Why You Should Sell Your iPad 2 Now [CHART]

Apple hasn’t yet confirmed the existence of the iPad 3, but first and second-generation iPad ownersare already rushing to sell their devices based on reports that the iPad 3 will debut in March.

Why the rush? Consumers who sold their original iPads before the iPad 2 was announced were able to fetch higher prices from eBay, and resellers such as Gazelle and NextWorth, than those who waited to list theirs until after the iPad 2 arrived in stores.

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For example: in March 2011, immediately after the announcement unveiling the iPad 2, my colleagueChristina Warren and I were able to sell our 32GB iPads on Gazelle for around $550 each. But just hours later, the asking price had dropped to the $300 range.

Here's a chart, courtesy of NextWorth, that shows the drop in secondhand iPad prices around the time of the iPad 2 launch on eBay:

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Thus, if you're certain you want to upgrade to the iPad 3, you might want to sell your used iPad now.

And if you're not that impressed with the iPad 3? You could still pick up another secondhand version for a lot less money on eBay in a few weeks.

Quad-core Huawei Ascend D1 Q press shots surface

It's no secret Huawei has big plans for its Sunday press conference. The event, which should kickstart the MWC will feature at least one quad-core smartphone device and we get to see its press shots in advance.

The Huawei Ascend D1 Q will obviously have a pretty face to go along with all the muscle under the hood. Judging by those press shots, the Tegra 3-packing Ascend D1 Q won't have the impressively slim waistline of the Ascend P1 S, but it will still be one sleek smartphone.

   Usability and attention to detail are also advertised as the Huawei Ascend D1 Q strengths, though the wording of the Huawei PR team is rather strange. At any rate, the D1 Q has every chance of becoming the first quad-core global smartphone to be announced as the Huawei press conference is a few hours before the HTC one this Sunday.

Now enjoy those smooth lines for a while more and don't forget to watch this spot on Sunday for the updates from the press event.

BLU Studio 5.3 in white makes a point out of not being your typical budget smartphone

Let’s face it: the BLU Studio 5.3, which is on our hands today, looks like anything but a budget minded Android smartphone. It is very big and very white. And yes: it also packs two SIM card slots and two (!) homescreen buttons.

Without a closer look at its hardware and specs, the BLU Studio 5.3 can easily pass for a direct competitor to the mighty Samsung Galaxy Note. But it is not. It costs less than half the Korean royalty, and doesn’t have the ambition to go head to head with it

Instead, the white dressed giant is gunning for the hordes of budget Android devices, sporting displays in the 3″ range, and falling short from the presence it packs.

ZTE announces new Tegra 2 based Mimosa X smartphone

Along with the two new ICS handsets announced yesterday, ZTE had another ICS-based smartphone to announce before MWC. This one is called the Mimosa X and will be running on the Nvidia Tegra 2 processor. While that itself is nothing special, it will also be the first device to have the Nvidia Icera 450 HSPA+ modem.

If you're wondering what so special about that, so far the phones made with the Tegra 2 processor had to rely on modems from other companies, such as Qualcomm. Last year, Nvidia acquired Icera who also make modems for smartphones. This allows them to use their own modems in phones powered by their processors and the ZTE Mimosa X is the first phone to do so.

Other than that the Mimosa X is a typical upper mid-range smartphone, with a qHD display, 5 megapixel rear camera, VGA front camera, 4GB memory, GPS, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. For any further information, we will have to wait for MWC next week. The phone will be launched in Q2, 2012.

Samsung announces Galaxy Ace 2 and Galaxy Mini 2

Samsung has announced two new Android smartphones just a before the Mobile World Congress begins next week.

The first one is the Galaxy Ace 2, which will have a 3.8-inch, 800 x 480 resolution display, 800MHz dual-core processor, 768MB RAM, 4GB internal memory, 5 megapixel rear camera with 720p video recording, VGA front camera, Bluetooth 3.0, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Wi-Fi Direct, GPS/GLONASS and a 1,500mAh battery.

Next up is the Galaxy Mini 2. It has a 3.27-inch, 480 x 320 resolution display, 800MHz processor, 512MB of RAM, 4GB internal memory, 3 megapixel fixed-focus rear camera with VGA video recording, Bluetooth 3.0, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n with DLNA, A-GPS and a 1,300mAh battery.

LG announces L7, L5 and L3 - will be shown at MWC 2012

Following yesterday's "L" teaser LG has officially announced three new droids - the L7, L5 and L3. All three devices will be shown at the MWC next week.

The Optimus L3, L5 and L7

The three Optimus L smartphones will feature square, thin metallic design with a textured leather-like panel on the back. They will also offer what LG calls "floating mass display" - a display closer to the surface, which should appear as if it is floating on it.

Panasonic uncovers Eluga specs, live hands-on photos pop up

As promised yesterday, Panasonic unveiled the specifications of their Android smartphone dubbed the Eluga, expected to debut on the European market this March.

The poorly named Eluga is powered by a dual-core 1GHz TI OMAP 4430 processor and 1GB of RAM and 8GB of internal memory, which we have come to expect from high-end droids these days. At the front we find a 4.3-inch OLED display with qHD 960 x 540 pixels resolution.

It's also water- and dust-proof with NFC on-board. Remarkably, this hasn't made the device as thick as one might expect. The Eluga is just 7.8mm thick and weighs only 103grams, which, to bring it in a perspective, beats the Galaxy S II hands-down.

The reason for the phone's little hump at the back is the 8MP auto-focus snapper with image stabilization. Speaking of the back, underneath the back cover resides 1,150 mAh battery good for 300h of standby and 240 minutes of talk time.

The Eluga will run Android Gingerbread 2.3.5 when initially sold with Ice Cream Sandwich coming in the Spring of this year, or at least that's what Panasonic promises.

Qualcomm S4 chipset benchmarks promise amazing performance

A fresh batch of benchmarks of Qualcomm's S4 platform show just how powerful the new Krait cores are. The tests were run on a reference platform, but since we don't care about the rest of the hardware (screen, camera, etc.), just the chipset performance, these result are a good indication of what to expect.

Qualcomm S4 uses Krait cores, two running at 1.5GHz in the case of the MSM8960 that was used in the reference platform. Krait is better in almost every respect than the old Scorpion cores and as a result performance has skyrocketed in both single and multi threaded tests.

Linpack reports a whopping 106.8 MFLOPS in single-threaded mode and 218.2 MFLOPS in multithreaded mode. For comparison, a Tegra 3 chipset with four Cortex-A9 cores at 1.3GHz score 135.9 MFLOPS in the multi-threaded benchmark.

   
Linpack benchmark results for Qualcomm S4 MSM8960 and Tegra 3 (single and multithreaded)

SunSpider and BrowserMark results top even the highly optimized Samsung Galaxy Nexus, though not by as much as we would have expected.

The GPU inside the Qualcomm MSM8960 is an Adreno 225, even though S4 chipsets are supposed to use Adreno 3xx GPUs. Still, on paper the 225 matches the PowerVR SGX543MP2, a.k.a. the GPU found inside the iPhone 4S.