Everyone’s favorite smartphone murderer, ratedrr, has put Nokia’s flagship smartphones to the test in a head-to-head competition to see if either can survive being shot with a AK47. As expected, both phones don’t survive.

For more ratedrr fun, check out his previous video featuring the Galaxy S4 losing to a sniper rifle.

After announcing the Lumia 928 for Verizon last week, Nokia announced today that its next flagship device – the Lumia 925 – will be available on T-Mobile later this year. The Lumia 925 is very similar to the Lumia 928 with the only differences seemingly appearing in the camera.

Before we get to that, however, you should know that the Lumia 925 has the same 4.5-inch OLED display that the 928 has. It also features the same 1GB of RAM, 8.7MP camera and 32GB of internal storage.

As for the camera differences, the Lumia 925 features a dual-LED flash – the same on the original Lumia 920. The Lumia 928 went with a Xenon flash instead. The 928 will have the best flash out of the three, but a dual-LED flash isn’t too shabby.

Speaking of cameras, Nokia also announced today new camera software for the Lumia 925 called Smart Camera. As its name implies, it allows users to do some pretty sophisticated photo editing work from within the camera app:

So, when will T-Mobile customers be able to get their hands on the Lumia 925? The carrier isn’t saying yet. The same goes for the price.

[h/t: Engadget]

As you can imagine, this isn’t the first time 3D printers have been used to make smartphone cases. A quick search on Thingiverse for “iPhone case” returns 591 results. 3D printers have also been used to make some rather interesting designs, like a steampunk gear case or a sweater case.

Nokia announced today that its Here app services, which includes Drive, Maps and Transit, will be launching exclusively across Windows Phone 8. That being said, Nokia says the best Here experience will be had on its own Lumia hardware, including the recently announced Nokia Lumia 720 and 520.

The most exciting part about Here is the integration of Nokia’s AR technology. In essence, a user can hold the phone up, and have the name of restaurants and other locations displayed across the landscape. It might not be exactly useful in a real word setting, but it’s incredibly cool nonetheless.

Here Maps and other services are now available for Windows Phone 8.

Here is already available on iOS, and will be launching on Firefox OS later this year. An Android version was apparently available via Amazon’s Appstore for Android, but the link to it is longer working.

At the Mobile World Congress event today, Nokia announced several new Windows Phone 8 Lumia devices, including the Lumia 720 and Lumia 520, as well as budget phones called the Nokia 105 and Nokia 301.

The Lumia smartphones are similar in design to Nokia’s premium Windows Phone 8 devices, the Lumia 920 and the Lumia 822, but feature less expensive hardware. The Lumia 720, for example, features a 1GHZ processor and 512MB of memory, while the Lumia 520 has a smaller 4-inch display. The 720 will sell for €249 and the 520 will sell for €139. Both will be out in March.

The really interesting portion of Nokia’s announcements was the reveal of very inexpensive feature phones the company hopes to push in developing nations such as China.

The Nokia 105 will sell for just €15 and offers the bare minimum of features. It offers support for phone calls and SMS, and also features an FM radio, flashlight, and 35 days of standby battery power. The Nokia 301 is a small step up and offers a camera and more feature phone perks such as social media apps. It will retail for €65.

In a preliminary filing, Nokia says that its Devices & Services business has “exceeded expectations and achieved underlying profitability” over the last quarter. The company estimates that its fourth quarter net sales were approximately €3.9 billion. It also shipped a total of 86.3 million units in the same quarter.

So how well did its smartphone division do? Nokia says that it sold 6.6 million smartphones in the last quarter for sales of €1.2 billion. Out of those 6.6 million devices, 4.4 million were Nokia Lumia devices. It doesn’t say how well the Lumia 920 specifically did, but an analyst report from last year says that Nokia received an order for 2.5 million Lumia 920s after selling out at online retailer Amazon, and seeing great success in Germany.

Like always, Nokia seems to have done well in its regular mobile phone division with sales of €2.5 billion. The company shipped 79.6 million units in the last quarter with its proprietary Asha feature phone series selling 9.3 million units.

“We are pleased that Q4 2012 was a solid quarter where we exceeded expectations and delivered underlying profitability in Devices & Services and record underlying profitability in Nokia Siemens Networks,” Nokia CEO Stephen Elop said. “We focused on our priorities and as a result we sold a total of 14 million Asha smartphones and Lumia smartphones while managing our costs efficiently, and Nokia Siemens Networks delivered yet another very good quarter.”

Nokia isn’t out of the woods just yet, however, as the company has to keep its momentum going forward. One good quarter doesn’t mean a thing if Windows Phone 8 fails to catch on at large. Nokia made a gamble when it threw all in with Microsoft, and now Microsoft has to work on convincing people that its mobile platform is better than what’s provided by Apple or Google.

Even if Windows Phone 8 fails to capture a worthwhile audience, it seems that Nokia may have a backup plan. Just don’t expect that plan to feature any more smartphones.

Zacks Equity Research released a report today that says Nokia is seeing increased demand for its Lumia 920 handset since launch. The report cites a story originally from The Next Web that says the Lumia 920 is sold out at Amazon, and only the white model is available at AT&T’s online store. All Things D reports that the Lumia 920 is also selling out across Germany.

To add even more fuel to Nokia’s new found success, the Zacks report says that the company has received orders for an additional 2.5 million units of just the Lumia 920. The report compares that to the 2.9 million Lumia series phones that Nokia sold last quarter. If true, the Lumia 920 could prove to be the savior of Nokia and Windows Phone 8.

All these factors lead to Zacks saying that it remains optimistic about the future of Nokia. It says that the Lumia 920 is “a winner” and that it may give the company “a ray of hope to gain some market traction.” That being said, the analyst firm says that Nokia shouldn’t rest on its laurels and continue building out its handset business. It’s with that Zacks gives Nokia a short-term Buy rating.

The folks at PhoneBuff decided to put the Nokia Lumia 920 through its paces. They started with a simple drop test – the very same test that has taken out numerous other devices.

The drop test didn’t take the Lumia 920 out of commission so the folks at PhoneHub took it to the next level. They attempted to scratch both sides of the device with some keys, and then took a hamer and a knife to the device.

After the Lumia 920 survived the previous two tests, they went all out to destroy the phone. First, they ran over the phone with a car and nothing happened. The phone finally stopped working after being hit with a board across a parking lot, but didn’t actually break until it was thrown against a concrete slab.

The point of this is that the Lumia 920 will survive normal everyday situations. It should take any drops or scratches like a champ. Just don’t throw the phone against a concrete wall.

Nokia announced today that it’s rolling its maps and digital location services into one service called HERE. It will encompass anything and everything maps into a single brand that will be used across the Web and various mobile devices.

“People want great maps, and with HERE we can bring together Nokia’s location offering to deliver people a better way to explore, discover and share their world,” said Nokia President and CEO Stephen Elop. “Additionally, with HERE we can extend our 20 years of location expertise to new devices and operating systems that reach beyond Nokia. As a result, we believe that more people benefit from and contribute to our leading mapping and location service.”

As part of its new initiative, Nokia will be branching out its maps into new territory. In the coming weeks, Nokia will be launching HERE maps on iOS. It will be one more map app that Apple can point its customers to as it works on making a decent app itself.

Interestingly enough, Nokia has also pledged support for Mozilla’s open source Firefox OS. There will be an HTML5 HERE app available on the Mozilla Marketplace early next year when the first FIrefox OS devices launch.

“Mozilla is a leader in HTML5, building the Web as a platform for developing compelling applications, and location is a key part of that platform,” said Jay Sullivan, Mozilla Vice President of Products. “We are excited to work with Nokia as the combination of Firefox OS and HERE’s location platform provides rich possibilities for mobile application developers to create amazing experiences for users.”

Android isn’t being left out of the fun either. Nokia is working on a HERE SDK for Android OEMs that should be available by early next year. Device manufacturers can use the SDK to create built-in map and location-based applications using Nokia’s maps content.

The launch of HERE isn’t the only thing that Nokia has going for it today. To help foster the 3D capabilities in HERE, Nokia is acquiring Berkeley, California-based earthmine. The company, much like Google Street View, captures 3D data with car mounted cameras and creates 3D street-level view maps.

In all honesty, this is the best possible move Nokia can make at the moment. The company’s hardware business is suffering, and the soon to be released Lumia 920 Windows Phone may not be as huge as of a hit as the company hopes. Expanding into mobile services like mapping and location services, especially when the Nokia Maps brand is already pretty strong, can only be a good thing.

You can try out the HTML5 version of Here maps in your browser right now. It works on any HTML5 capable browser which means that Chrome and Firefox for Android and Chrome and Safari for iOS should suffice.

Research firm Canalys today released its worldwide country-level smartphone shipment data for the third quarter of 2012, and the numbers still don’t look good for anyone other than Samsung, Apple, and Sony.

Their shipment data shows that the worldwide smartphone market reached 173.7 million units in Q3 2012 – 44% higher than Q3 2011. For the third consecutive quarter, Samsung led the global market by shipping 55.5 million smartphones, or 32% of all smartphone shipments. Apple came next with 26.9 million (15.5%), and Sony rounded out the top 3 with 8.8 million (5.1%).

HTC and RIM come next on the list, and they aren’t far behind Sony, with 8.4 million (4.8%) and 7.3 million (4.2%), respectively. However, these numbers are a huge decrease for these companies from their 2011 shipment numbers. HTC shipped 36% more smartphones in Q3 2011, and RIM shipped 38% more. Their shares of shipment numbers have similarly dropped, over 5% in HTC’s case and almost that much for RIM.

Nokia has been pushed off the top 5 and is now included with the “others” category, which collectively ships 38.5% of the world’s smartphones. Nokia shipped fewer units in Q3 2012 in anticipation of the launch of Windows Phone 8. RIM is currently gearing up for BlackBerry 10, which it hopes will revitalize its business, but which analysts are predicting might be DOA.

Canalys emphasized that these numbers are heavily skewed by China, where Samsung has a large lead in the smartphone market.

“When considering actual use of smart phones, however, the markets differ dramatically again, determined by network availability, speed, pricing and localization,” said Chris Jones, Canalys co-founder and principal analyst. “For example, data from the Canalys App Interrogator tool shows that the US market still leads in terms of app downloads and revenue. For example, the US made up 45% of all Apple iPhone app downloads in September, compared with just 11% in China.”

(via BGR)