It has been some time coming but we now have stock of the Sony Xperia Z DK26 charging dock in Black, White & Purple.

For more information or to order yours, please CLICK HERE.

The post Sony DK26 charging dock now in stock appeared first on Clove Technology's Blog.

Set to be available in both Black and White, the Mega will be priced at £383.33 excluding VAT or £459.99 including VAT.

First stock of the I9205 16GB model is expected in July, the exact date for which is still to be confirmed.

We now have it available for pre-order on the Clove website, you can put your name down for one by CLICKING HERE.

The post Samsung Galaxy Mega coming in July appeared first on Clove Technology's Blog.

Whilst they are not alone in the way they report memory, they are perhaps the biggest culprits for excessive use of the available storage.

I currently have an S4 and after installing all my apps (no games) i have around 600MB left.  Thankfully I stream my music, but I do not have any room for the music to be stored in offline mode .

Anyway, this has got me thinking…

Why when Samsung (and equivalents) announce cool features, why can we not download them as individual elements that can be installed at the users discretion?

This way if you wanted only 1 of the 30 features you will use less memory than installing all 30 that come currently pre-installed on the phone.

For example, I do not use S-Voice for anything other than the camera.  I have the other elements turned off, so can I remove these other elements?! It has been documented how you can speed up the home button by turning off S-Voice.  But for me I must have S-Voice on because I want to use it within the camera.

I do not use Smart Screen at all. It is doing no harm in the settings, but it must be eating up some memory.

There is a very strong argument that you should just opt for stock Android and then customise it with apps.  However this does not appeal to all and I have to say even as a more seasoned Android user, I like some of the Samsung features.

When we consider the wider mass market, your mum who has an Android phone wouldn’t even contemplate some features or adding them onto a stock Android handset. Samsung put them there for convenience thus there is a lot of appeal.

So why not have any of it installed as standard.  Upon initial start-up explain what can be downloaded and then allow users to download the bits they want. Hey presto, everyone gets what they want.

The obvious advantage here would be the ability to customise your phone more than you can now.  Yes, we can turn features on or off, but if you never use some features they sit in the background chewing up memory etc.

However, I think currently there are too many disadvantages from the eyes of the manufacturer.

It isn’t that simple just to add and remove bits of software as it all ties in and is fundamental to the phone in many cases.

There is the potential for even greater fragmentation of devices making it more difficult for support.

Certain great features would be overlooked by the mass market reducing the chance of success for the handset in global sales; but maybe we could reverse the idea and uninstall bits?!

My knowledge is software how it integrates to the hardware not to mention the possibility of the above is limited; but what I do know is many apps can be downloaded and installed onto phones to take a stock feel to a heavily customised and much more powerful solution like a Samsung Galaxy, so it must be nearly possible.

Samsung with their ever-growing size and power, not to mention cash reserves could be the ones to pioneer this approach and satisfy almost all users don’t you think?

The post New phone software–download the features we want? appeared first on Clove Technology's Blog.

The big news this morning is the flickr is now offering everyone 1 terabyte of FREE photo storage.

With a whopping 1 terabyte you can store an incredible 873,813 4 megapixel photos or 218,453 16 megapixel images. You can not deny that this is impressive.

So with so much storage how to make best use of it?

No doubt you use your Android phone for taking pictures. You may store the photos on the phone memory or an SD card, but do you back them up?

If you do not back them up, or do so at irregular intervals then why not take advantage of auto uploading.

Auto-uploading can backup your pictures to the cloud within minutes of taking picture or video on your phone. Meaning should you loose the phone, delete the image off your phone, there is always a copy online to access at any time.

Such auto-upload services can work over WiFi only or over a mobile data connection too, the choice is yours.

You may have heard that Dropbox offers such a feature, it works well (I use it all the time) but there is limited free storage. This means occasionally you need to go in and delete content.

Naturally flickr now seems the ideal option with so much storage. You will  probably only have to go in and delete or edit photos every year or less!

Flickr offer an Android app but that allows upload but you have to initiate the upload which is frustrating. It works well but you would have to keep doing uploads every so often.

Using IFTTT you can set up Dropbox stored photos to be added to Flickr but this doesn’t really solve the issue because you have limited free Dropbox storage, but it is free to do this.

The solution? A £1.99 app from Google Play Store called FlickrFolio.

I have got to be honest I have been using it for only a short period of time at the time of writing, but have tested it thoroughly in that time and all is working well.

You can set whether it uploads over WIFi or data connection or whether it uploads when the phone is charging or not.

It automatically uploads images as private so the whole world doesn’t see pictures unless you specifically ask it to.

You can too force it to upload older images you may have on your phone too as well as video.

We have all lost photos or data at some point and realise only after the event how important it was.  With this service there is no excuse and for just £1.99 this is a fantastic price.

I strongly encourage you to try this app and backup your valuable photos and videos now.

The post Auto upload photos to Flickr–Android app appeared first on Clove Technology's Blog.

In the 55th vlog from Clove we discuss the potential for custom smartphones.

The post Clove Vlog #55 – Custom Smartphones appeared first on Clove Technology's Blog.

Battery life is one of the aspects of smartphone design that still requires significant improvement. One way to facilitate this will be through hardware technology breakthroughs, one of which we recently covered here. The other approach to improving battery life, however, is by optimising the software used on handsets. With handsets such as the Xperia Z, Sony has tried to do just that with STAMINA mode.

An easy assumption to make when it comes to smartphone battery life is that placing your handset on standby will stop apps from running and therefore stop power consumption. This is incorrect – apps still run in the background and there are constant synchronisation requests for things such as message updates and notifications.

Using STAMINA mode, Sony does its best to address the problem of apps running in the background. It achieves this by blocking data traffic a minute after the handset is placed on standby. Whilst doing this the phone automatically logs your IP address, meaning you are instantly connected once the phone is powered on again.

When STAMINA mode is activated, you will still receive phone calls, text messages and picture messages. However, you should be aware that notifications that require an internet connection will stop.

So, if I have STAMINA mode on, I won’t get alerts such as Whatsapp, Email, Facebook, etc?

That’s correct. By default, STAMINA mode will block apps such as those above from syncing. However, there is the option to whitelist specific apps so that they are not blocked by STAMINA mode. If you still need email to sync, whitelist your chosen email client and you’ll still get your emails come through. It’s worth noting that if you have push email enabled your battery will be drained much quicker than if you have the handset to synchronise periodically, such as every hour. It really depends on how urgently you need to check email. You will be able to find synchronisation options in the setting of your email app.

What else does STAMINA mode do?

As well as disabling mobile data when your screen is turned off, STAMINA mode also has a few other features to offer. You can set it to show (as a percentage) how much battery life you have left with an icon in the status bar (for non-Xperia users, Battery Widget Reborn also offers this). There’s also the option to disable certain functions once battery reaches a critical level, or you can automatically enable Wi-Fi when in range of a preferred network – connecting to Wi-Fi drains the battery a lot less than scanning for 3G/4G networks.

As well as offering the above features, STAMINA mode will also pop up with suggestions as to how you can improve battery. For example, if your device is left dormant for 6 hours and STAMINA mode is off, you’ll get a notification in the status bar to recommend that you turn it on.

Which handsets have STAMINA mode and how do I turn it on?

At the moment, those handsets which offers STAMINA mode include Xperia Z, Xperia ZL, Xperia Tablet Z, Xperia SP and Xperia L. By default, STAMINA mode is turned off, but you can activate it by going to Settings > Power Management.

The post How Sony’s STAMINA Mode works appeared first on Clove Technology's Blog.

We always need to take photo samples released by manufacturers with a small pinch of salt – naturally they will always always show their own device in its best light – but the following should give a fairly good indication of what we can expect from the Lumia 925.

Nokia tells us that ‘low-light photos never looked this good’ and while the video below (bottom of post) doesn’t reveal an awful lot in terms of the 925′s low-light capabilities, the comparison photos with rival devices offer some pretty substantial proof.

Most notably we’re interested in how the 925 matches up against the HTC One, with low-light photography having been touted as one of the latter’s specialties thanks to its UltraPixel sensor. In the photos below, which comes from Nokia Conversations, the 925 certainly comes out top of the pile in poorly lit environments.

We’ll be interested however to see a more diverse range of samples once the 925 has made its way to the Clove office.

Nokia Lumia 925 (low-light photo)

Nokia Lumia 925 vs HTC One (low-light test)

Nokia Lumia 925 vs Sony Xperia Z (low-light test)

Nokia Lumia 925 vs Apple iPhone 5 (low-light test)

Nokia Lumia 925 vs Samsung Galaxy S4 (low-light test)

The post Nokia Lumia 925 low light comparison photos appeared first on Clove Technology's Blog.

It should be noted that this isn’t the first ever phone call to be made from Everest’s summit, but it is the first ever video call. Hughes was able to make the call using Immarsat’s Broadband Global Area Network service which, taking into account his rather remote location, isn’t of bad quality at all.

You can view the call itself in the video below – no doubt HTC will be proud to have been a part of it. Currently Hughes has raised just £40,673 of the targeted £1million for the Everest Million campaign. If you would like to contribute to his effort, you can visit the website here and donate.

Source BBC

Via The Verge

The post HTC One is the first smartphone to make a video call from Everest appeared first on Clove Technology's Blog.

After coming under criticism on BBC Watchdog for its lack of user-accessible internal storage on the Galaxy S4, Samsung has said that it is “reviewing the possibility to secure more memory space through further software optimisation.”

Speaking to CNET, Samsung said it is “committed to listening to our customers and responding to their needs as part of our innovation process.”

Previously Samsung has defended the amount of internal storage that is taken up by the system install and preloaded apps, which equates to around 7GB out of an advertised 16GB, leaving 9GB available to the user. Samsung’s custom Android skin, TouchWiz, comes with a host of new features and this is the reason that so much of the internal storage is already in use out of the box.

It sounds as though Samsung may push an update out at some point that condenses the system files and therefore frees up more space for the user. How much this will equate to is as yet unclear, but needless to say even a small improvement will be welcome.

Via CNET

The post Samsung may improve user-accessible internal storage of S4 appeared first on Clove Technology's Blog.

If you are an avid BlackBerry fan but didn’t like the idea of not having a keyboard on the Z10, then the Q10 is the answer.

Find out more or order yours HERE.

The post BlackBerry Q10 now in stock appeared first on Clove Technology's Blog.