Despite an early leak on Monday, once again the internet lit-up with chatter about the release of Facebook Home in the Google Play store. All good and well if you find yourself in the right place with the right phone, but what about everyone else? Unsurprisingly, the digital door staff (read, Facebook's hardware restrictions) have already been dispatched, meaning almost any Android device can download and install the social software.
When BlackBerry announced the largest single handset purchase in the company’s history earlier this week — one million BlackBerry 10 devices — it refused to name the “established partner” to which they’d been sold. “We are bound by confidentiality,” BlackBerry spokesman Adam Emery told AllThingsD when asked who the mystery customer might be.
At the time the announcement was made, speculation was that the “established partner” was most likely a carrier. And since it occured the same week that AT&T and Verizon both began taking preorders for the BlackBerry Z10, some assumed that one of them was responsible for that one-million-device order.
In November, mobile app services company Flurry announced that China was on track to top the U.S. and Android install base at some point in the first quarter of 2013. Today, Flurry says that has happened. China has passed the U.S. to become the world’s top country for active Android and iOS smartphones and tablets, a year after the country became the fastest-growing smart device market in the world.
For its report, Flurry sourced from its entire data set of over 2.4 billion anonymous, aggregated app session daily across over 275,000 applications around the world. The company says it reliably measures activity in over 90 percent of the world’s smart devices.
In January of this year, the U.S. and China were neck-and-neck in terms of their active smart device installed base, at 222 million and 221 million, respectively. By the end of this month, Flurry estimates that will change to 230 million in the U.S. and 246 million in China.
More importantly, the U.S. will not regain the lead after this shift occurs, due the size of China’s population (over 1.3 billion people vs. 310 million in the U.S.). In fact, the report notes, the only other country that could eventually challenge China is India, which has just over 1.2 billion people. But China’s smart device installed base is significantly larger than India’s, where today there are only 19 million active devices.
In five years, planet earth will be home to 7.6 billion people, says the United Nations. Those folks will be using 10.3 billion Internet-connected mobile devices.
In other words, there will be more mobile devices in the world than people, says Cisco in its annual jaw-dropping report on the growth of the mobile Internet.
The tipping point will happen this year, Cisco predicts.
You might look around at the toys in your house, your smartphone, your tablet, your Pebble watch, and think this stat is obvious.
Apple customers have a bit of good news today.
iOS 6.1, the latest operating system for the company's mobile devices, has been jailbroken.
This is the first jailbreak that will work with your iPhone 5 and iPad Mini.
Jailbroken devices are free from the shackles of Apple's "walled garden," meaning they can run software do things that are normally not allowed.
Jailbreaking is perfectly legal and it unlocks some pretty cool capabilities for your iPhone.
A while ago, I thought that cellphone carriers were unaware that consumers could buy a phone for the contract price and then use it anywhere unrestricted. Then, after a while I learned this wasn’t the case and that carriers had every possible loophole filled in.
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a bill to hinder hackers from wandering away from their device’s service provider, will now include an additional rule stating that unlocking phones will be deemed illegal.
The surging revolution in technology has demonstrated a peculiar tendency of human nature. We like to stuff as much as possible in as small a device as we can. We have transcended from bulky desktop personal computers to portable laptops to revolutionary tablet devices and Smartphones. So, what’s next? What is smaller than a mobile phone and is used daily?
Well, we all have wrist watches, and most of us use it. Since the time of Dick Tracy’s two way wrist radio and James Bond’s Seiko Watch Pager, smart watches have always enticed every gadget maker ranging from big electronic manufacturers to small time inventors. Till some time back, no wrist gadget had got so much popularity with an exception of the calculator watch.
These days any time you talk mobile app development or operating systems, HTML5 is a key part of the conversation.
Perhaps the biggest development for HTML5 in 2012 was its non-development. At the end of 2011, HTML5 seemed like a young athlete that had no limits to its potential. Yet, just as we watch many athletes mature into professional players, the development was marred by maturation and performance issues that took some of the luster off the subject. From a technological standpoint, the HTML5 stack saw good improvement in 2012 as companies like Google, Mozilla, appMobi, Sencha, Research In Motion, Facebook and others have developed towards the stack. HTML5 is well on its way to being a mature technology.
2012 was a big year in mobile. We have never seen a year like this where there were so many quality devices from so many disparate suppliers all competing for the interest of consumers and enterprises. What were the best of the best? We rank the top 10 smartphones and tablets below...
With the discovery of latest and improved mobile phones, mobile photography has been taken to the whole new level. Now, people have mobile phones that come with 5MP camera or even more and also have some more features to make photographs even more interesting. In this showcase, we are presenting some extraordinarily attractive and visually fascinating examples of photographs that have been taken from smartphones that come with HD 8MP iPhone 5 Camera.
Smartphones are getting smarter and smarter day by day with the high mega pixel camera, organizer, music player, audio or video recorder and much more. Enjoy looking into this collection and be inspired. You can share this collection with your friends and on social networking websites.
In this collection, we displayed an amazing examples of photos captured from smartphones that proved the high quality of camera featured beautifuly. Here are 50 Wonderful Photos Captured with SmartPhones. If you guys have captured any amazing moment with your smartphone, that can be share as well below comment box.
Paris designers Anthony Veloso and Quentin Dron of Retro Game Addict created great animated Nintendo History timeline that takes us on an artistic journey from the Game & Watch handheld (1980) to the Wii U (2012).
Smartphones and other handheld devices contribute substantially to the overall viewership of any website. Latest estimates show that it is not long before the mobile Internet users are slated to have more stake in the website usage from their desktop and laptop counterparts.
In such a scenario it would be a cardinal sin to ignore the mobile users when it comes to development of a website. Thus one of the most important stages is making a website mobile friendly is to test it for different smartphone platforms and other handheld devices. Let us take a look the importance of mobile phone emulators when it comes to designing websites.
Prior to smartphones and tablets, many of us sat quietly on the bus and people watched as we waited for our desired destination to arrive. Nowadays, with the enhancements in technology and mobile devices we are able to watch movies, use various social networks, and check emails while passing time while we travel.
Mobile devices are being used everywhere and provide just about everything at our fingertips. With 64% of people using their mobile devices on public transportation, 79% using it when they shop, and 89% while on the go, it would seem that smartphones and tablets are changing the way we live our lives. Click to enlarge.
The 2000s were a great decade for technology. We are still seeing influences from this recent time period today.
In case you don't remember, here are 10 pieces of tech that changed everything by making our lives easier and more enjoyable.
What would you do if you could travel back in time? Go on a date with Marilyn Monroe? Assassinate Hitler? Obviously. But here’s what Alex Varanese would do after that: grab all the modern technology he can find, take it to the late 70′s, superficially redesign it all to blend in, start a consumer electronics company to unleash it upon the world, then sit back as I rake in billions, trillions, or even millions of dollars.
Alex Varanese makes artwork for a living and hopes to one day marry your mom. His hobbies include time travel, apologizing for inappropriately referencing 9/11 and cutting his own hair with a staple remover. As a professional graphicologist, Alex’s clients include Nike, Chevrolet, Fortune, Playboy, Island Records, Wired UK, Money Magazine, Surface Magazine, Advanced Photoshop Magazine, Computer Arts Magazine, CBS, Drambuie, and Jack Kerouac.
Gaming is serious business. The game industry alone is worth US$74 billion (yes, with a b) in 2011 and the numbers are rising. Chances are, you have several games going on on your smartphone and you have one or two consoles at home equipped for some heavy gaming sessions. But if you want to talk about extreme gaming pieces – let’s just limit it to PC this time – then you will definitely love today’s showcase.
Equiso has released a demo video of the Smart TV, which is currently being funded on Kickstarter.
The Smart TV is an HDMI dongle that plugs into your television and essentially turns it into an Android tablet. You have access to apps, the web, and any video content you can stream and store on the device.
At the time of this writing Equiso is well on the way to its goal, having raised $84,000 of the $100,000 target. Check out the demo video below and see if it's something you're interested in -- they're offering the device for $69 through Kickstarter.
Apple and Samsung appear to be the only two companies generating decent profit from their smartphones. Report on Business takes a look at the specs on some mobile devices.
Think your smartphone is powerful now? Wait until the year 2050, when Apple will have faded into oblivion (most major tech companies can last barely 30 years).
Your phone will be paper thin and charge wirelessly. You'll probably project a high-def screen onto a wall when you want a bigger screen, since laptops will have become relics. But the truly impressive innovations will go far beyond these well-known predictions. Super-smart AI will make your phone even more powerful for business. Here are my predictions for what phones will do:
When the first iPhone was released it took the tech world by storm. Since then it has been almost 5 years and the smartphone market has ramped up in popularity, with even the Microsoft has gotten into the competition with its Windows 7 OS and partners. With so many Internet users on their smartphone nowadays, it’s common sense to expect the number of mobile website to increase aggressively.
