More Android fragmentation madness: If Motorola’s Verizon Droid is a loaf of day old bread, then its new AT&T Backflip sounds like it’s stale beyond all recognition.
Tag Archives | Smartphones
Android Market Needs Stars
The quantity of software in Google’s Android Market app store is growing rapidly. But compared to Apple’s App Store, the Android one is still short on stuff by rockstar developers like this one. Wonder what Google is doing to make it worth their while to build great stuff for its platform?
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5Words: Sony’s Latest Apple-Trouncing Efforts
Sony’s Apple response: smartphone, tablet?
Apple yanks iPhone Wi-Fi finders.
YouTube rolls out autocaptioning feature.
Google introduces Android gesture search.
Google Apps: free disaster recovery.
Smartphone platforms are inherently fragmented.
Yahoo Mail gets Facebook Contacts.
Archos announces more Internet tablets.
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Microsoft Phones: Verizon in April?
Is Microsoft planning to introduce Microsoft-branded phones? Project “Pink” is a rumor that’s been floating around for months, and at this point it’s not that interesting a question. But here’s the latest scuttlebutt, courtesy of Gizmodo: A Sidekick-like Microsoft “social networking” phone will be coming to Verizon Wireless in April. It won’t be running Windows Phone 7 Series, or at least not Windows Phone 7 Series in the form that Microsoft has been talking about.
Maybe that’s Microsoft’s strategy for entering the phone business without ticking off its hardware partners: Use a different flavor of OS for its own phones, and restrict itself to a fairly narrow slice of the market…
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How Long Do You Give the Desktop?
One of the big subjects of debate on the Interwebs this morning is a big, existential technological question: Are phones on the cusp of replacing PCs?
Don Dodge (presently of Google, formerly of Microsoft) thinks so:
The future of computing is that your cell phone will become your primary computer, communicator, camera, and entertainment device, all in one. The exciting new applications are running in the browser, with application code and data in the cloud, and the cell phone as a major platform. I think in the near future there will be docking stations everywhere with a screen and a keyboard. You simply pull out your phone, plug it into the docking station, and instantly all your applications and data are available to you.
So does Google Europe sales chief John Herlihy, as quoted by a Silicon Republic story:
“In three years time, desktops will be irrelevant. In Japan, most research is done today on smart phones, not PCs,” Herlihy told a baffled audience, echoing comments by Google CEO Eric Schmidt at the recent GSM Association Mobile World Congress 2010 that everything the company will do going forward will be via a mobile lens, centring on the cloud, computing and connectivity.
BetaNews’s Joe Wilcox basically agrees with Herlihy:
Three years — most certainly five — is not an unrealistic time horizon at all. Even if it proves wrong, Google is acting like change will come rapidly. Last month, Google CEO Eric Schmidt asserted the company would put mobile first — yes, before the PC. There is no Windows monopoly on mobile handsets to stop Google, Apple or any other would-be mobile competitor from rapidly advancing. Cloud services, whether delivered by applications or browsers, promise anytime and anywhere access to anything.
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Apple-HTC: The Grim, Dystopian Scenario
I promise I’ll stop talking about Apple’s suit against smartphone rival HTC until further developments warrant. But the more I think about it, the more I’m struck by the parallels to Apple’s 1988 suit against Microsoft and HP over Windows and HP’s New Wave interface.
Here’s a good story over at Low End Mac on the case, as well as Apple’s earlier threats to take Microsoft to court and the agreement between the two companies that postponed the courtroom battle for a few years. In the 1988 case, the role of the iPhone was played, of course, by the Mac. And Android phones like the models mentioned in Apple’s filing are played by Windows PCs.
(Actually, the parallels between Windows a couple of decades ago and Android right now are uncanny: Windows was nowhere near as slick and well-designed as the Mac, but it was good enough that Microsoft’s licensing strategy paid off hugely. Android is nowhere near as slick and well-designed as the iPhone, but it’s good enough that Google’s licensing strategy seems to be on the cusp of paying off hugely.)
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Eight Naïve Questions About Apple’s Suit Against HTC
I’m not a reflexive enemy of the U.S. patent system. But having spent the day mulling over Apple’s lawsuit against HTC over smartphone-related patents, it still feels like the move is bad for consumers, bad for any smartphone-related company that isn’t headquartered in Cupertino–and quite possibly bad for Apple, too.
Now that this shoe has dropped, you gotta think that lots of other shoes are poised to drop all over Silicon Valley and Asia. Here are some questions I’m scratching my head over tonight. I suspect some people will maintain that the answers are obvious, but they’re not (yet) obvious to me…
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Palm’s Pre, Plussed: The Technologizer Review
From time to time, I’ve called Palm’s Pre the Most Interesting Smartphone That Isn’t the iPhone. It’s now been almost nine months since the Pre debuted on Sprint, and a bunch of other formidable handsets have since appeared, such as the Verizon Droid and Google Nexus One. But thanks to its exceptionally inventive WebOS software and distinctive form factor, the Pre still holds its own.
Now the Sprint Pre has been joined by the Pre Plus, which runs on Verizon Wireless and began shipping in January. After I recently said I was flirting with abandoning my AT&T iPhone, Palm offered to loan me a Plus for review. Here’s my take, following up on the story I did on the original Sprint Pre back in June. Executive summary: the Pre Plus isn’t a radically different phone from its predecessor, but it’s still a really good one–and while the WebOS third-party application situation pales in comparison to the iPhone, it’s better than I expected judged on the number of available apps alone.
(Note: Over the weekend, Palm pushed out WebOS 1.4, an OS upgrade that enables video capture and which supports Adobe’s Flash Player. However, it’s n0t yet available for Verizon’s WebOS phones, the Pre Plus and Pixi Plus, and I haven’t tried it.)
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The Next Nexus
Rumor: Google’s Nexus One “superphone” will hit Verizon Wireless on March 23rd--which happens to be the first day of the big CTIA wireless show…
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A Web Site is No Longer Enough
The way in which we interact with technology has changed dramatically over the past few years. The era of light computing has begun, and social media is big enough that the average person can shape perceptions. A Web site is no longer the most meaningful way for us to interact to tell companies about their products or to use online services.
Smartphones are selling in droves, and people are using apps rather than visiting Web sites for everything from buying movie tickets to checking stocks. At any given time, it is likely that conversations about big businesses are happening on Facebook, Twitter and other social media, and those conversations can be initiated by anyone from anywhere.