Ben Ling sent us yet another Sony Xperia concept phone, one packing a 5 inch Full HD display, but looking more like an Xperia Mini, if I take a quick glance at the renders. For some reason I feel that the diagonal should be smaller, maybe because of those big bezels.
The Sony Xperia UL, that’s the name of the concept, comes with a Super AMOLED display, which is rare for Sony, who relies on TFT or other technologies. There’s also Corning Gorilla Glass 3 protection, a 14 megapixel camera with HDR and LED flash, Exmor RS sensor for mobile and a case that’s both dust and water resistant.
The camera at the back does 16x zoom and Full HD video capture, while upfront there’s a 3 megapixel HDR camera with 1080p capture. Inside the handset there’s a quad core 1.8 GHz Krait 300 processor, of the Snapdragon 600 kind. Sony Xperia UL comes with PlayStation certification, a removable batery, 2 GB of RAM, 4G LTE, Android 4.2.2 and 32 GB of storage.
It uses a 2800 mAh battery, a microSD card slot and Sony Mobile Bravia Engine 3 technology. How about it? Does the handset also seem smaller to you?

You’re probably aware of the Apple patent that was recently filed for a curved wraparound screen on a future handset, presumably the iPhone 6. Well, T3 took the story and turned into the beautiful concept iPhone shown below, plus the video at the end of the article.
Of course, Apple does have a huge amount of patents, so they may end up not using this one, but why not let our imagination run wild? A recent patent they filed details a wraparound AMOLED screen on a smartphone and a design that looks like the fourth generation iPod Nano. The patent says that the screen can be “unrolled” or “unfolded” thanks to a special hinge-like mechanism.
The documents include facial recognition, gesture control, layering of screens to create 3D effects, all of them very cool sounding technologies. The T3 iPhone 6 concept features a resolution of 1615 x 1800 pixels, a Facetime HD 2 megapixel camera at the front, NFC, lightning connector. In the video you can see gesture controls and virtual buttons on the side, plus a new multitasking system. FIFA sure looks great on the device, as do wraparound panoramas. Will this model ever become real?
[via T3]

Over the past hours we’ve been seeing a mystery Samsung device get pictured in a shot circulating on the web. After Yugatech got hold of the image, they turned it into the render you can see below. The original image can be seen at the end of the article…
Speculations say this may well be the Samsung Galaxy Note 3, although I kind of doubt it. For one thing, it’s too bulky and also it’s not wide enough. If we judge by the past years’ Samsung releases, the Note is always a bigger version of the current generation of Galaxy S model, so I expect the Note 3 to be a bigger Galaxy S4.
It would be about time for Samsung to change that pebble design to something else, of course. I find this new design direction to be hugely similar to the one of the Nokia Lumias, but at least something’s changed. We haven’t gotten rid of the Home button, that’s even more highlighted now, if we judge by these shots. Could Samsung be preparing a rectangular edge Galaxy Note 3?
[via Yugatech and @evleaks]

In lack of the usual avalanche of iPhone concepts, we’re stuck with searching such devices all over the web. This is the way we’ve found the interesting design created by Eric Huismann, a German designer who imagined that the iPhone 6 will have a transparent display.
This handset is 17% thinner than the already very thin iPhone 5 and it comes with a 10 megapixel camera with Full HD video capture. Inside it we find the Apple A7 processor and the screen keeps the 4 inch diagonal, but it’s transparent this time. We’ve seen a see through iPhone before, but not in such a detailed view.
Keep in mind that the display is completely transparent, while the bottom and top areas stay opaque. iOS 7 is present on board and there’s even a promise of a November launch date from the designer. There are many advantages for a transparent iPhone, like an improved camera viewfinder, a ton of augmented reality apps and cooler effects to play within the interface. Will this device ever exist?

David Jeba sent us an email showing us a concept/vision of what Windows Phone 9 may end up looking like and some of its features. Meanwhile, this summer we should get the Windows Phone 8.1 release aka Windows Phone Blue, so we’re in for a much longer wait till WP9, probably coming in 2014.
The idea of this WP9 concept is that we get to group apps in 1 or 4 (folders?) and get an unified notification system that will launch the respective app. There’s also an individual group lockscreen and settings control, plus a partition manager for the memory. You can also configure the user profile account manager and probably add more accounts/users, like in Android 4.2.
What I want from Windows Phone 9? Well, definitely an improved notification system, tiles that are truly dynamic, not only in name, maybe a system of overlapping tiles to save room on the screen… perhaps a better camera UI, that doesn’t require so many swipes to get around. What do you want from the future OS?
[Thanks David Jeba]