Author: Stuff writer

LG has introduced a new variant of the G3 dubbed the “G3 Screen”. As its moniker suggests, the G3 Screen has a larger (but lower-res) screen than the regular G3 – a 5.9in full HD screen compared to the G3’s 5.5in 2K display. But that’s not the only big difference: there’s also a new octo-core processor on board, and it’s actually been designed and manufactured by LG. THE POWER OF EIGHT The ARM-based NUCLUN processor is LG’s first mobile CPU, and features four cores running at 1.5GHz and four at 1.2GHz. The first batch are used for intensive processing and…

Spare a moment of silence and pour a drink out for Nokia. Its name has finally been axed from gracing Lumia smartphones. Instead, Microsoft will replace it with, well, ‘Microsoft’, ushering in a new era of Microsoft Lumia phones. Have we said Microsoft enough yet? Microsoft. There. It’s unclear when the new Nokia-less phones will land, but the name itself isn’t completely dead. Areas of Nokia that Microsoft’s vast riches didn’t snap up can still use the name, and Microsoft can still choose to label its less powerful ‘feature phones’ with the legendary Finnish brand, for the next ten years.…

It’s no longer a case of who’s getting in on wearable tech but who isn’t – and Lenovo is no longer content to be the latter. The company’s Smartband SW-B100, which has popped up on the Lenovo website, looks a lot like the Fitbit Flex – a rubbery wristband that presumably syncs data with your smartphone. With Asus and even Xiaomi making fitness bands, you might wonder what Lenovo is bringing to the table with this one. The band is available in two colours: blue and orange. As far as compatibility requirements go, it seems to work with Windows (Windows…

Survival horror games, it seems, are back in fashion. Whether it’s poking around abandoned asylums in indie hit Outlast, treading carefully through the same stretch of corridor again and again only to be suddenly stopped in your tracks by something horrendous in Silent Hills’ playable teaser, or confronting the restless dead head-on in The Evil Within, it’s clear gamers get a big kick out of feeling powerless, weak and very, very scared. And then there’s Alien: Isolation, a big budget game that promises to bring primal, gut-wrenching fear back to the Alien universe by using the original movie as its…

Facebook is a great place to keep tabs on friends and share kid/pet/travel photos, but not so much to have really focussed conversations – or get weird without being judged by loved ones. That’s where Rooms comes in, and it’s very much an old concept remixed for a mobile world. At its core, Rooms isn’t exactly groundbreaking: it’s an app that allows you to generate message boards and chat about anything and everything with random strangers and pals alike. The difference here is that you can create them on the fly, and it’s solely a mobile, app-centric experience. More interestingly…

Asus has an event scheduled for 28th October – and it could well be that we’ll be getting our first official look at new ZenFone and ZenWatch models. At the IFA tech expo in early September, Asus announced that its elegant Android Wear-running ZenWatch would be out by Christmas. But now, its Japan branch has released a handful of teaser images that hint – maybe – at a new ZenWatch, as well as a new ZenFone. The other possibility is that the watch is the model we already saw at IFA, rather than a brand new smartwatch. Being optimistic Looking…

Tired of the traditional inbox? Email triage apps like Mailbox let you easily sort your messages, but Google thinks it has a new way forward with Inbox, a smarter, simplified way to access Gmail. Available on Android and iOS, Inbox brings a dash of Google Now magic to the Gmail experience, highlighting important messages in an easy-to-read feed, bundling together complementary messages, and bringing in helpful elements that can get you in and out of email faster. For example, Inbox can pull in real-time flight status info and package location details, as well as bring in a map of a…

The Raspberry Pi Foundation hopes to have a new piece of hardware in the market by the end of 2014 or beginning of 2015. It’s been a long time coming, but Raspberry Pi founder Eben Upton has finally announced plans to release a portable touchscreen display for the budget single board mini-PC. It obviously has a lot of applications, but the simplest way to describe it is that it’s now possible to turn your Raspberry Pi into a (rather bulky) tablet. Speaking at TechCrunch Disrupt, Upton showed off a prototype of the actual display, a VGA seven-inch capacitive touch panel…

Yes, we know there have been supposedly “real” hoverboards before that turned out to be faker than an honest politician, but the new Hendo board is different – and it’s genuine. The deck uses electromagnet technology based on the same principles as a Maglev train, which means there’s an interesting, and limiting, proviso: it’ll only hover above certain non-ferrous metal surfaces. A big sheet of copper or aluminium will be fine. A concrete car park? Not so much. Hendo hovers around an inch off the ground, and can carry up to around 135kg of weight, which gives you an idea…

Microsoft’s acquisition of Nokia’s mobile division caused some confusion in branding, since the rest of the iconic Finnish company remained intact. But it doesn’t sound like that’ll be a problem for much longer. Following reports that Microsoft would be dropping the Nokia branding this holiday season, the company rolled out a Facebook post in France today saying that the smartphone line will soon fall under new branding, using the “Microsoft Lumia” name instead. Additionally, Microsoft confirmed to The Verge that similar branding changes will likewise roll out into other territories in the coming weeks, completing the transition worldwide. Microsoft is…