Today, surprising someone with the cool features of your mobile phone is not a big challenge anymore. Nevertheless, some creative personalities like to be different than the others and stand out of the crowd and they find good ways to achieve it. Wrapping your mobile phone into an unusual case makes it look more unique and gives it more individuality. We have compiled some of the best examples you might want to check.
On April 3rd, 1973, Motorola engineer Marty Cooper placed the first public call from a cellphone. In midtown Manhattan, Cooper called Joel Engel — head of rival research department Bell Labs — saying "Joel, this is Marty. I'm calling you from a cell phone, a real handheld portable cell phone." The call was placed on a Motorola DynaTAC 8000x, which weighed 2.5 pounds, a far cry from today's 4-ounce handsets.
A new kind of three-dimensional display developed at HP Labs plays hologram-like videos without the need for any moving parts or glasses. Videos displayed on the HP system hover above the screen, and viewers can walk around them and experience an image or video from as many 200 different viewpoints—like walking around a real object.
The screen is made by modifying a conventional liquid-crystal display (LCD), the same kind of display found in most phones, laptops, tablets, and televisions. Researchers hope these 3D systems will enable new kinds of user interfaces for portable electronics, gaming, and data visualization. The work, carried out at HP Labs in Palo Alto, Calif., relies on complex physics to make 3D displays that are as thin as half a millimeter.
Conventional 3D—the type found in movie theaters—provides the viewer with only one perspective. The key to making a multiview 3D display is reproducing all the light rays reflecting off an object from every angle and to get a different image to the left and right eye of the viewer. Some systems for producing multiview 3D images require rapidly spinning mirrors; others use systems of lasers and multiple graphics processors.
Blackberry's demise, much talked about and somewhat goaded, is on hold while the world reacts to the Blackberry 10 OS and two handsets launching on March 22. And already someone has come forward to buy a million units. So that's...unexpected.
There's one complaint that often crops up with the Galaxy S III: it feels "plastic-y."
At a time when competitors are using glass, aluminum, and even higher quality plastics such as polycarbonate, Samsung has stuck to its guns with a thin, bendable plastic body.
Which is why the Galaxy S4 won't stray too far from that design philosophy.
CNET sat down with Y.H. Lee, executive vice president of Samsung's mobile business, to discuss the company's thoughts on design. When Samsung looks at what materials to use, it isn't just taking into consideration the aesthetic quality of the device, Lee said. The company also assesses how quickly and efficiently it can manufacture the product, knowing that it will have to ship a high volume.
Lee said that because Samsung will ship large units, it must consider the smartphone's manufacturability and durability.
The Marchex Institute took a data dive into the various phone habits of men and women. The findings may surprise you:
BlackBerry officially unveiled its brand new operating system called BlackBerry 10 this week.
The OS will run on two new smartphones called the BlackBerry Z10 (a touchscreen-only phone) and the BlackBerry Q10 (a phone with a classic BlackBerry physical keyboard). The phones will launch in the U.S. in March (Z10) and April (Q10).
BlackBerry gave a bunch of industry analysts, tech pundits, and members of the press a Z10 to test out BlackBerry 10.
Want to see what it's like? Check out the gallery below for a full tour of BlackBerry 10.
By a vote of 73 to 23, the US Senate just voted for the warrantless surveillance of American citizens until 2017.
The vote, set to affirm to eradicate the FAA Sunsets Extension Act of 2012, means we'll be living with Bush-era spy laws for another half decade. In 2007, the Senate voted to grant blanket immunity to companies like AT&T, which conspired with the NSA to monitor American digital conversations without government oversight after 9/11. Today's vote continues that immunity, and provides further carte blanche for the American intelligence-gathering apparatus. Phone calls, texts, and emails are all fair game—and a judge doesn't have to give the OK, so long as it's in the name of counterterrorism. Which is a very easy guise.
We just got our hands on the HTC Droid DNA this morning, and our first impressions were very promising. The screen is really, really gorgeous. But, how gorgeous is it when you put it next to the other best smartphones?
We decided to pit the Droid DNA against the iPhone 5, Nexus 4, HTC One X, and Samsung Galaxy S III (from left to right it's the iPhone, Nexus 4, Droid DNA, One X, and Galaxy S III). All screens were turned up to maximum brightness, as can be seen in the photo above. The first thing you'll note is that the Droid DNA isn't the brightest by a long shot; that title still belongs to the iPhone 5, followed by the One X (though the One X seems brighter because there are simply more pixels in total). Disappointing? Yes, though it's still plenty bright enough to be visible in daylight.
The biggest difference between Android smartphones and iPhones is freedom -- Android users have it and iPhone users are stuck in Apple's walled garden.
While iOS users might be content changing the backgrounds on their phones, Android allows for total customization and control over how your phone looks and works.
Here are the coolest ways to change the look of your Android phone.
In the late 1990s, Nokia predicted the future of mobile: it spent millions on research, and even demonstrated touch-screen devices that closely resembled todays iPhones and Androids. So why is it only now making a dent on the smartphone market?
The Wall Street Journal has a nice article describing the decision-making processes behind Nokia's ill-fated last decade. It starts by setting the scene, describing the kinds of devices that were being researched by Nokia over ten years ago...
Political and economic analysts alike have been awed by the proliferation of technology and social media to connect people and send ideas across borders that never before been crossed.
The importance of such technology has been evident in the protests and revolutions of the Arab Spring, but a closer look at the data shows just how deeply mobile technology is transforming the world.
That's the subject of a new report from the World Bank. This infographic sums up some of the data the report cites.
Get this: in just 10 years, developing countries have gone from accounting for just 29 percent of mobile subscriptions worldwide to 77 percent of subscriptions. In 2010, 90 percent of the world had a mobile cell signal.
According to the latest comScore report, Google’s mobile platform accounts for more than 50 percent of the smartphone market share. That means half of today’s smartphone users are running around with an Android phone in their hand or pocket. It should come as no surprise considering the influx of new handsets released over the past year. And with such a massive lineup to choose from, it can get overwhelming just browsing through the entire batch. Having tested every major phone out, we compiled a collection of the greatest across all four major carriers. So before you go wasting an upgrade on obsolete hardware, we recommend looking over our list of the 10 Best Android Phones Available Now.
If we've learned one thing from our Media Diets, it's that the first thing many people reach for in the morning is their smartphone. In fact, many of them sleep with them in their beds at night. We're inclined to write this off as another of the many examples of smartphone obsession, but there's a certain creep factor to folks sleeping with their phones as if the devices were a spouse, isn't there?
Not for nearly a quarter of 1,600 business managers and professionals, surveyed from a list of business people who've taken executive education courses at Harvard. According to Harvard Business School professor Leslie Perlow, 26% of these go-getters answered yes when asked, "during the week do you sleep with your handheld device?" That finding anchors her aptly titled new book, Sleeping With Your Smartphone, all about businesspeople's crazy marriage to their work (often through their smartphones). The key passage...
