Mobile Technology

Acer has unveiled a new addition to its Iconia tablet series in the oddly familiar shape of the Iconia Tab A200. The budget-friendly A200 shares much of its hardware profile with the company's Iconia Tab A500 launched earlier in the year, although the former lacks a rear-facing camera and will come in 8GB and 16GB varieties only. When it first hits the shelves, the new tablet will run on Android 3.2 but Acer says that as soon as Google's next flavor of Android (codenamed Ice Cream Sandwich) is released in January 2012, the new tablet will be switched to the new operating system - with a free upgrade to Android 4.0 for existing A200 owners. Read More

Femtocell and picocell manufacturer ip.access unveiled its fully functioning 'Advanced Femtocell Concept' (AFC) at the no doubt riotous Femtocells Americas 2011 conference in San Diego on Monday. A relatively new technology, femtocells essentially provide mobile phone network access via a local broadband connection. It's a technology that might interest homes and businesses in signal-blocking buildings, remote areas, or anywhere where cellular signals are patchy. But how is the AFC different? In a word: portability. Read More

Hong Kong-based electronics company ENMAC, which describes itself as the "world leader in digital Islamic Products" has announced the latest iterations in its range of digital color Qurans. Among them are a range of mobile phones which come preinstalled with 29 translations and seven recorded recitations of the religious text. The enterprise appears to be a relatively simple but potentially shrewd combination of aging mobile technology with readily-available recordings of the Quran. It's a notable development as an instance of electronics hardware (rather than merely an app) being tailored to an enormous religious market. Read More

While most of the newest tech products are marketed at youngsters or people of working age, there's an increasing number of gadgets aimed at senior users as well. A case in point is the recently introduced Memo Touch tablet, which is based on a 10-inch Archos 101 tablet and comes with custom software that provides memory-challenged aging users with virtual assistance to help them deal with everyday activities and it allows caregivers to update content remotely. Read More

Mobile phones may have the opportunity to get even thinner. Sharp has recently taken the wraps off its new 12-megapixel smartphone camera sensor, which it claims is the thinnest camera sensor on the market. Measuring in at a mere 5.6 millimeters thick, the sensor has built-in image stabilization and is capable of capturing 1080p high-definition video. The optical image stabilization in the lens makes it ideal for situations where pictures are often blurry due to camera shake, such as low-light situations. Read More

It may not have been the first e-Reader on the market sporting E ink's electronic paper display - Sony's LIBRIé claimed those bragging rights when it debuted in Japan in April 2004 - but since its launch in November 2007, Amazon's Kindle has risen to dominate the e-Reader market. In that time, it has also gone through a number of updates, including the Kindle 2, the Kindle DX, Kindle 3 and most recently, the Kindle Touch and the first Kindle without an E Ink display, the Kindle Fire. The latest updates to the line-up also saw the Kindle enter its fourth generation, and with the Touch and Fire having the lion's share of attention, we decided to turn the spotlight on the 4th-gen Kindle with a review. Read More

Have you been looking for a speaker system for your iPhone? How about a giant megaphone instead? Not unlike the Horn Stand Amplifier on steroids, the appropriately named "Megaphone," is a giant horn that will amplify the sound from your iPhone in a way that's bound to turn at least a few heads. Essentially just a giant megaphone, the horn's design amplifies the sound from your phone rather than a speaker system, with the actual volume control being taken care of on your handset rather than on the horn. Read More

Samsung has announced its latest system-on-chip for next-gen smartphones and tablets. Built using a 32-nm process, the Samsung Exynos 5250 will be one of the world's first hardware platforms to utilize the ARM Cortex-A15 CPU with a duo of cores running at 2GHz each that deliver support for WQXGA (2560 x 1600) resolution and stereoscopic 3D. Read More

Now you don't need to have a Windows Mobile phone in order to test drive Windows Phone 7.5 Mango. To let prospective customers get a tastes of the mobile OS, Microsoft has created a HTML 5-based demonstration designed specifically to be viewed using the mobile browser on the iPhone and Android handsets. Read More