Samsung’s Galaxy S4 is due to be announced in a little over a week. That means the rumor mill is going to be spinning non-stop at a furious pace for the next eight days or so. I got punked earlier this week by @evleaks, apologies for that, but this next leaks seems a bit more legit. Someone who doesn’t want to identify themselves for obvious reasons sent the folks at SamMobile four screenshots that show off the eye tracking and head tracking features in the GS4. I’m only going to embed one screenshot, but you get the idea.

It appears that the eye tracking will enable automatic scrolling for certain applications, meaning it’s not a system wide feature. Chrome looks to be supported, as well as both the Gmail and Email apps, but that’s all we can tell. And as for head tracking, it looks like the GS4 will pause videos if you turn your head away. All of this sounds really neat, but it’s going to be all about the execution.

And in case you haven’t noticed, it looks like TouchWiz hasn’t changed. At all. We’re quite shocked by that, but at the same time we’re not all that surprised. Samsung would rather spend their money adding features upon features to their devices instead of improving their theme. But hey, you never know, maybe Samsung is keeping Nature UX 2.0 a secret as well as they’re keeping the GS4 a secret?

What else do we know about the GS4? The screen will measure 4.99 inches diagnol and do 1080p, the camera will be a 13 megapixel part, and the Exynos 5 Octa will be inside the belly of the beast. That’s it. Anything anyone else tells you is just bunk.

HTC has just published their February 2013 revenue numbers. Actually, it’s just one number: $11.37 billion Taiwanese dollars, which translates to about $384 million. That’s an incredible 44% less than the same month one year ago, and it’s 27% less than revenues for January 2013. According to The Next Web, the last time HTC made this little money during one month was February 2010, exactly three years ago.

This is bad. Really bad. To provide some additional context, most of HTC’s sales are in Asia. Do you know what takes place every February? Chinese New Year. This writer was in Taiwan last month, and he can report that it was an absolutely insane experience. Gift giving is a critical component of the culture, and many highly sought after consumer electronic items were simply out of stock.

Did people know about the upcoming HTC One and simply decide to delay their smartphone purchase? We’ll find out in April, when HTC reports their March figures. But to be perfectly honest with you, we think HTC has simply lost their way. The One, regardless of how good it might be, will starve for attention once Samsung starts marketing the Galaxy S4. Maybe HTC has something up their sleeve that they’ve yet to show off? We can only hope.

What else is there to say at this point? HTC should be studied by everyone in the mobile industry, because they make great products, yet the company is losing money left and right. Why? When you stop and think about it, HTC doesn’t really do anything other than put together other people’s components. They don’t make their own screens, their own chips, their own batteries, anything really.

Meanwhile, Samsung depends on their own factories for pretty much their entire portfolio. Yes, there are several Braodcom powered Galaxy phones out there, but the bleeding edge stuff, the high margin high end devices, those contain a fair amount of Samsung parts.

ZTE is such a dirty girl. They’ll do business with just about anyone, as long as they get some sort of preferential treatment. ZTE was the one and only company to ship a phone using an NVIDIA Tegra 2 and Icera modem. They were also one of the first companies to announce a Tegra 3 phone. And recently they said they’ll be the first handset maker to launch a phone using the Tegra 4. Forgetting about NVIDIA for a second, just last month they announced that the ZTE Grand Memo will be the first device to use the Qualcomm Snapdragon 800.

See where we’re going with this?

Yesterday ZTE made yet another announcement. They’ve signed an agreement with Intel to make a phone using the Atom Z2580. What exactly is so special about that chip? It’s a dual core processor, with each core having HyperThreading support, so Android is going to see it as “four” cores. It also has a wicked fast graphics processor, the PowerVR SGX 544MP2. There’s even an integrated HSPA+ modem that can hit a theoretical 42 Mbps.

So this as yet to be named phone will be fast, but will it stand out from the crowd?

The answer is probably not, which isn’t too surprising. ZTE is known more in emerging economies, but even there they fall behind their Chinese cousins Huawei and Lenovo. We’d love to be proven wrong though, and have this Intel powered ZTE phone be the coolest thing since sliced bread, but we’re not going to hold our breath.

Recommended Reading: Intel’s Clover Trail+: Dual-Core CPU and Graphics Unveiled at MWC

Earlier today I published two photos of the alleged Galaxy S4 that were tweeted by the anonymous Twitter user @evleaks. I have no idea who @evleaks is, but I “trust” them. By “trust” I mean that they’ve usually gotten rumors right in the past.

Shortly after publishing that article, several people reached out to me on Twitter to say that the same renders, but without @evleaks watermark, are on Expansys’ website. In case you don’t know who Expansys is, they’re an online retailer that specializes in selling unlocked phones. Expansys France then followed on Twitter, and I asked them what exactly what going on with the S4 renders.

Their response:

First, I’d like to apologize, because I broke a lot of people’s hearts. I also passed on information that was false, mainly because I honestly thought it was true. Second, I can now no longer trust @evleaks. That account will probably publish a ton of leaks in the future, all of which will be accurate, but all it takes is one screw up like this to damage a reputation.

Do I feel bad? Yes. At the same time I’m going to tell you guys what I’ve been saying since I started writing for technology sites back in 2007: Nothing is official until you’re reading a press release on a company’s website. Luckily, Samsung is going to host an event in just 10 days.

We can all wait 10 days, right?

The headline above is going to confuse a lot of you without some backstory, so here’s what you should know: Opera has been making web browsers for as long as we can remember. They’ve always used their own browsing engines, and in 2003 they launched “Presto”. It’s an engine that’s served them well, but today’s world is dominated by WebKit. WebKit is the name of the open source rendering engine that Apple uses for Safari, that Google uses for Chrome, that Nokia used over half a decade ago in Symbian, and what RIM’s using in the latest version of their BlackBerry platform.

In other words, if you’re not using WebKit, you’re just plain weird.

Last month, about a week or two before Mobile World Congress, Opera said that they’re going to switch to WebKit and throw Presto out the window. The internet got pissed, saying that we need competition to exist, and blah, blah, blah. We don’t know why people would be so upset with the idea of a company as talented as Opera contributing to an open source project that benefits everyone.

Anyway, all that brings us to today’s news. Today Opera published a beta version of their web browser for Android. You can grab it from the Google Play Store right now. It looks different, it has an improved “Speed Dial”, which is Opera’s version of homepage bookmarks, and there are a ton of other small tweaks in there as well.

Should you check it out? Absolutely, but we wouldn’t be surprised if you decided to go back to Chrome, or Dolphin, or whatever you prefer. We’ll definitly take Opera’s browser a bit more seriously once it’s out of beta, but we know some of you like to live on the bleeding edge.

There’s a company out in Canada that wants to take a business model we’re all familiar with, monthly subscriptions, and bring it to the relatively young market of third party applications. It’s called Mobiroo, and here’s how it works: You sign up for the service, which is $2.49 per month for a limited time, normally it’s $5, and then you can download as many applications from their app store as you want. According to the official press release, some apps in the store cost as much as $20, so you’re actually saving quite a bit of money.

What types of apps are in the Mobiroo store? We don’t really know. They say that there are some EA games in there, as well as apps from publishers such as Herocraft, Vector Unit, GameHouse. There’s also a free seven day trial which we need to investigate at some point later today.

Will this take off? That’s incredibly hard to say. Everyone knows what happens when you buy a new phone. You spend the next few days hunting for apps, you find the ones you like, and then that’s it, you stop consuming. Sure, you might hear about a game from a friend or on a tech site like this one, but you don’t spend time just scrolling through new apps like you once did.

We’re extremly curious to see how Mobiroo pans out. Subscription music is one thing, we’re all huge fans of Spotify here at Android Authority, and subscription movies are obviously a win, we can’t tell you how much we all love Netflix, but subscription apps? It’s one of those concepts that sounds good on paper, but in the real world it’s just … strange.

Google is an innovate company, no one is denying that, but many people don’t understand how they many money. Everything Google does comes back to advertising. Android was created so that phones with web browsers could become cheap. Gmail was created so Google could serve you ads based on what you were talking about with your friends. Google Maps was created so Google could offer you ads for nearby restaurants and bars.

The list just goes on an on.

Samsung creating a new operating system doesn’t register on Google’s radar. Neither does Windows Phone or Microsoft’s Surface tablet. But when a company tries to enter the ad game, that’s when the proverbial shit hits the fan.

This brings us to today’s news: Amazon is introducing an ad API that anyone making Android applications can use. That means developers who are currently relying on AdSense to make money now have another choice, and that choice is the largest retailer in the United States.

Will Amazon’s ad API take off? It’s really early days, and we haven’t even seen it in action yet, but here’s one thing that needs to be pointed out: Amazon is a household brand in the USA, but in other countries they might as well not even exist. Amazon will obviously try to address that over the coming years, but even then, if you’re a developer in Germany who’s trying to make a game that’ll appeal to people in America, you’re going to think about going with Amazon’s ads instead of Google’s ads, right?

As soon as we know more, we’ll let you know. Also, let’s not forget about all those Amazon phone rumors that cropped up in 2012. Maybe we’ll finally see the device in 2013?

You never know.

The bean counters at IDC have just published a prediction that we’re not going to dispute: Smartphones are going to outsell feature phones in 2013. They say that 50.1% of the mobile phones sold this year will run some sort of smart operating system, and that by 2017 that number will hit 66%.

What’s responsible for this shift? It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure it out. Smartphones used to be painfully expensive devices that were only sold in Western markets where operators offered subsidies. But gradually, thanks to the relentless pace of technological innovation, people today can buy a device with the same specifications as the Nexus One for less than $200. You could probably find a single core 1 GHz Android phone with a 5 megapixel camera for even less than that actually.

Which country is the biggest consumer of smartphones? Again, easy answer: China. There are more people living in China than there are in Europe and the United States combined. Many of those people starting to climb up the socioeconomic ladder, and they can now afford a smartphone, whereas before it was just a flight of fancy.

In the number two spot is America, but it’s nowhere near China. IDC says China will buy over 301 million smartphones this year. America on the other hand, “just” 137.5 million. Granted, many of the devices that will be sold in America will be subsidized superphones, whereas in China they’ll be sub $200 smartphones from local players, but still, a smartphone is a smartphone.

What operating system is going to power a majority of these smartphones? Android, of course, but you already knew that. People cry about Android fragmentation all the time, but it’s because of fragmentation that $99 Android smartphones exist in emerging economies.

Should Google be scared of a so called “cheap” iPhone? We’ll just have to wait and see.

The man or woman behind the Twitter account @evleaks just dropped two huge bombshells on us. They’ve published two renders of the upcoming Samsung Galaxy S4. Should you trust @evleaks? We do. We can’t count the number of times that they’ve published accurate information. In fact, we’re not even sure if @evleaks has ever said anything that was incorrect.

But enough about that, let’s discuss the renders. The device looks more square than the GS3. We’d go so far as to say that it even looks a bit like the original 5.3 inch Galaxy Note. The bezels are insanely thin, which we like, and there appears to be no front facing buttons.

If true, that would be amazing, since that’s the number one complaint we have about Samsung hardware. That and cheap plastic that flexes far too easily.

Looking at the top, the hole for the front facing camera looks massive. Earlier today we filed a report that said the GS4 would include a feature that tracked a user’s eyes while they were reading a web page. When the user reaches the end of the last paragraph, the device scrolls automatically for them. Having an advanced front facing camera is needed for that. Let’s also not forget about all the wide angle stuff HTC has been doing with their front facing cameras. Perhaps this is Samsung taking a lesson from their enemy in Taiwan.

We’re 100% sure that more leaks are going to take place between now and the 14th, when Samsung officially announces the GS4. You’re either going to love the leaks or hate them. This writer falls into the latter camp, but at the same time he also understands that most people love this sort of stuff.

That’s life.

Samsung is going to announce the Galaxy S4 in roughly 10 days. We’re not going to lie, we’re excited. Sure, HTC’s One is pretty, and Sony’s new Xperia phones are drop dead gorgeous, but let’s be honest with each other: The GS4 is going to be the best selling Android phone of 2013. Even if it ends up being a total pile of garbage, which it might, you never know, Samsung is going to market the living crap out of it.

You’re not going to be able to buy toilet paper from your local supermarket without bumping into at least three or four GS4 ads this time next month.

Which brings us to today’s “news”, if you even want to call it that. Samsung has uploaded an 80 second teaser to their YouTube channel that’s … just watch the video above and let us know how you feel. If you can’t because you’re at work or on a slow internet connection, it’s basically some little rich kid getting a “sneak peek” at a box that lights up. This is easily the worst teaser we’ve seen in a long time. HTC’s teasers show off small sections of their devices. LG’s teasers more so. But this? Who commisioned this to be made?

Anyway, like we said earlier, just 10 days to go. Expect a ton of rumors, both fake and legitimate, to be hitting the internet between now and then. We’ll try to give you the stuff we think is actually true, but this writer thinks you should just ignore everything until the actual date of the event.