A leaked picture and video has provided us with out best look yet of Research in Motion's L Series smartphone, one of two devices on which it will debut BlackBerry 10 next year.

If you’re excited about Research in Motion’s new BlackBerry 10 hardware, due to launch at the end of January, then you’re in for a treat as a we’ve been given a good look at the L Series phone. The L Series will be RIM’s full touchscreen model and it will be released alongside the QWERTY keyboard-equipped N Series.

Earlier this week, a close-up shot of the phone appeared on BlackBerry’s own BB10 website, and although it didn’t show much detail, it did confirm the new phone will have a textured rear panel. Up until that point we’d only had the Dev Alpha phone to go on, which has a rather dull, featureless design.

RIM’s teaser shot has now been joined by a leaked picture of the whole device, showing the complete textured back and a large, central BlackBerry logo. A keen developer found the image hidden inside a Dev Alpha software update, and as it’s suitably high resolution, we can also see a set of metallic buttons running down the left-hand side of the device too.

Previous leaks have shown the L Series phone to be quite long, and it’s rumored to have a 4.2-inch, 1280 x 768 pixel resolution screen, plus a dual-core processor is expected to power the new device.

As for the front of the phone, a leaked video showing a little more about BlackBerry 10’s gesture control system features a phone which looks very similar to L Series handsets seen before. It could be that by putting the phone featured in the video together with the rear panel seen above, we’ve got our best clue yet as to how the new L Series phone will look. Research in Motion recently published its own video showing BlackBerry Flow in action too.

Research in Motion will reveal BlackBerry 10 and its two new phones at a global event to be held on January 30.

A working Apple-1 computer sold at an auction in Germany recently for an astonishing $640,000, almost doubling the previous record for an Apple-1 sold at auction set earlier this year.

It’s often said that we pay a premium for Apple products, but this is ridiculous. It’s emerged that late last month, at an auction in Germany, an Apple-1 computer fetched a mind-boggling $640,000, smashing the previous record for an Apple-1 sold at auction of $374,500. The sale took place at the Team Breker auction house in the city of Cologne, according to the Classic Computing website. It’s not known who bought the machine.

As its name cleverly suggests, the Apple-1 was Apple’s very first computer, hand-built by Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs in the garage of Jobs’ family home way back in 1976. It sold for $666.66, a somewhat bizarre-looking price tag arrived at because Wozniak was apparently into repeating digits. According to Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography, neither Jobs nor Wozniak knew at the time that 666 symbolized the number of the beast. Some people complained.

Only 200 Apple-1 units were made, of which about 50 are known to still exist. Of these, only six are believed to be in working condition. The computer was replaced a year later in 1977 by the Apple II.

Attempting to explain why collectors go ga-ga over (really) old Apple products, Roswell, Ga. resident Lonnie Mimms, a keen collector himself (he has two Apple-1 units), told Classic Computing, “The Apple-1, because of Apple’s status now in the world, is the beginning of that company. For corporate America and for the computer industry, there isn’t anything more iconic than that in existence.”

The previous record for an Apple-1 computer sold at auction was $374,500. The sale took place at Sotheby’s in New York in June 2012 alongside another piece of rare Apple memorabilia – a four-page memo handwritten by Steve Jobs in 1974 during his time at video game company Atari. That went for an incredible $27,500.

[via Apple Insider]

London's black cabs are set to offer free Wi-Fi to passengers from early next year. The service will be supported by an ads-for-access model requiring users to watch a short ad prior to connecting.

 Jump into one of London’s iconic black cabs from early next year and the chances are you’ll be able to fire up your mobile device and hook up to its free Wi-Fi service.

London-based tech start-up Eyetease has just been given the green light by Transport for London to launch the service. The company said it’s been working on the project for two years and plans to have it up and running in the coming months once various sponsorship deals have been finalized.

The free service, called CabWiFi, will be supported by an ‘ads-for-access’ model where users will have to watch (or you could just look out the window) a 15-second ad in exchange for 15 minutes of free Internet access. Sounds straightforward enough, right?

“Tourists and business travellers can now access their emails, talk on Skype or surf the web without the fear of being hit with high data roaming charges when they return home,” Eyetease founder and CEO Richard Corbett said in a statement announcing the news.

Cab drivers will also be able to make use of the service, enabling them to “off-set the high cost of data charges incurred from using taxi apps, which some drivers claim have doubled their phone bills in recent months,” Eyetease said.

The start-up is reportedly already in advanced talks with several major consumer brands – including a global credit card company and a leading mobile phone manufacturer – to sponsor the rollout of the free service.

Londoners have already been enjoying free subway-based Wi-Fi for a while now, after stations on its sprawling network introduced the service in time for the visiting masses that descended on the UK capital for the Olympics in the summer.

This week the supplier of the service, Virgin Media, announced it had just increased its reach by 20 stations, bringing the total number of web-connected stations to 92. While not available on the trains themselves, passengers can connect in ticket halls, walkways and platforms.

Virgin Media’s service will be free to all users until the end of January 2013, after which customers with providers other than Virgin Media, EE and Vodafone will be required to pay a fee.

[Image: Rob Wilson / Shutterstock]

Upcoming smartphone manufacturer Oppo has launched the Find 5, an Android 4.1 smartphone with a 5-inch, 1080p resolution touchscreen and an impressive 13-megapixel camera. It's almost certainly coming to the USA too.

After many months of teasing, the Oppo Find 5 has finally been made official at a special event held in Beijing. The device’s debut follows the appearance of a website offering the phone for sale in the U.S., although it’s still not clear whether this is an Oppo-sanctioned release.

Oppo made a name for itself recently with the Oppo Finder, which bagged the title of world’s thinnest smartphone, measuring a ridiculous 6.65mm thick. The Find 5 is one of the first state-of-the-art phones with a 1080p resolution screen, but it cannot claim any titles this time, having been beaten to stores by several devices including the Droid DNA. Early reports did say the Find 5 would still be super-slim though, potentially measuring less than 7mm thick, but Oppo hasn’t provided any dimensions or the weight of the Find 5 to confirm its stats yet.

The Find 5’s spec is quite similar to the Droid DNA, as its 5-inch display has the same 1920 x 1080 pixel count and 441ppi pixel density, plus the 1.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro chip is identical too. There’s also 2GB of RAM and 16GB of internal storage. It’s not all the same though, as Oppo has given the Find 5 a very special 13-megapixel primary camera and equipped it with some interesting software features too.

The press release calls it, “the most advanced 1/3.06-type sensor available,” and talks of its f2.2 aperture and four layer coating. It’s also said to be the first smartphone to use hardware supported HDR stills and video recording, plus it has a burst mode that shoots 100 stills in five seconds and 1080p video recording at up to 120 frames per second.

Android 4.1 Jelly Bean has been selected as its operating system, plus there’s everything from DLNA connectivity, NFC and Wi-Fi Direct to a 1.9-megapixel video call lens and Dolby 3D surround sound onboard too. There’s no denying Oppo has gone all out to provide the Find 5 with a truly exciting spec sheet. Oppo has even managed to squeeze in a 2500mAh battery too.

It’s not all good news though, as like the Droid DNA there’s no microSD card slot to increase the phone’s storage capacity. It’s also strictly a 3G HSPA+ device with no 4G LTE support. Oppo says it will release the Find 5 in selected markets early next year, but doesn’t go as far as to say exactly which ones. According to the aforementioned U.S. website, it’ll be priced at $499 SIM-free.