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by Michael Fisher | July 17, 2012 3:40 PMRead OnAbout a week ago, some smartphone news dropped that was either earth-shattering or completely irrelevant, depending on your point of view. It's my bet that most of our readers fall into the latter camp, as most of our coverage is devoted to the top three platforms in the mobile world. In fact, we didn't even run a story on this piece of news, so tangential was it to the modern mobile landscape. The news in question: the MeeGo platform isn't quite as dead as the world thought it was. Specifically, a team of ex-Nokia employees has leapt from the wobbly deck of the beleaguered phone ...
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by Michael Fisher | July 16, 2012 6:47 PMRead OnI was talking with Brandon Miniman the other day about the Android task switcher. Because that's the kind of conversation you have when you're a phone geek, and it's awesome. Anyway, we weren't talking about the modern Ice Cream Sandwich implementation, with the ribbon of cards and the dedicated multitasking button; we were talking about the Gingerbread-and-below multitasking approach. You remember the one: if you wanted to call up your last-used apps, you could hold down the home key, and a box containing them would appear. For a while, this box only contained four six of your most ...
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by Anton D. Nagy | July 1, 2012 3:49 AMRead OnA mobile phone's main characteristics, by definition, are the ability to make and receive phone calls as well as exchange text messages. A smartphone should be a phone that has the ability to run applications but these days it seems to be the other way around: a mobile computer that can also do voice calls. A recent O2 study shows that smartphone owners have at least four more important things to do on their smartphones than to place calls. According to the findings, people are using their smartphones for at least two hours every day, out of which more than half of that time is dedicated ...
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by Michael Fisher | June 15, 2012 11:14 AMRead OnReaders. Lend me your eyeballs a moment. You all visit sites like Pocketnow for a variety of reasons. Technology news, editorials, phone reviews; it's all part of the package sites like ours provide. A great deal of that coverage focuses on smartphones, and a huge percentage -everything but news, really- is opinion. We make a constant effort to minimize the subjective and enhance the objective where possible, but that's a hard thing to do. That's because mobile phones are intensely personal devices. We carry them everywhere. They're on our person at almost all times. There are waterproof ...
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by Michael Fisher | May 23, 2012 5:08 PMRead OnWe've recently run a series of articles discussing the awesome features of certain mobile platforms, and how those highlights drive users to love them. We've covered Windows Phone, iOS, and Android, the platforms with the best combination of mindshare and potential, and today I thought I'd give a shoutout to a lesser-known (but immensely influential) player in the mobile space: webOS. If the details are hazy with the passage of time, here's a brief refresher. webOS was Palm's replacement for its legacy PalmOS, the platform that helped launch the smartphone and PDA revolution via the Palm ...
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by Michael Fisher | May 22, 2012 3:42 PMRead OnThose of you who've followed my writing for a while know that I'm a refugee from the Great webOS Collapse of 2011, and there's still a lot I miss and love about the platform. While I try to write about it as often as I can, the sad truth is there's not a lot of news about the "little OS that couldn't" these days - things are pretty quiet as it marches toward open source. So I'm kind of waiting along with everyone else for that to wrap up this fall. Until then, though, I'm still using webOS somewhat often via my HP TouchPad. Sometimes I even pull the tiny HP Veer out of storage and relive ...
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by Stephen Schenck | May 18, 2012 3:22 PMRead OnFollowing last summer's announcement by HP that it was calling it quits on webOS, the company started selling remaining TouchPad stock at some fantastic discounts. That created a huge, new wave of interest in the tablet, and it quickly sold out. Over the following months, we saw HP make some additional units available from time to time, but after one final push on eBay, it looked like supplies had finally dried up. If you'd been wishing you snagged one of those TouchPads while you had the chance, you're in luck, as online retailer Woot has some for sale for today only; would you still be ...
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by Michael Fisher | May 10, 2012 11:47 AMRead OnBefore the release of Apple's newest tablet, when we were all still calling it the "iPad 3," there was the usual tempest of rumor and speculation regarding the new device. Some of this scuttlebutt, like the Retina display, proved to be true. Other unverified claims, like quad-core processors and an 8MP camera, didn't. My favorite rumor at the time, because I didn't care much about either tablet cameras or CPU core count, was that Apple would be eliminating the home button on its new iPad, leaving a clean uninterrupted bezel all the way around the screen. It wasn't the first time we'd heard ...
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by Michael Fisher | May 10, 2012 9:02 AMRead OnDevotees of the webOS ecosystem learned long ago not to underestimate the power of a motivated homebrew community. It was grassroots efforts like webOS-Internals that unlocked the potential of the platform and earned the respect and endorsement of Palm, and later HP. It should come as no surprise, then, that a group of similarly talented but differently motivated developers have come together for the common goal of altering yet another webOS device: the diminutive HP Veer. This time, though, their goal isn't to modify webOS, but to replace it- with Android. Fortunately, some of these sharp ...
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by Michael Fisher | May 5, 2012 2:15 AMRead OnSo, you might've heard some news out of London recently. Samsung finally took the wraps off its new hotness, the Galaxy S III, and it looks to be packing quite a cool set of features. In many ways, the GSIII represents the best Samsung -and, to an extent, Android- has to offer. As with every smartphone, its display will play a critical role in shaping its success. The debates have already begun in forums across the internet over how well or poorly the GSIII's display will perform, the arguments peppered with terms like "S-AMOLED" and "PenTile" and "STFU fanboy!!!!!!!!" But let's put all ...
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by Michael Fisher | April 19, 2012 3:02 PMRead OnWe've talked before about notifications being the essence of a mobile device. Half the reason for the existence of cellphones -and to a lesser extent, tablets- is to inform you of incoming comm traffic. To that end, mobile devices are fitted with a variety of alert mechanisms. Ringtones have evolved from monotone beeps to polyphonic MIDIs to custom mp3s. The vibrating alert, that old veteran of the silent pocket prod, has remained largely the same. These two annunciators are common to most phones; with the exception of the occasional custom vibe schemes or extra-loud ringtones, ...
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by Michael Fisher | March 28, 2012 1:38 PMRead OnWhen Android first launched on the HTC Dream/G1 in 2008, it incorporated among its features a new notification paradigm: users could drag down from the top of the screen to reveal a "window shade" containing all new notifications. When Apple stole drew inspiration from Android for iOS5's notification center, it did what Apple does best: took an existing idea and implemented it in a new way. Today's iOS users access their notifications just like their Android cousins do: by dragging down from the top of the screen. Windows Phone 7's approach to notifications emphasizes glanceable ...
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by Michael Fisher | March 23, 2012 12:53 PMRead OnI'd like 2012 to know something: I'm fine without Back to the Future's hover-skateboard, or the Jetsons' flying car. I can even survive with the knowledge that the "Human Bird Wings" video is a fake. As I may have mentioned before, I grew up watching Star Trek. The moment I was able to start carrying a communicator and a tricorder wherever I went, "the future" became "the present," and my life was basically complete. Aim high, kids. What I can not brook, however, is the tech world's continued insistence that wires play a part in our wireless world. As personal media players, smartphones, ...
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by Michael Fisher | March 17, 2012 12:25 AMRead OnLast week, I showed you how to install the CyanogenMod9-Alpha 0.6 build of Android Ice Cream Sandwich on the HP TouchPad. Seven days worth of using Google's software on the ill-fated tablet have left me with a few observations to share. As a recovering webOS die-hard who's carried the TouchPad since launch day, the experience was equal parts surreal and exciting, with one or two dollops of frustration and fear thrown in. If you're a fellow webOS expat, or if you'd just like to see what the CM9 experience is like for someone more used to flipping cards than tinkering with widgets, check out ...
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by Anton D. Nagy | March 15, 2012 7:00 AMRead OnApple and some others might disagree but you really can't ignore the voice of the market! It sure looks like people want their smartphones to be as thin as possible with a screen size many would call "relatively large" or "beyond their sweet-spot". According to a recent Strategy Analytics survey, people in the U.K. and U.S. have spoken: they want screen sizes that measure anywhere between 4.0 and 4.5-inches in diagonal. This not only is contrary to Apple's current trend of screen sizes but it also conflicts with a new direction: phablets. Though they represent two separate segments of the ...
