Apple trims price of iPad Air and iPad Mini for Black Friday

iPhone and iPad Mini 2 discounts a non-starter, though.

Apple has cut the price of its flagship iPad and first-generation micro tablet for 24 hours, as the buying bonanza-cum-newly-minted-Xmas-tradition that is Black Friday gets underway.
Buy an iPad Air from the Apple Store today and you’ll qualify for a £31 discount on the 16GB model in its Wi-Fi-only and 3G flavours, bringing the asking price down to £368. Reductions on the 32GB, 64GB and 128GB models are £41, £51 and £61 respectively.

Disappointingly, there’s no discount on the iPad 2, aka the slate that Apple’s diktats insist we refer to as the ‘iPad mini with Retina Display.

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Top 5 iPhone 5S alternatives

Other smartphones are available....

There’s an awful a lot to love about the iPhone 5S. But there’s a lot that people aren’t so keen on too.
Problems with iMessage and a divisive new version of Apple's operating system mean that for every person who loves iOS 7, there’s one who preferred iOS 6.
Look no further than our poll to see just how much His Iveness’s meisterwerk has split opinion.
Add to that glitches with gyroscope and compass levels, random reboots, reports that up to 25% of iOS users experience motion sickness due to the software’s whizzy animations and issues with logouts and it’s fair to say not everything is rosy in iPhone 5S land.
The good news is that you’re ready to leave the walled-garden of the iPhone and take a walk on the wilder, less restricted shores of Android and Windows Phone, there are plenty of cool smartphones to choose from.
We’ve corralled the pick of the year’s handset objets de desir right here to help you make your mind up.
 

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Samsung Galaxy Note 3 bundled with free Galaxy Gear smartwatch

Flavor Flav-style massive timepiece up for grabs gratis.

One of the UK’s largest retailers is offering Samsung’s debut smartwatch for free when customers shell out for the Galaxy Note 3, amid reports that consumers’ response to the smartphone peripheral is more than a little disappointing.
Under the terms of Phones 4U’s offer, gadget-fanciers who buy the Note 3 on a two-year monthly contract at £42.99 per month before Thursday (that’s November 14th, date fans) qualify for a free Samsung Galaxy Gear.
Depending on where you do your gadget-shopping, the smartwatch is normally priced between £240 and £299 or so.
Alternatively, you can pick up Note 3 for £39.99 per month and shell out £99.99 upfront for the Gear. [Affects voiceover voice] ‘It really is up to you’.
Phones 4U’s promotion comes after evidence that the Gear was being returned by a frightening one out of three customers at Best Buy stores in the US, for reasons that have yet to be fully determined.

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iPad mini 2 on sale today from Apple, supply shortages looming already?

But for how long?

The iPad mini 2 is on sale now at the Apple Store, defying rumours that the tech giant would be forced to delay the slate due to manufacturing problems and stock shortages.
At the time of writing, the space grey and silver-white models were both in stock in all storage iterations. However, some models are in short supply already, it seems.

Order the space-grey Wi-Fi-only model in either the 16GB or 32GB flavour and you’re looking at a paltry wait of between one and three days before it’s dispatched. But if you want any the Wi-Fi-only 64GB or 128GB models or any of the 4G-capable editions, you’re warned to expect a wait of between five and ten days.
Choose the silver-white iPad mini 2 in any storage option and it's the same story, with delays of between five and ten days for it to be despatched in every iteration except the Wi-Fi only 16GB and 32GB iterations. As with the space-grey colourway, these ought to sent out within three days of reciept of your order.

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Moto G gets priced up ahead of launch

Cheap SIM-free price

Motorola’s Moto G smartphone isn’t due to get the official nod until September 13th. But Amazon UK appears to have got trigger happy, revealing the price and firming-up rumours about the device’s spec sheet.
The mid-tier Android phone will cost just £159.99 when it’s launched tomorrow. That’s for a 16GB model, with higher pricing expected for more capacious devices.
The rear shell will be available in a number of different, unspecified colours, while the screen will come in at a more than ample 4.5-inches. A quad-core processor completes the picture, suggesting the Moto G will be impressively specced considering the cost.

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Samsung Galaxy S5 concept packs flexible screen and aluminium unibody

Another designer gets all ‘what-if?’ on us.

The next flagship Galaxy S smartphone will be a radical break with form. Or at least it will be if the Samsung-fixated sorts at galaxys5info.com have anything to do with it.
A designer at the site has worked up a concept phone packing the flexible screen technology that’s been earmarked for Samsung phones for what feels like ages. But which has been omitted so far, presumably because it’s not market-ready yet.
The 5.3-inch flexible OLED YOUM screen wraps around the edges of the phone, with touch-sensitive controls where you’d normally expect to find a physical volume rocker. The standard physical home button has gone the way of all flesh too and is replaced by a touch sensor.

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iPad air and iPad mini 2 unveiled, more powerful and dropping November

Apple takes the fight to low-cost slates.

Apple landed a heavy one-two punch combination on its rivals in the burgeoning Christmas tablet market tonight, with the unveiling of new, significantly upgraded full-size and mini iPads.
The new full-size tablet has been re-christened the iPad air and was touted at the press event as the "biggest leap forward ever for the full-size iPad".

As its name suggests, it's 20% slimmer at 7.5mm thick and has slimmed down from 1.4lb to 1lb while retaining its 9.7-inch super-high-density Retina Display, thanks in part to a smaller bezel around the screen.
According to Apple's Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing Phil Schiller this makes it by some distance the "lightest full-size tablet in the world" and offers a "dramatically different experience when you hold it".
Under the bonnet, the improvements are similarly far-reaching. For the first time, the iPad air debuts the same 64-bit A7 processor as the iPhone 5S, as well as the smartphone's M7 auxiliary processor. These combine for a tablet that's purportedly eight times faster than the original iPad.
The M7 takes some of the strain off the A7 and, in the case of the more portable iPhone 5S at least, serves a secondary purpose of offering more accurate motion-tracking for improved sports and so-called 'quantified self' apps.

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Samsung Galaxy S5 to pack 16-megapixel camera?

Camera details filter through.

Samsung’s Galaxy S4 has been on sale just shy of six months or so now. But already it seems the handset’s maker’s next flagship smartphone is starting to take shape.
Over recent weeks, a slew of reports have attested that the Galaxy S5 will pack iPhone 5S-style biometric security technology. But that it will scan users’ eyeballs and not fingerprints to determine their identity.

Depending on who you believe, the S5 is also rumoured to feature a faux-leather, Galaxy Note 3-style back, an aluminium unibody construction and possibly even a flexible display. Oh and could sport the octa-core Exynos processor that some expected to debut in the S4 too.
Today, we’ve been graced with some details about the S5’s camera. And assuming they’re on-point, it sounds like it could be one of its standout features.
According to Unwired View, which picked up the story from ET News, the S5 is almost certain to pack a 16-megapixel camera – up from the 13-megapixel snapper that features on the S4.
What’s less clear is who’ll be making it. The site claims that Samsung’s LSI wing and Sony are competing to get the nod, with obvious benefits and disadvantages either way. Not least the depth of experience with SLRs that Sony would bring.

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Microsoft’s iPad attack: If tablets are 'easy' why was the Surface a flop?

Back-biting is never a good look, says Joe Minihane.

This week’s blistering attack by Microsoft’s vice president of communications Frank Shaw on Apple’s decision to release the new iWork for free, and by extension its new iPad Air, shows an astonishing level of hubris.
In a blog post that appeared just hours after Tim Cook had gazumped Microsoft and Nokia’s announcements of new Windows Phones and a new Lumia tablet, Shaw tore into Apple’s move.
According to the Big M’s man, it showed that the ‘reality distortion field’ of an Apple event had extended beyond Cupertino, suggesting the coverage of the decision to free iWork was disproportionate.
This is always a complaint of companies who feel they’ve been treated unfairly by the media, when in fact they’ve been releasing products that have simply failed to capture the imagination of tech’s hardcore or the general public.
But beyond Shaw’s complaints about iWork, it’s his comments about Microsoft Surface that are particularly interesting.
He describes the tablet as a “single, simple, affordable device that helps you both lean in and kick back”.

Surface may well let you ‘lean in and kick back’. But the simple fact is that it has been an unmitigated disaster for Microsoft.
It had to write down $900 million to cover the cost of the device, making just $853 million from sales up to July.
There’s still no official word on how many were sold, even if the tech giant claims sales doubled in the most recent quarter.
This failure to reveal numbers means the slate has been a flop, make no mistake about that.
If it had been a success, Steve Ballmer would have been shouting from the rooftops.
Shaw’s assertion that “helping folks kill time on a tablet is relatively easy. Give them books, music, videos and games, and they’ll figure out the rest. Pretty much all tablets do that,” is also hilarious.

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HTC One and One Max get update to Android 4.3 Jelly Bean

Sense 5.5 incoming too.

HTC has begun rolling out Android 4.3 and HTC Sense 5.5 to its flagship One phone and its phablet cousin the One Max, bringing a suite of spiffy new features to the handsets.
Originally scheduled to arrive on European smartphones back in September, Android 4.3 isn’t a massive upgrade over 4.2. But it’s not without its merits, not least among them the fact it adds support for multiple users with security-protected profiles.
The fresh software (fresh-ish, anyway) also enables One and One Max users to pair their handsets with Bluetooth Smart accessories.
And the latest version of HTC’s Sense custom skin isn’t to be sneezed at either. This offers the chance to disable BlinkFeed and revamped, improved Camera, music and Gallery apps.

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