Items tagged with smartphones
We're careless creatures, there's no denying that. It's why we lose our car keys, forget concert tickets at home, and misplace our smartphones. Google can't help you with the first two, but if you happen to lose your Android device, or even worse it ends up stolen, don't panic, the search giant launched a new feature...
Read more...
Microsoft has found a new partner in the smartphone sector in Xiaomi, a major player in China that's looking to expand its reach into other territories. To help it do that, Microsoft sold Xiaomi around 1,500 of its patents for an undisclosed sum. The two also entered into a cross-licensing deal as part of what they're...
Read more...
The OnePlus team made a lot of fans happy today. How so? Not only is OnePlus ditching its reviled invite system for its OnePlus 3 release, it's saying goodbye to the invite system forever. That's right, invites are gone forever, and so are the headaches on both sides of the equation that accompanied them.
"With the OnePlus 3, we’re officially
Read more...
In the United States, the smartphone market feels almost like a two-horse race between Apple and Samsung, with HTC galloping a fair distance behind. But lest anyone forget, Sony offers some intriguing handsets under its Xperia banner, four of which are arriving unlocked in the next couple of months.
Forgiveness is...
Read more...
It seems as though Microsoft is coming around to the realization that it has a snowball's chance in hell of competing with Android and (to a lesser extent) iOS for smartphone market share, so it's pulling back even further than it already has. Or more specifically, Microsoft's is "streamlining" its smartphone...
Read more...
Remember the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man that lumbered through New York City in the original Ghostbusters? That's how big Android has become, which coincidentally is on its Marshmallow release. That's not to say that Android is bloated and slow, just that it's really big—out of the 349 million smartphones shipped in the...
Read more...
Verizon plans on raising its data limit for prepaid smartphone plans. Starting May 15th, the data limit on Verizon's $45 a month plan jumps from 1GB to 3GB, while the $60 plan has been doubled to 6GB. This includes unlimited talk and text in the United States. The $45 plan comes with free texting to Mexico and Canada...
Read more...
It's hard not to cringe whenever HTC releases an earnings report these days, though if you're hoping for the handset maker to turn its fortunes around, its latest financial report is especially stomach turning. HTC's revenue during the first quarter for the period ending March 31, 2016, plummeted 64 percent to NT$14.8...
Read more...
The market hasn't shown a ton of interest in Microsoft's Lumia 950 and Lumia 950 XL handsets so the Redmond outfit is making an offer it hopes customers will have a tougher time refusing. If you purchase an unlocked Lumia 950 XL smartphone from the Microsoft Store, Microsoft will throw in an unlocked Lumia 950 handset...
Read more...
A city in Germany has embedded LED traffic lights into sidewalks so that pedestrians who are too busy looking at their smartphone won't accidentally walk out into oncoming traffic. Sadly, this isn't a belated April Fool's story, and it begs the question, has it really come to this? And at the risk of sounding crass...
Read more...
Windows 10 Mobile Insider Preview Build 14322 Visits Fast Ring With Wealth Of New Features And Fixes
Microsoft made it clear that now is not the time to focus its efforts on becoming a leader in mobile, but even so, it isn't abandoning the smartphone sector or its Windows 10 Mobile platform. Windows 10 Mobile remains a key part of Microsoft's ongoing strategy to unite devices from different categories with a single...
Read more...
AT&T just bumped its wireless activation and upgrade fee to $20 per smartphone on several of its plans, a 33 percent increase from its previous $15 charge, though save some of your outrage for Verizon. It was Big Red that rolled out a new $20 upgrade fee earlier this week, which AT&T apparently took as an opening to...
Read more...
LG's attempt to shake up the smartphone industry begins in earnest early next month, which is when the South Korean electronics maker plans to ship its modular G5 handset to the United States. The "early April" release isn't much of a surprise—LG had previously announced plans to ship the G5 to Canada on April...
Read more...
In the wake of Apple's fight with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) over certain iPhone security features, French parliament officials voted to penalize smartphone makers that refuse to hand over encrypted data in cases involving terrorism. The legislation is being introduced as an amendment to a penal reform...
Read more...
Competition is heating up in the high-end handset market thanks to some compelling options by Chinese manufacturers. Just last week, Xiaomi made a splash with its Mi 5, a decked out phone with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 processor and a starting price of just $300. Now Huawei is answering the call for a flagship with...
Read more...
Today's smartphones are more capable (and storage hungry) than ever—they can play high-end games, record 4K resolution videos, and snap point-n-shoot quality pictures, to name just a few of the storage hogging things you can do with your phone. To that end, Samsung today announced that it's begun mass producing the...
Read more...
In early December, Mozilla pretty much confirmed that the end was near for Firefox OS on smartphones. “Firefox OS proved the flexibility of the Web, scaling from low-end smartphones all the way up to HD TVs,” said Mozilla SVP of Connected Devices Ari Jaaksi at the time. “However, we weren’t able to offer the best user...
Read more...
Google might be taking a page from its rival and changing the way it operates in the mobile phone space, at least on the manufacturing side. Rather than continue to outsource production to established players like HTC and LG, Google's now interested in controlling the entire process from start to finish, much like...
Read more...
China continues to swell with smartphones—the latest data from Strategy Analytics pegs China's smartphone shipments as having grown 3 percent year-over-over to a hit record 438 million handsets in 2015. That's especially good news for Xiaomi, which retained its top spot with a 15.4 percent share of the market, but not...
Read more...
Look around at any given time and you're likely to see multiple people actively using a smartphone. They're everywhere these days, and in the fourth quarter of 2015, hundreds of millions of more smartphone devices infiltrated the market—404.5 million to be exact, up 6 percent annually from 380.1 million units shipped...
Read more...
Though they're bitter rivals in the mobile space, Samsung and Apple often show each other the sincerest form of flattery, which is imitation. You can argue that one copies the other more often, but they both do it, often to the benefit of customers. The latest example of this has Samsung planning to roll out a Galaxy...
Read more...
Legislatures in New York have drafted a bill that, if passed, would require Apple and other smartphone makers to provide backdoors to encrypted handsets for law enforcement officials or otherwise eliminate encryption altogether. Failure to do so would result in a $2,500 fine per device, a sum that would quickly add...
Read more...
