Samsung’s first round smartwatch, which is hopefully going to be released by the end of this year, has been leaking for months. The Gear A was codenamed Orbis, and recently its features and specs have been made public. Samsung itself even confirmed certain details about it too.

That said, the Gear A is still not official. That may change soon, but in the meantime we’ve got some new information on it thanks to yet another leak.

This one says there will be at least three versions of the watch, boasting the model numbers SM-R720, SM-R730, and SM-R732, respectively. All of these apparently still have Orbis in their internal codenames. The SM-R720 is the Orbis 1, the SM-R730 is known inside Samsung as the Orbis S2, while the SM-R732 is the Orbis Classic.

It’s unclear at this point what the exact differences between these variants will be. Perhaps Samsung will go the way of Apple and launch the smartwatch with multiple material choices. There might also be connectivity differences, as we have previously heard that one iteration of the Gear A will come with mobile data support on top of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

The Gear A may be introduced to the world either during Samsung’s Unpacked event on August 13, or at IFA in Berlin in a few weeks. It’s been rumored to sport a 1.65-inch 360×360 Super AMOLED touchscreen, the Exynos 3472 chipset, 768MB of RAM, 4GB of storage, NFC, a heart rate monitor, and a 250 mAh battery. It will run a special version of Tizen. It will use a rotating bezel for easy navigation through the…

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Panasonic has unveiled a new smartphone for India today, continuing a long line of Eluga-branded devices that have so far been launched in the subcontinent. The latest entrant in the series is the Eluga Icon, and it will become available on August 13, exclusively at Amazon India.

In line with Panasonic’s previous efforts in the country, the Eluga Icon is a mid-range offering. It comes with a 5.5-inch 720p touchscreen, a 13 MP rear camera with LED flash, an 8 MP front-facing snapper, 2GB of RAM, 16GB of expandable storage, and a 3,500 mAh battery.

It’s powered by the 64-bit MediaTek MT6752 chipset, boasting a 1.5 GHz octa-core CPU and Mali-T760 GPU. It has dual-SIM functionality and 4G LTE, but unfortunately runs Android 4.4 KitKat. On top of that you’ll find Panasonic’s Icon UI.

The handset will be priced at INR 10,999, which means about $172 or €156 right now. It will be offered in two color versions, slate and gold.

The Eluga Icon is 7.9mm thin, and sports a unibody construction. Its battery is very beefy for this price point, but the OS it comes with is rather ancient by mobile world standards.

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Tomorrow, on August 11, the first people outside of China are going to be able to order a OnePlus 2. That’s when OnePlus will release the first batch of invites for its latest smartphone. While it’s unclear how big that batch will be, it is clear that quite a few people seem to want a OnePlus 2 – the invite request queue is now in the millions.

The Chinese startup has today published some sad news for fans of the OnePlus 2 who are located in the US and Canada. It turns out that due to production schedules, the phone will only start shipping to North American customers around 2-3 weeks after shipments to Europe commence.

However, you’ll still be able to order a OnePlus 2 from tomorrow (if you get an invite, that is) – you’ll just have to wait for it to actually arrive at your doorstep a lot more than fans in Europe. This probably means that no OnePlus 2 will reach the US or Canada before September.

There is some good news too, namely that the production of the OnePlus 2 is said to be “in full swing”. Unfortunately, it looks like only customers in Europe will be able to benefit from that at first.

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Back in June Google unveiled its revamped Hangouts messaging app for iOS, version 4.0 to be exact. For whatever reason, the Android iteration has taken this long to come to life, and is only launching today.

If it hasn’t already arrived on your Android device via update notification, know that Hangouts 4.0 is on its way to the Play Store and should land within the next few days, as Google likes to stage the rollouts of its app updates.

Hangouts 4.0 comes with material design, the philosophy Google has embraced more and more starting with the release of Android 5.0 Lollipop. The company says things now respond to your touch in more intuitive ways, and the transitions are more fluid.

The app is faster now too, thanks to a big number of bugs having been fixed as well as a general message delivery speedup. An added bonus should apparently be less battery drain from this particular app.

Hangouts now features a simplified contact list and Compose button, for easier interactions. Since attachments have been revamped too, it should be a breeze to share stuff from this point on – whether that’s a photo (or multiple ones), some emoji, GIFs, or your location.

The calls you make from the Hangouts Dialer (which is a separate app) finally come with outbound caller ID, so the people you’re calling won’t be receiving calls from “Unknown”. You can reply to group MMS messages using Google Voice, and even use Hangouts on your Android Wear-powered smartwatch. Finally, custom status messages have been added…

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North America was the first market for the 5.5″ Alcatel Idol 3. The smartphone turned out quite a treat with very capable hardware and beautiful design. Currently the phone is on sale at about $250, contract-free and unlocked.

Today Alcatel announced it will be finally releasing the smaller 4.7″ flavor of the Idol 3. It will hit North America this Friday – August 14. It has been available in several markets for a while but USA and Canada didn’t get the same launch treatment.

So, the Alcatel Idol 3 (4.7) features a 4.7″ 720p IPS display and runs on the Snapdragon 410 chip (quad-core 1.2GHz Cortex-A53, Adreno 306 and 1.5GB RAM). It offers 16GB expandable storage, a 13MP main cam and a 5MP selfie snapper, plus a 2,000 mAh battery. The Android OS in charge of the new Idol 3 is Lollipop 5.0.2.

Amazon, Alcatel USA and Alcatel Canada will begin selling the Idol 3 (4.7) this Friday for $179.99 (about CAD…

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Cyanogen’s employee Adnan Begovic dropped quite the bomb over the Seattle Code Rush dev event. He claims today Cyanogen has over 50 million users, which is more than Windows Mobile and BlackBerry combined.

And let me stop you before you start digging evidences and reports that this is not true. He is absolutely right, at least technically.

Windows Mobile is the key here – the OS is the predecessor of Windows Phone and very few people are still using it today. The golden era of the Windows Mobile has been long over and only few users are still using their WM phones. Most of them probably use the notorious HTC HD2 and may even not run WM, but that’s for another topic.

We are sure BlackBerry and the few Windows Mobile users can’t compete with the 50 million Cyanogen gang. But who really cares? This is one very obscure comparison anyway.

There is a chance Adnan Begovic meant Windows Phone instead of Windows Mobile. This means someone at Cyanogen was too keen to brag before making any proper calculations. Windows Phone had 50 million active users by the end of 2013 as per AdDuplex report, which means 20 months later those should be a lot more. And we are sure BlackBerry users are enough to tip the scales even if the Microsoft platform has been standing still (and it hasn’t).

Long story short – we are sure there are better ways for Cyanogen to brag about its user base than comparing it to a dead platform and a niche operating system. Or worse – misleading the public by feeding it with false information.

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Verizon has discontinued the Sony Xperia Z3v. The phone has been removed from the company’s website and has likely been given the end-of-life status.

The Xperia Z3v is the Verizon variant of the Xperia Z3 sold internationally. The phone was on sale for ten months before it was removed. This is likely due to the Z4v expected to launch shortly on Verizon in the coming months, which is the CDMA version of the Z4/Z3+ sold…

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The Honor 7 went on sale just recently and Huawei is already focusing on its next batch of devices. A few days ago we saw a new Honor smartphone leak with quite an interesting highlight feature – a sliding camera module.

As it turns out the unorthodox device should be announced on August 20 in China as Honor 7i. The phone already leaked via TENAA and shed some light on the purported design and specs. Today we can add some more details to the pop-up camera module, which offers high resolution snappers on both ends, both accompanied by dual-LED dual-tone flashes.

The Honor 7i is rumored to pack a 5.2″ 1080p display, just like the Honor 7, and run on either Kirin 935 with 3GB of RAM, or Snapdragon 615 with 2GB RAM. It’s unclear if this should be a market dependent feature or one of those rumors is false. Both 16 and 32GB flavors of the Honor 7i should be available at launch.

Speaking of launch, Huawei’s latest teasers reveals both the name of the Honor 7i and the announcement date – August 20. The event will take place in China, but we suppose the Honor 7i won’t be a China exclusive. The expected retail price of the Honor 7i is between $320 and $400, depending on the hardware you choose.

Huawei is working on another smartphone side by side with the Honor 7i – it’s a new 4.7″ Mate 7, which will be called Mate 7 mini or Mate 7 plus.

Huawei Mate 7 plus or mini, model number CRR-UL00, should pack a 1080p display and run on company’s latest Kirin 935 chip with 3GB RAM, according to a recent AnTuTu results. Note the app determines the display as 4.7″ big, but the device looks bigger and we’ve already seen AnTuTu detect the 5.2″ Honor 7 wrongly as 4.7″.

Anyway, the new Mate 7, either mini or plus, should go official soon as well. It will be running on the latest Android 5.1.1 plus Huawei’s newest Emotion launcher.

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The Samsung Galaxy Note 5 is like a teenager in front of a mirror – ten new photos fly out to Twitter each minute. Here’s the budding adolescent showing off its S6-like design, trademark S Pen and this time – it’s retail box.

The box details 4G LTE, 64-bit octa-core processor with 4GB of RAM, 5.7″ Super AMOLED display with QHD resolution, a 16MP OIS-enabled camera and 5MP selfie camera, wireless charging and 32GB of built-in storage.

Spy photos of the Samsung Galaxy Note 5, including its retail box.

Here’s hoping the rumors are wrong about only the dual-SIM model having a microSD slot, 32GB is a tight fit (64GB and 128GB will be available, for a price). Anyway, the card(s) slot moved on top since the glass back is sealed. The S Pen is still on the bottom as usual, near the microUSB 2.0 port (Samsung dropped USB 3.0 and apparently isn’t rushing towards Type C).

Nothing unexpected this far – we’re just days away from the August 13 Unpacked event that should launch the Galaxy Note 5 and the Galaxy S6 edge Plus.

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About a year ago Qualcomm unveiled a mid-range and an entry-level chipset with LTE support, now it’s time for a minor refresh. The Snapdragon 412 and 212 bring minor improvements over the 410 and 210, largely thanks to upped clockspeeds.

Snapdragon 412

Four 64-bit capable Cortex-A53 cores and Adreno 306 reteam for the new Snapdragon 412 chipset. Compared to the 410 it’s running the CPU and GPU at higher frequencies and features enhanced memory speeds.

The chip is still built on the 28nm process, but the processor is clocked at up to 1.4GHz. That’s up from 1.2GHz though we’ve seen the Snapdragon 410 CPU at 1.4GHz too (like in the Moto G 3rd gen).

The chipset supports up to 1,920 x 1,200px screens and FullHD video capture and playback from cameras up to 13MP. It features X5 LTE connectivity (Cat. 4, 150Mbps) along with Wi-Fi b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.1 and USB 2.0. QuickCharge 2.0 is supported for fast battery top-ups.

Snapdragon 212

Filling the hole left behind from the popular Snapdragon 400, this one brings four 32-bit Cortex-A7 cores and Adreno 304 graphics. These are again built on 28nm and the CPU has been bumped from 1.1GHz to 1.3GHz.

The Snapdragon 212 supports 720p screens and up to 1080p video (both H.264 and H.265). It works with up to 8MP cameras. Connectivity is pretty much the same – Cat.4 LTE, Wi-Fi b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.1 + BLE, USB 2.0 with Quick Charge 2.0.

Both chipsets work with CDMA carriers too. We should start seeing devices with the new chipsets soon though don’t expect any major improvements in performance over existing models.

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