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Samsung is to launch a new battery pack for its Galaxy S3 smartphone. This should boost the handset's battery life by up to 42%.


If your Samsung Galaxy S3 guzzles up battery power like there's no tomorrow, then you may be interested to hear that an official 3000 mAh extended battery kit with NFC support is due out imminently. This should extend the handset's battery life by up to 42%. Your S3 should therefore be able to hold out for a couple of days between charges. However, the new battery will make the handset thicker and heavier.


The Samsung Galaxy S3 extended battery kit is due out in January for £40.

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Hot on the heels of the 8X, the 8S is HTC's second Windows Phone 8 handset. The 8S is lined up as an entry-level mobile with the kind of tech specs that could mostly have been found in a Windows Phone 7 model. But that by no means makes it a bad phone!


This fairly compact phone has a 4" Super LCD screen (as often seen in HTC handsets) with 800 x 480 pixels. The 8S runs on a 1 GHz dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon processor and 512 MB of RAM. You only get 4 GB of built-in storage (with just over 2 GB of available memory) but a microSD card slot is on hand for boosting capacity by up to 32 GB.

> Read the Full Review: HTC 8S

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Babak Parviz, one of the leading minds behind Project Glass, recently held an interview with IEEE Spectrum to give an update on Google's long-awaited prototype.

Among the details gleaned during the interview held in mid-December, Mr. Parviz revealed that Google Glass would "do two things that we think would be useful for a lot of people. One is to have a device that would allow for pictorial communications, to allow people to connect to others with images and video". The second is "to have a technology that would allow people to access information very, very quickly".

The glasses will have an audio in and out, voice recognition and potentially a touch pad for changing options.

Google intends to produce the hardware itself and, in a carefully chosen phrase, Mr. Parviz added that "at the moment, there are no plans for advertising on this device".

As for potentially adverse side effects on the eyes and vision, Mr. Parviz assures us that Google has "taken this very seriously from the beginning of the project. We’ve looked at this, and we’ve made sure the device is safe, visually and otherwise".

If you fancy yourself a pair of Google Goggles, you'll have to sit tight because the company has released no information about a potential release date or price range. For now, at least, Google Glass remains a thing of the future.

With CES 2013 now just a few days away, manufacturers are trying to keep their upcoming products and announcements under wraps. However, some leaks are inevitable in the run up to the show, and this time they've come straight from Sony.

  
Pictures leaked on the official Sony Mobile site show two Sony smartphones, the Xperia Z and Xperia ZL. The Z is apparently due to sell in Japan while the ZL will be sold globally. The ZL appears to be the slimmer of the two handsets, and features a front-facing camera at the bottom of the phone. This is located above the screen in the Z. The ZL also has an LED notification light below the screen.

Both handsets are due to ship with the Android Jelly Bean OS and run on 1.5 GHz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro processors and 2 GB of RAM. The phones each have a built-in 13-Megapixel camera and a 5" screen with 1920 x 1080 pixels. Stay tuned to our coverage of the CES tech show for more information.
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