82x chipset. However, the mention of a 4K resolution on such a diagonal stretches our skepticism straight to disbelief.

Now that HTC’s upcoming flagships have started to surface in rumors, we’ll undoubtedly be hearing more in the coming weeks, so stay tuned.

Source 1 Source 2 (both in Chinese) |…

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Samsung has announced one of its two new flagship smartphones, the awkwardly named Galaxy S6 edge+, in India. The phone is priced at INR 57,900 ($888) for the 32GB model and will be available for purchase starting August 28.

The Galaxy S6 edge+ is essentially the bigger variant of the Galaxy S6 edge. It has a larger 5.7-inch Quad HD Super AMOLED display, 4GB RAM, 3,000mAh battery and wireless fast charging, with the rest of the specifications being identical.

Samsung will be announcing the Galaxy Note5 in India at a later…

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Since the Galaxy Note5 won’t be sold over there, if you’re in the UK and want to grab one of Samsung’s two new high-end phablets, you’re stuck with the Galaxy S6 edge+. If you don’t mind that, however, you’ll be happy to know that pre-orders for this handset have finally started in the UK.

If you want to buy it SIM-free and unlocked, Samsung itself is giving you the opportunity to pre-order a unit in either black or gold – for a whopping £749. That is, if 32GB of storage seems enough to you. If not, and you want 64GB, you’ll need to shell out £829. The pre-ordered devices are scheduled to ship on September 3.

If you don’t feel like ponying up that much cash upfront, you can also opt for a contract with an operator. Vodafone, O2, and Three are all offering up the Galaxy s6 edge+ with a myriad of different Pay Monthly plans. One of them will surely suit your particular needs. The operators all seem to expect shipping to start on September…

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Last month Motorola unveiled the new Moto X Play, an upper-midrange smartphone with a huge battery. Although oddly this won’t be sold in the US, it is going to be offered by the company pretty much everywhere else.

And today it’s become available to order in at least two countries. We’re talking about the UK and Germany. In both cases, you go through Motorola’s Moto Maker online customization service to get your Moto X Play as you want it.

Prices start at £279 in the UK and €379 in Germany, but certain features cost more (for example, opting for 32GB of storage instead of 16GB will require an additional £40 or €50).

In the UK, the Moto X Play is set to start shipping on August 26, while in Germany the same will happen one day later, on August 27.

The Moto X Play has a 5.5-inch 1080p touchscreen, a 21 MP rear camera with dual-tone dual-LED flash, a 5 MP selfie shooter, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 615 SoC with a 1.7 GHz octa-core CPU, 2GB of RAM, microSD card support, 4G LTE, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, NFC, and a 3,630 mAh battery. It runs Android 5.1.1…

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Samsung’s recently announced Galaxy Note5 and Galaxy S6 edge+ not only have support for fast charging and wireless charging, but also fast wireless charging – in what’s probably a first for the mobile world.

While the company has talked up this feature during the two phones’ announcement, saying it enables wireless charging that’s almost as fast as wired charging, more details were supposed to come later.

And here we are today, when Samsung has decided to list its first fast wireless charger in its US online store. This is the accessory you need to pair with a Note5 or Galaxy S6 edge+ in order to achieve those much-touted wireless charging speeds.

You can order such a charger for $69.99, in white or black. It’s currently listed as “coming soon”, with no additional information about a release date. That said, if you want to be among the first to get one, you know what to do.

It’s Qi certified, so it will work with other Qi compatible devices, but at ‘normal’ wireless charging speeds. And if you’re shelling out this much cash for a wireless charger, you probably want to use it to its fullest, in conjunction with one of Samsung’s latest high-end…

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Google’s latest hardware project is, a bit unexpectedly perhaps, a Wi-Fi router. It’s called OnHub and it’s built in partnership with TP-Link. Oh, and it looks nothing like your average router.

The OnHub is an AC1900 router, boasting a total of 13 built-in antennas: 6 for the 2.4 GHz band, 6 for 5 GHz, and another one that’s used for continuously monitoring your environment for wireless congestions. In conjunction with this antenna’s scans, the software automatically switches wireless channels when necessary (but not when you’re actively using the Internet).

Aside from the 802.11ac support, you get legacy a/b/g/n too, but this router also has Bluetooth (with Bluetooth Smart Ready), and support for Weave and 802.15.4, so it’s as future-proof as possible.

Speaking of which, Google promises many firmware updates, and these will apparently download and install automatically. The OnHub doesn’t have annoying blinking lights, instead featuring a dimmable four-color light ring that uses each of those colors to give you feedback.

On the hardware side, we’re looking at a Qualcomm / Atheros chipset solution, with an IPQ8064 1.4 GHz dual-core processor, 1GB of RAM, 8MB of NOR flash, 4GB of eMMC flash, and a QCA8337 Gigabit Ethernet switch.

There’s only one Ethernet port, though, unlike normal routers which come with four. The OnHub has a USB 3.0 port, an ambient light sensor (presumably for auto-dimming those LEDs), and a 3W integrated speaker. This is used for the initial setup of the router, which also requires an Android or iOS device and the Google On app installed.

Basically all the management of the router is done via this app. It lets you easily test the speed of your connection, see each connected device and which is using the most bandwidth, and even prioritize the traffic from certain devices.

The OnHub is available to order today from the Google Store as well as many other retailers. It costs $199.99 and is offered in blue and black. According to Amazon, it will be released on August 31. Google itself only says it will be shipping “in the coming weeks”.

Source |…

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Today Google has announced that the Android One program has entered a new continent: Africa. So far, the company’s affordable smartphone initiative has been contained to certain Asian markets.

However, with the Infinix Hot 2 handset, Android One will debut in Nigeria, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Egypt, and Morocco. These countries have combined populations of 379 million people. Infinix, Google’s partner this time around, is apparently “one of the hottest, fastest growing smartphone brands in Africa”.

The Infinix Hot 2 comes with a 5-inch 720p touchscreen, an 8 MP rear camera with LED flash, a 2 MP selfie snapper, a 1.3 GHz quad-core MediaTek processor, 16GB of storage, dual-SIM support, an FM radio, and a 2,200 mAh battery. There’s a version with 1GB of RAM, and this is offered in black, white, red, or blue, and another with 2GB of RAM, which is only out in gold.

The smartphone runs Android 5.1.1 Lollipop from the get-go, and it’s also guaranteed to receive an update to Android 6.0 Marshmallow at some point in the future.

The Hot 2 is available today in Nigeria for NGN 17,500 (with 1GB of RAM) or NGN 19,500 (with 2GB of RAM). These prices currently translate into $87 and $97, respectively (or €79 and €88). The device will make its way to the other African countries mentioned above “over the next few weeks”, presumably with similar pricing.

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What could be better for on the go entertainment and productivity than a spacious tablet screen? Well, a keyboard is quite helpful and why not one coupled with a comfy case. And as long as we are carrying around the extra case weight, why not a second screen?

If that sounds like a tantalizing idea then you are definitely not alone and as it turns out Apple’s next iPad and Smart Cover might be right up your valley. A new patent filed by the Cupertino giant describes just that – a Smart Cover, complete with a secondary display.

As we have learned time and time again, receiving a patent in the tech world means little in itself, but could still be indicative of a future intention. If the gadget does, however, turn out to be real and in the works, it could bring about interesting new possibilities and use cases, some of which are described within the patent, like having app notifications and widgets easily accessible, at a glance.

Speculations about the Smart Cover extend even further with claims that the smart accessory will, in fact, be unveiled together with Apple’s next tablet device. The alleged model in question is the iPad Pro, which is yet another unconfirmed rumor at this point, but has been around for quite some time now. The iPad Pro will allegedly be Apple’s biggest tablet to date with a spacious 12.2-inch or perhaps even 12.9-inch screen.

With that kind of screen real estate it is aimed squarely at other productivity-oriented devices, like the Microsoft Surface Pro 3 or the Samsung Tab S 10.5. However, the iPad Pro has proved quite elusive with initial rumors extending well into 2014 and even as early as 2013. At this point we aren’t really sure that a Pro series is even on Apple’s roadmap. As far as we know, the latest batch of speculations talk of a November 2015 release date and an A9 CPU, Force Touch, NFC and USB Type C.

We’ll just have to wait and see if any of this comes to pass or the alleged iPad Pro will miss a launch windows this year as…

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The Xiaomi Mi 5 started showing up in rumors way back in the spring, but all these months later it hasn’t yet materialized, at least not to the general public. After the MIUI 7 launch and the announcement of the Redmi Note 2, it was time for the Mi5 to break the silence, and it has allegedly appeared on the Antutu database.

Easy as these numbers are to manipulate (remember the hoax with the unannounced Samsung with 96K?), the Xiaomi Mi5 has posted a very believable 73,075 figure. The Exynos-7420-powered Galaxy S6/S6 edge are so far the front-runners in this particular benchmark and they score in the 70K ballpark, so a 73K number is plausible for a device coming out 6 months later.

That said, there’s still some debate as to the chipset inside the Xiaomi Mi 5. It has been widely accepted that it will be the all-new Snapdragon 820, but Qualcomm’s latest and greatest is not expected to be seen in a working device until H1 2016. That may stretch the life cycle of the existing Mi 4 up to two full years, and that’s hardly acceptable.

Alternatively, Xiaomi may have opted for a Mediatek Helio X20, which has been official for a few months and seems to be in a more advanced stage of its development. It takes the prevalent big.LITTLE architecture to another level and employs a tri-cluster CPU with a total of 10 cores. However, the TENAA certification page of the supposed large-screened brother Mi 5 Plus listed the CPU as having 8 cores, so we may actually get to see the S820 in a Mi 5 this November.

Whichever chipset is inside the Mi 5, the general consensus us that it will come with a 5.3-inch QHD display, 4GB of RAM and 16MP optically stabilized primary camera. A Type-C microUSB connector is also on the list of rumored specs.

The usual word of caution is due here as well – the above info remains to be confirmed by solid evidence.

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Back in 2013 Panasonic gave up on smartphones, but later changed its mind. Today it launched three new Android 5.1 powered smartphones in India. All three boast 4G LTE connectivity and have two SIM slots.

Panasonic Eluga L2

The biggest of the three, the Eluga L2 boasts a 5.5″ screen (we’re waiting on confirmation of the screen size). It measures 8.6mm thick and weighs 158g, reasonable for the screen size and price segment. The battery is a bit of a letdown, however, at only 2,500mAh.

The phone packs 8MP camera on the back, a 2MP one for selfies. There’s only 8GB of storage, but the good news is that it’s expandable. The L5 is powered by an unnamed Snapdragon chipset with a 1.2GHz quad-core processor and just a gig of RAM.

The price for the Panasonic Eluga L2 is set at INR 9,990 ($222) and you get a choice between Sand Grey and Midnight Black.

Panasonic Eluga I2

The Eluga I2 is the middle child with a 5″ 720p screen. This one tips the scales at 135g and measures 8.8mm thick, the battery is once again below average – 2,000mAh.

The camera setup is the same, 8MP/2MP, as is the storage. The chipset is a step down with a 1GHz quad-core processor and 1 gig of RAM.

The more affordable Panasonic Eluga I2 will set you back INR 8,290 ($184) and has a bit more freedom of choice when it comes to colors – Metallic Silver, Metallic Gold, Metallic Grey.

Panasonic Eluga T45

The most affordable of the three is also the smallest – the Eluga T45 packs a 4.5″ screen. The phone goes up in thickness (9.5mm) while going even further down in battery capacity (1,800mAh).

This one gets a 5MP main camera and only a 0.3MP snapper for selfies. At least the storage is kept at 8GB with a microSD slot. The chipset looks identical to the Eluga I2 – 1GHz quad-core CPU with 1GB of RAM.

Price for the Panasonic Eluga T45 is INR 6,980 ($155).

Thanks, Ravish, for the…

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