Over in the UK the Blackberry Q10 outsold the Z10 by a large amount. The Q10 is supposed to be the phone to save Blackberry, although the Z10 has exceeded everyone’s expectations, people really love the physical keyboard, and pair that with a pretty hefty battery (2300 mAh) and you have yourself a pretty sweet phone.

The department store began selling the Q10 last Friday, but buyers were also able to pre-order the device from the store’s Web site since April 24.

Selfridges’ initial stock of 2,000 Q10 units sold out in a matter of two hours from the time store opened its doors last Friday. Additional stock was being delivered “Continually on the hour, every hour” to keep up with demand, according to a statement from Selfridges.

Read more at the source links below.

• Hands on review: BlackBerry Q10
  Canadian Tire to buy thousands of new BlackBerry
• Do huge Q10 sales save BlackBerry longer term?

You can also order the phone online from various retailers via Blackberry’s website.

What’s this you ask? Well the Mega Series of phone is Samsung’s newest breed of smartphone or phablet as some like to call them. At a whopping 5.8″ and 6.3″ display size, these phones should be able to act as micro tablets (then again probably not, keep reading). Still great maybe for the office, I wouldn’t be caught holding one of these to my ear, let’s assume most people will use head sets!

What I do not get is that each phone, as big as the display is, will not have true HD displays, the 5.8 will get 960×540 and the 6.3 will get at least 1280x720p. They both have larger batteries, 2600mAh and 3200mAh, and since the display’s aren’t high resolution they should be lighter on power than the Galaxy S4.

So If you are looking for a bigger version of the Galaxy S4, you are looking in the wrong place, these phones are not meant to intrude on the S4′s market, but to help Samsung compete in the 5″+ category.

Read more here.

Check out the specifications below.

I read a recent review from ZDnet, where the editor states that the HTC One is the best phone he has ever used… This is definitely a smartphone to look out for. Check out the article and make sure you “hold” the HTC One before you even consider an iPhone!

This is very good news, smartphones and tablets are lacking when it comes to storage speed. Sure the processors are getting faster and have more cores, but when the underlying storage is slow as molasses what’s the point, the phone will end up being sluggish. I pulled some information from Sandisk‘s site.

For the most demanding tablet and smartphone designs, choose SanDisk iNAND Extreme Embedded Flash Drives (EFDs). Give users more memory-up to 128GB and benefit from industry-standard e.MMC interfaces for fast integration of flash drives into OEM manufacturing processes. Consumers will enjoy smooth, rich multimedia and fast app loading.

• Advanced multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash technology
• Up to 80MB/s read and 50MB/s**Based on SanDisk internal testing; performance may be lower depending upon host device. 1 MB = 1 million bytes. write speeds
• Capacities from 16GB to 128GB
• For leading-edge mobile devices
• Plug-and-play simplicity

Can you imaging a smartphone/tablet that can read and write at those speeds with near zero seek times? That would make for one snappy device… let’s hope we hear more partnership deals with Sandisk from other vendors. Want more?! Go here.

One person is trying to convince the world of that, in the Smartphone business, rumors create hype, and hype is great for Samsung right now. The soon to be released Samsung Galaxy S4 will apparently have eight cores, how do we  know this? This alleged person says he has a S4 Prototype and ran a benchmark on it. Here is an insert from Gizmodo.

The Antutu benchmark test reports that the S4 is powered by Samsung’s own Exynos 5410 chipset, with its eight cores running at 1.8GHz clock speed. It’s coupled with a PowerVR SGX 544 graphics processor, with 2GB of RAM onboard. The S4 in this allegedly current state also feature a 4.99″ display running at 1920×1080 resolution, with Android 4.2 the phone’s launch OS. Source Article

Will eight Cores really matter in today’s market. Yes and No, power users or geeks, whatever you want to call us, always want the best, why settle for four measly cores when you can have eight? No in the fact that todays applications usually don’t take advantage of eight cores right now, maybe later, but not now. I would rather have four really strong cores, and one slower one for emails, texts, and updates. Not unlike the Nvidia Processors.

Samsung sure isn’t backing down from NVIDIA, announcing an 8-Core Mobile Processor. Didn’t they just announce a new Quad-Core Processor? Yes I believe they did, considering I wrote an article about it!

Because it’s using this strategy, this chip is more suitable form small form factor devices like phones. Samsung says this tech will allow the chip to use up to 70-percent less power than a traditional quad-core A15 SoC, or even a dual core Exynos 5 like the one seen in the Nexus 10. source AndroidCentral

Samsung used the big.LITTLE technology developed by ARM for its Exynos 5 Octa chipset. The Samsung processor is built using four ARM Cortex A15 cores, most likely clocked at 2.0 GHz, used for the tasks that require more processing power (games, photo/video editing, etc.) and four ARM Cortex A7 cores, probably clocked at 1.7 GHz, for the basic tasks. Source Android.gs

This seems very promising, but then again, the processor isn’t currently the battery drain, it’s the screen, in the end, every little bit helps. I sure look forward to seeing this in our future smartphones!

Here are some features.

• a shift to a 28nm HPm (“High Performance for mobile”) fabrication process
• an upgraded Hexagon V5 digital signal processor
• the adoption of 800MHz LPDDR3 memory to match up to the PC-like 12.8GB/s bandwidth of Samsung’s Exynos 5
• an all-new Krait 400 architecture running at higher clock speeds of up to 2.3GHz
• an equally new Adreno 330 GPU that’ll offer a double helping of compute power

This makes you wonder, will they make screens more dense, do you think its feasible to put a 2160p screen on a phone? You wouldn’t be able to see pixels anymore at that point… but if they can do it then why not? I sure wish they would improve batteries as quickly as they do processing power! Now that would be innovation.

Look forward to more posts in the coming future about these new SoC chips, which phones they are used in and how they will improve our lives.

Introducing the Tegra 4 Processor.

 The Tegra 4 will be a 28 nanometer ARM Cortex-A15 quad-core (4+1 as seen in the Tegra 3) system on chip. The A15 architecture is the next generation of silicon, and is already being used in the Exynos 5 as seen in the Nexus 10. The lower power draw and faster processing speed make a remarkable difference when you need it.

The GPU is a whopping 72 core GeForce unit, bringing six times the graphical performance of the Tegra 3. With support for a full 2560×1440 24 bit color display and native hardware decoding for video, it should be able to handle anything you could throw at it in a tablet.

6x more powerful than its predecessor, yet using less power, that’s awesome news. We have to remember though that with all smartphones, its the screen that takes up the most battery. So should you get that 1080p display, or is 768p enough. Currently I am perfectly fine with 1280 x 768, I guess we shall wait and see what the future holds. One thing I heard is that Samsung is starting to manufacture an unbreakable bendable display, what? More on that to follow…

You thought the iPhone4/4S display was crisp and clear… go here to read the full story and see some image comparisons to see exactly what I am talking about. Just think, a display so clear and smooth that you cannot see the pixels anymore (kind of like looking through a sheet of glass). If they are able to apply this resolution to a TV screen 10x the size it would be like having a 16000p display never mind 1080p, that is just amazing. It’s an amazing time in technology, and it only gets better as the years fly by.

-NS

I think that all the people that say BlackBerry is dead, can go back to their SMS texting. I mean come on people. The BlackBerry is just so easy to use and you can get everything done within seconds. Other touch phones are so annoying to try and find the proper application to load then you start typing and you have to backspace all the time because that DAMN Autocorrect messes you up.

Anyways getting back to the Bold 99xx Smartphone. Its out. Mine is in the mail. This makes me one happy blogger. Its a touch screen phone, its a Qwerty keyboard phone as well. Its fast…. really fast… you though the Bold 9700 could get things done(minus the browsing of course haha), the new phone can do it all 10 times faster on its 1.2Ghz processor, connect it to a WiFi hotspot and enjoy 802.11n speeds on its new completely overhauled browser, no more checker boards for us!

To give you an example of how popular the new smartphone is, well, they were all sold out in Winnipeg before the end of the day… IN WINNIPEG… so i am sure RIM has sold A LOT of phones today all over the world.

The only thing I have against you o’ BlackBerry why release a new phone in 6 months, with an OS (QNX) that doesn’t support BES out of the box? I don’t want to use ActiveSync… sigh… at least it will be dual-core this time around. Until 1st QTR 2012 ill stick with the Bold 9900 from Rogers.

Have a great night!

-NS