BlackBerry cancels ‘Live’ conference and two low-end devices

The bad news just keeps rolling in for the Waterloo-based BlackBerry following the announcement of its third quarter loss. The Verge reported BlackBerry will be calling off its annual conference, BlackBerry Live, for 2014 and making it the first cancellation for the said event since it started in 2002. The Wall Street Journal also reported that two low-end devices for the emerging market have been shuffled off but there are “several” higher-end devices that are still being developed.

HP rumoured to unveil ‘cheap’ smartphones by end of 2013

Could we be getting more of these soon?

The end of the year is fast approaching but it seems HP wants to make one last hurrah, if rumours are to be believed that is. The Verge cited a report from The Information claiming the IT company will be unveiling at least six new handsets before the year closes. The devices will be targeted at emerging markets such as China, the Philippines, and India and will be priced somewhere between US$200 and $250 sans contract. Of course, this rumour has to be taken with a grain of salt as we have about a week left until the New Year.

Review: HTC Desire (2013)

By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla

HTC continues its roll out of smartphones in different segments. The mid-tier HTC Desire blends the familiar front aluminum fascia of the HTC One with the polycarbonate rear casing of last year's HTC One X and X+. With a 4.5-inch qHD display, 4G-LTE connectivity, a 1.4Ghz dual-core processor, 1GB of RAM and 8GB of storage, the HTC Desire is available from Bell, Virgin Mobile, Fido, Rogers, Koodo and Videotron in Canada.

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SlideShow: Google's Moto G smartphone and first impressions

Text and photos by Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla

The Moto X's younger brother, the Moto G, is Google's attempt at capturing customers in emerging markets and covering the feature phone void once dominated by Nokia.

The Moto G is an impressive smartphone which looks and feels very much like the Moto X except it is slightly heavier and thicker. Performance is surprisingly speedy for most functions and call quality is superb on the TELUS network.

The Moto G runs on Android 4.3 and features a 1.2 GHz Snapdragon 400 quad-core processor, 1GB of RAM and 8GB of storage space (around 5.2 GB of which is usable) although users automatically receive 50 GB from Google Drive. No contract price for this smartphone is $200 without a contract.

On the flipside, Moto G has no LTE connectivity, no NFC, one less microphone and lacks all the gesture-based controls, the Just Talk voice functionality and the active notifications that were showcased with the Moto X. You don't even get a wall adapter, just the USB cable to charge. Motorola has had to make choices on what to keep and what to feature and so far, it looks like they made the right choices.