Designer Ben Ling proposes a very slight update to the Galaxy Note II, that is supposed to hit the USA stores soon. He imagined the Samsung Galaxy Note II Plus, a device that keeps about 80% of the specs of the predecessor and adds minor changes. One of them is replacing the physical Home button with a touch one and another is making the device less elongated, from what I can see. We’re still dealing with a 5.5 inch phablet with a Super AMOLED TFT display and Corning Gorilla Glass 2 protection. The screen here supports a 720p resolution and on board we find a quad core 1.7 GHz Exynos 4412 processor, as well as a Mali 400 MP GPU. The OS of choice is Android 4.1.1. Jelly Bean with the promise of updating to Android 4.2 ASAP. TouchWiz is applied on top of the OS and at the back of the device we find a 12 megapixel camera with LED flash and 16x digital zoom.
The camera is capable of 1080p HD video recording and there’s also a front 2 megapixel camera, with 1080p capture as well. Inside the phablet we find a Li-Ion 3300 mAh battery and other features available include 16/32/64 GB of storage, 2 GB of RAM, NFC and Bluetooth 4.0. The S Pen stylus is kept and the thickness of the device is 9.3 mm. Would you buy a Note II with these small upgrades?

I can’t remember the last time I saw a Windows Phone concept that wasn’t a Lumia or a Surface Phone… well, now we have a Sony Xperia Windows Phone 8 device on our hands. Sanjaya Kanishka created this design, with specs that remind me of the Samsung Ativ S a bit. Sony Xperia W features a 4.8 inch True HD IPS+ LED backlit TFT display, with a 768 x 1366 pixel resolution and 326 ppi. The display uses Mobile Bravia Engine 2 technology and White Magic too, plus Corning Gorilla Glass 2 protection. Inside the handset there’s a 1.5 GHz quad core Krait CPU, a Snapdragon S4 Pro chipset with Adreno 320 GPU. We also get 2 GB of RAM, 16/32GB of storage and a microSD card slot. At the back there’s a 16 megapixel camera, with Exmor R sensor and Xenon flash.
The cam is able to do 2160p 30 fps video recording and it’s accompanied by a front 2 MP shooter. HSDPA is available as well, LTE too, DLNA, WiFi and micro HDMI as well. Xloud is available for speakers and Sony Xperia W also has NFC. Powering up the smartphone is a 3500 mAh Li-Ion battery and we even have a price from the designer: 500 euros, free of contract. The design is also pretty nice and looks a bit like the ASUS PadFone, a bit like the Xperia Ray and Samsung Omnia 7 combined.

Ben Ling imagined a bunch of Sony Xperia phablets dubbed Sony Xperia Pad and Xperia Pad L, that you can see pictured below. The devices rely on a 5.8 inch touchscreen, which would fit the rumors we’ve heard about Sony making  an Android device with a huge diagonal. The 5.8 inch screen here is a Full HD TFT one, that’s both shatter proof and scratch resistant. Sony Xperia Pad’s specs include a 16 megapixel camera with LED flash, a HDMI port, Sony White Magic technology and a quad core 2.3 GHz Krait CPU. The handset uses Exmor RS tech for the camera, that offers Full HD capture and 16x digital zoom. There’s also a front 2 megapixel camera, with 1080p capture as well. For the graphics we’ve got an Adreno 320 GPU and the measurements of the device include a thickness of 9.2 mm for the Pad and 9.5 for the Pad L.
NFC is in board as well and the weight of the device is 170 grams for the Pad and 181 for the Pad L. 2GB of RAM and Android 4.1.1 Jelly Bean are also here, as well as 32 GB of storage. From what I can see in the pictures the differences between devices are the upper and lower edge of the handsets. You should also know that the Xperia Pad uses a Li-Ion 3000 mAh battery, while the Xperia Pad L has a Li-Ion 3300 mAh battery. Quite an interesting design, but a bit too compact for my taste…

The Nexus 10 tablet has been in the rumors for a while now and leaks are becoming more and more detailed. Some specs have leaked online and before we get a press picture of the device there are some mockups of the 10 inch Nexus tablet I’d like to show you. They’re made by Deviantart user CapuchinoMedia, who imagined the fresh family of Nexus devices. At the bottom we have the LG Nexus 4, the smallest of the gang, then the Nexus 7 and finally the Nexus 10, that seems to adopt the same industrial design as the Nexus 7. From what I’ve heard the new model will be made by Samsung and it may end up looking like the Galaxy Tab 2 10.1 and a bit like the Galaxy Note 10.1. Rumored specs include a dual core Cortex A15 processor, 2 GB of RAM, 16 GB of storage and a crazy good 2560 x 1600 pixel resolution, courtesy of Samsung technology.
At the back there should be a 5 megapixel camera and other usual features include NFC, WiFi, dual speakers at the front and a front facing camera. The OS here will most likely be Android 4.2, just like on the LG Nexus 4. Hopefully the model will be reasonably priced, although that’s pretty hard with such strong hardware. Tomorrow we’ll be back with some leaked pics of the Nexus 10 tablet, but till then you have these mockups. Do you like them?

The concept Nokia models made by Edgar Mkrtchyan are simply stunning, so it was a joy when he sent us a new model, the Nokia Lumia 940, made entirely of carbon. The device adopts a more rounded approach to the usual Lumia design and runs Windows Phone 8, as the author claims.
The material at the back reminds me of a knitted sweater or of a basket made of small, flexible branches. It may be the same idea of weaving kevlar like on the Motorola Droid RAZR. Anyway, you should know that the Nokia Lumia 940 features a carbon shell with a large curved screen and inside there’s a dual core 1.5 GHz processor, while upfront we’ve got a 4.5 inch PureMotion HD+ 1280 x 768 screen with Gorilla Glass protection.
At the back there’s a 12 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics, dual LED flash and 1080p video capture. Powering up the entire unit is a 3000 mAh battery and as far as connectivity goes, there’s microUSB, NFC, Bluetooth and Nokia 3.5 AV. I find this to be a very interesting handset and among the advantages of carbon I can think of is its low weight and pretty high durability. Fancy the Nokia 940?