Items tagged with smartphones
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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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Google seems to have gotten the memo that a price cut for its Nexus 5X handset would be much appreciated, and so the powers that be in Mountain View made it happen. The Nexus 5X is now permanently lightened by $30, bringing the cost down for $349 for the 16GB model and $399 for the 32GB version, both unlocked and off-contract.
For what
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Before Microsoft can complete its plan to rule the world with Windows 10, it will have to figure out how to tackle the smartphone market, one that's largely eluded the Redmond outfit over the years. The latest data from market research firm comScore has Microsoft clinging to a less than 3 percent share of the...
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There was a time when the Motorola brand was a big deal in the mobile phone space. Remember all those Razr flip phones that were all the rage? That was Motorola's heyday, and it's now a distant memory, have given way to the likes of Apple, Samsung, and HTC. And starting soon, the Motorola brand will no longer be found...
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If you’re one of the few that still purchases brand new smartphones with a two-year contract, America’s second largest wireless carrier is about to strip that option away from you. Starting January 8th, AT&T customers will have to purchase a new phone using NEXT or eat the entire cost of the device upfront.
This...
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Somebody must have spiked Verizon's non-alcoholic eggnog with a bit of rum over the holiday, as the wireless carrier now finds itself in semi-snark mode. Verizon's also feeling generous. So generous, in fact, that it's dangling up to $650 in front of anyone who "didn't get the right network" and is willing to...
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Password security is one of those things you either have or you don't. If you're password is a combination of alphanumeric characters and symbols with varying punctuation, congratulations, you're in much better shape than the guy who uses "12345," the same as found on his luggage. That said, traditional password input...
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The mantra from Microsoft has been "Windows 10 for all devices" repeated over and over again, and having played with the OS extensively on the desktop, we think the company is headed in the right direction. At the same time, it's not a movement that will happen overnight. As we've seen. it's taking some time to roll...
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In what could be Microsoft's last Lumia launch of the year, the Redmond outfit today announced that its entry-level Lumia 550 is now available to purchase, provided you live in Europe. Granted, this moment in time doesn't hold the same weight as Microsoft's Lumia 950 and Lumia 950 XL launch, but hey, they can't all be...
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Microsoft's been hard at work trying to unite devices from different categories under a single ecosystem, and spreading Windows 10 Mobile to the masses is one of the keys to achieving that goal. The good news for Microsoft is that at least one market research firm is projecting an uptick in smartphones running Windows 10 Mobile over the next
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The mobile market is flooded with smartphone makers, many of which are focused on Android handsets. Does it really need another one? That's up for debate, though if there's one person you'd want to see make a run at building Android phones, it would be Andy Rubin, who co-founded Android before it was purchased by...
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While most of us get ready to carve into turkeys and dive into fixings, Chinese phone maker Huawei was busy unwrapping its latest mobile device, the Mate 8, a premium phablet with a 6-inch Full HD 1080p display. As is vogue right now, the Mate 8 features a seamless aluminum design with a gold (is best!) color...
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