The iPhone 4 has a “4” in its name. It’s also the fourth-generation iPhone. But it’s not a 4G phone–which is what a meaningful minority of the people who participated in a Retrevo survey think it is. I wonder if thinking that makes you more impressed with its network speed, or less so?
Tag Archives | Smartphones
Katango: Your Facebook Friends, Grouped Automatically
When Google+ arrived at the end of June, it made a splash in part based on its defining notion: you have different kinds of friends and don’t want to share everything with all of them all of the time. This week a new iPhone group-messaging app called Katangoo is debuting. And its defining feature–which it came up with a long time before Google+ went public–is that people have different kinds of friends and dont want to share everything with all of them all of the time.
Katango’s distinctive feature is that it uses artificial intelligence to analyze all your Facebook friends, identify common attributes, and then automatically sort them into groups of people with something in common. The more friends you have, the more time this approach might save compared to you trying to organize them by hand.
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Color Loses Another Exec
I still think that there’s a good idea–or at least an interesting one–at the heart of Color, the iPhone app that had a catastrophic launch. So I’m hoping it successfully reboots. But the big news at the moment is that it’s lost its chief scientist.
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iPhone 4S, iPhone 5, iPad HD, Arrrrrrrgh!
I’ve sort of given up on keeping track of Apple rumors (which is why I cheerfully ignore most of ’em and never write about them here). But here’s Josh Topolsky of This is My Next with a snapshot of the current thinking on the question “When will we see the next iPhone and iPad, and what will they look like?“
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Hey, Off-Contract Smartphones Are Getting Cheaper!
As I looked over Verizon’s announcement of the Motorola Droid 3 today, one thing in particular caught my eye: Without a two-year contract, the phone costs $460.
That may look expensive next to the Droid 3’s two-year agreement price of $200, but it’s a lot cheaper than what high-end, off-contract smartphones used to cost. Last year, for example, the Droid 2 debuted for $599 without a contract. At the time, that was pretty much the standard price.
So I figured the Droid 3 was cracking the mold, until I looked around. Right now, Verizon’s Droid X2 sells for $450 without a contract, and the Droid Incredible 2 sells for $440. Over on AT&T, you can get a contract-free Motorola Atrix 4G for $450. These are all high-end phones, with dual-core processors and screens of 4 inches or higher, but you might not know it from their off-contract prices.
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Verizon Powers 32% of All iPhone 4s in the U.S.
If you subscribe to the theory that most potential iPhone buyers on Verizon have held out on purchasing a device till the new model launches this fall, then this statistic should surprise you: 32% of all current iPhone 4 users in the U.S. are on the Verizon network.
Yep, that’s right. Research firm Localytics released data Thursday that shows the device has shown steady growth since its launch on the Verizon network in February. The iPhone 4 started out on the right foot rather quickly, quickly grabbing 20% of the market early on, but its real growth has been over the summer.
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More WebOS to Come
PreCentral says it has info on HP’s plans for WebOS devices for the rest of the year–including a 64GB white TouchPad, an AT&T “4G” model, a 7-inch tablet, and the Pre 3. Sounds interesting–but judging from the first TouchPad, what WebOS really, really needs is a thorough debugging.
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BlinQ TV, a $9.99 Social Universal Remote for Your iPhone
Back, in July, I wrote about Peel, a software-and-hardware system that turns an iPhone or iPod Touch into a slick universal TV remote. It’s neat. But it costs $99.95, and involves two doohickeys–one that you plug into your router, and one that sits near your TV.
Ryz Media’s BlinQ TV has a new twist on the same basic idea–and the most striking difference is the hardware. Instead of routing commands from your iPhone over Wi-Fi into a gizmo like the Peel’s “Fruit” and then into the TV via infrared, BlinQ gives you a lollipop-shaped IR blaster that plugs into the phone’s headphone jack and lets you control a TV, set-top box, and other living-room devices with no intermediary hardware. It costs one-tenth as much as Peel: $9.99.
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AT&T Approves BlackBerry/PlayBook E-Mail Tethering App
One reason why RIM’s decision to let the PlayBook tablet access e-mail only via a BlackBerry phone wasn’t such a hot idea: it’s only now that AT&T customers are able to do it.
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Skype Video Chat Now Works on Android Phones (But Probably Not Yours)
At last, Skype’s Android app supports video calling, but it’s only available on four phones for now.
Video calling works over Wi-Fi and 3G, and is supported on the HTC Desire S, Sony Ericsson Xperia Neo, Sony Ericsson Xperia Pro and Google Nexus S. The common thread among these phones is that they all run Android 2.3, but a Skype representative told me that the company’s working to make video chat available on a wider range of devices shortly after launch.