China Unveils List Of 30 Top Mobile Businesses In China. Finland's Jolla Will Be The Ferrari Of The Smartphone World. Huawei Aims to Be Smarter About Its Phone Branding - Ina Fried - Mobile. China’s Huawei has been a rapidly growing force in the global smartphone market, but remains little known to most U.S. consumers. The company hopes to change that — not just by stepping up sales, but also through a big marketing campaign set to kick off in the second half of the year. In an interview at the CTIA trade show in New Orleans on Thursday, Huawei Executive Vice President James Jiang said the company has high hopes for the American market. “We have ambitions to be one of the top players in this market and globalwise,” Jiang said. The company last year sold $1 billion worth of devices, double that of the prior year.
It has said it hopes to ship 60 million smartphones globally this year. Like fellow Chinese phone maker ZTE, Huawei has been steadily building its business from unbranded phones and laptop cards to smartphones bearing the company’s own name. “We hope to bring the entire line to the U.S.,” Jiang said. “It makes us relevant to the discussion,” Roese said. Facebook Sends Traffic to Apps, Makes Less Money in Mobile - Ina Fried - Mobile.
Why Apple Has Already Pwned the Gaming Market. A number of recent opinion posts have suggested that Apple has a real shot at the gaming market. Part of this flurry of commentary stemmed from a rumor, which turned out to be false, that Apple CEO Tim Cook met with executives at game publisher Valve. “Apple is Set to Change Gaming,” said one headline. The deck went on: “It’s just a matter of time before Apple storms into the console business.” “How Apple Can Conquer the Gaming Industry Without Firing a Shot,” said another headline. I’m sorry, but this conquering of the gaming market has already happened. Here’s why. Apple is the Starbucks of Gaming One way to understand Apple’s participation in the gaming market is to compare it with Starbucks’ in the coffee market.
Before Starbucks, a tiny minority of coffee drinkers in the United States sought out specialty shops that sold premium whole beans and ground their own at home, brewing it with some exotic, imported European coffee contraption. That’s what Apple does with gaming. Related. BlackBerry Maker To Manage iPhones, iPads, Android Devices. Microsoft says Windows Phone will surpass Apple in China (yes, really) Two Reasons Why RIM Is Still Worth Buying. Facebook Considers Android and iOS to be its Competitors. 1 February '12, 11:29pm Follow There are still many interesting facts being unearthed in Facebook’s IPO filing today, many of which we are dissecting for your pleasure.
One of the most interesting I found was that 51% of Facebook’s 845M monthly active users are mobile users too. That means that 425M of Facebook’s MAU’s are browsing the service on a mobile device, and that worries the company for a couple of reasons. First, the fact that they are growing in a massive way on mobile, yet display no advertising there—a product which accounted for a huge part of its revenue in the past year. If the company is unable to successfully implant effective advertising into its mobile offerings, this could mean a huge hit on its revenue into the increasingly mobile future.
Second, it knows that it does not control its own mobile destiny. Uh-oh, PC: Half of computing device sales are mobile — Mobile Technology News. Apple May Need Cheaper Phones To Compete In China. Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga: a Windows 8 laptop that bends backwards into a tablet (hands-on video) Lenovo has indeed saved the best for last here at CES 2012. After days of interminable laptop announcements, the company has one more to share: the 13.3-inch IdeaPad Yoga, which opens like a normal laptop but can then flip backwards to become a tablet. Yes, it's as crazy as it sounds, and even better it's running Windows 8.
This is the sort of thing that is really best seen in video, so I suggest you scroll on down as soon as possible, but what I can tell you is that the .6-inch thick laptop looks and feels a lot like the IdeaPad U300s (or the new U310 / U410) until you realize you can push the screen back completely and morph it into a Windows 8 tablet. While the Yoga isn't going to be coming out until Windows 8 is release — likely in the Fall of this year — the version that Lenovo brought to Vegas was actually quite far along, at least on the hardware front. Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga hands-on pictures Previous Next View full Gallery. Windows Phone Marketshare. Ellis Hamburger, Business Insider Good question. However, if you want an honest opinion, it's usually best to go straight to the source.
A former GM who used to work on Windows Phone 7 for Microsoft, Charlie Kindel, took to his personal blog today with some thoughts on why Microsoft's mobile efforts seem so stagnant. It boils down to carriers, manufacturers, and the companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft who make the operating system are all locked in this big three-way pissing contest to see who gets the most say in marketing a device. According to Kindel, Android is crushing iOS and Windows Phone 7 when it comes to marketshare simply because its open platform allows manufacturers and carriers to get away with whatever they want, while cranking out dozens of devices a year. And yes, that means bloatware, nasty skins, and fragmentation on your Android phone. Here's Kindel: Microsoft's approach seems nice and balanced.
Now, let’s look at the ads on TV right now. Google Activating 700,000 Android Devices A Day. Why many developers look to iOS first? Money. Microsoft Dishes Out Free Windows Phones To Angry Android Users. Pre-Order the Ubislate7 Android 2.2 Tablet w/ 7" Touchscreen (India Only) Facebook phone Buffy is real, could be available in 18 months. The rumored Facebook phone is real and will be manufactured by HTC under the codename “Buffy,” anonymous sources have told AllThingsD. Although the news site doesn’t indicate where its information comes from, it must have more to report, because this is the first of what AllThingsD says will be a week-long series on the mysterious device. The so-called “Facebook phone” has been at the heart of rampant speculation for more than two years, although the only devices to emerge so far have been fairly standard Android or feature phones with Facebook features slapped on.
“Buffy,” if real, is named after the famous vampire slayer featured in a movie and a long-running television series. The Buffy phone will run a heavily modified version of Android featuring support for apps developed in HTML5, and could see the light of day in a year to 18 months, according to writers Liz Gannes and Ina Fried. Kindle Fire or Nook Tablet? I bought the… — Mobile Technology News.
The Big Ideas Inside A New Version Of India's $35 Aakash Tablet. Barely a month has passed since the release of India's "$35" Aakash tablet, but its creators already have its successor--a sleeker, more powerful low-cost tablet--ready to launch. When the Aakash was launched in October, it was greeted with enthusiasm--what potential it holds for a developing market! --followed almost immediately by skepticism--could it possibly work for that cheap?
What's the catch? Aakash, or Ubislate 7 as U.K. manufacturer DataWind calls it, has a 7-inch screen, runs Android 2.2. But the original designers of the tablet--students and professors who thought up and prototyped the first early versions of the device--are keeping their sights set squarely on the Indian market, while nurturing more ambitious plans for the next version and making low-cost technology accessible to all Indians. Prem Kumar Kalra, the professor at IIT Kanpur, began engineering the tablet in 2009 with a target price of $50. DataWind bought the design and then created their version of the tablet. Yahoo Goes All-In With Mobile. Yahoo released four products Wednesday, and almost all of them were for iPad, Android and mobile. The big news was Yahoo Livestand for iPad, a social newsstand app that competes directly with Flipboard. But Livestand wasn't the only product that Team Yahoo released at its Product Runway Even at its headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif.
The struggling digital media giant also released IntoNow for iPad. IntoNow, which Yahoo acquired earlier this year, has the ability to listen to a couple seconds of a TV show and determine what show you are watching. The new iPad app brings that functionality to the tablet, while surfacing related tweets, hashtags and other content. It's designed to be the ultimate companion app to the TV. The company also unveiled Yahoo Weather for Android, now available in 35 languages. Lastly, Yahoo released a new HTML5 version of Yahoo Mail for the iPad. The commitment to mobile is stark, but it isn't a surprise. Facebook Mobile Usage Set to Explode. There are now 800 million monthly active users on Facebook, according to Facebook's own statistics. More than 350 million of those people access Facebook through their mobile devices, nearly 44% of its total active user base. In terms of traffic, 33% of Facebook traffic comes from mobile devices - according to data revealed by Mary Meeker in her Web 2.0 Summit presentation this month.
Make no mistake, Facebook is getting serious about mobile. October 2011 was a big month for Facebook's mobile initiatives, with a new iPad app, an updated iPhone app and a revamped mobile browser site that closely mimics the functionality of its iOS apps. It also offers mobile versions for Android, Blackberry and other platforms. But Facebook is just getting started, there's a lot of upside to come. That 350 million figure for active mobile users will likely increase rapidly, now that Facebook has released new versions of its mobile site and iOS apps. Source: Mary Meeker Source: comScore. Toyota introduces Touch Life smartphone mirroring system, your Prius and iPhone can become one.
Toyota Touch Life - world-first smartphone mirroring infotainment product 25/10/2011 Toyota introduces the latest addition to the Toyota Touch infotainment product family with the all-new Toyota Touch Life. Offering consumers with unprecedented smartphone-vehicle connectivity, Toyota Touch Life will be available for the Toyota iQ city car towards the end of 2011 in selected markets. Toyota Touch Life uses the latest industry connectivity protocols to mirror the smartphone's display on the infotainment system's 7-inch touchscreen. Smartphone functionalities can now be easily accessed using steering wheel-based controls or the large touchscreen surface. Nokia smartphone owners can seamlessly connect their devices with Toyota Touch Life using the new industry standard connectivity protocol, MirrorLink™, developed by the Car Connectivity Consortium.
This represents an automotive industry world-first deployment of the protocol. (3) AUPEO! Siri Comes to the iPad...Sort Of. Apple has decided to restrict the usage of Siri to the iPhone 4S but that doesn't mean that enterprising developers haven't started the process of porting to devices like the regular iPhone 4 and iPad. Over the weekend, developer @jackoplane was able to show some progress of getting Siri working on the iPad 1. The breakthrough comes a week after Steve Troughton was able to get everyone's favorite personal assistant to run on the iPhone 4.
Of course, there is a catch. Siri will load on jailbroken iPhone 4 devices — and the iPad 1 — but it won't work the way you might expect. Because Siri's secret sauce comes from interacting directly with Apple's servers in the cloud, Siri doesn't function if the device being used is not an iPhone 4S. Jailbreak Story quotes Stroughton as saying that any iOS device could theoretically be spoofed to look like an iPhone 4S.
Joshua Tucker of ModMyi and Jackoplane are maintaining an FAQ with information about the state of the Siri port to other devices. Blogging with Siri. As I mentioned on my earlier post, Steve Sande and I have been hard at work collaborating on "Talking to Siri," an ebook that will soon hit the Kindle store. One of the topics we're exploring is how to push Siri beyond its advertised limits. Take blogging, for example. Did you know that you could create blog posts entirely by voice? I'm not talking about basic dictation either. That's because Siri supports SMS messaging, and a little known feature of Google Blogger allows you to create blog posts directly from SMS text messages. [You can also use SMS to post to Tumblr and Posterous, although it's a bit more finicky.
Interested in giving it a spin? To create a new post, just reply to the 256447 conversation. You can visit the mobile blog I created this way over at Blogger and see the two posts I created using Siri. If you're on a limited SMS diet, posting by text message may prove too rich for your blood. Android Ice Cream Sandwich includes native stylus support. Google confirms Ice Cream Sandwich will be open source. If you were wondering if Google’s Ice Cream Sandwich Android platform was to suffer the same fate of its Honeycomb predecessor, you can breathe a sigh of relief after Google employee Jean Baptitse Queru confirmed the code is open source and will be released to Google’s AOSP repository, Thinq reports. Having experienced many issues with its Honeycomb software, Google decided not to release the code for its tablet-centric platform after admitting it had rushed its development to get it onto tablets to compete against Apple’s iOS platform on its popular iPad device.
However, with Queru’s confirmation, via a post on his Google+ profile, Ice Cream Sandwich should be available via the Android Open Source Project in the near future: This is what’s been consuming my entire life for the last 6 weeks. The Android Open-Source Project is distributing source code again. Get also a glimpse about the future (yes, that means ICS will be coming to AOSP). The future of voice is “apps” With us moving away from single-purpose, 12-key-pad, mobile phones to more touch-centric Internet devices, the “voice” has been reduced to being an app. Sure, today, phone companies run that app and use traditional phone technology, but in the future, all voice communication could be from apps using Internet technologies. On Wednesday, Juniper Research of the U.K. released a report that shows that by 2016 nearly four-fifths of 640 million mobile VoIP users will be making calls through apps downloaded on their smartphones, while rest of the calls could be over phone company networks.
Even today companies such as Nimbuzz and Skype are enjoying tremendous success on smartphones, a trend I have written about many times. Juniper forecasts that the number of mobile video callers will jump to 130 million by 2016, thanks to the introduction of mobile video calling services from most major companies and improvements in video calling technology. Speech smack-down: Siri vs. Android Voice Actions — Mobile Technology News. Siri is not search technology, but it can still hurt Google. Video quality comparison: iPhone 4S vs. $3,000 Canon 5D Mark II. The Fragmented Mobile Information Race. Arm Race: Your Wristwatch Is Your Next Web Portal. Tech support for iPhone is cheaper than BlackBerry, Android. Mobile media stores: Apple vs. Amazon vs. Samsung — Mobile Technology News.