BlackBerry PlayBook 2.0 pictures and hands-on

BlackBerry has finally released its PlayBook 2.0 operating system bringing with it a host of new features -most importantly email and calendar options. But has it been worth the wait and do the new additions now make it the best budget tablet on the market?

Messages

When the PlayBook was announced in 2010 we were promised email, when it launched in 2011 we were promised email, finally after all that waiting we now have email beyond just accessing it via your BlackBerry smartphone.
The good news is, is that the PlayBook email client is a joy to use. Signing in and setting up your email account is simply a case of entering your email and password and if you use a service such as gmail the software will do the rest for you.

Once you've done that you can start checking your emails and emailing people without their needing to have a BlackBerry.
Here you get all the usual email features. You can choose to have your emails automatically download images or not, send them on, put them into a specific folder or go full screen if it is something you need to read properly.

LG Optimus 4X HD, Optimus 3D Max and Optimus Vu get the hands-on treatment

LG has been announcing its new handsets over the last week, one a day, in the run-up to Mobile World Congress 2012 - where it'll presumably have nothing to announce, but plenty to show.
Well that's no longer the case, as Italian website Telefonino.net seems to have played with the new handsets and made short videos them for all to see. No sneaky, low-res garbage either, as they're all laid out in full high-definition for you to enjoy - although, naturally, they're all in narrated in Italian.
Above we have the Optimus 4X HD, the most conventional of the line-up, offering a Tegra 3 quad-core chipset and a 4.7-inch HD IPS display. Even if you speak no Italian it's worth a view just to see how Ice Cream Sandwich has been implemented and to marvel at the fact that "pinch to zoom" in Italian appears to be "pinch to zoom".
The Optimus 4X HD looks lightning fast. The lockscreen looks innovative and the feel of ICS has mostly been preserved, although some of LG's icons looks a little bland, we have to say. The video shows little of the design and focuses mostly on the app tray and customisation of the homescreen. Still, it looks a solid step forward from the Tegra 2 Optimus 2X, which never really felt comfortable, or fast.
Next up is the LG Optimus Vu. This is a rival to the Samsung Galaxy Note and it's size and the inclusion of a stylus suggest it's aimed mostly at the Korean market, but it's notable because of its odd 4:3 display aspect. It's the very definition of phablet at 5-inches.
The chap in the video is even good enough to put it side-by-side with the aforementioned Samsung device for a quick comparison. Interestingly, the Optimus Vu shares many design highlights with the Prada Phone by LG 3.0 that we reviewed recently.
Finally we have the LG Optimus 3D Max. One of the big boasts of this phone is that it now offers a complete 3D platform, including video editing. Although the phone is slimmer than the original, it’s launching on Gingerbread and the UI looks frighteningly similar to the last version, if a little faster.
So, having seen these three models (and remember there is also the new L-Style devices to investigate) it does look very much as though the LG Optimus 4X HD will be the star of the Mobile World Congress show.

Android 'Smoked by Windows Phone'

How quick is Windows Phone 7 exactly? Much quicker than the fastest Android handsets apparently. That's according to Microsoft, which has turned its "Smoked by Windows Phone" stunt from CES into a fully blown ad campaign.
The premise is that fandroids pitch their Android smartphone against a Windows Phone 7 handset (the HTC Titan II) to see which handset performs everyday tasks the quickest.
"Last month, we kicked off Smoked by Windows Phone at CES as a fun way of showing the world why Windows Phone is simply faster at the real stuff that real people do on their smartphones every day," explained Ben Rudolph on the Windows Team Blog.
"Since the show, where we won 88 per cent of our challenges (95 per cent, including the wins from our tour of California) against the best smartphones in the business, we’ve seen a huge swell of support for Smoked."
Apparently, WP7 fans demanded an ad campaign featuring the challenges. So now, Microsoft has posted a series of 15 to 30-second videos of the action on sites such as Forbes.com, Entertainment Tonight and Geek.com.