Early screenshots of Firefox OS revealed

You may already be aware of Mozilla's upcoming mobile operating system based on HTML5. We now have some new screenshots of the UI, courtesy of Mozilla evangelist Robert Nyman.

The UI looks markedly different from some of the previous screenshots we have seen and draws heavy inspiration from some of the other mobile operating system. You can see the iOS influence in the homescreen UI and some Android influence in the settings app and notification drawer.

Still, we wouldn't dwell too much on these because, as Nyman has pointed out, the OS is still being developed and a lot can change by the time it reaches its final stage.

Motorola announces Electrify 2 and Defy XT for U.S. Cellular

Motorola has announce two new Android smartphones - the Electrify 2 and the Defy XT - for the U.S. Cellular in the, well, US.

The Electrify is the successor to last year's Electrify, also known as the Photon 4G, but it is closer to the current Atrix HD. The two look a lot similar but the Electrify 2 cuts down on certain things. For example, it has a 4.3-inch qHD display compared to the 4.5-inch HD display on the Atrix HD. It also get a slower 1.2GHz dual-core processor (no specific ship mentioned but it's probably the OMAP 4430 from the RAZR).
Other features include an 8 megapixel camera with 1080p video recording, 1GB RAM, 8GB built-in memory, 8.4mm thickness, Keblar back, splash resistant body, Android 4.0 and 1,780mAh battery.
The Motorola Electrify 2 is now on sale for $199 with a $100 mail-in rebate. At that price you'd have to wonder why you would buy a phone that has less features than the Atrix HD instead of the Atrix HD itself, which sells for the same price on AT&T.
Moving on to the Defy XT, this one gets a 3.7-inch “high resolution” display, 1GHz processor, 5 megapixel camera, FWVGA (854 x 480) video recording, 512MB RAM, 1GB ROM and the same rugged body that the Defy series is known for. Unfortunately, this phone will be launching with Android 2.3, Gingerbread, which is simply unacceptable today.
The Motorola Defy XT will go on sale tomorrow, although no price information is available at the moment.

Android 4.0 adoption more than doubled in the past two month

Google has once again published the Android distribution figures and things are looking good for Android 4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich.
Of course, some of you might say that it is no longer the latest version of Android and we should be concentrating on Jelly Bean now but it is an important update nevertheless and has had the most profound impact of any Android update so far.
Now coming back to the distribution figures, we see that the total ICS user base has moved up to a respectable 15.9 percent. If you remember, at the beginning of last month it was 10.9 percent and the month before that it was 7.1 percent. This means that the ICS user base has more than doubled in the past two months.

ICS has also, for the first time, overtaken the user base of Froyo, which now stands at 15.5 percent, down from 17.3 percent last month.
Gingerbread, however, still commands the majority of the Android user base, with a staggering 60.6 percent. Still, it's down from last month's 64 percent.
For the first time, Jelly Bean has made an appearance on the chart but as usual, it has had a weak start, having just 0.8 percent of the total user base. That was expected, considering mostly Google's own devices are running it at the moment.

Next month, hopefully, ICS will make greater inroads into the Gingerbread figures and Jelly Bean would have spread to greater number of devices.

Nokia's marketing stint for the Lumia 900 involves nail polish

Nokia has decided to boost the appeal of its Lumia 900 flagship in the United States in a rather unusual fashion. The Finnish giant has partnered with Duality Cosmetics to release its own branded nail polish, which matches the color of the pink Nokia Lumia 900 for AT&T.

The campaign also included one-day only salons in Los Angeles, Dallas, and Denver, where those who are interested will be able to check out the pink Lumia 900 while getting their manicure done by a celebrity nail stylist. You can find out all the info on the official Facebook page of Nokia USA.
Naturally, Nokia have released a promo video to mark the occasion. Here it goes.

With Windows Phone 8 right around the corner and the Nokia Lumia 900 not scheduled for an update, it is understandable that the company is trying to move as many devices as possible. We can't wait to see how this marketing push turns out.

Sony adds black, silver and white to the Xperia SL color palette

The Xperia SL already showed us its fun personality posing in blue and pink. Now, thanks to some press shots ePrice has managed to acquire, Sony shows the Xperia SL means business, too.

The pieces of the Xperia SL puzzle are slowly falling into place, but not as fast as we'd hope. What we know thus far is that the smartphone is going to be a successor to the Xperia S and will feature an overclocked 1.7GHz processor core inside its MSM8260 chipset.
Sony is expected to unveil the smartphone alongside the Xperia J and the LT29i Hayabusa in a pre-IFA event in Berlin later this month. August 28 just can't come fast enough.

The Apple-Samsung trial goes on, shows us new iPhone prototypes

The second day of the Apple vs. Samsung trial went interesting to say the least. After the court denied Samsung the right to make an argument that a Sony concept was the real inspiration behind iPhone's design, the Koreans decided to take matters into their own hands and released the evidence, which has been previously dismissed by the court.
The evidence in question consists of twelve slides showing that Samsung couldn't have possibly ripped Apple off as they've been working on devices like it months before iPhone's launch. Such device is the company's F700, among others.

However, Judge Lucy Koh has had enough of that and got really irritated with Samsung's actions. She even asked John Quinn, Samsung's lead attorney, to write a declaration explaining his role in releasing the excluded evidence to the press.
Judge Koh had already rejected the evidence multiple times. She noted that "Samsung has filed like 10 motions for reconsideration," and even threatened Quinn with personal sanctioning. This came after reportedly, he literally begged the court to reconsider its decision about the evidence in question.
Check out some of the evidence in question.

Back to the trial at hand, it became clear that Samsung's position in all this is that they did not copy the iPhone and that even though they may have used some tech patented by Apple (the touchscreen), it is Apple that is infringing on much more important patents held by Samsung (3G stuff).
Charles Verhoeven, Samsung's attorney, stated Apple did not invent the rectangular design with rounded corners (hence the leak of the discarded evidence): "Samsung is not some copyist, some Johnny come lately doing knockoffs," he added. Verhoeven also went through Apple's list of patents and tossed them aside one by one citing reasons why they should be excluded.
Christopher Stringer, Apple's veteran designer since 1995, was first to take the stand as the company's witness. As he went on with his testimony, he revealed a lot of the early iPhone and iPad prototype designs.
Additionally, Stringer stated that Apple has been "ripped off". "It's a huge leap in imagination to come up with something new. That's what we did," added the veteran Apple designer.
Fortunately, TheVerge.com got hold of those prototype's images. Check out some of them below, and we'll let you be the judge if they resemble anything familiar.

The trial continues today with the testimonies of Phil Schiller, Apple's Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing, and Scott Forstall, Apple's Senior Vice President of iOS Software starting at 9AM Pacific time.

New BlackBerry 10 dev phone pops up, RIM confirms

A render of a mysterious BlackBerry device was "accidentally" leaked on the RIM's developer website. The device apparently is called Dev Alpha B - a successor to the current Dev Alpha device, used to test out the still unofficial BlackBerry 10 OS. The render was quickly pulled down from the site.

 A vigilant twitter user by the name of @NerdBoss514 went ahead and asked the guys over at @BlackBerryDev on twitter for some info on the mystery device. He got a response that the Dev Alpha B will be an eventual hardware bump to the current Dev Alpha.

Upon asking a second question about whether the bump will be purely cosmetic or if there would be more major changes he got a second answer. It seems the Dev Alpha B has a slightly different inner layout, the MicroSIM card slot, for one, would change location on the new developer device.

Currently, the Dev Alpha device features a 4.2" 1280 x 768 pixels display, a gig of RAM, 16 GB of internal storage, a microSD card slot and a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9, or better, chipset inside.
RIM has confirmed that they would be giving away Dev Alpha B devices to developers prior to the BB 10 launch so the more likely time for this to happen is around BlackBerry 10 Jam Americas, an in-house developer event held by BlackBerry that will take place September 25-27 in San Jose, California.

ZTE become the 5th largest smartphone vendor in Q2 2012

ZTE have never been shy about proclaiming their ambitions of being amongst the big names of the smartphone game, and have moved one step closer to their goal this past quarter.

 During Q2 of this year, ZTE managed to ship some 8 million smartphones, mostly in their native China. It is estimated that they now hold a global market share of 5.2%, which puts them just behind HTC and Nokia and makes them the 5th largest smartphone supplier in the world.
ZTE have also retained their 4th rank in terms of overall mobile devices sold (which includes smartphones and feature phones), a title they claimed last year. Their goal is to ramp up their annual sales to the 100 million handset mark by 2015.

Shazam – Android App

Ever heard a great song on the radio, and didn't know the song's name? Well, those days are over, now you have Shazam.

Many people listen to the radio, in the car, at home, etc, and as soon a they hear a song they like, they have to remember the lyrics and maybe do a Google search to find out the name of the song. This could sometimes be really irritating, especially when Google can't pin point the song out, with the bit of lyrics you provided.

But that doesn't have to be a problem anymore, because Shazam can help you. What Shazam does is, listen to the song on the radio and matches it with the correct name through an online database in a matter of seconds. Once you have the name of the song, you are free to download it later.

You can even go back to Shazam and check the name of the song, because it stores the song it heard. It is very easy to use and is freely available on the play store.

Once you have downloaded Shazam, all you have to do is tap the big black logo on the center of the page. It is also helpful if you can place the mic of your phone closer to the radio, so that Shazam has no problem in picking up the sound waves.

If you did it correctly, you should see the above picture, where it will say listening. Once the program matches your song with the name, it will appear on the screen.

The information of the song will be displayed for you, and you are free to download the song via a website or buy it off Amazon, which is given in the application itself.

There is also the Shazam widget, which is extremely useful because you don't have to go into the application to make the phone start listening to the song.

All you have to do is, go download it from the Play store. There are two versions, the free and paid ones. If you really love the free version, you can download the paid version later.

To download the free version click here

To download Shazam Encore (Paid) click here

RIM loses its place in top smartphones ranking

Blackberry manufacturer RIM continues to experience bad times. The research group IDC has said that Blackberry sales continued to decline last quarter and thus reached levels that was unseen since 2009. Aside from the Blackberry Playbook, we haven't had any new and newsworthy products from RIM in a while and like Nokia, they failed to update their ageing OS with significant features that would put them on par with Android and iOS. It is quite understandable then that they would end up in this predicament.
And if things couldn't have gotten any worse, the Blackberry 10 devices which would assist their transition was delayed until 2013 further hindering the recovery process. Delayed BB10 launch will mean that RIM would lose valuable holiday sales to rivals. Samsung still retains its place as #1 ahead of Apple.
Nokia with a 6.6% market share takes the third spot and HTC grabs the number 4 spot with a market share of 5.7%.  ZTE Corp takes the 5th spot with a market share of 5.2% as its phones are proving to be popular in China, Latin America and the Caribbean. RIM is still a few cards shot of going bust and if they can make it through the rest of the year's big releases like Windows Phone 8 and the new iPhone 5, they might just prove to be deserving of an alternate option for consumers and operators.