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Windows Phone
by Adam Z. Lein | May 27, 2012 12:55 PMRead OnFor some reason it seems people like to bake cakes that look like Windows Phones. Quite a few have appeared on the Windows Phone Facebook page in the "Fan Art" section and it looks like Microsoft has decided to start a little contest to encourage even more Windows Phone themed cakes. The top three with the most "Likes" for their Windows Phone themed cake photo wins a new Windows Phone for themselves. The submission deadline is 5/30/12 and voting ends 6/6/12, so if you feel like baking a nice Windows Phone cake, do it soon so that you might win a new phone. Or, just bake a ...
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by Anton D. Nagy | May 27, 2012 6:17 AMRead On
We're too busy nowadays rocking our quad-core smartphones with their 720p displays but we continue to look back in time and check out those phones which represented important milestones in the history of a company, platform or the user experience in general. The HTC Touch was launched in June 2007 -- it will be five years old soon -- and it represents the foundation for everything HTC Sense-enabled we came to know and love nowadays. Thanks to HTC TouchFlo (aka the Cube), the HTC Touch tried to make Windows Mobile 6.0 Professional more user friendly. In terms of specs it featured a 200MHz ...
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Windows Phone
by Adam Z. Lein | May 26, 2012 9:51 PMRead OnWe had a talk with Nokia the other day and they wanted to tell us more about this "Smart Start" program which sounds like it would be especially nice for all the new users out there. Normally when people buy a new phone they'll usually try to get a few basics about the functionality from the sales person. It's not really their job to teach you how to use the phone, but it's important that you at least know a little bit about the device before you leave the store. After that, maybe you'll call the carrier for more support, but who knows how knowledgable the service rep would be on ...
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Windows Phone
by Brandon Miniman | May 25, 2012 10:30 PMRead OnAfter having announced the (then-named) Windows Phone 7 Series platform at Mobile World Congress 2010, Microsoft planned a flashy New York City event in the fall of that same year to show off the first devices that would be bestowed with the Windows ecosystem's answer to Apple and Google's foray into mobile. There were a handful of devices, though one stood out to us in particular: the Samsung Focus, which seemed to have the best screen, the snappiest performance, and the most impressive thin-and-light form factor. The Focus went on to be one of the best-selling early Windows Phone 7 ...
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by Daniel Webster | May 25, 2012 9:01 PMRead OnWhat makes a smartphone “smart”? The apps of course! Every week we will feature some of the best newest or updated apps for the three big names in the mobile industry; iPhone, Windows Phone, and Android. We have sifted through hundred of apps and have deemed these 12 the most noteworthy for you, the smartphone enthusiast. To download any of these apps to your respective platform just click on the name of the app to launch the AppStore, Windows Marketplace, or Google Play. iPhone Earth Lapse– A paid app that costs $0.99 With Earth Lapse you can explore amazing ...
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Android
by Stephen Schenck | May 25, 2012 8:02 PMRead OnOver the past several months, we've been seeing Samsung register trademarks for a lot of new Galaxy-series devices. By now, it seems like the company has registered more names than it could ever hope to actually use, yet they keep on coming. Is Samsung just securing them in the hopes that it might one day want to release products under these names, or could this be the sort of concealment Apple introduced with device IDs in iOS 5, where there are just too many to know what's real and what's not? In any case, we've now got three new Galaxy names to keep an eye out for. Samsung has filed for ...
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Android
by Stephen Schenck | May 25, 2012 7:27 PMRead OnWe've been waiting for some sort of confirmation on when Samsung's eagerly-anticipated Galaxy S III would become available in the States, and while we still lack precise official word, tonight a newly-leaked roadmap out of T-Mobile gives us some anticipated dates for a couple upcoming models, including the GS3. According to this leak, T-Mobile will first get the Galaxy S III in blue on June 20 (the same date we've seen tipped for the phone's Canadian release), with the white version following on July 11. This is interesting for a couple reasons, first because that's precisely the opposite ...
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Android
by Joe Levi | May 25, 2012 7:16 PMRead OnWhen Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich was announced we were told that, like Honeycomb before it, more emphasis would be placed on the graphics processor. We even saw a new addition in the Developer section of the Settings that lets users "force GPU rendering". What is the GPU? The GPU is the Graphics Processing Unit. It's very much like the CPU, but instead of crunching numbers and taking care of tasks for the operating system and hardware, the GPU renders graphical information and puts it on the screen for you. The CPU can process graphical instructions just fine, but doing so takes time ...
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Android
by Stephen Schenck | May 25, 2012 7:03 PMRead OnIt wasn't that long ago when a 13.3-inch Android tablet sounded like it was some sort of gigantic exaggeration. Of course, we were quick to learn that Toshiba was very much interested in releasing that tablet as a commercial product, and sure enough, the company ended up announcing it as the Excite 13. Surely, we must have been getting close to the upper limit on the practical size for a tablet, right? Don't tell that to ViewSonic, which is apparently working on a 22-inch Android device that seems more monitor than tablet. ViewSonic intends to demonstrate the 22-inch giant as part of its ...
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Android
by Stephen Schenck | May 25, 2012 5:20 PMRead OnDealing with carriers can be such a pain at times, whether you're fighting over fees, trying to get a device upgrade, or dealing with network connectivity issues. That's why it's so refreshing to see one do something that's all at once unexpected, unnecessary, and seems to be motivated by little more than wanting to do right by its subscribers. We just heard yesterday that, following the phone's delay in US Customs, the HTC EVO 4G LTE was finally starting to arrive in the hands of Sprint users who had pre-ordered the device. What we didn't know then, though, is that Sprint has been ...
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iOS
by Stephen Schenck | May 25, 2012 4:33 PMRead OnAirPlay can be a great way to get media off your iPhone and onto other devices, but what if you were interested in going the other way, in using your iPhone to receive an AirPlay stream? While there have been apps available to provide this functionality, Apple has recently started cracking-down on them for violating its rules for inclusion in the App Store; just what's going on, and why is Apple so upset? The problem has to with how developers bring this functionality to their apps. Apple doesn't provide an AirPlay API that readily lets software receive the stream, only send it. To get ...
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by Michael Fisher | May 25, 2012 4:23 PMRead OnWe've reached that point, folks. The battle for the title of "world's slimmest smartphone" is down to fights over hundredths of a millimeter- the internationally-recognized sign of a fight no one cares about anymore. In the past six months, phone makers Motorola, Huawei, and Oppo have all made the "thinnest" claim at some point. Today, Huawei's Ascend P1 S is still lording the lofty title of most-svelte over its rivals, with a thickness measurement of 6.68mm. That's just a little ways from the DROID RAZR's 7.1mm, but a far cry from the 13.9mm original RAZR that kicked off this whole ...
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Android
by Evan Blass | May 25, 2012 4:15 PMRead OnSony Mobile has apparently finalized its list of Android handsets due to receive an upgrade to Ice Cream Sandwich, and unfortunately for Xperia PLAY owners, their phones will not see an official upgrade path. The reason? Testing revealed that PLAY couldn't deliver a competent gaming experience when running an ICS build. There are definitely grounds to take issue with this explanation, with the most obvious being: why is another PlayStation Certified handset with nearly identical specs, the arc, still apparently upgrade-ready, while the PLAY is not? Either arc owners have a lousy gaming ...
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Android
by Stephen Schenck | May 25, 2012 3:21 PMRead OnRemember back when the iPhone 4 first arrived, and we were expecting the white version to be available shortly after the black version hit retail? Then we learned of a short delay due to manufacturing issues, which then became a longer delay, which then became ten months. The latest smartphone to be hit with similar news of production problems with certain color options may not be from Apple, but it's definitely another high-profile model; reports indicate that Samsung is having some troubles of its own getting the Pebble Blue version of the Galaxy S III out to retailers. At first, this ...
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Android
by Stephen Schenck | May 25, 2012 1:18 PMRead OnEven as more details on the Google Project Glass user experience arrive, we're still very much in the dark as to just what Google's planning for the innovative gadget. Recently, expectations have retreated from the lofty idea of some sort of head-mounted smartphone to something a little more realistic, like a head-mounted camera with sharing abilities. What we actually end up with could fall anywhere between the two, or arrive as something very different altogether, so we're always keen to learn more about the details of just how work on Project Glass is going. This week, Google employees ...
