Rent your house or buy one? Lease that car or purchase it outright? Over and over in our lives we're offered these decisions. Now, it looks like a similar dichotomy is gaining support in the software industry, including when it comes to mobile apps: do you want to buy your software now, or pay a little bit each month as part of an ongoing subscription? While there are absolutely benefits to the latter, I'm concerned that as time goes on, users are going to have a decreasing say in the matter, and subscription-based apps will become the norm, to the ultimate detriment of users. This is a ...

Not sure if you remember, but we've talked about Instagram around these parts before. We've gave you a guided tour of the photo-sharing app when it first came to Android last Spring, and the relative merit of the app has been disputed more times on the Pocketnow Weekly podcast than is probably necessary. But regardless of your personal feelings about the social photography title (looking at you here Taylor Martin), you'd have a hard time arguing that it's not a significant force in mobile. Instagram currently boasts 100 million active users posting 40 million photos per day - photos that ...

Before we begin, we'd just like to say something to everyone who's going to call us out for click-baiting with that "Galaxy S 5" title: your allegations are completely founded and true. But look here: even though Galaxy S 5 rumors are (to say the least) premature and indicative of a serious problem with our nasty-fast industry -an issue we discuss on the air- they're also important. That's because, as unreliable and, frankly, stupid as they are, they also give us an opportunity to discuss the future of Samsung industrial design. And any opportunity we get to talk about the Galaxy family in ...

Who's the person responsible when a smartphone company really nails a handset launch? Who do we blame when a product bombs? While there are any number of engineers, designers, marketing folk, and executives involved with the release of a new device or service, when it comes to giving one of these corporate entities a face, more often than not we look to the company's CEO. Sure, up on this same level we can find all matter of presidents, board members, and chairpeople (persons?) overseeing a company's business, but in the end it's the Chief Executive Officer making the managerial decisions ...

Smaller screen resolutions will be possible with the upcoming refresh to Microsoft's platform. A seven-inch Windows 8 tablet was shown off at Computex. It not only demonstrates how the OS runs on a smaller form factor, but this reference tablet is also powered by Intel's brand new Intel "Atom" Bay-Trail M processor, introduced at Computex, among other chips. This reference tablet -- don't look for it on store shelves -- is codenamed Lyon and is made by ODM Inventec. It packs a seven-inch display with 1280 x 800 resolution; 2GB of RAM (could be equipped with 4- or 8GB); 64- and 128GB ...

Watch today's Pocketnow Daily as we talk about the announcement of the BlackBerry Q10 for AT&T, along with the rumors of a flagship BlackBerry A10 for the fall. Microsoft has also announced Outlook RT for Windows RT, but there's a lot that's lame about the timing. Nokia is next as they've just leaked photos of their EOS smartphone emerge, some good, some fake. HTC takes the spotlight again today as we've got some leaked photos of an HTC One Mini, which looks like an interesting alternative to the One. We end today's show talking about Samsung's announcement of the Galaxy S 4 Active, ...

Rumors about a Windows RT port of Microsoft Outlook have persisted since the beginning of the year. It started off as a project we weren't sure would ever actually see the light of day. A few months later, in April, chances for the software's release seemed to be looking up, but that was followed shortly thereafter by claims of delays, including one that Outlook RT wouldn't launch until the fall of 2014. Thankfully, we can now confirm that the app will arrive very much sooner, as Microsoft has gone ahead at this year's Computex expo and announced how Outlook RT will launch. Microsoft will ...

Microsoft surprised a lot of people a decade ago when it not only released its first dedicated gaming console, but managed to succeed where even industry heavyweights like Sega had failed. It's gained more momentum with the release of the Xbox 360, but we've yet to see all this new gaming experience really translate over to Windows Phone in any meaningful way; sure, there are plenty of WP games available for download, but a combination of not getting popular games from other platforms and lacking any high-profile "killer app" games itself has made this mobile venture a lot less ...