Items tagged with Cellphones
It was revealed several months ago that the U.S. Marshal Service secretly uses spy planes equipped with devices that mimic cell towers to scan for and harvest cellphone information on a mass scale. Now it's being reported that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) played a key role in helping the Justice Department...
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In a one-city crusade, San Francisco attempted to pass an ordinance requiring retailers to post warnings to consumers about the potentially dangerous levels of radiation coming from their cell phones. It didn’t get far, as a judge blocked the 2011 ordinance before it could take effect, and now, Reuters reports...
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Just about every company out in Las Vegas this week has a cellphone with their name on it. Okay, that's probably stretching the truth a good amount, but there isn't a shortage of new phones at CES, that's for certain. Acer is also introducing a new piece this week, the Liquid Mini. This phone's designed to be a fun, colorful, stylish one....
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The cell phone has almost become an extension of the human body as of late. Whether it's texting, tweeting, Facebooking, web-surfing, picture-taking, it has become more and more evident that Americans use their phone to do just about anything and everything. Ubiquitous would be a word that comes to mind but that doesn't quite capture the situation...
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After disappointing sales of its nuvifone, we reported back in September that Garmin was considering its options with its smartphone unit. Now, Reuters is reporting that Asus plans to end its mobile phone agreement with Garmin, thereby paving the way for Garmin to exit the smartphone business altogether. A company official for Asustek said...
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Well, what do you know? It's the executive shuffle in the mobile world! It sure looks like fun, and according to All Things D, the same man that designed last month as the head of Nokia's MeeGo division is now an employee of Palm. It seems like a round-robin of high-level executives, but we aren't too surprised. Ari Jaaksi has a track record...
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Worried that you'll lose your phone? Worried that you have no way to trace it or wipe it if it were to vanish before your very eyes? Apple has a solution for that called "Find my iPhone." It comes with each new iPhone so long as you activate a $99/year MobileMe service, and it lets users track their phone via GPS and...
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Windows Phone 7 is almost here. The holidays are rapidly approaching, and Microsoft has long since maintained that WP7 handsets would be on sale prior to 2011. As the time draws near, we are seeing more and more leaks and hints of what Windows Phone 7 will actually look like. Take this video for example. It popped up on YouTube over the weekend...
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It simply had to happen sooner or later. Usually, when it comes to U.S. carriers, they each follow one another. If one does one thing, the other follows suit. Generally, these are minor things. Unlimited calling plan introductions, unlimited texting, etc. But tiered data pricing is a fundamental shift in how mobile data is distributed, and...
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Mobile phone penetration has been steadily increasing worldwide for many years, so much so in fact, that recent data suggests there will be more than 5 billion wireless subscriptions by the end of this year. Wow, that’s a ton of Razrs. Another interesting tid-bit—the average age an American receives his or...
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Five billion. That's a lot of faces, a lot of eyes, and a lot of ears. It's also a lot of humans talking amongst one another, and according to a new iSuppli report, that's the number of wireless subscriptions that our planet is home to. Almost, anyway. The report estimates that the grand total of wireless...
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Microsoft never really has had much luck in the phone market. Not the mobile OS market, mind you, the phone market. Recently, Microsoft attempted to reach the "tween" market with the launch of the Kin. The Kin lineup initially consisted of two phones on Verizon, both of which required pricey $30/month data plans just like a proper smartphone....
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There are plenty of pre-paid wireless options out there. It seems like every direction you turn, there's another MVNO offering you more cell service. But your post-paid options are fairly limited in the U.S. Get ready for a big change, though. Walmart announced this week that they were introducing a new post-paid cellular service (which won't...
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When you think about Garmin, you probably think about one major thing: GPS. Here's something you probably don't associate with Garmin: smartphones. But regardless, they're in both markets right now. The original nuvifone was announced with a huge amount of hype behind it, but it was delayed for around a year while the iPhone came out and stole...
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And just like that, it's done. Rumors were flaring over the past couple of months that Nokia's existing CEO was on the hot seat. We guess those rumors weren't wrong. It's being reported that a search for a new Nokia CEO had been ongoing since at least May, and it seems that Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo's replacement has now been found. The timing...
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Are we seeing a shift in the mobile trends of America? For years, things have been moving along with little change. If you wanted a cheap(er) phone, you bit the bullet and signed a 2-year long-term agreement to stick with a carrier. It was either that, or suck it up and go prepaid, albeit with a far less featured phone. But now, prepaid options...
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There's some interesting findings coming from a new report on the wireless industry in America this week. The analysis, which was published by the Government Accountability Office and is pointed at the U.S. Government, found that four major network operators control 90% of the entire U.S. wireless market. That's a...
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Nokia still has some ways to go before they can reasonably compete with the iPhone 4 and the many other Android 2.x smartphones that are shipping today, but one area where no one has really considered the competition going is price. Pricing hasn't been a huge focal point for smartphones in America; most are just...
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ntel and Nokia aren't too similar. One focuses on cellphones, one focuses on processors. But both are major corporations with major faces in the technology world, and both stand to learn a lot from working with one another. In fact, they already have. The two have worked together in order to create MeeGo, which is the combination of Maemo...
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It's not that this phone in particular will make you dump your iPhone and come running, but it's yet another newcomer that can add some needed competition to the handset space in America. ZTE is a huge, well known company in Asia, and they do have some business here in North America as well. But up until now, it has been pretty impossible...
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The biggest problem facing prepaid mobile carriers isn't the pricing. In many cases, their pricing is far better than the major postpaid carriers. But aside from a lack of marketing at times, the phone selection is the biggest obstacle. AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint and Verizon manage to land the best phones, and when...
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It already happened in the home, and now it's happening on college campuses everywhere: landline phones are vanishing. With the proliferation of cellphones, it has made it harder and harder for landline services to prove necessary. Even VoIP-based services such as digital phone from a cable company or Vonage seem limited in use, with the only...
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