Exciting news for Android and Google lovers came out of the annual Google I/O developers conference yesterday.  The keynote speech from CEO Larry Page, which lasted more than 3 hours, announced a new variant on the Samsung Galaxy S4.  The new Google version of the popular smartphone will run on a stock Android operating system, a potentially appealing prospect for a lot of tech geeks.

The Samsung Galaxy series has built a huge following due to its impressive hardware.  On the S4, a 1080p screen with 441 ppi, a 13 megapixel camera, and a powerful Qualcomm Snapdragon processor are among its most impressive pieces of hardware.

The stock Android Jellybean 4.2 OS on the upcoming Google S4 eliminates the Nexus branding that other Galaxy devices have held and comes with a completely unlocked bootloader.  The themes and skins that have identified Galaxy software will be replaced by a basic and direct Android interface, and it will have no preinstalled apps bogging it down.  That will make for a cleaner and more customizable phone, ideal for developers who seek the capability to modify their devices (hence its announcement at the developers’ conference).

Perhaps because of Google’s backing or perhaps because of the lack of Nexus branding, the stripped-down, unlocked Google S4 will carry a lower price tag than other Galaxy iterations.   When it hits the stores June 26, AT&T and T-Mobile members will be able to pick up this developer’s dream device for a relatively light $649.

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Foxconn’s Hon Hai Precision Industry posted a 19.2 percent year-over-year decline in revenue for the first quarter, with sales likely affected by weak demand for Apple’s iPhone 5, according to an analyst.

The Taiwanese contract manufacturer said on Wednesday its revenue for the quarter was NT$809 billion (US$27 billion), although net profit was up 8.4 percent year-over-year, reaching NT$16.4 billion.

Hon Hai Precision Industry is the main manufacturing arm of Foxconn Technology Group, which is best known as a supplier to U.S. tech giant Apple. The partnership between the two companies has helped fuel Foxconn’s rapid growth in recent years, especially in China where it has over 1.2 million employees.

But in this year’s first quarter, sales of Apple’s iPhone 5 have been in decline, which was the main reason for the drop in Hon Hai’s revenue, said Arthur Liao, an analyst with Fubon Securities Investment Services Co. In addition, consumers are buying up Apple’s lower-cost iPad mini over the more profitable iPad, he said.

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We all love our smartphones, and rely on them for a lot of daily tasks.  But we’re all left with the same frustration when they run out of power in the middle of an important call or while watching a video.

Fortunately, there are some easy steps you can take to extend the life of your battery.  Here are nine of the best.

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Not long after rumors that Nokia’s new Lumia 928 would lead Verizon’s upcoming lineup, Nokia has announced details on their new Lumia 925, which will be debuting with T-Mobile.

The new Lumia 925 boasts an aluminum and polycarbonate body that’s both lighter and thinner than its predecessor, the 920.  The 925 delivers a 4.5 inch 1280x768 display and runs Windows 8 with a 1.5 GHz dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon processor.  Its design specs are an undeniable improvement on Nokia’s current offering, giving it a higher-end feel and appearance.  It will also have an improved software experience, particularly with camera operation.

T-Mobile made waves in March when they announced a shift to no-contract mobile plans, in addition to offering unlimited data.  These offerings disrupted the normal 2-year-contract and capped-data model.  Although they have the fewest number of subscribers amongst the top four carriers, T-Mobile’s no-contract mantra has gotten them a lot of attention.  The addition of a hotly anticipated, high-end smartphone like the 925 to their lineup may serve to reinforce their foothold.

The Lumia 925 is expected to carry a $600+ price tag when it lands in stores this summer.  Typically, no-contract cell phone plans offer minimal - if any - reductions on hardware costs, although they do provide financing plans which allow customers access to new smartphones without the extreme up-front cost. 

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Nokia has announced the long-rumored Lumia 928, which will be an exclusive to Verizon Wireless when it goes on sale next week.

The phone is part of Nokia's effort to improve its fortunes in the U.S. market, where it only sold 400,000 phones during the first quarter of the year.

The 928 is an improved version of the Lumia 920. Both phones are powered by a 1.5 GHz dual-core processor from Qualcomm and have a 4.5-inch screen with a 1280 x 768 pixel resolution and an 8.7-megapixel camera. The Lumia 920 drew criticism for its weight, 186 grams. With the Lumia 928 Nokia made a slightly lighter phone at 162 grams.

It will be available in white or black at Verizon Wireless stores and online beginning May 16 for $99 after a $50 mail-in rebate, with a new two-year customer agreement, according to Nokia. For a limited time, buyers will also get a $25 credit for Windows Phone apps and games.

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Canonical on Wednesday announced its next moves on the way to market with a Linux-powered phone.

By the end of this month Canonical plans to equip its employees with early versions of its widely hyped “Ubuntu phone” for testing and refinement.

“We should drive as hard as we can to making it so that we can use our phones with Ubuntu Touch as our real daily phones as soon as possible,” said Rick Spencer, Canonical's vice president of Ubuntu engineering, in a Wednesday blog post. “Really eat our own dog food, so to speak.”

'User data is retained'

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AT&T is now following in the footsteps of Sprint and T-Mobile by creating a separate service for customers who are (understandably) wary of signing up for a two-year mobile contract.  Like Virgin Mobile and Ultra Mobile, AT&T’s Aio Wireless offers relatively low-cost options without requiring a long-term commitment.  This affordable, no-contract option is becoming increasingly appealing for both customers and carriers.

Aio prepaid plans range from $40-$70/month, which are common price levels for prepaid mobile plans.  Every Aio plan offers unlimited data, talk, and text.  The different prices for each plan are justified by the speed of the data that’s delivered, and what percentage of it is “high speed.”  None of the Aio plans offer LTE, limiting their service to 4G data speeds topping out at 4 Mbps.

New customers to a contract-free Aio Wireless plan are offered a range of smartphones when signing up.  Although you won’t have access to the discounts you get when agreeing to a two-year AT&T contract, some smartphone prices are set low enough to be well within the grasp of most consumers.    A very capable Nokia Lumia 620, for example, will run you $179 if you buy it through Aio Wireless.  For any smartphone running on a high-end Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, that’s an eye-catching price point.  Aio also offers phones from Samsung, ZTE, and other manufacturers.

Right now, Aio plans are only available in Tampa, Orlando, and Houston, but AT&T has plans to open up more markets soon. 

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Nokia has expanded its line of phones with the Asha 501, which comes with an improved touch user interface to help keep low-cost Android-based products at bay.

The launch of the second new member of the Asha family in about two weeks follows Nokia's announcement last month that sales of its mobile phones in the first quarter had dropped by 21 percent year-on- year, to 55.8 million units. The product family has become important for Nokia because a lot of the future growth is expected to come from low-end smartphones, and its Windows Phone-based products are still not cheap enough to address the whole market.

The new phone and the underlying platform is, in part, the result of last year's acquisition of Norwegian company Smarterphone.

The Asha 501 will cost $99 before taxes and subsidies when it starts shipping in June. The GSM phone has a 3-inch screen, a 3.2-megapixel camera, Wi-Fi and a choice between one or two SIM cards. Offering the latter has become a must in many developing countries.

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Apple retook its spot as China's fifth largest smartphone vendor in the first quarter, as the country's market grew to triple the size of the U.S.'s.

Apple had an 8 percent share of the smartphone market, while Samsung continued to lead all vendors with a 20 percent share, according to research firm Canalys. Trailing behind Samsung were Yulong Computer Telecommunication Scientific, Huawei, and Lenovo.

In last year's third and fourth quarter, Apple fell to the sixth spot. But iPhone 5 sales, along with price cuts to older iPhone models, propelled the company's smartphone shipments in China's intensely competitive market, said Nicole Peng, an analyst with Canalys.

Samsung and Apple were the only two foreign companies to rank among China's top ten smartphone vendors. In the first quarter, about 68 percent of all shipments to the nation's market were from domestic vendors, Peng said. Smartphone popularity in China is soaring to the point that the market now dwarfs the U.S.'s. Vendors shipped 82 million smartphones to the Chinese market during the quarter, but only 27 million to the U.S.

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Taiwan and Hong Kong may be only the beginning of Xiaomi’s expansion outside China. The popular Chinese vendor of low-priced handsets is aiming at getting into five more markets next year.

“This year, we will only do Hong Kong and Taiwan,” said CEO Lei Jun on Wednesday. “At the same time, we will also look at next year possibly doing five other markets. This year we will look at which five markets will be the easiest to do.”

Xiaomi may not be a major name outside of China, but the company has built one of the hottest smartphone brands in the country. Crowds of fans congregate for its product launches and pre-orders for the devices run into the hundreds of thousands. Last year, Xiaomi sold 7 million handsets, and this year it hopes to double sales to 15 million.

The company has thrived by selling low-priced handsets built with higher-end specs. One of its latest smartphones, the Xiaomi 2S, features a quad-core Qualcomm processor and a 4.3-inch HD screen, at a starting price of 1999 yuan (US$322) when bought without a contract.

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Two months ago, everything about i-mate’s Intelegent Windows 8 phone screamed vaporware. Today, the handset is back, with specs that suggest it's very much real. Shoot, PCWorld has even seen videos of it in action.

Yes—Windows 8 on a phone

It's no wonder the Intelegent made waves when it was announced earlier this year. In addition to the phone itself—which, to be clear, runs the full-blown Windows 8 operating system, not the Windows Phone OS—i-mate promised a docking station that would turn the Intelegent into a desktop workstation. It was all the Windows 8 you could need, all in one place.

However, i-mate wasn’t actually demonstrating the device in public.

An exclusive story by Brier Dudley of the Seattle Times showed only product renderings, and claimed that the Intelegent would be “unveiled” at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. (Press materials were prepared by i-mate for the show, but the company didn’t release them publicly.) On i-mate’s website, a short message promised “More information coming soon.” And that message remains on the site today.

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Alibaba Group hopes to make a dent in Google’s dominance of China’s smartphone market, and has high hopes that handsets running the company’s mobile OS will reach sales of 30 million units.

“We targeted for 30 million activated units in the next 12 months or so,” said Wang Jian, the company’s chief technology officer in an interview on Tuesday. “That’s about 10 percent market share of China’s smartphones.”

The Chinese e-commerce giant wants to popularize its Linux-based Alibaba Mobile Operating System (AMOS) after the OS collided with Google last year. The U.S. search giant contends that the OS is a variant of its Android OS, but built with software incompatibilities. This set off a dispute that has threatened to drive away top Android handset makers from using Alibaba’s still-fledgling OS.

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Intel revealed key details of its redesigned Atom microprocessor product line this morning. Code-named Silvermont, this all-new microarchitecture marks the first time that Intel will use its 22nm manufacturing process and 3D Tri-gate transistor technology to build a system-on-a-chip (SoC) platform for devices ranging from smartphones and tablets to microservers.

Intel

Intel’s current Atom line is based on the five-year-old Bonnell microarchitecture introduced back in 2008. Although Intel switched from a 45nm manufacturing process to a 32nm process in 2012, resulting in the current Saltwell platform, Saltwell is not fundamentally different from Bonnell.

As a result of the age of their underlying architecture, Atom processors have not been competitive with mobile CPUs based on designs from the UK’s ARM Holdings. The Apple A series, Nvidia Tegra, Qualcomm Snapdragon, and Samsung Exynos mobile CPUs that power the vast majority of modern smartphones (and many non-Windows tablets) are all variations on one or another ARM platform.

Intel

Intel claims that will all change with Silvermont, and that Atom processors based on this new microarchitecture will deliver three times the performance while consuming five times less power (compared to its current-generation Atom cores, at least). “This is not just a tweak of Saltwell,” said Intel Fellow and chief architect Belli Kuttanna and at an embargoed press briefing last week, “it’s a fundamentally new design.” Kuttanna explained that many of the features present in Intel’s powerful Core series of desktop CPUs have been brought over to Silvermont, and that Silvermont SoCs will be available with up to eight CPU cores.

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Most people just want their smartphones to take great pictures of their dogs or their kids’ soccer games.

NASA is a bit more ambitious.

The space agency Friday released photos that three smartphones took from their orbit around Earth (shown above). The HTC Nexus One from Google running the Android operating system was the photographer.

How it worked

NASA combined multiple photos from the orbiting smartphones, called PhoneSats, to create images of Earth as seen from space.

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They're good enough for government work: The U.S. Department of Defense has cleared use of devices running the BlackBerry 10 operating system and Samsung’s secure version of Android called Knox.

So far, this means that both the BlackBerry Z10 and the Samsung Galaxy S4 have beaten Apple’s iPhone to achieve DoD security clearance, although iOS 6 is expected to get approval this month, according to a Reuters report.

The Pentagon also cleared the use of BlackBerry PlayBook tablets using its Enterprise Service 10 system for use on Defense Department networks, in a bid to establish a “a multivendor environment that supports a variety of state-of-the-art devices and operating systems.”

BlackBerry dominates DoD

The DoD has some 600,000 smartphone and tablet users, most of whom are BlackBerry users (around 470,000), and just 41,000 Apple users and 8700 with Android phones, most of them in testing programs. The Pentagon denied reports earlier this year that it is looking to abandon the use of BlackBerry device, but by officially clearing Samsung Knox, and soon iOS 6, the Pentagon will put more pressure on BlackBerry, which has seen its market share slide in recent years in favor of Android and iPhones.

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The CEO of Finnish smartphone upstart Jolla is stepping down to focus his energy on the development of the Sailfish operating system as the company gets ready to show its first product later this month.

Jolla, which was founded by former Nokia employees who wanted to continue the development work the Finnish phone maker had done on the MeeGo OS, is getting ready to take a shot at breaking into the smartphone market. The company demoed its Sailfish OS in November. Jolla said on Friday that it will show its first commercial smartphone this month, and begin selling it in the second half of the year.

Marc Dillon will relinquish the CEO job to serve as head of software development, but that isn't a new task as he has been in charge of the company's software development all along, according to Jolla. Dillon was CEO for only about seven months. Allowing him to focus on getting Sailfish ready "will be crucial in the months leading to the market entry of the first Jolla phone," the company said.

Tomi Pienimäki will be Jolla's new CEO as of May 6. He joins from Itella, one of the largest logistics operators in the Nordic countries, according to Jolla.

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The U.S. Department of Defense has cleared BlackBerry 10 smartphones and PlayBook tablets for use on its networks, amid reports that the department may also clear devices from Samsung Electronics and Apple.

The department has approved BlackBerry 10 smartphones and PlayBook tablets with its enterprise mobility management platform BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10 to be used on its networks, BlackBerry said Thursday.

After testing through DoD labs, the devices have been listed in the Defense Information Systems Agency’s Unified Communications Approved Product List. DISA, which manages the information infrastructure for defense, certifies commercial technology for defense use.

The company, formerly known as Research In Motion, had announced in November that its BlackBerry 10 platform was FIPS 140-2 certified. FIPS (Federal Information Processing Standard) security certification would enable government agencies to deploy BlackBerry 10 smartphones and BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10, it said.

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About half of the world’s companies will enact BYOD (bring your own device) programs by 2017 and will no longer provide computing devices to employees, a new Gartner report predicts.

Ultimately, only 15 percent of companies will never move to a BYOD model, while 40 percent will offer a choice between BYOD and employer-provided devices, according to the report by Gartner analyst David Willis, which was announced Wednesday.

While mobile computing helps make on-the-go workers more productive, the average cost of more than $600 per employee per year for company-provided devices has been difficult for many to shoulder, Willis wrote. This along with other factors, such as increased employee satisfaction, has helped drive the BYOD movement, he added.

So far, BYOD adoption is most common in companies with between $500 million and $5 billion in revenue, but there are significant differences according to geography, said Gartner. The U.S. adoption rate is double that of Europe, but the highest rate is in India, China, and Brazil, according to the report.

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BlackBerry and Samsung have separately launched security and management software with dual-personality features for their latest Z10 and Galaxy S4 smartphones, both designed to meet the demands of a growing BYOD marketplace.

Yet, it still isn’t clear when either company will make an impact with either of their products—a software package called Knox for Samsung and Balance for BlackBerry.

Dual-personality software keeps personal and work data separate on a smartphone, allowing an IT shop to quickly delete sensitive corporate data from a worker-owned smartphone should the worker lose the device or leave the company.

The problems with both the Knox and Balance products apparently resides with delays in implementations of server-side software to give IT shops or wireless carriers the controls they need over users’ smartphones, analysts said.

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Verizon has announced that it will be providing its own cloud storage service directly to customers as of today. Verizon Cloud gives Android users an off-site, in-network option to supplement the storage on their mobile device. 

Verizon Cloud is currently only compatible with a limited number of Android smartphones and tablets, including several HTC and Motorola devices and a handful of tablets, including the Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 running on a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor.  The service is also accessible through the web on Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems.  Verizon says an iOS version is imminent, as well as support for additional Android devices.  Cross-platform compatibility may go a long way towards popularizing it with smartphone users who use multiple devices.

The service starts users off with 500MB of free storage, a relatively small amount considering that many web-based cloud providers provide a number of Gigabytes for free.  Users can upgrade to 25 GB for only $3/month, though, or 125 GB for $10.

Competitors like Box, Google, and iCloud also offer applications that can be downloaded onto mobile devices, and are compatible with many more devices than Verizon Cloud is upon its launch today.  Given this embedded competition, Verizon may not intend to become a large-scale cloud storage competitor with their new tool.  It may be their intention to focus on adding value to their service as a cellular network.

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PCWorld's parent company, IDG, is once again conducting its annual Global Mobile Survey, which quizzes you on your mobile-device habits and media consumption so we can learn more about how people are using their smartphones and tablets today. Readers who participate will be entered in a drawing for a chance to win an iPad mini.

This year we want to explore whether you use your smartphone for online purchases, and if not, what's holding you back? Your feedback will help us to more closely align our mobile services with your needs, so give us a hand by taking the survey!

Take the 2013 Mobile survey

The survey is around 10-15 minutes in length. And there's a reward! Five lucky respondents who complete the survey will have a chance to win an Apple iPad mini.  Get started now.

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If you're looking for more robust security features for your business's Android phones, you're going to be waiting a while longer—at least if your company relies on hardware from the most popular Android manufacturer in the land.

Samsung has pushed back the launch of its Knox security software for Galaxy Android smartphones until summer, according to a New York Times report that claims more testing is needed before Knox finds its way into people’s hands.

Knox, a beefed-up version of the SAFE business security software already found on some current-gen Samsung handsets, was first announced in February. The software was widely expected to debut inside the Samsung Galaxy S4, which will start shipping in the next week, although Samsung never announced an official launch date for Knox.

The Times' sources say Samsung will now likely to push the release of the security software to July.

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Motorola Mobility’s Android phones infringe on a Microsoft text messaging patent, the Higher District Court of Munich ruled on Thursday.

The German court ruled that Motorola infringes on a Microsoft patent that allows a phone to break up a long text message from a sender and reassemble it for the person receiving it. The technology is used as a way to send longer text messages over the air.

The appeal was rejected and Motorola has to bear all the costs of the appeal, said Wilhelm Schneider, spokesman for the Higher District Court of Munich in an email. “An appeal against this decision was not approved,” Schneider added.

“Generally this decision prevents Motorola from selling its Android phones in Germany,” Microsoft spokesman Thomas Baumgärtner said in an email. “We are gratified the court has affirmed the District Courts original decision and that Motorola remains unable to sell infringing products in Germany,” he added.

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Microsoft has inked an agreement with China’s ZTE for its Android and Chrome patent licensing program.

Financial details of deal were not disclosed. But the agreement gives ZTE access to Microsoft patents covering phones, tablets, computers and other devices running Google’s Android and Chrome operating systems.

ZTE joins others, including Samsung, HTC and Acer, that have also signed up with Microsoft’s patent licensing program. Last week, manufacturing giant Foxconn entered into a similar agreement and is paying royalties to Microsoft for access to its patent portfolio.

Both Android and Chrome are Google-developed operating systems. But according to Microsoft, the two operating systems also use technologies patented by the company. Previously, Microsoft has filed lawsuits against Android device makers for patent infringement.

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Automobile makers should prevent drivers from using their in-vehicle electronic devices to browse the Internet and send text messages while their vehicles are moving, the U.S. Department of Transportation has recommended.

Auto makers should also lock out drivers in moving cars from reading text messages, viewing photographs, displaying scrolling text, and using video apps, the DOT’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) recommended in voluntary guidelines released this week.

“Distracted driving is a deadly epidemic that has devastating consequences on our nation’s roadways,” U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said in a statement.

The guidelines recommend that “that in-vehicle devices be designed so that they cannot be used by the driver to perform these inherently distracting activities while driving,” the NHTSA said in a report.

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A patent that Motorola Mobility used to force Apple to turn off its iCloud push mail service in Germany is likely to be invalid, the Higher Regional Court in Karlsruhe said on Wednesday—but the ban will not be lifted, a court spokeswoman said.

Apple was ordered to stop offering push mail services in Germany in February last year after the District Court in Mannheim found that Apple infringed on a Motorola patent entitled “Multiple Pager Status Synchronization System and Method,” also known as the push notification patent.

Apple took the case to Mannheim’s appellate court in Karlsruhe, where the court decided to postpone its decision until the German Federal Patent Court has ruled on the patent’s validity, Christiane Oehler, spokeswoman for the Karlsruhe appeals court said.

Similar doubts were raised about the same patent by the Mannheim court last Friday in a case between Motorola and Microsoft. That court too decided to wait for the outcome of the pending validity procedure because the patent was likely to be invalid. Neither of the German courts however disclosed why it thought the patent was invalid.

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Nokia’s latest advanced feature phone, the $72 Asha 210, comes with a physical key to access WhatsApp messaging, as well as software clients for Twitter and Facebook and appears to be keyed to the overseas markets.

The launch of the new member of the Asha family follows Nokia’s announcement last week that sales of its mobile phones in the first quarter had dropped by 21 percent year on year, to 55.8 million units. As smartphone sales slowed, sales of more basic mobile phones had helped keep Nokia afloat.

To turn around its fortunes the company is working on upgrading its line-up, and the Asha 210 is latest phone to arrive. It has a 2.4-inch screen, a 2-megapixel camera, Wi-Fi and a QWERTY keyboard. There are physical keys for both the camera and the Wi-Fi connection.

Social-network integration push

But it is the integration with social networks that Nokia hopes will help set the phone apart in a segment of the market that is getting increasingly competitive. Just below the Asha 210’s screen is a dedicated WhatsApp button that users can click on to start chatting with other users of the cross-platform mobile messaging app. WhatsApp is also integrated with the phonebook.

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Apple’s net profit dropped during the second quarter of 2013 as the company’s iPhone shipment growth slowed down, based on year-over-year comparisons.

Apple recorded a profit of $9.5 billion for the second quarter ending on March 30, falling from the $11.6 billion profit reported in the same quarter last year. The company’s revenue was $43.6 billion, growing from $39.19 billion in the year-ago quarter. Analysts expected revenue to be $42.33 billion.

IPhone sales grew, totaling 37.4 million units, compared to 35.1 million in last year’s second quarter; however, in that period last year unit shipments increased by 88 percent year over year. Mac sales were flat, totaling just under 4 million units during the quarter.

The company recorded fast growth with iPads, with shipments totaling 19.5 million during the quarter, compared to 11.8 million in the previous year’s quarter.

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The first two developer smartphones running Mozilla's upstart Firefox OS went on sale Tuesday morning and then quickly sold out.

Manufactured and sold by Spain-based Geeksphone, the new devices were both described as “developer preview” handsets intended for app makers interested in building and testing applications for Firefox OS.

"The Firefox OS Developer Preview Geeksphone devices have development versions of Firefox OS and are unlocked so that developers can use them wherever they are in the world and they are updated regularly with the latest Firefox OS build," explained Stormy Peters, Mozilla's director of websites and developer engagement, in a Monday blog post.

Down for maintenance

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There have been rumblings that Nokia’s newest, most advanced smartphone would come to market soon, but until now, it was assumed that AT&T would land the contract.  As of today, Bloomberg reports that Verizon struck a deal to put the forthcoming Lumia 928 at the head of its lineup.

To fuel the frenzy of this unexpected turn, the first images of the Lumia 928 hit the Web this morning.  Although the legitimacy of the new images hasn’t been confirmed, they seem to match what the new phone is expected to look like.

The 928 will be a variation on Lumia’s most advanced model, the 920, which was one of AT&T’s premiere models last year.  Like its predecessor, the 928 is expected to run on a state-of-the-art dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon processor.  It’s also expected to feature 32GB of NAND flash memory, wireless charging, a Carl Zeiss lens, and PureView technology for outstanding picture quality.

Those top-notch specs may be what’s been fueling the eager anticipation for the 928.  The new design — which is also expected to have a 4.5-inch AMOLED display and metal body — is geared towards optimal performance with no shortage of bells and whistles.

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