webOS is back in LG's new SmartTV

Twitter's leakmeister @evleaks kicks off the new year with a pre-CES reveal of what LG's webOS-powered SmartTV will look like. The photo shows off a sleek, nearly-frameless HDTV with a new piano-style interface which is supposedly running on webOS. For those of your that don't remember, webOS was Palm's mobile operating system that powered their Pre smartphones and TouchPad tablets before HP chewed them up, swallowed them whole  for 1.2 billion and regurgitated the promising mobile OS into little more than a patent stockpile. HP was thinking of putting webOS as a secondary OS on all its PC's printers and other devices before it sold certain aspects to LG who promised to make better use of the OS. It's going to be interesting to see where all of this goes.

Source: @evleaks via Twitter

Samsung pushes out Galaxy Camera 2 with bigger battery thinner dimensions

Samsung was the company that placed a phone in a point and shoot camera with the Galaxy Camera and they've followed up the first act with a Galaxy Camera 2. This time around the so-called smart camera features an identical 16 MP sensor and 21x optical zoom but now has a longer lasting battery and sports a newer 1.6Ghz quad core processor. 

Source: Engadget

Lenovo reveals Vibe Z Flagship smartphone

Lenovo's been a dominant Android smartphone manufacturer in parts of Asia for some time now and many expect the PC leader to become a serious player in the international market. The Vibe Z smartphone seems to be a good start. It features a 5.5-inch full IPS display, 4G-LTE, a 2.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor and a 13 megapixel camera to boot. No specific carrier or availability dates have been announced but we're days away from CES and should hear something more by then.

Source: Lenovo

Moto X gets $100 price cut in US

The Moto X is arguably one of the better Android smartphones in the market today. Midrange specs and innovative features made it count against more premium smartphones and the fact that it is a Google product ensured an expedient upgrade to the latest Android 4.4 version (in most markets, sadly not in Canada. Motorola has kicked off 2014 by cutting off $100 from the 16GB version for US models. This means you can design your own Moto X for a hundred bucks less. You still pay a $100 premium for the snazzy new bamboo backed variants. I recently purchased a used 32GB AT&T Moto X on eBay and unlocked it using the Unlock your Moto X app for US $13.00 and now use it on Telus. I couldn't be happier since the device came with KitKat preloaded.