Nokia Amber update coming in late August, early SeptemberNokia Amber update coming in late August, early SeptemberNokia Amber update coming in late August, early SeptemberNokia Amber update coming in late August, early September

Nokia Amber update coming  in late August, early September

13 August, 2013 | Comments (20) | Post your comment

Tags: Nokia, Windows Phone

We know everything about the Nokia Amber update, except for the launch date. We had heard August from Nokia Spain's Twitter, but those social networking accounts are often unreliable. Now Nokia PR at the Lumia 925 launch in Taiwan says late August, early September is the target.
That's good news, but unfortunately there's some bad news too – apparently, Nokia will prioritize the Lumia 920 update, which potentially means lower profile devices will have to wait. That wouldn’t be ideal, considering the humble Lumia 520 has exploded in popularity.
The Nokia Amber release for Windows Phone 8 handsets is a superset of the GDR2 update from Microsoft and will be available for the whole WP8 Lumia range with some small omissions (no FM radio for the Lumia 620, which doesn’t have the hardware for it). Note that the Lumia 925 and 1020 have Amber installed out of box.

You can read the full changelog, but the highlights are the Smart Camera app, Glance screen and updates to the HERE suit. There will be call and blocking too.

New BlackBerry 9720 brings QWERTY keyboard, old design

13 August, 2013 | Comments (8) | Post your comment

Tags: BlackBerry, QWERTY

Oh, BlackBerry! The company just announced the new BlackBerry 9720, a BlackBerry OS 7.1 phone with a 2.8" HVGA touchscreen and a hardware QWERTY keyboard. That's right, this isn't a Q5 alternative, just a leftover design (the Samoa that leaked a while back).


The phone is firmly low-end and is running an OS that’s about as current as Windows Phone 7 or Symbian. That said, we have to admit there's a painful lack of phones with a hardware keyboard, especially when you consider that even the BlackBerry Q5, the current cheapest BlackBerry 10 handset, is pretty pricey.
Besides the keyboard there's only things like BBM that the 9720 has going for it. The 1,450mAh battery won't impress anyone with the 7 hours of talk time and the 800MHz CPU with 512MB RAM seems outdated even before a 2011 model like the Bold Touch 9900. Really now, that was two years ago to the month.
"It's perfect for customers upgrading from a feature phone or entry-level Android or Windows Phone device," says the press release and there's some truth to that - it would make a good feature phone replacement.