The rumoured Nokia Lumia 630 is thought to be one of the first handsets to run Microsoft's incoming Windows Phone 8.1 OS, but a leaked press render suggests it won't have that much else going for it.
The image you see above comes courtesy of that ol' leakster @evleaks and shows a device in five pretty shades of polycarbonate, but without a camera flash on the rear or a physical camera button.
That suggests Nokia has trimmed back significantly on the hardware in order to keep the Lumia 630 as affordable as possible, while it continues to target the lower end of the market.
Earlier this week, a leak from Chinese site winp.cn, pegged the device as having a 4.5-inch 854 x 480 screen, Snapdragon 400 processor and 1GB of RAM.
An upgrade and a downgrade
Should that prove to be the case, it would still be a significant update on the Lumia 620, which brought a 3.8-inch 480 x 800 display and only 512MB of RAM to the party.
Still, you have to wonder just how much a little camera flash and the integration of a physical button actually costs Nokia and whether their omission is worth saving those few pennies.
The Lumia 630 is expected to arrive shortly after Microsoft unveils Windows Phone 8.1 at its Build conference in early April.
Recent reports have suggested Nokia may have already planned an event for April 19, but that remains unconfirmed.
BlackBerry isn't the only smartphone maker generating headlines for their mobile advertising initiatives this week: Apple is said to be working on iAds that automatically play video in full-screen mode on iOS devices.
Ad Age dug up a scoop on Apple's forthcoming plans for its mobile iAds which may soon see those relatively innocuous banner ads exploding all over their display with full-screen video playback - whether users like it or not.
According to the usual "people with knowledge of Apple's plans," iPhone, iPod touch and iPad owners may no longer have to voluntarily tap on a banner-based iAd to make it play.
These so-called "interstitials" are rumored to catch a user's attention while they are in the process of jumping to another level of gameplay or after reading an article, rather than disrupting whatever they happen to be doing at the time.
Lights, cameras, iAds?
Launched in 2010, Apple's iAds generated a lot of buzz but never really took off with advertisers, who balked at the initial asking price of $1 million (about UK£596,500, AU$1.99M) per buy.
Although Apple doesn't report iAd revenue, the iPhone maker is said to have steeply marked down the price of such ads to a more reasonable $100,000 (about UK£59,650, AU$109,890) in the years since.
According to IDC data, iAds added another $125 million (about UK£75M, AU$137M) to its already overflowing coffers in 2012, but that's a pittance compared to Google-owned AdMob, who advertised its way into $243 million (about UK£145M, AU$267M) during the same year.
Apple has yet to comment on its future plans for iAds, but Cupertino is expected to offer full-screen video interstitials through a rumored ad exchange, where space is auctioned off to the highest bidder.
Check out our completely iAd-free review of the iPad Air!
LG has kept the appearance of the G3 a closely guarded secret.
LG surprised us all with last year's LG G2. It combined top flight specs with innovative features and alongside the Nexus 4 and Nexus 5 it really put LG back on the mobile map.
But the company faces a bigger challenge now as it's got to keep that momentum going with an even more impressive successor - the LG G3.
Little is known about that successor yet, though a number of rumors are starting to bubble up. We've scoured the web for all the juicy gossip and put it in one place to start to paint a picture of the LG G3.
First of all, to get the completely unsurprising bit out of the way, it looks like the handset will indeed be called the LG G3, as LG has applied to trademark 'G3'. With that said, let's get down to business.
Cut to the chase What is it? The sequel to 2013's excellent LG G2 When is it out? Between May and July 2014 What will it cost? It may be slightly cheaper than direct rivals
The LG G2 didn't arrive until September, so a launch as early as May seems a little unlikely, but reportedly it's being done to allow the G3 to better compete with the Samsung Galaxy S5, Sony Xperia Z2 and new HTC One.
For what it's worth the same source claimed the LG G Pro 2 would be launched in February, which it was right about, so there could be something to its LG G3 claims.
On the other hand German site Giga Android is claiming a "source close to the matter" has quoted a June launch, while an anonymous user of the ortud.com forum claimed the device will probably launch in July. Whatever the case it looks like it might arrive earlier in the year than the LG G2 did.
There's no word on what it might sell for yet, but this is a flagship phone we're talking about, so it will cost a lot. However LG's flagships have tended to slightly undercut Samsung and HTC rivals, so keep your fingers crossed.
We're somewhat skeptical about that though, it feels more like wishful thinking than anything grounded in reality.
1080 x 1920 seems to be the current go-to resolution for flagship phones if the Samsung Galaxy S5 and Sony Xperia Z2 are anything to go by. Then again, if the LG G3 intends to stand out from the crowd a QHD screen could certainly do that.
LG G3 processor and RAM
The LG G2 has a 2.26GHz quad-core Snapdragon 800 processor, which is still pretty impressive, but LG is said to be improving its in-house Odin processor and an octa-core version of it is tipped for the LG G3.
The latest octa-core version of the processor will apparently have four cores clocked at 2.2GHz and the other four clocked at 1.7GHz, which should give it a sizable boost over the LG G2.
It's worth noting that most new flagships get tipped for octa-core processors at the moment and it doesn't always pan out, while it could equally be that only certain variants of the handset will get octa-core power, as we've seen in the likes of the Samsung Galaxy S4.
If this does turn out to be true though it would mean a move from the Snapdragon chipset in the LG G2 to LG's own chipset.
There's no word yet on how much RAM the LG G3 might have. The G2 has 2GB, but the LG G Pro 2 upped it to 3GB, so here's hoping for the same in the G3.
A benchmark for a mystery Android handset believed to be the LG G3 due to its model number of LG-D830 (which is similar to the G2's D802 model number) showed that it ran Android 4.4 KitKat. No surprise there, this is a flagship after all.
Unfortunately that's all we really know about the OS so far, but it seems a safe bet that it will use LG's Optimus UI and include recent LG innovations like Knock Code, which takes KnockOn to the next level by allowing users to tap a pattern on the screen when it's off, to both turn it on and unlock it.
LG G3 camera
Initial rumors coming out of ZDNet Korea pointed towards a 16MP sensor, but more recent leaks suggest a 13MP one.
What will probably be the first of many photos supposedly taken on the handset appeared the other day. The picture was an impressively detailed image of a cat and had a resolution of 4260 x 2342 according to the EXIF data.
That equates to 9.6MP at a 16:9 aspect ratio, which would mean the camera should be capable of taking 13MP photos at a 4:3 ratio.
The photo was posted on the ortud.com forum by someone going by the name 'Geek'. The poster claimed their friend was testing the phone and that it had a 13MP camera with optical image stabilization plus (OIS+) and that it's very similar to the snapper in the LG G Pro 2.
The posters megapixel claims match those revealed by the EXIF data, but that's something that's very easy to fake. Not to mention the fact that the device is listed as an LG-D972, which isn't a model number that we've ever come across.
If it does turn out to be real then it will have the same number of megapixels as the LG G2, but given the quality of the leaked image it looks like it could still be capable of taking significantly better photos.
Phone Arena also received a User Agent profile from an anonymous source which showed a device going by the name LG D830 (the same device as appeared in benchmarks) as having a 13MP camera along with support for 4K video playback and 120fps slow motion video.
It's a BENDY PHONE, for crying out loud. You could've just bent it a bit and we'd have been impressed
Here are the various emotions that you will go through when watching LG's latest ad for the LG G Flex:
Boredom, dismay, disbelief, ABJECT HORROR, what is that? is that a... no, wait, it's a mouth, dismay, confusion, dismay, why's he putting the ear to his ear and the mouth to his mouth?, more dismay, sick in your mouth, dismay, dismay, dismay.
We're starting an online petition to have the whole thing killed with fire, who's with us?
Health sensors everywhere could save a lot of lives
There's a big problem with wearable health tech: the people who need it won't buy it.
With the obvious exceptions - people who have conditions that mean they need to keep a close eye on what their bodies are up to - the kind of people who'll embrace wearable health gadgets are the kind of people who don't really need them.
If you care enough about your health to drop hundreds on health kit, you're probably not the kind of person who runs screaming from salad bars.
We don't need health sensors for healthy people, we need them for everybody else.
We need smartphones that will spy on us.
Pizza power
I'm not being judgemental here. In a former life I was Scotland's most enthusiastic smoker, and while I don't do that any more I still enjoy a deep-fried pizza - don't knock if you haven't tried it - and come out in a rash if I think about exercising. I'm as interested in health apps as I am in morris dancing, cricket or One Direction.
That's why a smartphone could save my life.
Everybody's going to die but many people die far too early. For example, it's estimated that a quarter of deaths from heart disease are preventable and the risk factors are both well-established and easy to monitor; they're things such as blood pressure, high cholesterol, lack of physical activity and so on.
The problem, of course, is that you have to monitor those things and many of us don't.
We're pretty good at pretending that unhealthy behaviours aren't affecting us - and the unhealthier the behaviour, the more in denial you can become. When I was torching entire tobacco plantations before breakfast the last person I wanted to see was my doctor. What's the point of going to see someone who'll only tell you to stop smoking?
Wearables might do a better job. If our devices come stuffed with sensors in the way they currently do with accelerometers and compasses, they could keep a close eye on how we're doing.
For example, the Wello smartphone case includes a handful of sensors that monitor your heart rate, blood pressure, oxygen levels, temperature and so on; Apple is reportedly working on audio sensors that can detect irregularities in arteries.
The trick is to make health monitoring the rule, not the exception. Given the choice between spending a couple of hundred on a health gadget or dropping the same sum on Haribo, the sweets will win every time - but if the sensors are in the gadgets we'll want to buy anyway, they can sneak in under our radar.
There are lots of issues to address - privacy is the biggie - but if wearables can get it right, they might warn us of imminent problems without just nipping our heads about eating more salad.
Sensors could be the canaries in our personal coalmines, spotting great danger when there's still time to do something about it.
Saving us from ourselves? Maybe we need an app for that.
