HTC’s Senior Global Online Communications Manager Jeff Gordon has come out on Twitter to say some things about the upcoming calendar year for the Taiwanese corporation, and it sounds pretty exciting if you want to take him at his word. He’s “overwhelmingly excited” for 2015.

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Google has updated its homepage today with a cute little doodle for New Years Eve, and is paying homage to a slew of notable trending topics and human achievements from 2014. Of the most interesting things that happened this year (according to Google trends at least) were the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, Flappy Bird, landing on an comet, amongst many others.
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One of Apple CEO Tim Cook’s favorite terms to throw around during earnings calls and keynote presentations is “Customer Sat,” but the latest from the American Customer Satisfaction Index has Apple down compared to last year while Samsung continues to rise despite declining sales.
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Reuters has pre-empted Huawei’s financial results, due to be released next month, citing an internal memo showing a 40% year-on-year increase in smartphone sales, with divisional revenue up almost a third to $11.8B.

The division shipped about 75 million smartphones in 2014, according to the year-end memo to employees sent by Richard Yu, the head of Huawei’s consumer business. Although that represented a more than 40 percent year-on-year increase, the figure lagged behind Huawei’s previously stated sales target of 80 million units.

While the company started life making low-end handsets, it later branched out into high-end smartphones, including the recently-announced Honor 6 Plus, closely modelled on Apple’s iPhone 6 Plus … 
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The Palm smartphone brand may not be as dead it seemed. While parent company HP has already taken the company apart and sold off its remnants, there’s some new evidence pointing to the idea that the name, logo, and other related trademarks may be preparing to make a comeback.

Specifically, HP sold Palm’s trademarks to a company called Wide Progress Global Limited. Other trademarks owned by that company include… absolutely nothing. It seems Wide Progress Global was created solely to handle the Palm trademarks until some other company could put them to use.

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We already know that Android 5.0 Lollipop is likely on its way to Samsung’s current lineup of devices soon (in fact, it’s already hitting devices over-the-air in Spain and Poland). But now, thanks to a post on Reddit from a user claiming to be a Samsung employee, we have a tidbit of information that pinpoints January as the month that will begin to happen in more countries around the world.

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Google Glass may seem to be essentially on the brink of death, but Google focusing on Android Wear for the time being doesn’t necessarily mean that the Mountain View company is done pursuing the area of smart glasses. In fact, Google’s Eric Schmidt recently said that it plans to bring Glass—described as if it’s going to see some kind of 2.0 rebirth—to the consumer market “soon,” but only “when it works.”

Google Glass has most definitely had a hard time capturing the imagination of the public (and the government), been met with countless criticisms thanks to its privacy implications, and generally created an image around itself that has made the device in its current form rather socially unacceptable to wear. But all this aside, Google X “moonshot” head Astro Teller says that it’s only a matter of time before glasses are the portal to our digital world.

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Google’s Francois Beaufort has revealed in a post on Google+ that Chrome OS users can now run Linux on their machines in a desktop window. This means that developers don’t have to switch back and forth between operating systems, but rather can run them side by side. This capability is made possible by the Crouton Chrome extension, which is available on the Chrome Web Store for free.

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As we reported yesterday, there are several rumors floating around that HTC intends to announce a new device of some kind at this year’s CES in Las Vegas, an event that’s typically fairly quiet for the Taiwanese corporation. But while many believed that the upcoming device might be the company’s next flagship, codenamed “Hima,” a new teaser image posted to the company’s official Weibo account would suggest otherwise. The image makes direct reference to the company’s “Desire” line of affordable phones.

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It’s no surprise, the Consumer Electronics Show 2015 is right around the corner and we’ve been prepping our gear and getting ready to hit the show floor. The whole thing kicks off on Jan 5, 2015 and we’re excited to dive in and bring you coverage of the latest gadgets and accessories that 2015 has to offer.

That being said, it takes a bit of work to put together the content that you’ll see and a backpack full of gear. Most of us try to pack light, but there are very important things that are necessary to make sure the job gets done. Today, we’re taking a look at the gear I’m lugging around the show floor. I may not have everything I’m used to, but these essential tools help make the coverage a bit easier…

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According to the Moto G page on the Brazilian Motorola website, there appears to be another model of the company’s affordable Moto X alternative in the works, sporting LTE and a variety of other minor changes (via Android Police). It was only a matter of time before this device popped up consider its predecessor had 4G capable model, and now it’s (almost) here.

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Sony sold off its VAIO PC brand earlier this year to investment firm Japan Industrial Partners, but it looks like Sony’s ex-brand might have some interesting new technology up its sleeves for 2015. According to a new report this morning out of Japanese paper Nikkei, the company is working on a line of smartphones to be announced in the coming months. And they might be coming sooner than anyone might have expected—possibly next week at CES 2015.

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Specifications for HTC’s upcoming flagship—dubbed “Hima”—began leaking earlier this month when it purportedly began carrier testing. But today, the phone has apparently passed through an AnTuTu benchmark (via Nowhereelse.fr), and the resulting specification sheet seems to line up perfectly with what we saw before. Additionally, new evidence suggests that HTC has plans to introduce the device earlier than expected, at the annual CES 2015 which officially starts just over one week from today.

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Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun announced this morning (via Weibo) that the company has completed its latest round of funding, securing another $1.1 billion for the startup to now be valued at $45 billion total. And in light of this news, the Chinese company has mentioned that it plans to announce its next flagship device at some point next month.

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The Galaxy Alpha – first announced in August – may turn out to be a short-lived model: rumors originating in Korea claim that the company plans to discontinue the model in favor of the Galaxy A5 as soon as current inventory is exhausted.

It was reported last month that Samsung planned to sell 30% fewer smartphones next year, as part of cost-cutting measures in response to declining profits … 
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Update: The FT reports that access has been restored for now at least, with a slight pickup in Google’s stats appearing to confirm.

China has tightened its firewall blockade of Google services, reports Re/code and the WSJ, with email apps no longer able to access Gmail via IMAP, POP3 or SMTP. While web access to Gmail has been blocked since June – believed related to the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre – users had remained able to access mail using email apps like Apple Mail and Outlook until Friday … 
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It was rumored earlier this month that Samsung had plans to introduce a new variation of the Galaxy Note 4, but it’s now been confirmed by the Korean company that this is indeed the case. While there are already two distinct models of the Note 4 available worldwide (sporting slightly different processors), today’s announcement adds a third to the mix, packing Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 810 and a claim of being the world’s “first commercially available LTE Advanced (LTE-A) Tri-Band Carrier Aggregation (CA) smartphone.”

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Kodak has yet to announce a smartphone, but that’s about to change very soon. Announced earlier this week, the company has partnered with Bullit Group to introduce a line of Android-powered devices, somehow aimed at photography enthusiasts (we would hope) and “consumers who want a high-end experience but aren’t always as comfortable using increasingly complicated mobile devices.”

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We told you last month that the NVIDIA Shield tablet would be getting Lollipop, and that time has since come and gone. Now, while most recently-released devices already have Lollipop (or are in line to get it soon), attention has been turned to see which devices are going to be first to get Google’s first bug fix release, 5.0.1. Most of the Nexus devices have received it already (and you can get those from Google’s factory image download page), but it appears NVIDIA is also making sure its Shield tablet receives a timely update.

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