BlackBerry, Alicia Keys to part ways starting Jan 30th

In a not so unexpected move, BlackBerry has announced that it is parting ways with global creative director-cum spokesperson Alicia Keys after barely year of collaborating.

Keys was introduced by ex-CEO Thorsten Heins during last year's BlackBerry 10 event which ushered in the Z10 and BlackBerry's new OS. With BlackBerry focusing on enterprise and slowly retreating from the consumer end of the market, a spokesperson of Keys' caliber and popularity is no longer needed. 14-time Grammy Award winner Keys appeared in various BlackBerry events and even integrated her Z10 into her stage routine during live shows. BlackBerry has often used musicians to promote its products, previous endorsers include DJ Diplo and The Martinez Brothers but it was recently revealed that they turned down Justin Bieber early in his career because they thought he was 'just a fad'. Bieber wanted $200,000.00 and 20 devices to be RIM's spokesperson.

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