The keynote of Google I/O 2013 has come and gone. This would have been the time when Google announced a new version of Android. Instead they went into great detail about new features that are coming to Google Play Services. To bring everyone up to speed, Google Play Services are a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) -- hooks that developers use to make apps do awesome things. While some may argue that APIs alone don't do much to help end users like you and I, others would say they provide a foundation upon which developers can write new applications and extend current apps ...

One of my biggest pet peeves with smartphones has been their branding. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, it's all a bit like a car showroom: some models have lovely, flowery names without the slightest hint of a descriptive element, where others bog their names down with overly-descriptive initialisms - instead of GT and 4WD we have HD and LTE. In recent years, I've had the feeling that things were slowly getting better, with phone names trending towards a happy medium between those extremes. Most recently, some of Samsung's models caught my eye as a prime example of really ...

What will be announced at Google I/O 2013? That's the question of the hour, especially for supporters and enthusiasts of Google's wildly popular mobile platform. The developer conference is generally where Google unveils its latest groundbreaking products, where we were first introduced to the Nexus Q, Nexus 7, Project Glass and Jelly Bean last year. Skydivers jumped from a plane, BMX riders jumped over building gaps, and one crazed man ran down the side of a building, all to demo Glass to the world, and to deliver a Glass unit to Sergey Brin on stage. Word has it, this year's I/O will be ...

Well, we're about six hours past the announcement of the latest Windows Phone out of Finland, the Nokia Lumia 925, so it's about time to start armchair quarterbacking. Everyone ready? Good. Let's hit it. What do you do when your flagship Windows Phone (indeed, your only flagship phone, period) is well-received by the marketplace, but draws criticism for a few elements of its design? Well, you correct those deficiencies in the next flagship, of course. But what if you want to address those concerns sooner, while also broadening the number of carriers which offer your device? Answer: you ...

The Nokia Lumia 925 broke cover at an announcement in London early this morning, putting the icing on a busy season of announcements from everyone's favorite Finnish phone fabricator. An intermediate update to Nokia's WP8 family, the Lumia 925 doesn't pack a mind-blowing feature set. That's no surprise given its minor numeric increase over last year's flagship, and a look at the spec sheet confirms that the new 925 shares a lot of DNA with its predecessor. We're looking at the same dual-core 1.5GHz Snapdragon S4, the same 1GB of RAM, and the same display size of 4.5" - though here it's ...

Yesterday, I made the stupid unconventional decision to compensate for a sedentary workweek by walking nine miles from my home northwest of Boston to Newton, Massachusetts. The resulting hunger, thirst, and mild exhaustion drove me into a delicatessen upon my return to civilization - but before I could walk in the door, something caught my eye: a black van, with the legend "Z10" painted in blue on the back door and the admonition "keep moving" spelled out in smaller letters on the sides. Now, not even moderate dehydration keeps me from satisfying my curiosity when it comes to street-level ...

Intel makes processors for all kinds of notebook, desktop, workstation, and server computers. They make excellent products that power the world -- well, the world outside your pocket anyway. Intel's chips are conspicuously few and far between when it comes to smartphones and tablets. That's something they hope to change with their new Silvermont SoC. Silvermont is the code-name for an upcoming line of chips from Intel. According to their documents, chips based on the Silvermont architecture will run up to three times as fast as their current models, handle up to eight cores, and some ...

After CES there's MWC and then comes IFA in the autumn but there's nothing really going on between February and September in terms of shows, the place to get all the cool stuff from manufacturers. That's when we put all of our hopes in individual events, like the HTC One event, the Samsung Galaxy S 4 launch, and, next week, Nokia and Google I/O. Many things have been rumored to be unveiled on the 14th in London, at the Nokia event: from the mysterious EOS to the Catwalk and the Lumia 928. Not many things have been said about Google I/O though: rumors imply Android Key Lime Pie might be ...