Tag Archives | Smartphones

It’s Official: Apple’s iPhone Event is Next Tuesday

Posted by Harry McCracken on September 27, 2011 at 8:20 am

Sooner or later, Apple rumors narrow in on the truth. Apple is indeed holding its iPhone event next Tuesday, October 4th. It is indeed doing so at its Town Hall auditorium on its own campus rather than in San Francisco. (That’s understandable: Oracle’s Open World conference will be pretty much commandeering the entire city that day.)

Apple isn’t bring too coy this time around: Invites for the event say “Let’s talk iPhone.” One big question is whether that’s iPhone singular or iPhones plural. We’ll know soon enough.

I won’t be there in person this time, but I have a good excuse: I’ll be on a long-planned journey to Tokyo to cover CEATEC, the big consumer-electronics conference. But I’ll be watching from afar–and I suspect I’ll be back in the States before the phone (phones?) hits store shelves. More thoughts to come…

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Assistant: The Best Reason to Buy an iPhone 5?

Posted by Harry McCracken on September 26, 2011 at 10:19 am

Back in April of last year, Apple bought a very young, very neat startup named Siri. 9to5 Mac’s Mark Gurman says that Siri’s voice-controlled semantic search features are going to be built right into the iPhone 5:

Assistant taps into many aspects of the iPhone, according to people familiar with the feature and SDK findings. For example, one can say make appointment with Mark Gurman for 7:30 PM and Assistant will create the appointment in the user’s calendar. On noting events, Assistant also allows users to set reminders for the iOS 5 Reminders application. For example, a user could say “remind me to buy milk when I arrive at the market.” Another example would be integration with the iOS Maps application. A user could ask: “how do I get to Staples Center?” and Assistant will use the user’s current location via GPS and provide directions.

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Did Case-Mate Just Reveal The iPhone 5 Design?

Posted by Ed Oswald on September 16, 2011 at 9:51 am

What’s a day without an iPhone 5 rumor? What your looking at here is one of the images of apparent iPhone 5 cases that was posted to accessory maker Case-Mate’s site briefly on Thursday before being pulled.

The company says its “inside resources” claim Apple would indeed be launching two phones in early October, the iPhone 4S and the iPhone 5. I don’t know why Case-Mate is jumping into the rumors game, as that’s our job, but I do digress…

BGR reports though that the page we’ve linked to here is different from a page they saw, which included a gallery of case images that has since disappeared. Either way, the now ever-more rumored tapered design akin to the iPad 2 seems to what Case-Mate is basing their case designs on, and it does appear noticeably wider.

Now this just could be Case-Mate reacting to the increasingly more frequent rumors of a wider and thinner iPhone 5, or they actually could have inside information. Personally, I’m hoping that either way, they’re right.

I’m no fan of the iPhone 4 design, and I remember in the days after that infamous Gizmodo leak saying “I hope this isn’t it.” But alas it was, despite my (and some others’) belief that this was way too utilitarian in design to come out of Apple. Thus, I’m happy to see Apple return to a sleeker design with the iPhone 5.

Either way Apple, could you hurry up? This iPhone 3GS is getting long in the tooth, and I’m getting impatient. If I have to wait any longer I may have to go to the dark side (Android, that is)! Perish the thought.

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Decide Tackles Phone Purchase Timing

Posted by Harry McCracken on September 12, 2011 at 4:02 pm

When people ask me when they should buy a particular tech product, I have a standard answer: “Wait as long as you can without driving yourself crazy, but no longer.” That is, of course, a pat, one-size-fits all response.  A site called Decide tries to provide more sophisticated answers for specific products, by analyzing the chances that its price will fall or rise, and whether or not it’s likely to be replaced in the near future.

The company’s been doing this for laptops, cameras, and TVs for a while, and now it’s added phones to the roster. So far, its advice doesn’t appear to be comprehensive or completely up-to-date: It doesn’t seem to list the Droid Bionic and Triumph, two Motorola phones I reviewed last week. But it does have lots of models, and the recommendations I checked seemed sensible. For instance, it advises against buying an iPhone 4 right now, but says it’s safe to buy one of Apple’s recently-released MacBook Airs.

No matter how much data you have, timing purchases is tough–and whatever and whenever you buy, you need to be able able to deal with one of the eternal verities of the technology world: Better, cheaper stuff is always ahead. But Device looks handy. (Retrevo, which has some purchase-timing features of its own, is another handy resource.)

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Me, Elsewhere

Posted by Harry McCracken on September 8, 2011 at 1:51 pm

I haven’t written as much here recently as I like to, but I have a good excuse: I’ve been hard at work writing for other sites. Three new stories are up today:

* At TIME.com, I reviewed two new Android phones from Motorola: the potent (and battery-hungry) Droid Bionic, and the basic (and thrifty) Triumph.

* TIME also asked me to try and make sense of the drama going on over at AOL and TechCrunch. I’m not even sure if that’s possible, but I tried.

* Over at AllBusiness.com, I wrote about a newish gadget that small businesses seem to be snapping up with the same zea they once adopted IBM PCs and PalmPilots. It’s called the iPad.

Whew! (And stay turned for another bit of related news in the not-too-distant future.)

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IFA: LG’s Net-Connected Appliances

Posted by Harry McCracken on September 3, 2011 at 3:16 am

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Way back when, LG introduced a refrigerator that–for reasons which were unclear at the time–ran Windows 98. The company’s still at it. As I wandered around the numerous halls at the IFA electronics trade show here in Berlin, I stumbled on LG’s booth, where a demo of its Smart ThinQ appliances (which, I assume, are powered by something other than Windows 98) was in progress.

The line includes a refrigerator, a washing machine, a microwave oven, and a robotic vacuum cleaner; all use Wi-Fi to connect to the Net and work with smartphone apps. For instance, you can manage a shopping list on the fridge and zap it to your phone and back. (The fridge screen also runs Facebook and various entertainment apps.) You can download new wash cycles from your phone to the washing machine, as well as adjust the cycle on the fly. And you can use a smartphone app to download receipes to the oven.

If nothing else, I admire LG for showing patience with this concept. Wonder how many of the appliances they’re selling, and whether folks continue to use the techy features after the novelty wears off?

A couple more photos after the jump. (Full disclosure: I spoke at IFA on a panel, and the conference orgaziners covered my travel costs.)
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Samsung’s Galaxy Note: The Return of the PDA

Posted by Harry McCracken on September 1, 2011 at 4:00 am

“If you see a stylus,” Steve Jobs famously said at the original iPhone launch, “they blew it.” Here at the IFA show in Berlin, Samsung just announced the Galaxy Note, a new device that’s got a stylus–and which revels in that fact. Samsung is calling it “a new category of device,” but to me, it feels like a 2011 take on an old idea: the PalmPilot-style Personal Digital Assistant.
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Windows Phone Catch-Up Continues With Front-Facing Camera, Hotspot

Posted by Jared Newman on August 26, 2011 at 10:19 am

As the launch of Microsoft’s Windows Phone “Mango” update approaches, the number of missing features keeps dwindling, with support for front-facing cameras and Wi-Fi hotspots now confirmed.

We’ve suspected that the next version of Windows Phones would support front-facing cameras, given that some upcoming Windows Phone handsets are rumored to have them, but the official word didn’t come until this week at Microsoft’s Tech Ed conference in New Zealand. There, a Microsoft staffer told Neowin and confirmed on Twitter that front-facing camera support was on the way.

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