Nobody in their right mind would dump their desktop or notebook PC for a smartphone, but plenty of people are willing to own both as they seek to stay connected and check email on the fly. Underscoring this point is fact that smartphone sales in 2011 skipped ahead of PC sales, and by a pretty wide margin, according to data released by Canalys. Canalys says vendors shipped 158.5 million smartphones in the fourth quarter of 2011, up 57 percent on the 101.2 million units shipped in the same quarter one year prior. [......]
The Samsung Galaxy S II successor will not be in attendance at Mobile World Congress. The company issued a statement this morning indicating that the phone will get its own event, one that’s closer to its launch date. But don’t worry that much for MWC. [......]
Time flies when you're having fun, which would explain all the lost productivity to mobile apps like Angry Birds, Temple Run, and Kingdom Rush. [......]
Intel's move into the mobile market is less than two weeks old and already the company's looking to make waves. At CES, CEO Paul Otellini revealed that Intel's Atom Z2460 -- aka "Medfield" -- chips would be powering Motorola and Lenovo phones in the second half of the year [......]
Samsung late last night put the word out that it's started producing embedded multi-chip package (eMCP) memory for use in entry-level and mid-range smartphones. The new eMCP solutions are offered to manufacturers in a wide range of densities and utilize LPDDR2 (low power double-data-rate 2) DRAM made with 30nm class process technology and NAND flash memory using 20nm class technology, Samsung said. "As the need is growing for more advanced software and increased data storage in smartphones and tablets, mobile device makers are expected to introduce embedded memory solutions throughout 2012 that offer higher performance and density," said Myungho Kim , vice president of memory marketing, Device Solutions, Samsung Electronics[......]
Microsoft has begun rolling out a Windows Phone update intended to stomp out myriad bugs and glitches associated with the mobile OS platform, and that should be received as a good thing. So why are so many Windows Phone users freaking out and suddenly worrying about fragmentation similar to what exists on Android? It has to do with a change in Microsoft's transparency policy[......]
Aesop tried to teach us that slow and steady wins the race and he used a turtle to drive the point home. That's cute, but out here in the real world, companies are blitzing the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) with pre-show announcements quick as can be, and that includes Turtle Beach, which unveiled a bunch of new products spanning wireless, mobile, and Dolby Surround Sound technologies. [......]
The folks over at Lenovo have been busy unwrapping a bunch of new notebook models for its business customers, and two of the more interesting units are the new ThinkPad X1 Hybrid and ThinkPad T430u Ultrabook. Both will be demonstrated at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas next week before shipping off to retail later this year[......]
"If at first you don’t succeed, try try again." It looks like LG and Intel have taken that old adage to heart, if a new report is to be believed. The Korea Times reports that LG will debut an Intel-powered smartphone at CES 2012, but the bigger question is whether or not the device will ever make it to market. LG and Intel’s first mobile partnership yielded an Android smartphone running on Intel’s Moorestown chipset for CES 2011 , but the device was ultimately scrapped. [......]
Legislators, regulators, and litigators aren't known for snap decisions, so tech policy stories tend to drag on… and on. But they do come to a resolution eventually, and some of this year's most important stories wound their way to a more-or-less satisfying conclusion. [......]
There are enough bad drivers on the road as it is, do we really need the added distraction of texting while behind the wheel? We're not crazy about either one, and when you combine the two, it makes us want to stay off the road altogether. [......]
The claims are magnificent: "The latest, top-tier, high-performance games…on over 500 million mobile devices." The results are slightly less than spectacular, but still impressive enough to completely shake up the mobile gaming scene. For the first time, you can play real games (as in titles previously only available on full-fledged gaming consoles) on a relatively low power device such as a tablet or smartphone. Thanks to Onlive’s just-launched mobile app, DiRT 3, Assasin’s Creed Revelations, L.A. [......]
Apple, Motorola, and three major wireless carriers are the latest to face a class-action lawsuit over a smartphone privacy scandal, with Carrier IQ, HTC, and Samsung also facing allegations that they spy on users with software installed on smartphones. While Carrier IQ makes the software, it is installed on phones manufactured by hardware companies and sold by carriers, providing plenty of targets for lawsuits. We noted the existence of two class-action lawsuits targeting Carrier IQ, HTC, and Samsung last week[......]
Samsung Korea today announced what it claims is the industry's first next-generation ARM Cortex-A15 equipped 2GHz dual-core system-on-chip (SoC). Dubbed 'Exynos 5250,' this dual-core part is built using a 32nm manufacturing process and offers roughly twice the performance as that of existing 1.5GHz dual-core Cortex A9 products, Samsung claims. Memory bandwidth is also doubled to 12.8GB/s, which helps the new SoC achieve a new maximum resolution of 2506x1600, paving the way for high resolution displays on upcoming tablets[......]
Don't worry if you just locked yourself into a two-year contract with a dual-core smartphone, there aren't a ton of apps out there that truly take advantage all that computing power anyway. We're not saying that to make you feel bad about purchasing a dual-core phone; on the contrary, we don't think anyone should needlessly stress about all those quad-core devices on the horizon[......]
