lumia

From smartphones and tablets to a $7,000 desktop, we've cracked open a lot of tech this year. And as is the tradition at the end of each year, it's time to take a look at a few of our favorites. During this special episode of Cracking Open, I'm counting down my top five teardowns of 2012.

5. Nokia Lumia 900

First on our list is the Nokia Lumia 900. Released in the spring, this Windows Phone device was Nokia's attempt to recapture some of the American smartphone market.

Unfortunately, as we discovered during our teardown, the phone's hardware just wasn't up to par with the competition. I went so far as to call it mediocre. So why did I include our 900 teardown on this list? Because it's probably this year's best example of why knowing what's inside a device is an important factor in deciding whether to buy one.… Read more

Samsung Electronics is the new leader in cell phones.

Already ahead of the pack in smartphones, Samsung extended its dominance over the entire worldwide handset industry by displacing longtime cell phone king Nokia, according to a study by IHS.

The role reversal illustrates how fast Samsung has risen, thanks largely to its Galaxy S smartphone franchise, and how far Nokia has fallen. Prior to this year, Nokia enjoyed a 14-year reign atop the cell phone market, though its past few years were propped up by its legacy Symbian platform.

Samsung controlled 29 percent of the overall cell phone market, and … Read more

Nokia has undergone a significant cultural and identity shift under the leadership of CEO Stephen Elop.

Elop didn't wait too long after he joined the company in September 2010 as CEO to make a splash. Five months into his tenure, he decided to drop the company's home-grown next-generation platform for Windows Phone, which just so happens to be created by his former employer.

But perhaps it's the changes within Nokia that will ultimately have the largest impact in the company's bid to turn itself … Read more

HELSINKI, Finland -- I came here to listen for a death rattle.

It was a late Monday morning in late November when I arrived, and there was no sunlight. None. The sky was gray, bleaching out the city's colorful buildings. I asked the cab driver whether it would get any brighter, but he wasn't confident. The sun comes up late in the day and fades early in the afternoon this time of year. As even the Finns concede with a stoic chuckle, it's depressing.

Unsurprisingly, it's considered the worst time of the year to travel to … Read more

CES is almost here, but it's important to keep in mind that the biggest consolidated electronics show of the year is often a mixed indicator of the year's actual tech trends. Case in point: consider CES 2010, where "big" products included smartbooks and Cell TVs, but the major wave of Android phones and the iPad were nowhere to be found.

With that in mind, let's look at CES 2012's Best Of awards winners and see where they are now that the year's about to come to a close. Were they Editors' Choice winners? … Read more

Nokia said today that it would launch a variant of its flagship smartphone, the Lumia 920, specifically for China Mobile.

The Lumia 920T will be the first Windows Phone to run on China Mobile's TD-SCDMA network. The phone is expected to hit the market by the end of the year and sell for 4,599 yuan (about $740).

This latest Nokia phone is important because it should allow the company to tap into China Mobile's more than 700 million customers -- the largest subscriber base in the world. China is an increasingly important market as Nokia hopes to … Read more

PARIS -- Nokia announced a new lower-end Windows Phone today, the $249 Nokia Lumia 620, hoping customers will be drawn to its rounded corners and bright colors when it launches in January of 2013.

The Lumia 620 is a 3G model with a 3.8-inch screen, 1GHz dual-core Snapdragon S4 processor, a back camera that'll shoot 720p video, a 5-megapixel front camera for video chat, near-field communications (NFC) technology, and loudspeakers, the company said. But Marko Ahtisaari, Nokia's executive vice president of design, put the new colors front and center as he unveiled the phone at the LeWeb … Read more

These days, almost every smartphone contains the same bag of tricks, with little to differentiate handsets, apart from the hardware and maybe some software extras.

Sure, one might have a better camera, more external or internal storage, and other specs that help us tell one phone from another. But on the whole, you can access e-mail, text messages, and social networks from them all, share photos and videos, surf the Internet, and install any number of apps.

This kind of uniformity is actually good news, since it means that even midrange smartphones can be just as capable as high-end products, even if they have a smaller screen or shorter battery life, for instance. Of course, there are some smartphones that stand out from the crowd for a certain physical or software feature. In no particular order, here's the current crop of unique handsets that have me looking twice.… Read more

We're back, and just in time for the holiday shopping season! Welcome to the pre-Black Friday episode of Always On: the unboxing extravaganza.

This episode alone features Google's two new pure-Android Nexus devices -- the LG Nexus 4 and the Nexus 10 tablet. I so wanted to love the Nexus 4, since I'm definitely in the market for a pure-Android device, but I'm skeptical (as is our CNET reviewer, Lynn La) about the lack of 4G LTE in the unlocked model. Then again, I don't have to sit around worrying about it since the phone … Read more