It’s hard to fault Nokia for the good work that has been put into the Lumia 800.

With a unibody polycarbonate shell, an AMOLED display and an eight-megapixel Carl-Zeiss lens, Nokia’s comeback phone is up against the top smartphones in the market, such as the iPhone 4S and Samsung Galaxy SII. …

Cellphone users in Singapore can expect extended coverage in buildings, on roads and when travelling in an MRT train underground, when stricter rules on 3G coverage unveiled today by the government regulator kick in as soon as April 2012.

Following a number of high-profile network outages last year, the Infocomm Development Authority (IDA) today spelt out the new rules, which will include 85 per cent coverage for each building here. Currently, telcos only have to cover 85 per cent of “public access areas”.

For commuters, the coverage will now include all road and MRT tunnels as well as the CTE by 2015, extending from the previous requirement of 95 per cent across road and MRT tunnels tested. In all, about 99 per cent of the outdoor space on the island is to be blanketed by 3G signals. Previously, the requirement was only 95 per cent across all roads.

And each time any of the three telecom operators here – SingTel, StarHub, M1 – fails to meet one requirement, they can be fined up to S$50,000, instead of the previous “slap on the wrist” S$5,000 per indicator per month.

…

Symantec has discovered over a dozen apps with malicious code that could cede control of your smartphone to perpetrators.

In a recent blog post, the security company said the apps, which are hosted on the Android Market, can be used to propagate a “bot-like threat that can receive commands to carry out certain actions, as well as steal information from the device”. …

With the Evernote and Skitch add-ons, features that were once available through separate apps can now be accessed directly through the Dolphin browser. …

Android might not be the smoothest of mobile operating systems – I’ve seen it slow down even on dual-core chips – but that’s all about to change with the ASUS  Eee Pad Transformer Prime and its brand new quad-core NVIDIA Tegra 3 processor.

A brief hands-on I had earlier in the week revealed that it truly is a sea change in the responsiveness of Android, even more so than the Sony Tablet S, which until now is the smoothest Android tablet I’ve tested. With a whole range of goodies packed into this tablet, the Transformer Prime is easily the best Android tablet on the market right now.

…

If 2011 was remembered for shiny new tablets that made people part with their hard-earned cash, then 2012 may just be the one where the craze for these thin and light yet powerful and affordable ultrabooks takes off big time.

At the annual CES show just concluded earlier in the week, a good number of laptop makers joined the fray with their takes on what people would be carrying to meetings and classrooms in the coming months.

Perhaps having seen Asus, Acer and Lenovo whip up demand for such ultra-light PCs in the closing months of 2011, the likes of Sony, Dell and HP showed of their versions of the ultrabook at CES this year. Lenovo too came up with a quite surprising “yoga-like” ultrabook cum tablet.

Here’s a sneak peek.

…

Motorola is putting up a lighter, more powerful follow-up to its Xoom tablet for sale here in Singapore from today, but with a rather hefty price of S$978.

The new Xoom 2, which will come with both 3G and Wi-Fi, sports a 10.1-inch screen and a faster processor, but will run only on Android Honeycomb (3.2) for now. It should likely be upgradeable to the newest Android 4.0 later in the year, if Motorola Singapore follows the practice of its US headquarters.

…

Today’s unveiling by HTC and Nokia at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) should send shivers down the spines of Windows Phone fans all over the world.

For starters, the long-rumoured Nokia Lumia 900 is finally a reality, and it’s every bit as awesome as I had imagined. The new Nokia flagship smartphone features a 4.3-inch ClearBlack AMOLED display (800 x 480), a 1.4GHz processor, 512MB of RAM and 16GB of internal storage. No word on whether there will be other storage options, and 16GB just seems so 2008.

…

If IBM researchers get their way, remembering passwords will soon be a thing of the past. Big Blue has recently published a video of what it thinks will become reality by 2016, such as mind reading and generating electricity from human activities, among other predictions: …

Okay, its eyes don’t light up in red and it doesn’t breathe digital fire, but a gaudy golden dragon – as cheesy a “Chinese” symbol as you can find – is going to adorn the face of Vertu’s new Signature phone specially designed for the Lunar New Year. …