Stephen Hall

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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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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Micromax (which recently launched the Yurkea smartphone under the brand name “YU Digital”), had an exclusivity agreement for using the Cyanogen OS in India, and took OnePlus to court earlier this month—banning them from selling their phone under order of the Delhi High Court. Now, it appears that very same court has had a change of heart, at least for now, and the ban on the OnePlus has been temporarily lifted (via India Times).

In a reprieve to the company, judges on Wednesday said the case “shall be heard and decided afresh”. The case will come up for hearing on January 7 under a single judge. “We dispose off the appeal, setting aside the impugned order dated December 16, 2014,” Justices Pradeep Nandrajog and RK Gauba said in their order on OnePlus’s petition, a copy of which was seen by ET.

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This is probably one of more dramatic smartphone explosion stories I’ve read lately. (But this is definitely not the first—almost every flagship phone has seemingly had a horror story like this one.) This time, it looks like an LG G3 was at one second sitting innocently on a mattress, but then erupted into flames so violently that its owners had to throw the mattress out the window.

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It seems as if smartphone specifications are looking more and more like the desktops of not long ago, and today’s news furthers this phenomenon. Samsung has announced that it has begun production of a LPDDR4 (low power double data rate 4) 8 Gigabit DRAM memory module based in its 20nm process, and says it will be ready by sometime in early 2015. This translates to a chip that’s 4 GB of usable memory, basically double of what most flagship smartphones have today.

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We told you yesterday about a new phone that ASUS is teasing, and the company made it look like it had some kind of interesting tricks up its sleeve (dual back cameras?) for the upcoming ZenFone refresh. But while the next ZenFone is definitely expected to be announced at the upcoming CES 2015, new specs have shown up in documents submitted to the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (via Android Police) for a phone dubbed the “ZC451CG,” and they aren’t all that spectacular.

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AnTuTu is likely a familiar name to you, as it’s probably one of the biggest sources of device specification leaks (most recently, a prototype Galaxy S6 was purportedly noticed). But unless it’s your job to test devices, it’s probably not likely that you actually use the AnTuTu Android app on a daily basis. Today, AnTuTu has updated said app to bring a completely new UI, support for 64 bit CPU testing, and a variety of bug fixes.
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Every once in a while, we get a new feature added to Google’s Knowledge Graph (the smart results that appear at the top of the search page). Today, Google has added the handy ability to see results for song lyrics right on the search page (via TechCrunch), meaning that websites focusing solely on providing lyrics and fighting for the top of Google’s results in this category might see a bit of a downturn in traffic…

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HP has quietly launched a new version of the Chromebook 14 (via OMGChrome), a laptop the company launched earlier this year that was met with much criticism over its less-than-perfect screen. Now, with a more expensive revised version of that device (but the others aren’t going anywhere, obviously) being available, customers have the option of going with a touchscreen Chrome experience and slightly improved specs over its little brothers. HP said that it would be coming soon at the launch of the Chromebook 14, and it looks like company has now followed through with that promise.

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Google released the latest version of its Transparency Report today, revealing data about government requests the company received between June and December of 2013. According to the report, Google received 3,105 requests to remove 14,637 pieces of content within that time period, which brings the total number of requests received by the Mountain View corporation up to 6,591 for the entirety of 2013, a figure that’s about 60% higher than the previous calendar year.

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