Despite almost constant speculation and various false starts there has been about as much chance of Spotify launching in the US as there has been of the Pope writing the foreward to Richard Dawkins new book. However, we are maybe and I do stress the word maybe very strongly, on the cusp of the actual American Spotify launch.

The New York Post is reporting that Spotify have secured the backing of Sony in America and are just days away from signing a deal with them. The Post also reports that in addition to Sony Spotify has the support of another, unnamed, record label. An anonymous music industry executive told the Post "Spotify is launching in the US, for sure. They've got the deals now".

The main problem for Spotify has been the record labels so if they really have managed to get them onboard this time it should mean the way is clear for a full blown launch. The labels have been wary of models that essentially give away music for free through advertising support as similar projects have failed in the past. Spotify, however, seems to be doing pretty well across Europe and with America being the world biggest market for music its a vital market for Spotify to get involved in.

Remember my words please. In 2012-2013 we either have to receive a new type of batteries for mobile phones or face the crisis because the record of one day of operation will be broken downwards. Even today you can make you gadget check mail all the time, be online in an IM client and surf the web via EDGE to get no more than 4 hour of operation. In the US I did not use my HTC Desire for data transfer much. Few calls are complemented by many text messages and you easily get two days of operation. It all depends on features you use in your phone.

In recent years the number of features and power used to service them have increase. Batteries have a limit of 2500 mAh and beyond their size becomes too big, which influences the weight of handsets. We need a technological breakthrough, but there is none in sight to offer a required solution to current woes.

The market of external batteries is growing rapidly. I could not resist the temptation and purchased a 1000 mAh battery for 30$, though in some countries the price can be around 20-25$. In my case HTC Desire needs slightly more than one hour to get around 50% of the charge. It gives me one day of active use, which is nice. As you can see on the body we have a miniUSB jack alongside microUSB. They can be used for charging too. This gadget is useful and inconspicuous. If we do not get any revolutionary technology soon and I am a bit skeptical now we will use similar external batteries more often. The market of accessories will boom.

Its been a month since Gigabyte announced their GSmart Rola phone and now the company is getting ready to launch the GSmart G1310 dual-SIM device running Android 2.2 Froyo for a decent price.

The GSmart G1310 features a 3.2-inch capacitive touchscreen with a resolution of 320x480 pixels and a 5 MP camera with autofocus. It all sounds great, until we get to the processor. The G1310 features the same Qualcomm MSM7225 CPU clocked at 528Mhz, 512 MB ROM and 256 RAM that are found in the GSmart Rola.

As connectivity goes, the G1310 is well covered with Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.1, and GPS. Two color variations will be available champagne gold and pearl white. The GSmart G1310 will launch in Eastern Europe in Q1 this year with an expected price of €199.

The British cell phone manufacturer Vertu has introduced another member to its portfolio of ultra expensive limited edition devices. The company hasonce again partnered with Ferrari to release the Ascent Ferrari GT handset.

Inspired by the equally high-end Italian cars, the Vertu Ascent Ferrari GT has a body made made forged titanium with a matte black PVD finish. The black and red hand-sewn leather ornaments use the exact same leather as the Ferrari interiors. The list of design highlights continues with a ceramic battery cover and a side inspired by the famous Ferrari engine grill.

The rest of the features of the Vertu Ascent Ferrari GT are more down-to-earth and include a 2" QVGA screen and a 5 megapixel autofocus camera with a LED flash. There's also 3G with HSDPA and A-GPS with navigation software and preoloaded maps. The Vertu trademark high-performance 11x15mm stereo speakers are also present.

Vertu will only create two thousand and eleven phones Ascent Ferrari GT units, but has so far not revealed their prices.

I bet you have seen the NVIDIA Tegra 2 moniker been thrown all over the place these days. CES 2011 is over now and we saw a slew of smartphones, tablets and Whats Not powered by Nvidia latest and greatest mobile platform. So what’s all the fuss about it and how high should you place your expectations for your next dual-core smartphone?

Although it sure looks like a computer CPU, the Tegra 2 chip is more complex than that. It’s packaged the same way, however inside it there is an ARM Cortex-A9 dual-core processor, 1MB worth of shared L2 cache, an ultra-low power GeForce GPU and as many as five other co-processors that help the dual-core big-boy do its job most efficiently.

Unfortunately, the current crop of mobile processors have hit a bump in their development. Pumping the clock rate and cache can only get you so far before any further voltage tweaks start sucking your battery juice in less than a day.

Enter dual-core platforms where multitasking is distributed evenly between the two cores thus allowing more flexibility in multitasking helped by capable dedicated processing hardware for specific tasks such as gaming and HD video playback and recording. Its much the same path desktop CPUs took from single-core to dual-core five years ago.

But how fast is it?

Without getting into the technical side of things any further, here is how fast the Tegra 2 is in a synthetic benchmark against some of the Android competition. According to Nvidia technology White paper, the Tegra 2 has a twice as fast Javascript performance as compared to the Galaxy S, for instance.

The dual-core architecture brings a total of 30% faster page load times as compared to the same configuration but with only one core enabled. That should give you a pretty good idea of the expected comparative performance gain regardless of custom architecture and OS.