Oppo will launch its European web store on Monday, May 27

Oppo announced the opening of its official European web store. Users across Europe will be able to shop for the Chinese company’s products starting this coming Monday, May 27.

The first device to go on sale will naturally be the company’s flagship, the Oppo Find 5. The quad-core Android beast with a 5″ 1080p display will be priced at the highly acceptable €399 for a unlocked handset, free of carrier branding.

The Oppo Find 5 units will be shipping from Europe. This means that customers across the continent won’t have worry about paying customs fees.

Interested in buying an Oppo Find 5? First, be sure to check our extensive review over here.

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Dual-SIM Samsung Galaxy Star to be released on July 31 for €70

Samsung announced the Galaxy Star in the beginning of April. It is a low-end droid, which will redefine the smartphone landscape with its rock bottom pricing.

The little smartphone runs on Android 4.1 Jelly Bean and is powered by a single-core 1GHz processor. It features a 3″ QVGA display, a 2MP snapper, 512MB of RAM, and an expandable 4GB worth of an internal storage.

The most important thing that we take away from Samsung’s announcement today about the dual-SIM S5282 Galaxy Star hitting the shelves in India on July 31 is the ground-breaking (literally) price point.

The S5282 Galaxy Star will cost only around €70, which is straight feature-phone price segment and probably makes it the cheapest smartphone to be made by a major mobile phone manufacturer to date.

We hope the smartphone’s availability in other countries around the world won’t take long after the Indian launch on July 31.

There is still no official pricing and availability on the single-SIM version (S5280) of the Samsung Galaxy Star, but we bet it will launch about the same time.

iOS 7 could sport flatter, less glossy look, black and white UI

Apple is set to unveil the latest installment of iOS 7 at its Worldwide Developer Conference coming this June 10. Apple announced the event stating it “can’t wait to get the new versions of iOS and OS X” into the hands of developers.

We’ve heard that iOS 7 will likely sport a flatter design but we’re now also hearing that the UI will revolve around black and white interface elements. The design teams behind the new iOS are planning on dropping heavy textures and moving away from the skeuomorphic philosophy, which former Senior VP of iOS Scott Forstall was so fond of.

The glossy surfaces and deep shadows will likely be changed in favor of a cleaner and flatter look – for instance the Notes app, which is reminiscent of a physical yellow pad will feature a white background.

The lockscreen will likely see a design change, too.

Apple is also working on a cleaner Notification center as well and could feature new widgets (aside from Stocks and Weather) and possibly a quickly-reachable toggles section for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, etc.

Vimeo and Flickr integration right into the OS could be on the way along with a dedicated FaceTime app for the iPhone.

Most of the pre-installed system apps will be overhauled. The Weather app, for instance, will include animated weather conditions such as rain, snow, etc. The Game Center will lose its green felt background and will probably come with a new icon. The Newsstand will shed the wood trimming for a new texture, like the one on OS X’s app dock.

We won’t have to wait too long to see the real thing ourselves. Apple is poised to show off iOS 7 in a couple of weeks and release it this fall along with the next iPhone hardware with frequent iOS 7 betas likely filling the months in between.

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The Samsung I8800 is a Tizen smartphone, photos leak

Samsung integrated its Bada OS into the Tizen project a while ago, but we are yet see a smartphone running on the open source project. However, traces of a Samsung device running on Tizen was confirmed by a UAProf earlier and now, the images of the smartphone with Tizen 2.1 have surfaced online.

Images of Samsung Redwood with Tizen 2.1

The upcoming Tizen smartphone from Samsung has been codenamed “Redwood” and bears the GT-I8800 model name.

The design of the device looks quite similar to the company’s own Galaxy smartphones. Samsung has obviously baked a few of its proprietary Android features into the Tizen OS such as S-Voice, Wi-Fi Direct and S-Beam.

The only thing we know about the Samsung I8800 Redwood is that it comes with a 720p display and runs the Tizen 2.1 OS.

The smartphone will be given away to some 500 developers, participating in the on-going Tizen Developer Conference for cross platform customizations.

So far we don’t know whether that’s actually a device that will be commercially available. It is possible that it only remains a developer’s platform.

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Leaked images show Android 4.3 on a Nexus 4 at a mobile expo

Two lucky XDA Developers Forum members (“challeen” and “innocent36″) were at the right place at the right time (Thailand Mobile Expo 2013). They spotted a Google Nexus 4 on display, running Android 4.3 and decided to share their find with the eager tech-savvy world.

As its About screen confirms, the device was running Android 4.3. One of the changes they’ve spotted is a fresh new camera app with a new action area, which features toggles for HDR, contrast, rotation, white balance, etc.

Leaked screenshots of Android 4.3

The customary Easter egg menu shows Android 4.3 Jelly Bean, which does confirm previous reports that v.4.3 will retain the name of its predecessor rather than being called Key Lime Pie.

The phone has a pre-release build (JWR45B) and a baseband string m9615a-cefwmazm-2.0.1700.74, which hasn’t been used elsewhere before and will most likely be intended for GSM networks.

Although Google I/O 2013 spared us any details about next Android version to come, we know that it’s already in testing on some devices, including the elusive white Nexus 4. We hope to see the new Android version on June 10, which happens to nicely coincide with Apple’s unveiling of iOS 7.

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Cover your BlackBerry Q10 in gold and diamonds for £20,000

Alexander Amosu, the luxury designer, who is well known for adding a dash of super expensive exclusivity to modern day electronic devices, has come up with a BlackBerry Q10 design, which is made up of white gold and diamonds.

The Amosu’s BlackBerry Q10 is made up of 18 carat white gold and the smartphone is encrusted with over 700 VVSI diamonds, which amount to a total of approx. 4.7 carats.

The designer also offers a new pattern for the potential consumers of the phone, with a choice of 18 carat yellow, 18 carat rose, silver and platinum – all with matching set of colorful diamonds.

The luxurious BlackBerry Q10 is priced at £20,000 (about $30,250) and the exclusive design is available in limited quantity.

Furthermore, you can also get your name or your company’s logo engraved on your show piece in solid 18 carat gold or have its back covered with crocodile skin.

Meanwhile, if you feel that the BlackBerry Q10 by Amosu is a bit out of your reach, you might be interested into a much cheaper Swarovski version by Amosu Couture, a sister company of the designer, that costs only £3,750 (about $5,671).

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HTC Desire 600 dual sim goes official, Sense 5 on board

The HTC One leads the charge of the Sense 5 experience and now the HTC Desire 600 dual sim fills the ranks with an affordable alternative. The smartphone was introduced today and is supposed to bring many of the One’s premium features at a far lower price point.

The HTC Desire 600 dual sim runs Android Jelly Bean (probably 4.1) with Sense 5 on top, which includes the BlinkFeed screen that pulls updates and info from your social networking accounts and 1,400 media sources.

It’s powered by a Snapdragon 200 chipset, which packs four Cortex-A5 CPUs clocked at 1.2GHz, 1GB RAM and Adreno 203 GPU. There’s 8GB of non-expandable built-in storage and a 1,860mAh battery.

The smartphone has a 4.5″ Super LCD2 screen with qHD resolution, surrounded by two BoomSound speakers, just like on the One. Beats Audio is, of course, also a part of the package.

The HTC Desire 600 dual sim packs an 8MP / 720p main camera and a 1.6MP front-facing camera that can be used to capture photos, which the Video Highlights feature combines into 30 second video clips. All you have to do is pick the music theme. It’s not as great as Zoe, but it’s in the same spirit.

As the name suggests, the phone has two SIM card slots and both cards are active at the same time – you can receive a call on one of them, even if the other is already in use. The phone has 3G with HSDPA connectivity (up to 7.2Mbps down), Bluetooth 4.0 with aptX, Wi-Fi b/g/n, NFC and GPS (plus GLONASS in Russia and the EU).

The HTC Desire 600 will be available early next month and while it aims for global availability, it will start off with Russia, Ukraine and the Middle East. There’s no info on pricing yet.

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Samsung device running Tizen OS confirmed by UAProf

A new device running the Tizen OS has been spotted on Samsung’s UAProf website codenamed the Redwood GT-I8805. This is no real surprise as it was announced earlier by Samsung that we’ll be seeing a Tizen device sometime in 2013 – in fact, even the codename Redwood has been seen floating around.

As far as specifications go, the LTE-enabled device will sport a 720p display of as-yet unknown diagonal, and despite earlier promises, will feature a standard Cortex-A9 SoC, rather than the more robust A15 processor line found in more recent high-end smartphones.

No word yet on when the other Tizen device, codenamed the GT-I8800 Melius, will surface, but we should hopefully hear more on both Tizen flagships as they approach announcement.

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HTC allegedly working on One with stock Android

Google surprised everyone at the I/O 2013 keynote by unveiling a special edition of the Samsung Galaxy S4 running stock Android 4.2 Jelly Bean. Now, it seems HTC is working on a similar version of its own HTC One for the US market.

According to the sources at Geek.com, HTC is working on a version of the HTC One running stock Android Jelly Bean instead of its usual Sense UI.

At this moment, it is unclear whether HTC is working with Google on this. This would decide how the phone is sold, i.e., through the Google Play Store or through HTC’s own online store and whether or not the phone would get timely updates (stock Android does not necessarily guarantee quick updates if its not directly from Google). If you recall, Hugo Barra did briefly mention the HTC One during the keynote before announcing the S4 with stock Android, so it’s quite likely HTC is collaborating with Google on this one.

As mentioned before, the device is expected to release only in the US, which is not the brightest of moves but that’s how these companies usually roll. We are looking forward to hearing more on this front as an HTC One with stock Android is nothing short of exciting.

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HTC exec claims HTC One already reached 5 million sales

The HTC One got a troubled start due to supply shortages of crucial components – the aluminum unibody and the UltraPixel camera sensor – but an anonymous HTC exec speaking to the Wall Street Journal claims the phone has been doing pretty well despite that.

The One launched at the end of March in several countries and expanded its availability late last month. The exec claims there have been 5 million HTC Ones sold since launch and that there are still more orders than HTC can’t fulfill, but the ramp up in production should be felt next month.

So, the HTC One has been on the market slightly longer than its chief rival, the Samsung Galaxy S4, which recently hit the 10 million sales mark. That’s not bad at all and might signal a turnaround for the troubled company.

Of course, we won’t have a confirmation of the 5 million number until HTC releases an official statement (they usually do every month).

Source (paywall) | Via