It seems positively bizarre to type, especially since I have been covering the company for nearly a decade now, but Nokia is no longer a cell phone maker. Once the largest phone vendor on the planet by a staggering margin, Nokia sold its devices and services business to Microsoft and will now wear a number of new hats as it looks toward the future. One of those hats, as it turns out, is that of an Android developer — and the company’s first big software announcement is a shockingly impressive one.

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Google has yet to release its next-gen Android OS version, but it looks like one major feature of the new operating system has been confirmed. Xda-developers has discovered that commits made to the AOSP master branch on Wednesday night show that Dalvik will be replaced with ART as default. None of that will make sense to many readers, but more experienced Android fans already know what Dalvik and ART are, and why it’s good news that Android will replace the former with the latter.

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It seems like each new social app that launches pushes us further apart as a society. Thousands of users posting minutia impossible to care about… ridiculous secrets anonymously posted with zero accountability… stupid apps designed to do little more than annoy us… it’s all becoming overwhelming. Every so often, however, something different emerges that finds novel ways to bring us closer together — and 20 Days Stranger is perhaps the most poetic new social app we have seen in quite some time.

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The iPhone is already the most popular mobile camera out there, even though many other smartphone makers are putting more and more emphasis on the camera tech in the devices they ship. With iOS 8, Apple plans to further improve the camera experience of iPhone users by adding many manual controls that will help photography fanatics take even better pictures with the iPhone.

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BlackBerry shocked Wall Street on Thursday by delivering a much narrower loss than expected. The company is now growing its cash pile even though it is shipping fewer than 2 million phones per quarter. This stabilization is a feat in itself, but where is future sales growth going to come from? Messaging app system BBM is the best bet. It now has close to 100 million active users — but some decidedly worrisome trends have emerged in recent months.

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Samsung finally took the wraps off of its hotly anticipated Galaxy S5 LTE-A — previously known as the Galaxy S5 Prime — earlier this week. Highlighted by a jaw-dropping a 5.1-inch Super AMOLED display with quad HD resolution, a 2.5GHz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 805 processor and 3GB of RAM, the Galaxy S5 LTE-A represents a significant improvement over the somewhat lackluster Galaxy S5, but consumers outside South Korea may never get to enjoy the beastly handset. For the time being, Samsung has no plans to launch the Galaxy S5 LTE-A globally.

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With the increasing number of mobile devices that can be wirelessly charged, it’s no surprise that more companies are thinking about how they can incorporate this technology in their products. Starbucks has recently announced that all its stores across the U.S. will offer customers wireless charging areas, but what if that’s not enough? One fashion designer, working together with Microsoft, has come up with a pair of pants for men that will wirelessly charge phones, Business Insider reports.

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Amazon is already taking pre-orders for its new Fire Phone – although no matter how cool its features may be, it doesn’t mean we’re looking at the next big thing right here – and DigiTimes has apparently learned that the giant retailer has high hopes for its first smartphone ever.

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BlackBerry on Thursday morning reported earnings that beat the Street’s expectations by a significant margin, suggesting that the company’s cost-cutting measures are paying off more quickly than analysts expected. For the fiscal first quarter ended in May, BlackBerry reported a loss of $0.11 per share versus the consensus estimate of a $0.25 loss per share. The company’s $966 million in Q1 revenue missed consensus estimates of $976 million, but smartphone shipments improved to 1.6 million units from 1.3 million in the year-ago quarter.

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T-Mobile is now ready to offer potential customers one more reason to change mobile operators, as the carrier on Wednesday announced a new element of its Uncarrier operation. Starting on Monday, June 23, T-Mobile will let customers sign up for T-Mobile Test Drive on the company’s website in order to try out T-Mobile’s “data-strong network” for seven days free of charge on an iPhone 5s that’s also provided by the carrier.

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