The prices of the Nokia Lumia 820 and the Lumia 920 have been published in Russia, Germany and in Italy with the devices expected to be launched in November 2012.

In Russia, the Lumia 920 will cost around £500 while the Lumia 820 will sell for £400, which is significantly more than what we expect them to sell in the UK. In Germany, the top of the range model will carry a suggested retail price of 649 Euros (£518) while the mainstream model will cost 499 Euros (£398). In Italy, expect the Lumia 920 to cost 599 Euros and the 820, 499 Euros as well.

Earlier this year, Nokia launched a scheme whereby anyone can try out one of their latest phones for two weeks free of charge. Since then, it has added a few other devices to the no strings attached scheme, namely the Nokia Lumia 900 and the Pureview 808.

Nokia will cover delivery costs and customs charges where applicable, and trialists are encouraged to provide feedback to the company. Other devices included in the trial are the Lumia 710, the Lumia 610 and the Nokia Purity 360 HD headset.

Of course, the company chooses who will be getting the free playtime with its phones, and individuals are required to pitch to Nokia about why they should be selected to participate in the scheme. You can increase your chance of being selected by highlighting your online presence (Twitter, YouTube, blogging etc.), and sharing reasons why you are contemplating a switch to Nokia soon.

It will be interesting to see if and when Nokia's two newest handsets, the Lumia 820 and Lumia 920, are added to the project. Both were launched at the beginning of September at a special event in New York, and we had a bit of hands-on time with the new-gen handsets over in the Big Apple.

Nokia has already started to clear out existing Windows Phone handsets ahead of the launch of its latest devices. The Lumia 710, for example, is billed on the Finnish firm's website as available from £99.95 on PAYG deals, or £229.95 SIM-free.

Source: Nokia Conversations

Planning to be outdoors and far away from power outlets for a while? A travel-sized solar charging dock might be just what you need. The Solar Power Dock from Netherlands-based manufacturer A-solar and solar tech company Intivation was unveiled earlier this week at the Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona. It charges iOS devices such as the iPhone and iPad with a little help from the sun and is small enough to fit in your pocket.

With a durable built-in battery, a small solar panel and strong rubber-finished casing, the Solar Power Dock can keep devices running when you’re far away from an outlet. The price: $105.

The Motorola RAZR is back, but not as we know it. The, er, razor thin clamshell was the ultimate fashion accessory six or seven years ago, but that was when a phone could be that and nothing more. The RAZR brand has returned enlightened, but has it really wised up during its years abroad? Let’s find out.

While late 2011 saw the launch of the iPhone 4s, the Samsung Galaxy Nexus and the Nokia Luma 800, the year’s defining smartphone arguably arrived way back in March. The Samsung Galaxy S 2 set formidably high standards and sold like hotcakes. Will 2012 be the year of the Samsung Galaxy S3?

Three million sales in less than two months, 10 million sales in less than five months. That’s what the Samsung Galaxy S2  reportedly managed in 2011, so it’s no surprise many are looking to the Samsung Galaxy S3 to be one of the biggest smartphones of 2012.

Be a star. Let the Samsung GALAXY S II’s video shooting capabilities bring out the celebrity in you. Featuring 1080p Full HD Recording, every moment is a potential masterpiece in the making. Capture the action in high resolution and in dual core speed, instantly play back your HD footage in incredible clarity on the 4.3” SUPER AMOLED Plus display.

• Samsung Voice Solution

  Get vocal. Just double tap the home key and you can control the Samsung GALAXY S II with a few selected words. Take charge and execute major functions like calling, music, messaging, scheduling and launching apps with the ease of a voice command. You can also capture your thoughts, make a note to yourself and send it to your friends by simply saying send!

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  Social Hub

  Organize and synchronize better all in your online contacts through Social Hub. Streamline your email, SMS, IM and SNS information into one unified box, and interact faster with more people in the way you want to.

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  NFC (Near Field Communication)

  Leave your wallet at home. The Samsung GALAXY S II has it in hand. It will house NFC short-range high frequency wireless communication technology for contactless credit card payments. It can communicate with existing smartcards and readers and is compatible with existing contactless infrastructure for public transportation and payment systems. Use NFC for secure purchasing, ticket reservations, as a transit pass, or even for electronic door entry. You can even scan smart tags on posters or billboards to download the details to your phone. That’s Samsung smart!

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  Dual Core Application Processor

  Making the impossible possible. Dual Core Application Processor is the ultra responsive
  answer to mobile performance, providing high-speed multitasking, quick web page loading, quick
  reaction speeds, a smoother UI, lightning fast image editing and high performance gaming. And with
  its screaming fast encoding/decoding ability, which supports video playing and shooting, outstands computing power and performance.

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  Game Hub

  Join in on the action. The Samsung GALAXY S II’s Game Hub lets you to download high quality games, providing over 20 social network games and premium games. Search for games and new release information or play away. With an accelerometer, and gyroscope sensors dynamic hand and arm movement games stand out from the crowd. The slightest tilt and you’re dead – now that’s entertainment.

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  Music Hub

  Keep your music close, while accessing the world of 13 million tracks of songs. Samsung’s Music Hub*, powered by 7digital, provides an intuitive playback system while you search, discover, preview, purchase and download tracks on the go. The app will also provide you with the viewing experience for rich information, with access to all the artist bios, discographies and reviews you desire. Get recommendations on hot and new albums and add to the excitement with the virtual 5.1 channel sound.

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  Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync

  Optimized to securely access enterprise resources on a Microsoft Exchange server to stay up to date with your business email, calendar, contacts and task synchronization, the Samsung GALAXY S II boasts the most comprehensive mobile implementation of Exchange ActiveSync. Providing the strongest security Mobile Device Management of any smart phone and the most policies and restrictions support among Android ActiveSync clients, it allows for real-time communication with employee phones to remotely configure settings, monitor compliance with policies, guarantee synchronized data safety and wipe or lock managed phones.

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  On Device Encryption

  Play it safe with a security solution that helps protect mobile data without the need to sacrifice speed and functionality. The Samsung Galaxy S II contains powerful encrypted hardware, minimising the use of security software and applying encryption technology to the hardware itself. The incorporated Sybase Afaria Mobile Device Management and Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync complement the encryption support with their own mechanisms to help secure important corporate and personal information.

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  VPN (Virtual Private Network)

  The Samsung GALAXY S II has adopted Cisco’s AnyConnect to provide reliable and easy-to-deploy encrypted network connectivity by delivering persistent corporate access for users on the go. Whether providing access to business email, a virtual desktop session, or other Android applications, it enables business-critical application connectivity.

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  MDM (Mobile Device Management)

  Wipe away your concerns. Sybase and Samsung are working together to address the management and security concerns commonly faced by enterprises when deploying Android devices. This partnership provides the comprehensive capabilities that It requires to allow mobile workers access to enterprise assets using the Samsung GALAXY S II. It can now confidently extend corporate security policies to the Samsung Android platform, allowing for the adoption of both personally owned and corporate owned GALAXY S II’s.

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  Cisco WebEx

  Stay on the same page and stay connected for important meetings on the go. With Cisco WebEx support, a secure, online meeting is just a click away. Users can view shared desktops, browsers, applications and documents with live annotations and feel the experience of deep integration with the Samsung GALAXY S II’s exclusive feature to initiate a WebEx meeting from the dialer and contacts screens.

As it happened, there was no iPhone 5 after all, butthe company did announce the iPhone 4S. However, the iPhone 5 is still on the cards - we're expecting it to debut in mid-2012. You can check out the latest rumours about iPhone 5 below. As the year 2011 is advancing, the frenzy of iPhone 5 is becoming stronger. The device is expected to look close to the iPhone 4 but will also come with a few improvements that will make it a better. For instance, the unit is expected to come with the same shatter and scratchproof Gorilla Glass. According to some iPhone 5 specs, the unit will most likely come with sleeker and thinner design than its predecessor. Expert insight predicts that the unit will also cater for the antenna problem that tends to affect people using iPhone 4. If you are an enthusiast of Apple products, keep reading here for some more speculations.

Samsung is developing an 11.6-inch tablet with a 2560×1600 pixel display, which might put the display of Apple’s next generation iPad to shame, Boy Genius Report claims, citing a “trusted source.”

The tablet will reportedly run Android 4.0 with a 2 GHz dual-core Exynos 5250 CPU, and it’s likely to be unveiled at the Mobile World Congress in February 2012.

Nokia and Microsoft has unveiled the Lumia 800 and the Lumia 710, Nokia’s first Window Phone devices in India. Both the Lumia 800 and the Lumia 710 were unveiled at the Nokia World 2011 in London. The Nokia Lumia 800 has a unibody design and comes with a 3.7-inch (800 x 480 pixels) ClearBlack AMOLED display. The Nokia Lumia 700 comes with a 3.7-inch (800 x 480 pixels) ClearBlack TFT display. Both these devices are powered by 1.4 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon Scorpion CPU and runs on Windows Phone 7.5 (Mango) OS.

Verizon has confirmed that it will begin selling a "flashy new white" version of the Droid RAZR just in time to make an appearance under the tree, with a pair of Xboard tablets shipping this month as well. The Xyboard (Xoom 2) will be available in five flavors -- the 10.1-incher will come in 16GB, 32GB and 64GB capacities for $530, $630 and $73

After some teases and leaks, Meizu's finally unveiled its next flagship phone MX to keep China entertained for 2012. While the quad core flavor won't be here until next year, this dual core model will be available in mainland China starting from ¥2,999 ($470) on January 1st (like with the M9 last year), and Hong Kong is still expecting an early January release. The full spec list now includes a 4-inch 960 x 640 ASV display, 1.4GHz Samsung Exynos 4210 dual core chip, 1GB of LPDDR2 RAM, 16GB of storage (32GB version to launch later), 0.3 megapixel front-facing camera, a secondary mic for noise cancellation and a 1,600mAh battery. Oh, that circular button at the bottom? It's just a physical home button instead of an optical trackpad as previously rumored.

Anyone who has ever tried to type on an iPad can understand why TouchFire — a simple keyboard overlay that makes typing easier — has raised almost $100,000 on Kickstarter.

Instead of inserting a string of babble into your prose as usually happens when you rest your fingers on the iPad’s keyboard, TouchFire doesn’t set off a single key when you rest you fingertips on the product. Its defined keys make typing while looking away from the screen possible, and its silicon body is an improbably thin and flexible solution to a problem that is usually solved with clunky plastic add-ons.

Apple might be adamant that Siri remain exclusive to the iPhone 4S, but that doesn’t mean that developers aren’t still trying to get the app running on other iOS devices using unofficial and unsupported means.

Back in October, we wrote about attempts to get Siri running on an iPad. Since then various hackers and developers have tried to solve the Siri puzzle. Most of these attempts are thwarted when it comes to actually getting Siri to communicate with the backend server that is required to answer and serve queries.

Remember Samsung's second-gen dual-screen Android clamshell we spotted about a month ago? Well, here it is at last: announced in partnership with China Telecom, this SCH-W999 flip phone packs two 3.5-inch 480 x 800 Super AMOLED panels back to back, along with a 1.2GHz dual-core Qualcomm MSM8660, Android 2.3 with TouchWiz, HyperSkin back cover (as featured on the Galaxy Nexus for grip plus anti-smear), five megapixel camera, Bluetooth 3.0, WiFi and WAPI (China's not-so-successful take on WiFi, basically).

AT&T stole some of LG's thunder earlier this week when it unveiled the company's LTE flagship -- the Nitro HD -- before the handset's official coming out soirée. Well, tonight LG's gone and thrown that fete anyway, introducing us (once again) to its 4.5-incher. But you have to wonder why the company's even bothering to roll out yet another Gingerbread-baked device when Samsung's Galaxy Nexus is already out of the gate and leading the Android charge with ICS -- not to mention the current availability of rival heavyweights like the Rezound and Droid RAZR. Still, the phone's packing some very respectable specs, with a "true" HD 1280 x 720 IPS display, dual 1.3 / 8 megapixel shooters, 20GB of storage (4GB internal / 16GB microSD) and a dual-core 1.5GHz Qualcomm APQ8060 processor running the show.

The next version of each smartphone's operating system is always the best. We impatiently wait for the latest and greatest firmware to come around, expecting it to liberate us from the shackles of last year's code and features that haven't shown up yet. This happens incessantly with Google's Android OS, and version 4.0 -- unveiled at this year's I/O conference in May -- is no different. Known as Ice Cream Sandwich (referred to henceforth as ICS), the last word in the title indicates the merging of Gingerbread, the most recent phone platform, and Honeycomb, the version optimized for use on tablets. We knew this much, but were otherwise left with conjecture as to how the company planned to accomplish such a feat -- and what else the new iteration had in store.