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#htc HTC's Beats Audio deal is seeing its first fruits come forth with their Sensation update, the Sensation XE. It's sure to sound great; it even has its own pair of Beats by Dre headphones. More »

NTT DoCoMo, Fujitsu, NEC and Panasonic are discussing a joint venture with Samsung that could be created as early as next year, Reuters reported recently. The companies will develop new smartphone baseband chips in an attempt to compete directly with Qualcomm, which currently has an 80% grip on the baseband chip industry. NTT DoCoMo will be the majority owner in the Japan-based joint venture and the total investment is expected to be about $390 million. The joint venture will help each firm cut down procurement costs. Samsung has considered using the new chips in its future family of GALAXY-branded handsets, but the group will also sell the new chips to other smartphone manufacturers. NTT DoCoMo, Fujitsu, NEC, Panasonic and Samsung have not yet announced formal plans for the venture. Read ...

Apple’s iPhone 4 might still be the best-selling smartphone in the world 14 months after its release in June of last year, but apparently only nerds and old people are buying the handset. Speaking with GeekWire, president of HTC America Martin Fichter recently shed some light on the smartphone scene after dropping his daughter off at college. “I talked to a few of the kids on her floor. And none of them has an iPhone because they told me: ‘My dad has an iPhone,’” the executive said. “There’s an interesting thing that’s going on in the market. The iPhone becomes a little less cool than it was. They were carrying HTCs. They were carrying Samsungs. They were even carrying some Chinese manufacture’s [sic] devices. If you look at a college campus, Mac Book Airs are cool. ...

#televisions Channel Master's newest DVR is a cord cutters dream. It lets users record over-the-air programming so they can ditch cable and still follow their local news and sports. And there's no monthly fee, just the cost of the device. More »

During Microsoft’s BUILD conference in Los Angeles, Microsoft execs took the stage and showed off a number of new tablets, notebooks and desktop computers running its latest Windows 8 operating system with the new Metro-style user interface. Steve Sinofsky demoed the operating system running on ARM-powered devices, Qualcomm powered devices and even one tablet running NVIDIA’s upcoming quad-core Tegra 3 chipset. One desktop computer, the HP Phoenix, is expected to be unveiled later this week, although full specs on the system have still not been announced. We’re impressed at the versatility of the new operating system and love that it can run anything from a small netbook with 1GB of RAM to a gaming rig running multiple graphics cards in SLI. Microsoft will also be giving ...

#watchthis The Bellagio water fountains ain't got nothing on this. This water fountain in Osaka Station, Japan is so amazing that it can tell you the time, draw pictures of leaves, show music notes, spell words and do a ton more. It's like watching animation but with water. [Freshome] More »

On September 8th, rumors surfaced suggesting that Microsoft’s Steven Sinofsky would show off a Windows 8-powered Samsung tablet this week during the company’s BUILD conference, and the latest leak lends a bit of credibility to those reports. A convincing image of the tablet in a BUILD-branded box with a Samsung logo was posted on Weibo, a Chinese social network similar to Twitter. It is hard to decipher how big the display is from the photo. Other rumors have pointed to a quad-core processor from Intel, but the full specs are still unclear. The BUILD keynote kicks off at 12:00 p.m. Eastern on Tuesday, so we’re sure we will hear a lot more about the device in just a few hours. Stay tuned. [Via This is my next] Read

Western Digital has a new iOS and Android app that works with the My Book Live (an external hard drive). When you plug the My Book Live into your router at home, you can access all the files through the app, from anywhere in the world. More »

#watchthis Italian artists Sten and Lex have created a building-sized mural using a stencil method they call "hole school." The duo apply a series of stencils to their canvas—in this case a building—then slice out and paint strips to create amazingly life-like images. More »

Apple’s iPhone 4 has been the best-selling smartphone in the world since it launched over 14 months ago in June 2010, but the iPhone 5 is even more highly anticipated than the current-generation model was ahead of its release. According to a recent survey conducted by RBC Capital Markets, Apple’s iPhone 5 is seeing “unprecedented demand” ahead of its release, which is expected next month. Headed by analyst Mike Abramsky, the investment bank commissioned a survey of 2,200 people between August 2nd and August 10th, and found that 31% of respondents were very likely or somewhat likely to purchase an iPhone 5 once it launches. Ahead of the iPhone 4 release last year, a similar RBC survey found that 25% of consumers planned to purchase the smartphone. Read on for more. The ...

#monstermachines How do you move a 16,000 pound M198 Howitzer, with its crew and ammo, 50 miles over impossible terrain in one night? You get yourself a Super Stallion, the biggest and strongest air pony in the US military. More »

Market research firm Nielsen on Tuesday revealed the 20 most popular Android applications in the United States. Using data obtained from metered device usage as opposed to observations from surveys as most similar data is collected, Nielsen studied Android owners’ app usage over the past month. The result is a ranking of the platform’s top-20 applications by active reach, or the percentage of Android device owners who used each app within the past 30 days. Google’s Android Market topped the charts overall as well as among men and women alike, with a reach of nearly 91%. Google Maps was the second most popular app overall with a reach of 74.6%, and the app was No. 2 behind the Android Market for men with 77.1%. Gmail was third among men (75.5%), Google Search was fourth (7 ...

The Samsung Galaxy S might be old news already, but it hasn't been forgotten by its maker just yet. A firmware update for the previous flagship of the Korean company, which brings its Android version number to 2.3.5 just surfaced online.What we have here is a Samsung-written ROM, but it's not an official release so if you want to try it now, you'd be doing it at your own risk. Leaked ROMs...

Mike first covered Amie Street back in 2006. At the time, he was a big fan. Back then, the startup was targeting a new music model, which allowed musicians to upload their songs to Amie Street's platform, offering those tracks to listeners for free. The more downloads the songs attracted, the price would slowly increase -- the price then indicating the song's popularity. In what now looks like a savvy decision, Amie Street sold to Amazon last September for an undisclosed amount, deciding to focus its efforts on Songza: The social Internet radio service it acquired in 2008. Today, after much iterating and tinkering, Songza is launching free mobile apps for iOS and Android that allow users to create and share personalized music collections -- in the comfort of the cloud. Songza Co-founder and ...

The HTC Runnymede is one of the most anticipated Android offerings to hit the market this Fall. After all, the droid is expected to be the first product of the recently announced partnership between the Taiwanese manufacturer and the Los Angeles based Beats Electronics.Today, we have the first press shot of the music oriented droid. In terms of specs, we already know that the smartphone will...

AT&T announced on Monday it will offer Acer’s Iconia Tab A501 Android Honeycomb tablet beginning on September 18th. We first saw the Iconia Tab during CTIA in March, though we weren’t terribly impressed with the initial product. The tablet is equipped with a 10.1-inch 1280 x 800-pixel resolution screen, support for AT&T’s HSPA+ network, a dual-core 1GHz NVIDIA Tegra2 processor, a full size USB port, a microSD card slot, a 5-megapixel rear-facing camera and a 2-megapixel front-facing camera for video chats. The Acer Iconia Tab A501 will be available in AT&T stores and online for $479.99 but AT&T says customers can pay a subsidized $329.99 price for the tablet if they opt to sign a two-year contract with a 3GB monthly plan. Read on for the full press release ...

The BlackBerry Bold Touch 9900 already has the title of the thinnest smartphone to come from RIM. The rest of its measures however, could have been more pocket friendly, leaving a lot of BlackBerry fans out there, wanting a device, which, in terms of size, is more in line with the previous generation of BlackBerry Bold handsets.As you can see in the picture above, RIM is about to answer...

#gadgets The Powerbag is a backpack, a sling, a tablet bag and a portable charging station for your mobile devices. The convertible bag is also roomy enough to carry your books, clothes and other personal items. More »

TechCrunch Disrupt finalist Everpix is a new service that automatically organizes and combines all your photo libraries into an elegant interface, whether they're stored on the desktop or in the cloud. It supports traditional desktop software programs, like Adobe Lightroom, Aperture and iPhoto, for example, as well as online services like Facebook, Flickr, Picasa and Instagram. It will soon be able to automatically upload photos from all your mobile devices, too. And it even supports integration with Gmail. Everpix runs as a little utility on your computer (Mac-only for now), fetching the photos from online services and local galleries. You can configure which folders it should monitor, so it won't import all the photos on your hard drive, and the online services you use. With the Gmail integration, ...

Qualcomm is one of biggest players (if not the biggest) in the mobile chipset space, and their dominance of the market is forcing other manufacturers to seek alternative strategies. While Qualcomm's huge presence has helped shape the market, a group of Asian companies are looking to form an alliance that will reduce their reliance on Qualcomm's products and instead develop and rely on their own. NTT DoCoMo, Samsung, Fujitsu, NEC, and Panasonic Mobile Communications are currently negotiating the possibility of a joint venture that could start operations as early as next year, Reuters reports.