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by Michael Fisher | February 4, 2014 8:41 PM
Read OnOn January 30th, just one day after the surprise announcement of their impending union, I received what superstitious people would call a "bad omen" regarding the Lenovo Motorola deal. The previous afternoon, I'd been wrapping up a pretty typical January week at Pocketnow; the botched Galaxy Gear + Nexus 5 experiment had already been transferred to the more-capable Joe Levi, so I was busy working on the AT&T G Flex unboxing and the smartphone guessing game posts, and willing the post-CES funk to dissipate so I could get some new devices in the review booth. Then Lenovo announced it ...
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by Joe Levi | February 4, 2014 2:17 PMRead OnYou're out on the town, you're having fun, and your smartphone is the furthest thing from your mind -- until you get home and check your pockets, and it isn't there. It's happened to the best of us, even some important people at Apple have left their super-secret prototype phones in bars. Though your device may be lost, there is something you can do to make sure your private information isn't compromised. Here's how you can use encryption to make your Android a little bit more secure just in case it gets lost somewhere along the way. Android Encryption We do a lot on our smartphones and ...
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by Taylor Martin | February 4, 2014 1:49 PMRead OnI remember sitting on my bed watching one of the first hands-on videos of the HTC Hero and dying to get my hands on one. It was just days from release, and the Hero on Sprint would be my first experience with Android … ever. What I got when I ripped the Hero out of the box wasn't quite what I was expecting, though. I spent hours that night, setting up the seven home screens, rearranging widgets, trying on new wallpapers, and digging through apps and games – something I was only sort of used to doing on my horde of prior BlackBerrys. It only took a few days for the newness to wear away, ...
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by Michael Fisher | February 4, 2014 1:36 PMRead OnSometimes when we get a carrier-specific version of an already-released smartphone, we'll go ahead and do a separate full review on it - like we did for the Galaxy Note 3, whose AT&T version got a full review just two weeks after the initial review landed for the international version. Other times we'll do what's called a "review rebuttal," where another Pocketnow team member takes a second look at the same device; that happened for the LG G2, HTC One max, and the South Korean version of the LG G Flex. For the AT&T version of the G Flex, though, the device has come to me - the guy ...
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by Taylor Martin | February 3, 2014 2:14 PMRead OnLast week smacked us with some crazy, unexpected news we're still not quite sure how to take. Of all companies, Lenovo purchased Motorola for $2.91 billion. Let's take it back minute first, though. On August 15, 2011, Google announced plans to purchase Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion. Not only would Google gain Motorola as an (independent) in-house hardware manufacturer, but it would also gain Motorola Mobility's expansive patent portfolio to "help protect the Android ecosystem," in the words of Google. To no surprise at all, speculation and loaded questions filled the mobile realm. ...
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by Joe Levi | February 3, 2014 7:24 AMRead OnBack when I started getting involved in cellphones I was a Nokia guy... so was everyone. VoiceStream gave me the option to pick up any one of several phones -- all of which were made by Nokia. They could all make and receive phone calls, send and receive text messages, and if you were really lucky you could even play Snake! At the time the phones were between $50 and $150 (on contract). Jump ahead to today and we've all but given up on the candy bar phone -- and the affordable prices that came along with them. Today we're surrounded by smartphones, but until recently they were all several ...
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by Anton D. Nagy | February 2, 2014 3:58 AMRead OnThe technology world is a fast moving one, and hence, there are more than 100 stories we publish on a weekly basis here on Pocketnow. Those include reviews, videos, editorials, news, and more. With this new, weekly series, we're making it easier for you to look back at the most interesting, exciting, and popular topics of the week, in case you missed anything. Look for the Pocketnow Week in Review every Sunday morning. It contains the most popular ten stories of the week printed on the portal, as well as top videos from our YouTube channel. Additionally, you can also find our Pocketnow ...
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by Taylor Martin | January 31, 2014 2:16 PMRead OnLove or hate them, smartwatches are a growing thing. Many of us here at Pocketnow have or will soon own a Pebble, and Michael Fisher also has a soft spot for the Galaxy Gear. And Joe and I share similar theories on the future of smartwatches, wearables, and the personal area network. But it's not just us those of us who are obsessed with technology either. As new generations of devices have come out and they become more visible to the general public, they have grown in popularity. For instance, while sitting in a coffee shop writing last week, I saw two random customers wearing Pebble. A ...
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by Taylor Martin | January 31, 2014 10:28 AMRead OnThe quality of my sleep has drastically declined over the years, as well as the amount I get each night. On a rare great night, I might get six hours of sleep. If it's the weekend, I may get eight. But an average night of sleep is five hours or less. Sometimes much less. It's a safe bet to assume the seemingly harmless smartphone in my pocket or tablet in my bag play a major part in this. Oh, and that incessantly buzzing smartwatch that rattles off the table every night … it plays a part, too. Countless studies have shown and proven the effects of technology on sleep, though, so this ...
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by Anton D. Nagy | January 31, 2014 9:55 AMRead OnClick this link to join the hangout! . Topic Time does fly by quickly, especially in tech, and here we are, 13 episodes later, preparing to wrap-up Season 2 of the Pocketnow Live, as we're getting ready for the biggest show of the year: Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. Let those MWC rumors fly around! Before we go on a hiatus, and before we fly out to Barcelona, we will have just one more hour of casual conversation related, or unrelated to mobile and wearable technology. Whether that's rumors of upcoming devices, like the Galaxy S 5, M8, or Xperia Z2, or the recent Google-Lenovo ...
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by Joe Levi | January 31, 2014 7:23 AMRead OnCyanogenMod has long been one of the leading names in the custom ROM community. Only recently did the group go "corporate" when they formed Cyanogen, Inc. Before that, CyanogenMod was available as a flashable ROM for devices from virtually all manufacturers, and brought unofficial updates and current versions of Android to devices that had been abandoned by carriers and OEMs alike. However, CyanogenMod was limited primarily as a second-class-citizen, since devices came with their own ROM pre-installed, which would then be replaced by a custom CyanogenMod ROM. What we needed was a device ...
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by Taylor Martin | January 30, 2014 8:03 PMRead OnSony's current flagship, the Xperia Z1 (or the Z1S here in the States) may only be a few months old, but that hasn't stopped the rumor mill from already pouring out word of its successor. The Xperia Z2 is said to be a lot of things – bigger, better, more powerful, and the rest of the typical hype-mongering buzzwords – and we're hearing rumors that is just might show its face as early as next month at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. So what do we want from Sony's next flagship? Where did the last go wrong? Take a gander below to find out! Fine tune the display If Sony ...
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by Joe Levi | January 30, 2014 12:10 PMRead OnPower users will likely recognize the name +Chainfire as one of the developers who brought superuser to Android and helped make rooting achievable for countless others. As you might expect, he's still very much into the "guts" of Android, and recently came across something a little troubling. When some power users pointed out a recent commit to the AOSP master tree, Chainfire found a significant amount of Android root changes -- which could break the majority of today's root apps. The change AOSP is the "core" Android code that developers use to create ROMs for their devices. Rooting is ...
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by Taylor Martin | January 29, 2014 7:57 PMRead On"Welcome to the Tizen Association, an industry consortium dedicated to providing in-market support and actively shaping the industry presence of Tizen." That's the message which appears when you visit tizenassociation.org. And I want to focus on the latter half of that sentence: "… dedicated to providing in-market support and actively shaping the industry presence of Tizen." In 2013, Tizen was mentioned here and there, devices were rumored, and we got a few glimpses at what to expect on the software side of things. The unofficial progress reports showed the platform growing and ...
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by Michael Fisher | January 29, 2014 6:16 PMRead On
"This don't make no ****** sense to me." "Oh what the ****?" That's a partial transcript of the conversation I just had with Chief News Editor Stephen Schenck, discussing the just-announced purchase of American smartphone maker Motorola by the Chinese technology firm Lenovo. The profanity, though bleeped out, is genuine; this is a scenario so outlandish that if you'd posed it to me as recently as two hours ago, I'd have made a silly bet including the phrase "I'll eat my hat." This means two things: first, I need to tone it down on the hyperbole. Second: I need to brush up on my business ...
Posts tagged with: Editorial