World Mobile News

Motorola lets you pick a wood or leather back for the Moto X (2015)? That's cute, Goldgenie lets you pick between diamonds, sapphires, rubies, topaz and emeralds to put on your 24K Gold, Rose gold or Platinum iPhone 6. Of course, those aren?t color names, those are the actual materials. You can top it off with Swarovski crystals on the Apple logo. The diamonds ? white, pink or black ? are used to coat the sides of the device, leading to the name Diamond Ecstasy. Goldgenie is kind enough to offer you the option of bigger diamonds, so that you don't get laughed out of the private island club. iPhone 6 Diamond Ecstasy in 24K Gold, Rose Gold or Platinum The price is unspeakable ? a run of the mill Rose Gold or Platinum iPhone 6 costs as little as ?1,500 or a limited edition for ?2,500. This one though costs ?2.3 million ($3.5 million). That?s the base price, by the way, you can always hop on your private jet and fly out to Goldgenie HQ and take a hands-on approach with the cust...

The Chinese smartphone manufacturer Meizu shipped a record 1.5 million smartphones last month. Jack Wong, the company?s CEO announced the achievement on the social network Weibo. Sales of the company have jumped 50% on a monthly basis. Back in December last year, Jack Wong announced that the manufacturer is shipping a million devices monthly. Meizu?s stellar sales should hardly catch anyone by surprise. In addition to offering the impressive, high-end Meizu MX4 and MX4 Pro, the company took on Xiaomi by launching the budget-friendly, well-equipped Meizu m1 and m1 note. The freshly announced Meizu m1 got 100,000 pre-orders in just a minute yesterday. Therefore, we can certainly expect Meizu to do even better throughout 2015. Source (in Chinese) | Via View the original article here

Samsung announced that it has passed the 10 million Galaxy Note units shipped in South Korea mark. The number includes all Galaxy Note phablets, starting from the original Galaxy Note which was introduced back in 2011, as well as its successors, Note II and Note 3. The company hasn’t mentioned the global numbers, but we would have to guess that figure is north of 50 million. Samsung pretty much created the phablet space that includes smartphones with 5.3-inch and bigger screens. Ever since the original Galaxy Note was launched, other vendors joined the trend, with Sony, Huawei, LG and HTC all launching comparable devices. Samsung, however, is still a dominant player in this market, and has consequently launched more affordable Galaxy Mega series. As I’m writing this, we’re waiting to see the first “Lite” Note unveiled, Galaxy Note 3 Lite, which will sit somewhere between the Note II and last year’s Note 3… Dusan has been using smartphones since their introduction and is now following...

CEO drops cryptic hint at desire for 'BlackBerry experience' on Android A few small nuggets of Android news out of BlackBerry's otherwise not-exactly-uplifting quarterly earnings report this morning. We'll break it down here in handy bullet-point form: More than 40 million new BBM registrations have come from Android and iOS in the past two months. BlackBerry didn't break it down any more than that. More than a dozen manufacturers are set to preload BBM on their hardware , as previously reported. The one we're most likely to see here in our neck of the woods is LG , but even that's subject to the whim of the carriers (in the U.S.), most likely. Apparently BlackBerry's new CEO John Chen would like to see some sort of "BlackBerry experience" on Android , which is only fair given that BlackBerry's doing all it can to put the Android experience on its phones.  And that's that. The kids at CrackBerry are covering this as only t...

Posted in: Mobile phones 13 hours ago by Ian At the Motorola event held today in New York City, Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt confirmed some interesting new numbers for the Android platform adoption. There are some 480 million total Androids in the world as of today. That’s 80 million more than there were on June 27, when we got the latest update. Currently there are 1.3 million new activations per day, of which 70,000 are Android tablets. Obviously the Google OS continues to grow at a staggering rate and despite already dominating the market, it’s not done expanding just yet. View the original article here

If you’ve carried around a Nokia phone over the last few years, the chances are that an app or game from Offscreen Technologies has been part of your toolkit. Well known for their polished and sublimely useful apps such as Grid Touch and Converter Touch, Offscreen are the latest developer to reach the milestone of 100 million downloads from the Nokia Store. We caught up with Offscreen’s CEO, Harri Myllynen, to find out how they did it. First of all, who is Offscreen? Offscreen is based in Helsinki, Finland, and was founded by the core team in 2005, when we saw great opportunities in developing software for the early Nokia smartphones at the time. We’re still a pretty small company, employing 20 people, most of whom are programmers. While we make money from our apps, our main line of business has been developing bespoke apps for clients.  Our success in Nokia store has proven to be a great way to promote our company and market our skills to potential clients. We’ve noticed that Offscre...

Microsoft has launched the new Outlook.com, which replaces the existing Hotmail webmail service. The new website makes good use of the Metro UI and also offers users to switch from their current @hotmail.com email addresses to @outlook.com addresses. Upon opening the new website you’ll notice just how clean and uncluttered the UI is. In fact, it’s so minimalistic that at first glance you’d think you accidentally opened the mobile version of the website. On the left you have your usual folder list including items such as Inbox, Junk, Drafts, etc. You can right-click on these to access additional options, such as marking all mails as read or creating a new folder. On the top you have the Outlook logo with a drop-down menu that lets you switch to your contacts, calendar or SkyDrive account. Weirdly, though, only the Contacts page uses the new Metro UI, whereas the Calendar and SkyDrive app use the same old Hotmail style UI. Worse still, once you switch over to these services, there is no...

Back in June, Samsung had announced that the Galaxy SIII would reach 10 million sales by July and it seems that they’ve reached that goal right on schedule. Shin Jying Kyun of Samsung has announced that the Galaxy SIII crossed the 10 million sales mark since its launch on May 29th. In comparison, it had taken the Galaxy SII almost 5 months to reach this mark. By current estimates it is believed that the sales figures for the SIII will cross 40 million by EOY 2012. The Jelly Bean update is  expected to hit this high profile handset sometime in August which should help keep sales going strong. [Via - Androinica] Dhruv Bhutani is a tech enthusiast who tries to keep a tab on the latest and greatest in the mobile and telecom sector. He is currently using an iPhone 4S and a Nokia Lumia 800. Catch him on Twitter @DhruvBhutani , you can also reach out on Facebook and Google+ View the original article here

Samsung’s newest Android flagship smartphone — the Galaxy S III — has surpassed 10 million sales in less than two months after going on sale, selling at a rate predicted by the company just last month, Samsung president Shin Jong-kyun (JK Shin) has revealed. The Samsung executive shared the milestone with Korean new agency Yonhap News (without giving exact numbers), which translates roughly into 190,000 Galaxy S III devices being sold each day and reaching the figure in less than half the time of its predecessor — the Galaxy S II. In June, Shin said that he expected the Galaxy S III to reach 10 million units sold in July, seeing an added boost as the handset went on sale in the US and other significant markets. By the end of the month, the device will be on sale via 296 carriers in 145 countries worldwide. In terms of comparative figures, the Samsung Galaxy S II chalked up 3 million pre-orders. The company recently revealed that it and predecessor the Galaxy S, have together passed 50...