Mobile posts

Research In Motion is having a pretty good week. Apple tried to drag them into Antennagate but they fought back, and now some more details of Blackberry 6, the upcoming operating system update for RIM’s flagship product. Blackberry 6 features a new user interface, new social networking features and finally a WebKit browser. RIM might be confident in their antenna technologies, but they know Apple has the mobile multimedia market cornered. Apple sets the standard for audio and video on smartphones, and this is an area where Blackberry has traditionally been weak. Users will be able to browse…

Nokia, the tech world’s most successful failure, is buying its way out of the huge hole it’s in, purchasing Motorola’s wireless network unit for $1.2 billion. Nokia dominated the mobile industry in Europe in the years of dumb phones, but has never been able to break into the smartphone market, particularly in North America, where Apple, RIM and HTC dominate. Nokia hopes the move will give them greater access to the North American market, while Motorola regroups to focus more on handsets and hardware under the name Motorola Mobility. The network will be purchased by Nokia Siemens, a joint venture…

Microsoft’s mobile division is in a pickle. And not one of those really tasty pickles, all crisp and the perfect mix of sour, sharp and savory. No, this is a pretty crappy pickle to be in. See, Apple, Google and RIM are all established in the smartphone space. They need to be, given that mobile search revenue is soaring, app sales are booming and hardware makers are raking in cash hand over fist. These people make pickles your Polish grandmother would be jealous of. So Microsoft cannot afford to sit mobile out. On the flip side, coming in to compete against those three and others like Nokia (who, I hear,…

Foursquare’s looking for a search suitor, and Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo are all on board to whisper sweet nothings into the geotagging maiden’s ear. For the remainder of this post, I guess, ‘dollars’ will be referred to as ‘sweet nothings’. If only. Anyway, Foursquare’s dude in charge, Dennis Crowley, recently rapped with the Telegraph about the talks. “Our data generates hugely interesting trends which would enrich search,” Crowley said. “We can anonymize data and use it to show venues which are trending at that moment. Twitter helped the world and the search engines know what people…

This signal thing has gotten blown way out of proportion, yeah? Totally ridiculous. And I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t done my part – people like me have made this problem far more a PR issue than a hardware one. But are you really gonna blame us? You want your free bumper, right? Then sit tight, and just let us poke Big Steve some more about this. Just a bit more. I swear, we’re almost done, then he’s all yours. Five more minutes. Actually, it seems everyone’s prodding may have worked. Apple has called a press conference tomorrow that will hopefully shed some real light on the issue, and what Steve &…

Greedy providers. The mobile industry is all about squeezing as much money from the consumer as it can. But with AT&T’s move to a tiered pricing for data — and with others sure to follow — we could bear witness to long-lasting impacts that could not only punish consumers, but could destroy potential innovation for the entire industry. We know how it works: as Verizon Wireless and AT&T continue raking in the profits, consumers are being forced to pay more for less, as usual. So now there is a new spin: pay less for less, which is exactly what AT&T is doing. But would this short-term…

Say what you will about the evils of the free market – you commie pig – but competition in the world of smartphones is definitely having a good effect. Case in point: the latest look we’ve gotten at Blackberry’s forthcoming new OS6 looks pretty impressive – good enough, even, to make Blackberry a compelling alternative to the aesthetic niceties of iOS or Android. Among the many features shown in the short clip are: An updated web browser that features multitouch gestures The ability to post to multiple social networks at once, in addition to social feeds An improved media player (finally!) Universal…

Forget about HDTVs, PSPs, Macbooks, iPods, radios, cameras, camcorders, books, maps, and GPSs. We don’t need ‘em! We have everything our technology-loving hearts could ever desire in the palm of our hand — many call them smart phones, but they are far more than that. They are the makings of a technological revolution. However, it wasn’t always this way. For far too long we were constrained with devices that did one single thing: telephones ensured you would always stay connected with annoying family members, MP3 players enabled you to jam to Justin Timberlake, GPSs managed to get you…

I don’t get what’s so great about the mobile web. It’s like a harder-to-see, harder-to-use version of the real internet. I dunno, call me old. You’d be wrong, but I guess I’d deserve it. I just really like real computers, as opposed to little phones that do phone-sized things. Be that as it may, I do like YouTube, and with the rollout of its new phone-sized thing, I’m coloured impressed. Boasting the entire functionality of YouTube Regular, the revamped mobile version sucks a verified 400% less than that previous garbage you thought was passable for a mobile YouTube experience. Man, remember that?…

Having acknowledged the now-infamous iPhone 4 ‘death grip’, Apple has rushed an update out the door that… well, it doesn’t really solve the problem at all. What the update does do is fix an apparent second problem that was displaying signal bars incorrectly. Apparently, your iPhone 4 has been lying to you, optimistically displaying four or five bars sometimes when it should be displaying one or two. Apple tells us it had something to do with the algorithm governing the definition of each level of strength. Great. So, in a nutshell, this means that my hypothetical iPhone 4 can now more accurately…