Canonical eventually wants to create a single operating system that can be installed across desktops, phones, and tablets, with a different interface presented on each device. That convergence hasn't been completed yet, so with 14.04 (codenamed "Trusty Tahr") there will be separate downloads for the mobile editions. "Full convergence means that the same code for operating systems and applications will be running on all types of devices, from phones to tablets to desktops, and even both smaller and larger devices," Ubuntu Engineering VP Rick Spencer told Ars in an e-mail. "Convergence is still a work in progress, and we will continue to move the code to the desktop as it is ready in each release."

I suspect we're in the very early days of gaming on the Fire TV. Amazon has gotten the Fire TV to market ahead of an Apple TV or Android TV that offers games, and we'll most likely see the game controller and the overall gaming experience get even better in future releases of the Fire TV.

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According to details from multiple sources, Amazon’s first phone will be powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, and it will also include 2GB of RAM. It will run a heavily customized version of Google’s Android operating system similar to the version that powers Amazon’s tablets.

Our sources state that the phone’s display will measure 4.7 inches diagonally, making the handset’s screen a bit smaller than recent flagship offerings from Samsung and HTC. The handset also have comparatively low pixel density, featuring 720p HD resolution compared to 1080p HD resolution on many rival devices.

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Samsung's first attempt at putting together an advanced smartwatch based on Android, the Galaxy Gear, met with a very rough reception at the tail end of last year, and the company quickly switched to its own Tizen software for the Gear 2 and Gear 2 Neo. In emailed comments to The Verge, Samsung has confirmed Yoon's timeline of a 2014 release for its new smartwatch and clarified that it will indeed be using Android Wear. Together with the Gear Fit, which runs its own custom software, Samsung will soon be supporting three different operating systems for its wearable devices.

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Linksys has started shipping a new router, and it’s touting its latest offering as the first consumer-grade Wi-Fi router to provide thorough wireless coverage throughout the home through its four external antennas.

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Firefox OS 2.0 plans include copy and paste support, a new mechanism for launching apps and switching among them, a more useful lock screen, a find-my phone system, and more. Those features will be crucial to the success of the nascent OS, which lags Android and iOS by years but which is critical to Mozilla's continued relevance.

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It isn't easy being an Android smartphone maker these days. Your flagship handsets are scrutinised for cutting-edge features, yet they're criticised if these features seem to be unnecessary, or are unnecessarily complicated.

Ever faster multicore processors are sometimes deemed by reviewers to be faster than needed, with the trade-off between power consumption and responsiveness often cited. Higher-resolution screens can be dismissed, as there comes a point where pixel count goes beyond being a factor in smooth text and graphics rendition. What's a manufacturer to do in the face of such criticism?

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If you want to be totally up-to-date, HP has the answer for you -- though it will cost you a little bit. The company has stealthily launched the Slate 8 Pro Business edition, which is similar to the non-Business version save for one key difference: It runs the latest version of Android -- 4.4, or KitKat.

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It’s interesting to note that, according to Koush, the APK is the “regular Android APK,” and can be used to mirror your Android phone with any other suitable Android device. As we all know, the Fire TV does run on Android and although, on the surface, it may not be immediately familiar to most Android users, its roots are the same and have allowed the app to work seamlessly.

The Fire TV offers gaming as well as the usual offerings of Netflix, Hulu Plus, and of course, Amazon Prime’s usual movie offerings. While it is the newest offering on the block, and separates itself from the crowd with the option to run Android games, rumors abound of Google‘s own Android TV, which, as usual, will seek to usurp all forerunners. The battle for the living room started some time ago, and it continues to rage on. 2014 seems like a perfect year for breakthroughs, and consumers from all financial brackets should be in for a grand treat.

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The Ubuntu Phone is set to launch this year. With more and more major players getting on board as hardware suppliers, you can bet the darling of Linux mobility will slowly find its way into every market imaginable. The big question mark is the US market. With Android and IOS having a stranglehold on US customers, can this new mobile platform make it? I firmly believe that the Ubuntu Phone not only can be your next mobile device, it should be. I'll give you 10 reasons why.

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The Intrinsyc Mobile Development Platform Tablet (“MDP/T”) uses an updated Qualcomm Snapdragon 805 SoC running Android 4.4 (KitKat). According to a TrustedReviews overview of the Snapdragon 800 family, the 805 is set to ship this summer, but Intrinsyc says it’s shipping the MDP/T now for $799. So consider this a sneak preview, or as Intrinsyc calls it “early access” to the Snapdragon 805.

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Today is the day!

If you are by any chance registered yourself to adopt Sailfish OS on your Nexus 4 before others do, today was your chance to receive an email containing a lot of new information about Sailfish Os image for your nexus 4!

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YOTA DEVICES launched its Yotaphone handset at Mobile World Congress in February, the first smartphone to arrive in Blighty featuring an always-on e-ink display on its rear. The secondary screen remains on constantly, but Yota Devices claims that it uses power only when it refreshes, so the handset will outlast the average smartphone battery.

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Motorola Mobility announced a round-faced Moto 360 smartwatch, based on Google’s new Android Wear platform and due this summer.

As expected, LG was first up to announce a smartwatch based on Google’s wearable platform, formally announced yesterday as Android Wear. But later in the day, Motorola Mobility stepped up with its own Android Wear smartwatch to join the LG G Watch: the Moto 360. While the sole image released by LG of the G Watch showed a fairly typical squarish, if relatively svelte, watch face, the Moto 360 offers something entirely different: a round-faced watch.

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Spanish mobile start-up Geeksphone is reportedly in discussions with Canonical to offer Ubuntu Touch in its new phone, the ‘Revolution’. Featuring a 4.7-inch IPS display, the dual-OS running smartphone was released last month.

The dual-core Intel-based smartphone currently packs two operating systems – Android Jelly Bean and an unbranded version of Mozilla Firefox OS.

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When Samsung announced the Gear 2 and the Gear 2 Neo last month, the news came with the confirmation that the company was dropping Android from both devices. Instead, both smart watches are powered by Tizen. This may not mean all that much for consumers in the short term, but it does impact developers. For you, Samsung has just shared the first version of the Tizen SDK aimed at wearables. This is what you need to grab if you intend to build apps for the company's two intelligent wristwatches.

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Meizu is thinking to take the “Xiaomi route” and allow other phones to run its own version of Android. Called Flyme OS, Meizu’s platform builds on top of the Android core adding quite a few enhancements and tweaks along the way, all of which helped made Meizu phones popular in the first place.

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Smartphones on Canonical’s Ubuntu operating system will cost between $200 and $400, according to the firm’s chief executive Mark Shuttleworth.

Speaking at CeBIT, he said: “Ours will come out in the mid-higher edge, so $200 to $400. We’re going with the higher end because we want people who are looking for a very sharp, beautiful experience and because our ambition is to be selling the future PC, the future personal computing engine.”

The Ubuntu project aims to produce hardware that can act as a smartphone and also work as a PC when plugged into a monitor, something Shuttleworth said many audiences found attractive.

Canonical teamed up with phone makers Meizu and BQ earlier this year to produce the devices, following what Shuttleworth called the “spectacular failure” of the firm’s efforts to raise $32m for the Ubuntu Edge smartphone. But he also called it a “spectacular success” because of the amount of attention it drew and the influence it could have on the industry.

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Renowned Chinese phone manufacturer Meizu has made its entry into the French market with the launch of its flagship smartphone, the Meizu MX3. This phone runs a homegrown fork of Android 4.2, dubbed Flyme OS 3.0, which the company claims to have “improved navigation” and “simple and fluid transitions”.

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Canonical announced in February that it plans to release smartphones based on its widely used Ubuntu distribution of the Linux platform are back on, with the first devices expected later this year.

This triggered eager anticipation among some members of the V3 team, including yours truly, as Canonical's original vision for an Ubuntu phone sounded like a compelling prospect, as well as a novel one for those of us who have seen smartphones become ever-more generic over recent years as vendors try to copy Apple's formula for success.

First disclosed early last year, Canonical proposed a version of Ubuntu with a touch-optimised user interface that could run on high-end smartphone hardware. While some mobile platforms, notably Android, are already underpinned by the Linux kernel, Ubuntu for phones was going to be the real deal; it would be able to run full Linux applications as well as HTML5 web apps optimised for mobile devices.

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