A few hours ago, the 3G-capable version of the Samsung Gear S2 classic has been revealed to be the first device ever to sport the new eSIM – a built-in, programmable SIM that lets you connect to the network of your choice without having to acquire a dedicated SIM card first. You can thus activate the Gear S2 classic at home, being spared a trip to your carrier’s closest store.

Now Samsung has announced that the Gear S2 classic 3G will become available in the US in black on March 11. It will be offered by AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon. Pricing hasn’t been outed yet unfortunately. Although Samsung is calling it the “Gear S2 classic 3G/4G”, don’t let that fool you – it doesn’t have LTE support, yet Samsung seems to think that HSPA+ is 4G; it’s not.

The Gear S2 classic 3G has a 1.2-inch 360×360 circular AMOLED touchscreen, a 1 GHz dual-core processor, 512MB of RAM, 4GB of storage, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, NFC, wireless charging support, and a 300 mAh battery. It runs the company’s Tizen-based wearable platform. It’s IP68 certified for dust and water resistance, and it comes with a bunch of sensors: accelerometer, gyroscope, heart rate monitor, barometer, and ambient light…

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PayPal has unveiled a big redesign for its mobile apps today. You can already find the updated versions in the iTunes App Store for iOS and the Google Play Store for Android.

The new apps come with simplified UIs and no more clutter, according to the company. It claims that customer feedback drove much of the redesign process.

Features have been simplified, and either app comes with a better global user experience, as the “iterative platform” they’re both based on allows for easier customization.

Sending and requesting money is now front and center inside the mobile apps, since apparently PayPal has seen over 100% growth in the number of peer-to-peer transactions happening over the last two years. A new personalized hub lets you easily add people from your contacts, while the new home screen lists all of your transaction details. That’s also where you can quickly pay your pending requests or send payments to any of your recent contacts.

Finally, account activity has been separated by pending and completed transactions, and fingerprint authentication on Android should now work with many more devices.

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Just a few days ago word got out that HP is working on a top of the line Windows 10 handset to be called Elite x3. This device was apparently codenamed Falcon, and it may have been benchmarked in December of last year.

Anyway, HP is probably going to announce the Elite x3 at MWC next week. Before that happens, however, you can feast your eyes upon a couple of leaked pictures of the device, along with the full list of its specs.

The Elite x3 is surely looking to be the main competitor to Microsoft’s Lumia 950 XL in the Windows 10 mobile ecosystem, as it packs some very high-end innards.

It has a 5.96-inch QHD touchscreen, a 16 MP rear camera, an 8 MP selfie cam, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 820 chipset powering it, 4GB of RAM, 32GB of expandable storage, a USB Type-C port with support for USB 3.0, Qi wireless charging, a fingerprint scanner (which might be embedded in that ‘chin’ underneath the display), an iris sensor, a special docking connection, IP67 certification for water and dust resistance, as well as MIL-STD-810G rating for withstanding drops from 1 meter or less.

The device is 7.8 mm thin, and will probably support Microsoft’s Continuum feature. It will obviously run Windows 10 Mobile. With such specs, you shouldn’t expect it to be cheap.

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It definitely seems like not a day can go by without some new leaks about the upcoming Galaxy S7 and S7 edge, which Samsung is going to make official this Sunday, on February 21. And today isn’t an exception. First off, we can now show you the Galaxy S7 in silver – this was a color that hasn’t previously been leaked in a press render. If you click on the thumbnail below, you’ll be taken to the full resolution shot. And to the right of the vanilla S7 we can see yet another live image portraying the black Galaxy S7 edge, with its curved screen front and center.

Silver Samsung Galaxy S7 and black Galaxy S7 edge

But that’s not all. Another newly leaked picture puts an end to any questions regarding the presence or absence of a USB Type-C port in Samsung’s new handsets.

This is a shot of the bottom side of the Galaxy S7 edge, and that’s clearly a standard microUSB port, and not the newer USB Type-C variation. So Samsung has chosen to stay with the tried and tested and postpone the introduction of Type-C into its smartphone portfolio. Perhaps the Note 6 will get the new port, but that remains to be seen. This will be good news for people who have a lot of microUSB cables around and wouldn’t have wanted to switch to the newer standard anyway.

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Archos is doing its best to announce new mobile devices before Samsung and LG totally steal the show this Sunday. So, after having already outed some new Oxygen tablets and the 50d Oxygen handset, today the French company has unveiled a pair of new smartphones, the Diamond 2 Plus and the Diamond 2 Note. These could in fact be considered Archos’ premier offerings from this point on, given their specs.

The Diamond 2 Plus comes with a 5.5-inch 1080p touchscreen, a 20 MP rear camera with dual-LED flash, an 8 MP selfie shooter, MediaTek’s MT6755 Helio P10 SoC running things (with an octa-core CPU clocked at up to 2 GHz and the Mali-T860MP2 GPU clocked at 700MHz), 4GB of RAM, 64GB of storage, LTE Cat.6 support, a fingerprint sensor on the back, a USB Type-C port, and a 3,000 mAh battery.

It runs Android 6.0 Marshmallow. Its dimensions are 148.3 x 73.8 x 8.3 mm, and it weighs 130g. The Archos Diamond 2 Plus will become available in May for $229, €249, or £199. That’s rather impressive for a phone with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage.

Moving on, the Archos Diamond 2 Note is a 6-inch “borderless” phablet coming with QHD resolution, a 16 MP rear camera with phase detection autofocus and dual-LED flash, an 8 MP selfie snapper, the MediaTek MT6795 Helio X10 SoC at the helm (with a 2 GHz octa-core CPU and PowerVR G6200 GPU), 3GB of RAM, 32GB of storage, LTE Cat.4 support, and a 3,610 mAh battery.

It too runs Android 6.0 Marshmallow. Its dimensions are 158.35 x 82.7 x 8.7 mm, and it weighs 150g. It will also be out in May, and will be priced at $279, €299, or £249, depending on where you…

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The new ASUS ZenPad M series of tablets targets the business market and offers a single solution for software distribution and device control called ADAM.

ADAM stands for ASUS Device Admin for Mobile and is a combination of tools suitable for managing all ZenPad M company tablets. The ADAM service supports remote installation and updating of apps, remote locking and secure wipe, taking screenshots for proper software distribution verification and sending messages.

The ADAM tools have been available via different Android apps, but ASUS has bundled them into a single solution that works via a web browser.

There are currently two ADAM-enabled tablets – a 7″ ZenPad M and a 10″ ZenPad M. Unfortunately ASUS hasn’t revealed the specs of either of those just yet. The ZenPad M & looks a lot like the ZenPad 7, but the ZenPad M 10 seems a bit different than the ZenPad 10 as shown in the video.

We expect the manufacturer to bring them at the upcoming MWC expo in Barcelona, so we’ll find out more in a few days.

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Twitter is having a hard time lately especially when its users heard about the upcoming timeline changes. Keen to put this fiasco behind it, Twitter is focused on adding new features to its service.

Yesterday the company launched the GIF button, which allows you to search and embed gifs from a rich catalog that’s been put together by Giphy and Riffsy. You can learn more about this here.

Today, Twitter launched yet another feature – video sharing within the Direct Messages. You can capture and share a video via the Direct Messages, which turns the Direct Messages even closer to a full-blown messaging service.

The update to Direct Messages is already available for Android and iOS, as well as on the regular web version.

Twitter already increased the character limit up to 10,000 symbols for the direct messages, among other improvements. Maybe Twitter’s endgame is to separate the DM service as a standalone app just like Facebook did with the Messenger a while back.

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SIM cards have gone from regular through mini and micro to nano and soon they will be the size of electrons. The Samsung Gear S2 classic 3G is the first product to support this new standard called eSIM.

This is a built-in, programmable SIM that allows users to remotely connect to a device to a mobile network. This makes it easier to join a carrier of your choice (no trips to the store!).

For now, the GSMA intends these eSIMs to be used for secondary devices – like the Gear S2 classic 3G smartwatch, tablets, smart bands and various Internet of Things devices (so you don’t have to plug an actual SIM card into each and every smart appliance at home).

These do not require an additional subscription but instead piggyback on your main contract. The GSMA plans to release additional specifications in June that will bring the eSIM standard to smartphones.

It has the support of some of the biggest mobile device makers – Samsung (obviously), LG, Huawei and Microsoft. Apple is notably missing from this list; characteristically it has its own standard. Some of the world’s biggest carriers, even chipset makers too.

The Samsung Gear S2 classic 3G will be available in…

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As usual, Apple hasn’t revealed anything about its future devices, but it seems eager fans have already unearthed enough information to confirm that the Cupertino giant will stay true to the rumored spring announcement and will hold an unveiling event on March 15, presumably for a new phone and tablet.

By all accounts, these are shaping up to be a new 4-inch iPhone and a refreshed iPad Air 3 model. As far as rumors go, the former will be referred to as the iPhone 5se and will allegedly resemble the retired iPhone 5S, but with a few notable upgrades. According to a report by Bloomberg, the handset will, in fact, be based on the Apple A9 chip, which powers the current 6s generation of iPhones.

Other suggested additions to the new 4-incher include NFC, Apple Pay and Live Photos. 3D touch, however, is unlikely to come to the model. In the same report, Bloomberg also suggests the the new iPad Air 3 will get a major processor upgrade. It will presumably be powered by the same A9X silicon running the iPad Pro – quite a powerful piece of tech. Other suggested features for the upcoming tablet include support for the Apple Pencil as well as a Smart Connector, required for keyboards and other peripherals.

If the March 15 unveiling does take place, sales of the devices may start as early as March 18.

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Isn’t it just great that we now live in a world where data can travel everywhere with you, seamlessly? Open up an instant messenger on your phone and voila, all your conversations are just where you left them last, perhaps on your PC or tablet. The same goes for your email, photos and most every data that you decide to hand over management of to Google, Apple, Microsoft or any other cloud service.

However, as most of you have surely considered at one point or another, while this might happen “automagically”, it does require quite a bit of background data usage, which most likely comes out of your data plan. Opera has always been a bit more concerned than most for proper mobile data utilization and its latest set of statistics provide a good reason why.

According to data aggregated through Opera Max users in December 2015, around 30% of all mobile data consumption happens in the background. Various syncing and refreshing services eat up around 1MB out of every 3MB passing through your device and while the behind the scenes functionality is definitely an invaluable features, not all apps are particularly efficient with you data plan.

According to the statistics, Facebook Messenger and Gmail do about 73% of their transfers behind the scenes, followed by Google Drive and WhatsApp, at around 50%. And while that doesn’t mean said apps waste data, others might, due to lack of optimization or development oversights. If this happens to be a concern for you as well, Opera actually has a viable solution.

Opera Max is a powerful Android app that helps you save on data through clever compression mechanisms, as well as monitoring tools and granular control over what and when gets a piece of the internet. Smart Alerts is a feature within Opera Max that informs you if an app is eating away too much data in the background and allows you to stop the leakage, if deemed unnecessary. You can get Opera Max free on the Google Play…

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