According to the New York Times, more than one tweet was present on her Twitter account from the iPhone, as well as images recently taken with Instagram, which you won’t find on any Blackberry handset. All of the activity has since been deleted, but it nonetheless makes her response to the issue seem less plausible than it would have if only one iPhone-sent tweet was present – that she was hacked.

As you can see in the screenshot above, Keys says that she did not send out the “Started from the bottom now were [sic] here” tweet, instead blaming it on being “hacked.” Her spokesperson has a different angle to the story, however, insinuating that Keys’ posted those tweets before officially “breaking up” with her iPhone.

Said Keys’ spokesman Rhett Usry: “The Internet is buzzing with speculation as to the exact time Alicia Keys ‘broke up’ with her previous smart phone. After a transitional period, she’s officially an exclusive BlackBerry 10 user today.” Which is it? We’ll never know, but the moral of the story is either to keep your Twitter password secret, or be careful when using a handset other than the one you’re supposed to exclusively represent.

[via The Verge]

The Nubia Z5 features a 5-inch full HD display at 1920 x 1080p. Inside, you’ll find a 1.5GHz Snapdragon S4 Pro and 2GB of RAM. The handset runs Android Jelly Bean 4.1.2, and features a 2-megapixel front-facing camera and a 13-megapixel rear camera. The battery is 2,500mAh. The design itself shows a relatively small bezel and three buttons along the bottom, meaning users won’t lose any pixels to on-screen buttons.

There’s no word on whether the handset will be available outside of China, but one can hope. Two other ZTE phablet-sized smartphones are also slated for release in the upcoming year, likely slated for the earlier part of 2013. Unfortunately, not all the handsets will be as high-quality as the Nubia Z5, including the recently announced U887.

The U887 is the Nubia Z5′s antithesis, offering a resolution of only 800 x 400, and a paltry 512MB of RAM alongside its dual-core 1.2GHz processor. The internal storage comes in at 4GB, although there’s presumably a microSD slot like on ZTE’s other handsets. The battery is smaller at 2,000mAh. There’s no word on when it will be available.

[via Android Community]

Samsung is also taking a 4.9% stake in the company with an additional payment of $34.4 million. CSR believes that the acquisition will allow the company to reach higher profitability in the future thanks to Samsung’s expanding smartphone business: “This transaction will accelerate our transformation into a higher gross margin platform company operating in attractive growth markets where we have a leading market position.”

CSR will grant Samsung the right to use its patents worldwide under a non-exclusive license, with 21 patents being fully transferred to the South Korean company. When the transaction closes in the fourth quarter, CSR expects to return around $285 million to shareholders.

[via The Next Web]

It’s pretty clear that Nintendo doesn’t intend of following Don Reisinger’s advice any time soon in getting out of the portables market, especially since against what we were hearing back in the first few months after release about terrible sales, Nintendo is indeed doing fairly well with this handset. Nintendo has reportedly moved 50 million DS units since launch and doesn’t intend on stopping there. This became quite clear all the way back in June when during E3 Nintendo had a Zelda extravaganza, this leading up to the device you see before you – golden!

The Hyrule emblem and gold-colored embellishments mark the device that celebrates the fully remastered Nintendo 64 classic: Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, now in 3D just for the 3DS. Also inside the box is a special double-sided sleeve with the classic game design one side and a limited edition gold-colored sleeve on the other. For those of you that’ve only played this game on the Nintendo 64, you’ll be in for a surprise as the controls have been altered to work with the Nintendo 3DS, and since you’re now also in a 3D environment, it’s a whole new world!

Get pumped up about the gold and grab it next week!

[via Kotaku]

As you’ll see in the video, this device feels extremely light and thin, certainly compared to the rest of the Windows Phone 7 devices we’ve seen released to the market thus far. You’ve got a 1500 mAh battery under the hood so you’ll more than likely get a full day’s use out of your smartphone before you need to recharge, and your internal memory at 8GB and external memory at 16GB will keep you ready to hold your media galore as downloaded from the Windows Phone Market and Zune for all the rest.

Have a look at our unboxing and hands-on here:

Other than the lovely new form factor here in the hardware, we’ll be looking at the new Windows Phone enhancements in the newest big version, that being 7.5 Mango. Head back to our first guide for Mango back when it was just 7.1 and check out this video for another simple run-down:

REMINDER : This is not a brand new phone, what we’re looking at here is a glimpse at Windows Phone 7.5 Mango in a vehicle we’ve seen before. The full review will be our look at the final build of Windows Phone 7.5 Mango.

The HTC Omega will come in a white and silver color combination with an aluminum construction and could possibly be called the HTC Radar when it is released on a carrier. It is believed to feature a 3.8-inch SLCD display, 1.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM8255 single-core processor, 512MB RAM, DLNA compatibility, and micro-HDMI output.

Additionally, it’s rumored to have an 8-megapixel rear-facing camera with LED flash and a front-facing camera that could mean Skype integration for video chat. The other rumored device called the HTC Eternity hasn’t turned up in photos yet but is believed to be a higher-end model with a larger 4.7-inch AMOLED display.

[via Pocketnow]

What this system aims to do is test out developers chops, mostly from a manufacturer standpoint, and see that they can perform well in a series of tests that see CPU and memory, Javascript, HTML5, canvas rendering speed, scrolling, network access, and more. When you run this benchmark suite, you’ll be able to choose from amongst the handful of test you want to perform, be they in Rendering, Javascript, User Experience, Networking, or “Advanced.” Each of these categories can be found in a section of the app called Pick Tests. And pick them you shall, for this test not only has the ability to show you your final cumulative score, it can give you the results of each individual test separately, all in a series of quite simple and well-designed screens. Well played!

You can even go to System Information and get specs on your device you’d never otherwise be able to access in a non-rooted machine, this being rather helpful for reviews, if you know what I mean, of devices taken care of by people like you know who. Latest Numbers give you the results of every test you’ve just taken, while Compare shows you how you rank against their stock scores. System Information is the button you want if you want to see some junk about your own device, and MORE has all the shortcuts to webpages of the developers, about and pick websites (for the tests) that you want. It’s also got access to Tutorial Mode, Override Safeguards, the Acid3 Test.

With this test, manufacturers are testing both he performance and the stability of their devices. Our good pal Sy Choudhury, Qualcomm Director of Product Management informs us that while Vellamo was originally developed for internal testing and was indeed used by Qualcomm workers to test as many aspects of web browsing as they could, proving over time to be a fair and non-bias set of tests that’d work to improve not only devices working with Qualcomm chipsets, but any device, as proven by the results of the tests you find after collecting your final score in the test.

The top score on the chart generally ends up being a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 (with an NVIDIA Tegra 2 processor inside), but my colleague Cory Gunther from Android Community has already made quick work of that with a swift overclocking of his Motorola XOOM tablet, beating the Tab’s score of 957 with a cool 1181. Below you’ll see the sweet score yours truly got with the new myTouch 4G Slide from T-Mobile. It’s a dual-core as well, running a 1.2GHz dual-core Snapdragon processor under the hood, but you’ll quickly see it simply doesn’t add up when it comes to the slightly bigger guns in this game – ALSO note that it’s not overlocked in anyway, so that matters too.

And what is the deal with these tests? What does Qualcomm say they really are? Have a look:

Rendering, See The Sun Canvas: Tests the performance of HTML 5 Canvas-based graphics.
Rendering, Deep Sea Canvas: Tests the performance of HTML 5 Canvas-based graphics.
Rendering, Aquarium Canvas: With many simultaneous objects, this stresses the performance of both the HTML 5 Canvas-based objects and the JavaScript engine.
Rendering, Pixel Blender: Measures the web graphics-related bandwidth available for blitting and blending operations.
JavaScript, Surf Wax Binder: Tests the array performance of the browser’s bindings between the Browser and JavaScript engine
JavaScript, Sun Spider (Online): Measures JavaScript performance using Rev 0.9.1 of the industry standard Sun Spider suite.
JavaScript, V8 Benchmark (online): Measures JavaScript performance using rev 6 of the industry standard V8 benchmarking suite.
User Experience, Ocean Flinger: This is a test that tests scrolling smoothness and performance using a demo news site.
User Experience, Image flinger: Stress tests the browser scroll performance when using a page made up of dense images. May take a minute to load.
User Experience, Text Flinger: Stress tests the browser scroll performance using a text-heavy web page. May take a minute to load.
Networking, Networking Loader: Repeatedly loads and reloads a sample web page to determine HTTP networking stack performance. This happens quickly, and hence you may only see the base color background.

Sounds like a pack of red hot apples to me. We’ll be using this test in future device reviews (where applicable) and I’m sure our sister site Android Community will be using it for ALL reviews too. Can’t wait to see how the EVO 3D fares, right? How about the Sensation 4G, the Galaxy S II, the Asus Eee Pad Transformer?! Wild stuff!

You can participate in the collection of all sorts of benchmarks with this app on all the different devices you own by downloading the app in the Android Market right now [for a total cost of ZERO] Good deal!

BONUS PROTIP: In Finnish mythology, Vellamo is the goddess of the sea. She’s often pictured as a mermaid and here we’re talking about web surfing. Hang ten!

This device has surround sound audio with SRS WOW HD, is able to capture high quality photos from its back camera with autofocus and LED flash, also capturing 720p HD video. The HTC trophy connects over Verizon’s 3G network and can also connect in more than 200 countries, over 125 of them connecting with 3G speeds, since this device is indeed a global-ready phone. You’ll be able to access HTC Hub, you can view and edit Microsoft Office documents such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint projects with the Office Hub with data access on SharePoint servers. Of course all of this pales in comparison to how the phone actually feels in your hand and functions on a day to day basis.

Therefor I’ve got to note once again that this being a Windows Phone, it should add up to a device that allows you to access it, work for a short period, and get back to your day as fast as possible. Will it add up? This HTC handset is small enough to fit in the palm of your hand but large enough that you can enjoy games and video – video through the already-installed Netflix app for easy viewing. An important point to make is that although you’ll have no expanded storage via microSD, you’ve got 13+ GB of storage inside the device, so unless you’re a downloadin’ maniac, you’ll be more than likely good on the containment front.

Also note that this device will be available at http://verizonwireless.com/ on May 26th and at stores on June 2nd for $149.99 after a $50 mail-in rebate with a 2-year customer agreement. Receipt will come in the form of a debit card which will then be able to be used anywhere debit cards are accepted.

We’ll have a full review up for you within a couple of days. Meanwhile – what would you like to know? What sort of tests would you like us to put this phone through?

There’s also a picture browser provided by Scalado that allows you to view up to 1,000 images simultaneously and zoom up to a specific one, with little-to-nil lag.  It looks to be a truly blazingly-fast chip.  Skip to just approximately 3:20 in the second clip and you’ll be able to watch a game demo that was designed specifically for the Android platform.

[via Android Community]

The official title of the application is “Apparatus and Method for Compensating for Variations in Digital Cameras”, and details various ways that lens manufacturing could be improved, from acquiring “video images of colored light” to  employing a “signal processor” that would adjust the calibrated color intensities of images and videos.

Hardware enhancements are always great, but what interests us most is the image showing a forward-facing camera on the nondescript Apple device.  What could it be?

[via Apple Insider]

The VPhone will be offered through Verizon as a Verizon Open Development Initiative handset. The device has a VGA camera on the user side for video calling and a 5MP camera on the front for taking pictures and recording video. The device offers WiFi, Bluetooth, and USB tethering capabilities for up to eight devices at once. Saygus claims the handset can do video calls at 24 to 30 frames per second and video calling works on EDGE 2.5 networks as well.

The slider design has a full QWERTY keyboard hiding under the 3.5-inch 800 x 480 resolution multi-touch screen. Saygus crams a 624MHz Marvell PXA310 processor under the hood and the device will run on the Verizon CDMA EVDO Rev A network. We know the handset will run Android, but Saygus is still mum on exactly what version of the OS the VPhone runs.

According to Strategy Analytics, Apple is now the most profitable handset vendor in the world with operating profits of $1.6 billion for Q3 2009. Nokia was second place with $1.1 billion in operating profits.

It’s hard to believe with all the models that Nokia offers Apple is able to turn more profit with a single product that the entire Nokia range. When/if Apple kills the exclusive deal with AT&T in the US, I wonder if its profits will grow even larger.

The handset supports the China Mobile TD-SCDMA 3G network. The device is optimized for the Chinese user on the world’s largest mobile provider. Features of the handset include a 5MP camera with dual LED flash, 2.8-inch QVGA screen, and the device runs the Symbian S60 platform.

Nokia reports that the handset is inspired by traditional Chinese furniture and architecture. The handset incorporates Chinese design elements including Chinese patterns on the back of the slide and the battery cover. Nokia expects the device to debut on the mobile carrier at the end of December 2009.

Although it certainly is an interesting design, it’s still something most people wouldn’t be caught dead wearing. It of course it can’t possibly help that it’s pink and makes you look like a giant turtle.

However, if you’re desperate for a seat I’m sure this backpack would be great for concerts and such. If eventually they made this concept design a little more practical I’m sure it would catch on a little faster.

‘Wear Your Seat’ Backpack Looks Convenient And Comfortable [via ohgizmo]