Latest BlackBerry 6 preview proves that the more things change…
Posted on 27. Jul, 2010 by IBM.
To say RIM has a lot riding on BlackBerry 6 is an understatement. With new kids on the block like Android and iOS stepping in with lustworthy apps and attractive UIs, the BlackBerrys have been sitting in a corner BBMing everyone else at the party tryi…
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Intel snaps up former Palm and Apple VP Mike Bell for its smartphone push
Posted on 16. Jul, 2010 by IBM.
Seriously, what the hell did HP acquire when it bought Palm? A bunch of pretty patents and a rapidly dwindling talent pool, it would seem. Mike Bell, a celebrated capture for Palm back in 2007 after 16 years at Apple, was most recently occupying the r…
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Apple and HTC lead charge as smartphone market looks set to grow and grow
Posted on 15. Jul, 2010 by IBM.
A recent survey of 4,028 US consumers by ChangeWave has thrown up a number of illuminating statistics, which you might consider as predictable as they are informative. The chief takeaway is that people are keen on buying smartphones like never before,…
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LG Application Store aims to sate WinMo, Android and featurephone users alike
Posted on 01. Jul, 2010 by IBM.
Like a bad perm in the 1980s, you just can’t be hip in the mobile world these days without an app store. We had secretly hoped that LG would take the wise route, à la Motorola with Android, of supporting a better established app platform and st…
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Yes, you can certainly scratch the iPhone 4 (updated with more photos)
Posted on 23. Jun, 2010 by IBM.
Update: We should note that while iFixit has said that the new iPhone’s front panel is made of Gorilla Glass (and they tend to be right about these things), the material on the back of the phone has not been positively identified, though it is also a hardened glass.
Update 2: We’ve added three higher quality photos after the break, and seen the scratch with our own eyes. It’s what we would call “incredibly minor,” not visible at all dead on, but in bright light at an angle… well see for yourself if the photos.
Continue reading Yes, you can certainly scratch the iPhone 4 (updated with more photos)
Yes, you can certainly scratch the iPhone 4 (updated with more photos) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 23 Jun 2010 10:14:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Adobe expects Flash on 250 million smartphones by end of 2012
Posted on 11. Jun, 2010 by IBM.
While in the midst of fixing a unicorn-sized hole in the security of its desktop software, Adobe has been talking about its future in the mobile space. According to its rose-tinted forecasts, Flash Player will be featured in a quarter billion handsets…
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‘iPhone vs Android’ report finds Apple has three times Google’s market share
Posted on 05. Jun, 2010 by IBM.
It’s oftentimes easy for us to get swept up in Android mania and forget that Google’s mobile platform is still in its infancy. Then we get cold hard numbers like these — showing iPhone OS owning 28 percent of the US smartphone market and closing in on RIM’s leading 35 percent — and we face up to the realization that Android handsets still account for less than one in every ten smartphones owned by Americans today. In spite of collecting 28 percent of all consumer smartphone purchases in the first quarter of 2010 (according to NPD), Google’s OS was only able to climb up a couple of percentage points in terms of total market share, showing just how long a road lies ahead of its world-conquering plans. Guess that now explains why Apple’s response to the earlier numbers was so nonchalant.
Other intriguing figures include a high rate of loyalty among iPhone OS and Android users, with 80 percent of the former and 70 percent of the latter expressing a preference for the same OS in their next phone — both rather shaming Microsoft and RIM’s numbers, which were a mediocre 34 and 47 percent, respectively. Funnily enough, despite its inflammatory title, this report finds Android and iPhone users are more similar to each other than anyone else — an uncomfortable fact for both parties to deal with, we’re sure. The source link contains some more demographic comparisons, so why not go check them out and drop some sage analysis for us in the comments?
‘iPhone vs Android’ report finds Apple has three times Google’s market share originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 05 Jun 2010 15:34:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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PTPT shows off wild Android UI skin, we go hands-on
Posted on 26. May, 2010 by IBM.
Last time we heard about ExB’s PTPT (pronounced “petite petite”), the software startup was just beginning to show off the basics of its touchscreen interface; since then, the small German company has been polishing up the UI and prepping it for Android phones and tablets. According to the CEO Ramin Assadollah, the company is in talks with a “major hardware manufacturer” that’s planning on skinning its Android products with the incredibly unique software. We got to see PTPT running on an Android 1.6-powered Acer Liquid while at the Netbook Summit, and though it took us a few minutes to understand how the interface worked, it’s definitely interesting and responsive. The input starts with three circular icons representing people, places, and things and then a bar that represents time.
You can simply select an individual person — you can import contacts from a variety of sources, including, Twitter, Facebook, and so on — from the halo that appears, and then drag them up to a specific time to get various updates or e-mails from that person. The custom predictive text keyboard in the e-mail interface was very snappy — it’s also just nice to see a change from the stock Android input. Then, you can drag that person to things to see pictures of them. And just like in the original demo, you can then move the pictures icon to a point on the timeline to see pictures from that time. Though the phone and tablet demos we saw didn’t have widgets on the homescreen, we were assured that they can be added. We promise this is all better explained in the demo video below, so mosey on down after the jump. We’ll be here, wondering what Android devices this software may pop-up on.
Continue reading PTPT shows off wild Android UI skin, we go hands-on
PTPT shows off wild Android UI skin, we go hands-on originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 26 May 2010 18:11:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Samsung’s AMOLED division is now profitable, expects major smartphone growth in 2010
Posted on 20. May, 2010 by IBM.
If you want the dish on what’s happening with mobile displays, Lee Woo-jong, VP for marketing at Samsung Mobile Display, is as good a person to ask as any. The chap has been telling the Reuters Global Technology Summit that his company has finally gone into the black with its AMOLED production line, and that its research projects a 50 percent jump in smartphone shipments in 2010 relative to 2009. This is expected to boost demand, which is already exceeding supply, for high-quality displays. Samsung says shortages might be experienced all the way until next year, but has reiterated its belief that AMOLED is the future with a $2.15 billion investment into expanding its production lines, while also predicting a 30-fold growth in shipments of such displays by 2015. Every handset out there looking like the Wave? We could learn to live with that.
Samsung’s AMOLED division is now profitable, expects major smartphone growth in 2010 originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 20 May 2010 20:03:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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NVIDIA puts its Tegra 2 eggs in Android’s basket, aims to topple Apple’s A4
Posted on 17. May, 2010 by IBM.
Microsoft’s Kin One and Kin Two might not turn out to be the most auspicious devices for Tegra’s debut in the smartphone arena, but NVIDIA seems to be learning from its mistakes. Admitting that the company committed too strongly to Microsoft with the first-gen iteration, Jen-Hsun Huang has now said that the second generation of Tegra will look to Android devices first and foremost. This newfound focus will materialize with both smartphones and tablets in the third and fourth quarter of this year, and will, according to Jen-Hsun, offer device makers a viable competitor to Apple’s A4 SOC. In other news, NVIDIA has now shipped “a few hundred thousand” Fermi cards, and has also achieved 70 design wins with its Optimus graphics switching technology. Eleven of those are now out in the wild, but the vast majority are still to come, mostly as part of the seasonal “back to school” refresh at the end of the summer. These revelations came during the company’s earnings call for the first quarter of its 2011 fiscal year, and you can find the full transcript at the source below.
[Thanks, TareG]
NVIDIA puts its Tegra 2 eggs in Android’s basket, aims to topple Apple’s A4 originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 17 May 2010 04:20:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Nokia Head of Design Marko Ahtisaari talks about priorities, competition, and future direction
Posted on 11. May, 2010 by IBM.
Marko Ahtisaari will be a familiar name to Dopplr users, being both the CEO and one of the major investors in the startup’s social networking software. Having been acquired by Nokia in late September 2009, his team now works to help Symbian regain its world-conquering ways while Marko himself has returned to Nokia to helm its Design group — an outfit that, judging by the world’s disappointment with the N97 and other devices, is frankly in need of some fresh ideas. So, when we were invited to meet him this morning for a journalist get-together where Marko hoped to “begin the conversation” about Nokia’s future direction, we grabbed our pen, paper and DSLR and rushed off to go have a listen. The camera came in use when we got to handle a Nokia N8 prototype for the first time, but do join us after the break to see what else we learned.
Nokia Head of Design Marko Ahtisaari talks about priorities, competition, and future direction originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 11 May 2010 12:05:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Intel reaches for the ‘smartphone zone’ with Moorestown-based Atom Z6, comes up shorthanded
Posted on 05. May, 2010 by IBM.
We’ve seen the future of Intel’s mobile platform, and it isn’t all roses and sunshine. Three years after the chipmaker told us Moorestown would reduce Atom’s energy consumption by a factor of 20, company execs told us earlier today that they’ve more than reached that goal with the new Z6xx series. Problem is, in the smartphone realm Intel’s competitors haven’t been sitting idle; according to one of Chipzilla’s cantaloupe-and-magenta bar charts, it seems the company has merely caught up in terms of battery life. That’s not to say the chips aren’t worlds better than previous Atoms — Intel sees 1.5GHz smartphone processors that slay Snapdragons and up to 1.9GHz in a tablet PC variety — but 5 hours of web browsing is most decidedly not the 24 hours of productivity Intel previously promised. Besides, who knows: Qualcomm also has a 1.5GHz SoC in the works, though it may not be available by the time Intel’s chips ship in the second half of the year.
None of this is to say that Intel won’t continue to dominate in the netbook marketplace — we shudder to think at the potential when combining a nice, chunky battery with Intel’s nearly leakproof new chips, and perhaps a small serving of switchable graphics while we’re at it. But without a single new MID or smartphone to show us this morning — Aava Mobile and OpenPeak‘s offerings seemed unchanged from our previous encounters — we’re not sure if the company’s other mobile ambitions have any sway. Not technical enough of a discussion for you? Peruse our gallery for the nitty-gritty.
Intel reaches for the ‘smartphone zone’ with Moorestown-based Atom Z6, comes up shorthanded originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 05 May 2010 02:44:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Intel looking to ‘deploy capital’ on smartphone and other CE acquisitions
Posted on 21. Apr, 2010 by IBM.
Say you’re the world’s largest producer of desktop processors, you’ve got a ton of cash ($16.3 billion to be exact) burning a hole in your pocket, and you’re watching the entire mobile industry grow into a monster before your very eyes with virtually no skin in the game. Sure, you’ve got MeeGo and Moorestown up your sleeve — but considering that they’re distant underdogs with no global domination strategy (or product, for that matter) in sight, it might be time to play some hardball, yeah? CFO Stacy Smith commented this week that the company is “looking at what [it believes] can accelerate [its] progress” in the smartphone game — and, more broadly, the consumer electronics game — and that it “can and will deploy capital” if it sees something it likes, just as it did with its Wind River Systems buy last year. Intel has had shockingly little relevance in the race to dominate the pocket ever since it offloaded XScale to Marvell a few years back; is it time for these guys to embrace ARM again, or can they find a way to put x86 cores in devices that people like?
Intel looking to ‘deploy capital’ on smartphone and other CE acquisitions originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 21 Apr 2010 12:49:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Intel adds Android to Moorestown compatibility list, wants to Atomize your smartphone
Posted on 13. Apr, 2010 by IBM.
Alright, so this isn’t the first time we’ve seen Android running on the x86 CPU architecture, but it’s notable that Intel has ported the OS to run on its Atom CPUs with the specific aim of offering Android plus Atom smartphone combos. Such is the news that has emerged today at the Intel Developer Forum in Beijing, which means Intel loyalists will have a second option in the smartphone sphere, beyond the already known Moorestown-powered MeeGo handsets. It would seem that Chipzilla is taking the ARM threat to its home markets seriously, and is launching a counter-offensive in the mobile space. As to when that will happen, Intel’s bigwigs are saying they’re still “on track for introduction during the first half of this year,” meaning we’ll be seeing (or at least hearing about) the vanguard of its attack by the end of June.
Intel adds Android to Moorestown compatibility list, wants to Atomize your smartphone originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 13 Apr 2010 05:41:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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NASDAQ and CEA announce Smartphone Index
Posted on 12. Apr, 2010 by IBM.
NASDAQ and CEA announce Smartphone Index originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 12 Apr 2010 15:54:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Samsung Bada handsets of the future revealed in presentation slide
Posted on 05. Apr, 2010 by IBM.
Just in case you had any doubts about Samsung’s commitment to the physical keyboard, here’s a slide of the Korean giant’s Bada OS roadmap, filled with rubbery QWERTY buttons aplenty. At top left you can see the Wave — which Samsung places in its “premium image brand” together with the Galaxy S — priced at 20,000 Rubles (just under $700), followed by its as yet nameless and spec-less Bada siblings. Our interest is piqued most by the QWERTY slider that’s sat so perfectly atop the 10,000-Ruble line, we wouldn’t mind seeing the Super AMOLED screen tech trickling down to such a price point. We wouldn’t mind that at all. All About Phones has also spotted two Windows Mobile and one Android handset during the presentation, though Sammy has been predictably recalcitrant about specs on those as well. All we’re told is to wait for the autumn. Guess that will have to do.
[Thanks, Muhammad]
Samsung Bada handsets of the future revealed in presentation slide originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 05 Apr 2010 06:46:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Stats: iPhone OS is still king of the mobile web space, but Android is nipping at its heels
Posted on 29. Mar, 2010 by IBM.
AdMob serves north of 10 billion ads per month to more than 15,000 mobile websites and applications. Thus, although its data is about ad rather than page impressions, it can be taken as a pretty robust indicator of how web usage habits are developing and changing over time. Android is the big standout of its most recent figures, with Google loyalists now constituting a cool 42 percent of AdMob’s smartphone audience in the US. With the EVO 4G and Galaxy S rapidly approaching, we wouldn’t be surprised by the little green droid stealing away the US share crown, at least until Apple counters with its next slice of magical machinery. Looking at the global stage, Android has also recently skipped ahead of Symbian, with a 24 percent share versus 18 percent for the smartphone leader. Together with BlackBerry OS, Symbian is still the predominant operating system in terms of smartphone sales, but it’s interesting to see both falling behind in the field of web or application usage, which is what this metric seeks to measure. Figures from Net Applications (to be found at the TheAppleBlog link) and ArsTechnica‘s own mobile user numbers corroborate these findings.
Stats: iPhone OS is still king of the mobile web space, but Android is nipping at its heels originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 29 Mar 2010 10:18:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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