Japanese network operator KDDI has been demoing a rather handy little innovation that should help those with low resolution screens. The idea is pretty simple, when watching a video stream you can zoom in on a particular part of it and have the stream cropped to show just the zoomed part.

The benefit is obvious for those who are not using devices with high resolution displays as it lets you see the important bits without a significant loss in quality. Not too shabby at all. The legwork is done server side and it also has the added bonus of reducing the data load on the network.

Video Demo Below!

Super AMOLED displays have been in short supply across the globe this year as smartphone sales to continue to grow. The shortage has affected various handsets over the past year or so, affecting their sales, not a position any manufacturer wants to see continue.

Well it looks like the drought may soon be over according to a report by Taiwan DigiTimes. Various companies in the Far East, most notably Samsung, are planning on ramping up production efforts so 2011 should hopefully see a surplus of the displays. Indeed Samsung is expected to command a dominating 90% share of the market by year end, a position that will be reinforced by the building of a new production facility that is due to come online in June 2011.

Other companies will also start increasing production of AMOLED displays, including two from Taiwan, AU Optronics and Chimei Innolux. A third Taiwanese company, Wintek is planning on joining the party too with its own production efforts. All in all the shortage of AMOLED panels should be a thing of the past.

Facebook application developer Tal Ater has been digging through Facebook code and voila he has found a "VideoChat" object, which refers to Skype and Skype user IDs the code checks for plugin support using either ActiveX on Internet Explorer, or using the Skype SDK. Apparently, this code is not shown every time a page is loaded, hinting us Facebook is currently bucket testing the feature.

Its only obvious Facebook will add voice and even video calls at some point in the future. Lets face it, today’s youth relies on Facebook rather than email for messaging and why not offer them calls and video calls while there, as well.

Mobiado has just announced the latest addition to their lineup of luxury phones the Classic 712 Stealth. Inspired by military stealth aircrafts, the Mobiado Classic 712 Stealth is hand-crafted from exquisite materials like aircraft aluminum and sapphire crystal.

On the feature side the 712 Stealth offers a 2.2-inch QVGA display, which Mobiado curiously refers to as large, a 5 megapixel camera with flash, 3G and integrated GPS. Not much for a 3000-dollar phone, but we all know you are not going to buy this one for the features.

You will do so because they let you pick between black, clear, blue, or ruby selection button and you can decide between English, Arabic, or Cyrillic inscription for the keyboard.

Qualcomm, the company behind Snapdragon, teased its successor the MSM8960 has two cores, five times the performance, better graphics and a multi-mode 3G and 4G modem. They also have a couple of other dual-core systems using the current Snapdragon core but at higher frequency.

Two Systems on a Chip (SoC) we will be seeing next year are the MSM8260 and MSM8660. They pack two Scorpion cores but run at 1.2GHz and they are shipping to manufacturers already.

The MSM8960 SoC steals the show however. It is based on a newer core and it has two of them and they will have 5x the performance, compared to a single-core Snapdragon SoC. The new Adreno GPU gives a 4x boost to the graphics compared to current Adreno GPUs and Qualcomm claims the performance will be similar to that of the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.

Its a pretty bold claim, considering the MSM8960 also boasts a 75% reduction of the power consumption. Anyway, besides the CPU and GPU the SoC also includes support for all 3G modes and LTE Multi-Mode.