Google has started rolling out a major update of the Android Market application for smartphones. It offers a more sophisticated layout, an improved visual style, and some significant new features—including support for renting movies and buying books. Virtually all of these features are already present in the Honeycomb version of the Android Market, but were not previously available in the smartphone version. The update brings feature parity and a unified look and feel between the phone and tablet variants of the market. Read the comments on this post
Posts Tagged ‘smartphone’
Hands on: new Android Market app sells books and movie rentals
August 5th, 2011 
admin 
Posted in Tech News 
Tags: article, Gadgets, honeycomb, market, news, read-the-rest, smartphone, tablet-variants, the-smartphone, these-features 
Comments OffApple, Samsung top smartphone sales as feature phones decline
August 5th, 2011 admin The touchscreen smartphone revolution continues to shake up the mobile phone industry, with Apple displacing Nokia as the top smartphone vendor in the world. In fact, Apple has also displaced longtime mobile industry players like Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and RIM to become the number four mobile phone vendor globally. But Apple’s rival Samsung, holding the number two spot in both mobile and smartphone market share, is poised to take both crowns if its massive sales growth can be maintained. The overall mobile phone market grew just over 11 percent year over year for the second quarter of 2011, for a total of 365 million units, according to market research firm IDC. Growth has been slower than expected, perhaps due to a 4 percent drop in feature phone shipments. That’s the first decline in feature phone sales since the third quarter of 2009. Read the comments on this post
Posted in Tech News Tags: article, Gadgets, ios, mobile, motorola, Nokia, overall-mobile, phone-industry, read-the-rest, second-quarter, since-the-third, smartphone, zte Comments OffDevelopers still divided on mobile app monetization, but love the cloud
August 5th, 2011 admin Mobile developers are still divided on how best to monetize mobile apps, according to the latest Mobile Developer Report survey by mobile development framework maker Appcelerator and market research firm IDC. A full 50 percent of the developers surveyed ranked attracting new users who buy software from an app store as a top priority going forward, down from 59 percent earlier this year. Another 50 percent ranked in-app purchasing as a top business model, up from 42 percent earlier this year. Despite the differences in business strategy, however, developers are increasingly incorporating cloud services, which one developer described to Ars as “very, very, very nice.” Appcelerator and IDC conduct a quarterly survey of mobile developers, and the latest update reveals some trends in business model preference. Among the 2,000 developers surveyed, those expecting to earn a payday via app store purchases alone is trending downward, while those relying on in-app purchasing is trending upward. Half of the respondents said they planned to use, or will continue to use, each of those models for the next year. The percentage planning to rely on ad revenue remained mostly flat at about 45 percent. Read the comments on this post
Posted in Tech News Tags: Developers, divided-on-how, idc, mobile, monetize-mobile, open-source, percent-earlier, respondents, smartphone, survey, surveyed-ranked, the-differences Comments OffSamsung to Manufacture PS Vita SoC
August 5th, 2011 admin A report in the (Japanese-language) Semiconductor Industry News today revealed that the quad-core Cortex A9 ARM SoC for Sony's upcoming Playstation Vita handheld would be manufactured by Samsung on a 45nm process. Samsung also supplies 45nm ARM processors for Apple (the A4 and A5) and other smartphone manufacturers. The move to a relatively off-the-shelf ARM processor is a move away from the expensive proprietary chips that powered Sony's PS2, PSP, and PS3, and it allows Sony to make the Vita more cheaply (it also allows developers to port code more easily from other ARM devices, like smartphones). This is an important move, since it allows Sony to compete more effectively with Apple and Nintendo – the latter, perhaps feeling the pressure from the Vita's impending launch, announced a substantial price cut to its 3DS handheld yesterday. The Playstation Vita succeeds the PlayStation Portable and is due out at some point this holiday season in Japan and North America. Its announced price is $249.99, $20 more than Apple's low-end iPod Touch and $80 more than Nintendo's 3DS. Source: Semiconductory Industry News
Posted in Tech News Tags: announced-price, apple, expensive, Gaming, Holiday, industry, industry-news, japan, make-the-vita, north, playstation, portable, semiconductor, smartphone, vita Comments OffNew wireless-charging tech may be in store for future iPhone
July 12th, 2011 admin Apple may bring wireless charging to the iPhone in a future iteration, but it likely won’t use the same induction charging technology popularized by Palm’s Touchstone charger. Instead, the company will likely implement more exotic near field magnetic resonance charging currently being championed by wireless power startup WiTricity. Induction charging works by inducing a current in a coil of wire from one device to another. A charger device (Palm’s Touchstone charger, for instance, or a mobile device “charging mat”) contains a large coil of wire inside. When a current passes through the coil, it creates a small magnetic field around the coil. When a second coil—embedded in a mobile device like a smartphone—is brought into close proximity of the first coil’s magnetic field, it induces a current to pass through the second coil. Read the comments on this post
Posted in Tech News Tags: apple, article, charging-works, Coil, implement-more, iPhone, macs, news, read-the-rest, same-induction, small-magnetic, smartphone, wireless-power, wirelesspower Comments OffiOS 5 legalese suggests Apple still plugging away at Maps improvements
July 1st, 2011 admin Though Apple hasn’t publicly disclosed any major upcoming improvements for iOS’s Maps app, new legal notices contained within iOS 5 suggest Apple is still hard at work developing improvements to its mapping and geolocation features. After acquiring two map data processing companies, PlaceBase and Poly9 , it seemed Apple was in a position to drop its reliance on Google for its Maps application. Google has increasingly become a competitor for Apple in the smartphone market and mobile advertising, so at least exploring alternatives to Google’s mapping data was seen as a wise move on Apple’s part. We believed that Apple would roll those improvements into iOS 5
Posted in Tech News Tags: apple, data, Gadgets, geolocation, ios, legal, maps, mobile, news, smartphone, though-apple, urban Comments OffMango goodness: Windows Phone developer firmware invitations roll out
July 1st, 2011 admin Registered Windows Phone developers now have access to a beta build of Windows Phone Mango, the major upgrade to the smartphone operating system that’s due in fall. The beta build doesn’t include everything that Mango will eventually include, but does have major features like multitasking, background tasks, programmatic access to the camera, network sockets, and more. The Windows Phone Developer Tools have also been updated to bring them in-line with the beta firmware. Read the comments on this post
Posted in Tech News Tags: been-updated, camera, Developers, developers-now, microsoft, network-sockets, read-the-rest, sdk, smartphone, the-smartphone, windows, windows-phone, windowsphone Comments Off
