Latest news

SanDisk has unveiled the world's first 128GB microSDXC card, the largest capacity microSD card to date.

"Smaller than the size of a fingernail, the new SanDisk Ultra microSDXC card enables consumers to use their phones and tablets as if storage limitations were never a concern, allowing users to capture thousands of songs and photos, and hours of video on a single, removable card," says the company.

The cards are designed for Android devices, although you will need to make sure the device can support microSDXC.

"The new SanDisk Ultra microSDXC card again demonstrates how SanDisk continues to expand the possibilities of storage so that consumers can benefit from our latest technology advancements," said Susan Park, director, retail product marketing, SanDisk. "With 128GB of removable storage, consumers will enjoy the freedom to capture and save whatever they want on a smartphone or tablet, without worrying about running out of storage space."

AT&T has announced that its LTE roaming has been expanded to 13 new nations.

The large carrier first introduced international LTE roaming a few months ago with an expansion to Canada and the UK. The new nations include Spain, South Korea, France, Japan and Australia.

Over time, AT&T will make its LTE roaming available in 200 countries. The carrier also has a deal in place with Fon to let AT&T subscribers use the Fon Wi-Fi network overseas.

To help travelers, the carrier has also released a new mobile app called the "AT&T International Travel App" that will allow customers to track their usage, learn more about their data plan, and to receive alerts if they hit their limits or do not have a roaming plan.

Qualcomm has unveiled their Snapdragon 615 today, the company's first octo-core, 64-bit mobile processor.

The company also showed off the Snapdragon 610, a 64-bit quad-core brother to the 615.

Featuring up to eight 64-bit ARM Cortex A53 cores, integrated LTE and Adreno 405 GPUs, the chips will be high-end entrants to the 600-series lineup, but will not be able to perform on par with the extremely high-end 800-series lineup.

Marketing VP Tim McDonough almost comically admitted that the decision to move to eight cores was based off Chinese consumer market research that found that smartphone buyers in China just liked more cores, "whether or not they make a big difference."

"They say the number of CPUs is important to them, which means it's important to our OEMs, which means it's important to us," added McDonough.

The new chips will hit the market in the Q4.

Sony has used the Mobile World Congress event to unveil its new flagship Android device, the Xperia Z2.

The display has been increased to 5.2 inches, with the same 1080p resolution. The new IPS Triluminos X-Reality display has Sony's new Live Color LEDs, which the company says offers the widest color gamut on the market.

Internals have been improved significantly, as well, to a quad-core 2.3GHz Snapdragon processor, 3GB RAM, 16GB internal storage, a microSD slot, Android 4.4.2, IPX5 and IPX8 waterproof/dustproof certification and new stereo speakers.

Samsung has unveiled their Galaxy S5, a rehauled version of last year's successful S4, and next progression of the popular line of devices.

The company has increased the screen size to 5.1 inches, kept the 1080p Super AMOLED display but added a plethora of new features. Under the display is a new home key with a fingerprint scanner, and under the camera is a heart rate monitor, adding to the industry's move towards fitness tracking.

Around the edges, the phone keeps the same metal-esque plastic and the USB 3.0 charging port has now been given a port cover to help with waterproofing. Samsung has added IP67 certification for water and dust resistance, meaning a dunk in some shallow water will likely not kill the device. The back cover is no longer the ugly plastic we are used to, and is instead the soft-touch rubber well known to original Nexus 7 owners. The new back cover will be much more comfortable, and frankly, is much more aesthetically pleasing.

"With the Galaxy S5, Samsung is going back to basics to focus on delivering the capabilities that matter most to our consumers," said JK Shin, President and Head of IT & Mobile Communications Division at Samsung. "Consumers are looking for mobile tools that inspire and support them as they improve their everyday lives. The Galaxy S5 represents an iconic design with essential and useful features to focus on delivering the ultimate smartphone on the market today through people inspired innovation."

After months and months of rumors and leaked images and speculation, Nokia unveiled its Android devices early this morning, dubbing the phones the X, X+ and XL.

Each of the devices has a Lumia-esque design matched with lower-end specs but more importantly comes with a variant of Android 4.1 (why?) that Nokia believes will be a gateway to its high-end Lumia Windows Phone devices.

The devices will launch in emerging markets including Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe (and some select other countries) but will certainly not be headed to the U.S., UK and other developed nations.

With the three phones, Nokia has effectively taken the open-source nature of Android and molded it to look like Windows Phone and included a suite of Nokia and Microsoft apps while leaving out Google applications like Gmail, Chrome, and even the Google Play Store. Nokia will use its own app store, for which they take a cut rather than Google. The devices do support sideloading, so getting APKs and installing them on the device to avoid the Nokia Store will not be an issue. Nokia says they hope the phones will be gateways to Lumia Windows Phones and their own growing ecosystem.

Apple is having a rough week and fans of their products should be hoping for patches, as soon as possible.

The company revealed a critical bug in its iOS and Safari data security, and quickly released a patch, iOS 7.0.6. Following that revelation, researchers found the same bug for Mac OS X, and today another researcher says the security holes go way further, extending to nearly all of Apple's services and apps. The bug has been dubbed 'GoToFail' due to a single improperly coded 'goto' command in Apple's code.

Among the list of vulnerable apps and services are Mail, Twitter, Facetime, iMessage, iBooks and Apple's software update mechanism.

At the heart of the problem is Apple's "'secure transport' framework, the coding library that developers depend on to build programs that securely communicate online using the common encryption protocols TLS and SSL."

Multiple sources have reported today that LG is working on Google's first smartwatch, which will be unveiled in part next month and be available in June following Google's I/O conference.

The company will show off the new special smartwatch-centric OS in a blog post next month, say the sources.

Branded as a Nexus, Google will design the software and control the launch, with LG building the hardware.

The new OS will be based around the Google Now integrated search feature, and will be similar to Google Glass. The watch is expected to have a mic for voice activation and should deeply integrate fitness, Google apps, weather, maps and more.

Wearable devices are expected to have the strongest growth in the industry in the coming years, and will get validation when Apple finally gets in to the mix. So far, there have been a few entries to the smartwatch market, but none have been successful. Pebble, Sony and Samsung are the big names for the time being. Google would certainly be the biggest when it gets in.

Huawei has used the MWC event to unveil their anticipated wearable device, the TalkBand B1.

The TalkBand has a 1.4-inch flexible OLED display but notably also includes a removable earpiece that allows for wireless calling.

As expected, the device will mainly be a fitness tracker, including a pedometer, calories burned and more. Additionally, the smartband is also a sleeping pattern monitor, which allows you to use the smart alarm function to wake you up at the most optimal time, when you will be the most rested.

For the calling, NFC or Bluetooth 4.1 pairs the device to your smartphone and the large 90mAh battery should give you almost a week of use. The band is also dust and water-proof.

The device will hit China next month, and then Western Europe, Japan and the Middle East in April. So far, only the European price has been revealed, a reasonable €99.

Speaking at the Mobile World Congress event in Spain today, Mozilla outlined its plans for the fledgling Firefox OS which includes the future of the operating system: a $25 smartphone aimed at the billions that cannot afford iPhones and Android phones and still have feature phones.

Mozilla has partnered with Chinese semi designer Spreadtrum who has already developed three chipsets built around the low-end ARM Cortex A5 processor.

Additionally, the amount of Firefox OS handsets on the market will expand significantly this year. Alcatel and ZTE currently offer one device each but both will launch two more this year. Huawei will also release their first Firefox OS device this year, as well. Alcatel's upcoming One Touch Fire S will have the highest specs, a 1.2GHz quad core processor and a 4.5 inch 960×540 screen. Most of the other devices will be low-end dual-core processors with displays under 4 inches.

Netflix has announced some truly breaking news this weekend, signing a long-term deal with Comcast that will ensure full access to the service provider's unthrottled broadband network, and provide a smooth experience for its streaming customers due to guaranteed throughput.

The news comes just months after Internet providers fought successfully to end net neutrality, and just days after Comcast agreed to purchase Time Warner Cable for $45 billion, essentially creating a monopoly for Internet and cable in the U.S.

Comcast is just one of a number of ISPs that have been seeing clogged networks and slower speeds for bandwidth hogs like Netflix, causing interruptions for customers, especially those trying to stream in HD or 4K. Additionally, Netflix connected to Comcast through a third-party, Cogent Communications, which led to added "traffic jams," especially during key times like the release of House of Cards season 2. Rather than pay a third-party to connect, Netflix will now deliver their content directly to Comcast, most likely at a higher base quality than they were getting previously. This is great for consumers.

Less than a week after the company was acquired for a staggering $19 billion by social networking behemoth Facebook, WhatsApp had its largest outage ever.

Founder and CEO Jan Koum has apologized this weekend for the four hour outage, giving a bit more details about the down time.

"It has been our longest and biggest outage in years and affected all of our users," Koum confirmed.

The CEO says a network router was faulty, causing a cascading failure that eventually hit their servers. That being said, it seems like coincidental timing rather than an influx of attention from the Facebook purchase pressing their networks.

Koum is working on making "sure it will not happen again" by overseeing new measures and working with their service provider.

According to sources, Ford will replace Windows with BlackBerry's QNX for its upcoming next-gen Sync smart dashboard.

By using QNX, the massive car company hopes to remove some of the current system's flaws and improve flexibility and speed. Additionally, QNX will be cheaper to license.

Ford currently has 7 million vehicles on the road using Sync, which allows for easier music playing, phone calls and more due to voice-activation software. Customer complaints have been increasing, however, about the touchscreens and general glitchiness of the technology.

New studies seem to suggest that new car buyers are actively looking for smart, connected dashboards, with 39 percent calling in-vehicle tech the top selling point for them and only 14 percent making power and speed their top choice.

QNX is currently used in Audi and BMW luxury cars and is also used to manage nuclear-power plants. BlackBerry purchased the company in 2010 to have a foundation for its BB10 smartphone operating system.

According to an internal company analysis of the breach, the hackers who attacked Neiman Marcus and stole hundreds of thousands of credit card numbers and personal information were working on the store for three and a half months, setting off security system alerts over 60,0000 times.

The report concluded the card data was stolen from July through October, and it was not done by the same groups or groups that hit Target, stealing information on 70 million consumers.

Ginger Reeder, speaking for Neiman Marcus, says the hackers named their malware almost identically to the company's payment software, thus allowing over 60,000 security alerts to pass unnoticed with all the huge amounts of data sorted by the company's security.

"These 60,000 entries, which occurred over a three-and-a-half month period, would have been on average around 1 percent or less of the daily entries on these endpoint protection logs, which have tens of thousands of entries every day," Reeder added (via BW).

After the investigation, the company also found that original estimates of 1.1 million cards stolen was high, with the real figure below 350,000. 9200 of the stolen cards were used fraudulently since the attacks. Neiman Marcus concluded that it was in compliance with standards to protect transaction data, and data-security requirements were increased again this year.

Samsung has unveiled their new second-generation smartwatches, replacing the poorly reviewed Galaxy Gear released last year.

The two devices, the Gear 2 and Gear 2 Neo, run on the Tizen operating system rather than Android, and should be the first commercial Tizen devices to hit the U.S.

By using Tizen, Samsung has been able to improve the battery life to 2-3 days, compared to the barely 24 hours of life the Galaxy Gear provided.

Both devices have a 1.63-inch touchscreen, 4GB internal storage, dual-core 1GHz processors, 512MB RAM and a 300 mAh battery. The Gear 2 has a 2MP camera with video support while the Neo has no camera. Samsung has moved the location of the camera off the wrist strap and right to the watch face, meaning you can replace the bands if you so choose.

The watches will be available in April, but there is no word on pricing yet.