Google Anxiety, Samsung’s Long Shadow And The Motorola Hedge

Android got a late start compared to Apple’s iOS in the worldwide smartphone battle, but it eventually grew to attain a larger worldwide market share, and it did so largely on the back of a single champion: Samsung. Samsung’s Galaxy line has become to Android what the iPhone is to iOS, despite hardware and software coming from completely distinct companies. But Google very specifically didn’t sign up to be a one horse kind of cowboy, and as such it makes sense for the search giant to be somewhat fearful of Samsung’s growing influence, as the WSJ reports.

Google’s top brass is concerned that Samsung is getting too big, according to the WSJ’s sources, giving the South Korean company much more weight behind potential negotiations to alter the terms of their licensing arrangement with Google in order to cut into the search giant’s ad business. Samsung has no near peer when it comes to Android device sales, having shipped 215.8 million smartphones during 2012. It accounted for 40.6 percent of Android smartphone sales during Q4 20112, according to IDC, and 27.9 percent of the Android tablet market, both of which are above any of their closest competitors. The next closest handset maker has less than 10 percent share, meaning that though some recent entrants like ZTE and Huawei show signs of considerable growth, Samsung’s dominance in the near future is pretty much guaranteed.

The WSJ says Google’s Android chief Andy Rubin has discussed Samsung as a potential threat at an event for executives last year, and notes that he talked about Motorola Mobility acting as a kind of “insurance policy” against its power. But Motorola hasn’t helped so far, and in fact has only been shedding market share since being picked up by Google. Motorola nabbed only 1.9 percent of Android smartphone share in Q4 2012, down from 6.2 percent year-over-year.

Google’s hardware direction could change completely when Motorola’s current pipeline runs down.

But Motorola may yet be Google’s sleeping giant: Google’s Patrick Pichette said during the company’s recent conference call in January that Motorola is still working through its existing pipeline, which had plans in place for around a year and a half of device releases before it was bought by Google. The company has been aggressively restructuring Motorola and divesting itself of parts of the organization that it doesn’t need, so we’re likely to see Google take its fresh hardware division in an entirely new direction when all the old plans put in motion previously finally get excised. The rumored X Phone could be the first fruit of Motorola’s Google-directed labors, and might present a much more competitive package, if Google’s recent Nexus launches are a good indicator of the direction it will take with its own in-house hardware.

The reason Google needs to field a strong competitor, either itself or through one of its OEM partners, boils down to advertising revenue. Samsung has received more than 10 percent of the ad revenue generated through Google services driven by its platform devices, the WSJ’s sources said, and looks to be interested in getting a bigger chunk of that pie as its install base drives more of that action.

Both Google and Samsung need each other: neither would’ve been able to achieve what they have in terms of competing with Apple’s mobile dominance without the other. But as with Apple and Samsung’s supplier relationship, as well as the maps and YouTube services arrangement between Apple and Google, success can breed contempt between massive companies working together when each is primarily interested in its own bottom line. To really win, Google has to field a legitimate competitor to Samsung that can weaken slightly, but not disarm its ally. A few strong players is better than one dominant one in terms of Google’s aims, but if it can’t elevate other OEMs to get that done, it may just have to go it alone.































View the Original article

Read More

Opera’s CEO On Innovation And Privacy, And A First Look At Its New WebKit-Based Browser For Android [TCTV]

Web browser company Opera Software, now 300 million users strong, caught the world off guard the other week when it announced that it would be ditching its own Presto framework and moving instead to Google’s WebKit to power its mobile and desktop browsers. In an interview with TechCrunch today, Opera’s CEO Lars Boilesen said that the decision has freed up the company to innovate in a way that it hadn’t for years. “By moving, it meant that we no longer had to have to have 200 engineers working on the core-level product,” he said in an interview with TechCrunch. “That meant they could work on new stuff. We could go on the offensive.”

Oslo, Norway-based Opera is in Barcelona this week and has been showing off a build of its browser to those who ask. We have a video of how it looks below — with a walk-through of new features, as presented by Opera’s head of product and SVP business development, Nuno Sitma.

We also took the opportunity to talk to Boilesen about what “new stuff” the browser would contain, and other topics like those Facebook acquisition rumors.

He says that the company was laser-focused on launching new features in the WebKit-based browser, which is due out in a matter of weeks. “When you switch code you have to come out with products really quickly,” he said. He even made a deal with his engineers — they played the wager — that he would run 40 kilometers if they could ship all the features they wanted to include in the new build by the time they announced their news earlier this month. He’s now training for a marathon.

Boilesen says that Opera’s move to WebKit and away from Presto was because Opera’s own core platform has ceased to be as essential in the industry. “Opera ported to different platforms. Opera was the engine that could run where no one else could,” he said. Times have changed, though. Together, Android and iOS accounted for 90% of the smartphones shipped in Q4 2012, according to Gartner. Fragmentation has ceased to be an issue for Opera. “There is no fragmentation in the market,” he told me, flatly. But the change has not been fast for them. He says that it was as early as 2009 that Opera could see the logic of moving away from Presto, when “everyone switched to Android.”

Indeed, there is a sense that while switching to WebKit may have made sense from an operational point of view, there was also a cultural nostalgia behind it. Boilsen was employed as employee number “sixteen or seventeen” in 1999. “Back then we were still in the startup phase,” he said. “Now we have nearly 1,000 people and are public, but we still want to feel empowered.” He says he uses Google as a model: “a good example of how you can remain innovative even when growing big.”

The new browser, as you will see below, runs smoothly and with good response, as a “native UI” experience in Boilesen’s words. (this was a live test using crappy network in the over-congested show floor of MWC).

One of the key features is two modes of network browsing. Effectively, Opera has embedded the Opera Mini browser as a proxy browser into its smartphone browser, which it calls “server mode,” designed to be used when you are on slower networks to bring down the time it takes to render pages. (This is in a popup menu that you can see in the video below.)

(Interestingly, he notes that for now the actual Opera Mini browser will remain on Presto — although eventually it and the company’s desktop browser will also be migrated.)

Opera has also overhauled discovery on its app, taking some cues from the use of its Smart Page social features — offering social recommendations by integrating with Facebook, and letting you share links that you like with others — that it launched last year. “We have 30 million users of those Smart Pages every week, and we found that people do want things recommended in the browser.”

But perhaps another lesson learned is that not everyone actually wants to be social in their discovery. “We now think Smart Page is not [quite] the right thing. It should be lean back surfing,” he says. “Things come to you.”

This part of the site — which looks a little like a simplified version of Flipboard in the video below — is not based on your browsing history. “We don’t want to know about your browsing history. We don’t want to spy on your history,” he says. “We base this on an algorithm and our database.”

Here’s how it works: while Opera does not track your browsing history, what it does do is read all the words on the pages that you view. These it feeds into an algorithm, which then searches the web for more content that fits the same profile. On top of that, it uses your location to further customize searches.

Given the move away from social signals, and the talk of maintaining privacy while still offering recommendations got me thinking about Facebook, and all those reports that Opera was in acquisition talks with the social networking giant — triggered by the latter company’s clear interest in mobile, and clear lack of mobile browser, and Opera’s large base of mobile users particularly in emerging markets.

Unsurprisingly, Boilesen gave no comment, just a laugh and an uncomfortable look away. Too hard to read into this. And this: “We have 240 million mobile users, 32% of them (85 million) on smartphones. That means we are playing in the big league.” Similarly, he was unable to explain why co-founder Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner was suddenly selling off shares — he owned 10% and could have blocked a sale. (One other theory: he liked Presto and didn’t agree with the decision.)

But if there ever was a sale on the cards, it’s off the cards now. “It’s true that in Norway if you have more than 10% you can block an acquisition, but at Opera we are not thinking about selling,” he said. “I think things are going well. We’re profitable and continue reinvesting and things have never gone better. And, we just acquired Skyfire. You don’t do that if you are selling the company.”

Skyfire, which Opera bought earlier this month for a price of up to $155 million, specializes in video optimization and monetization technologies. Boilesen says it will be a “two to three year” project to integrate it into Opera. It points to more focus for the company, which also recently consolidated all of its advertising operations into a single Mediaworks brand.

The new Opera for Android will be out “very soon,” with and iOS app to follow “right after,” and then “all tablets,” says Boilesen. After that it will turn to the desktop but not before the summer. Opera Mini, as we said above, will remain on Presto for now.



































View the Original article

Read More

The Super-Slim Xperia Tablet Z Feels Like Sony’s Finest Tablet Yet

After Sony released a string of curious Android tablets that failed to catch on, the company had no choice but to go back to the drawing table and try something different. That something different wound up being the Xperia Tablet Z, easily one of its most conventional designs yet — a choice that may end up paying off nicely. Now that the decidedly non-kooky Xperia Tablet Z is gearing up for an appearance stateside, we tracked one down here at MWC to get a glimpse at what Sony’s tantalizingly thin tab brings to the table.

First things first — if you’re a fan of minimalist industrial design, then you’ll find a lot to like here. Sony’s bright 10.1-inch Reality Display (running at 1,920×1200 no less) is the clear focal point of the device’s face, and there’s nothing else save for a Sony logo, an IR blaster in the corner, and an easily missed 2-megapixel camera. The display is also aided by one of Sony’s Mobile Bravia engines, which means colors can easily take on a lurid cast unless you dial it down. Meanwhile, the back is a matte black slab devoid of any detail other than a small Xperia logo and an 8.1-megapixel camera in the top- right corner. One could easily call it dull, but “understated” feels like a better fit because of how nice it feels.

The Tablet Z weighs in at a scant 1.09 pounds, and its trim waistline is only 6.99mm thick — for a bit of perspective, the iPad mini is just a hair thicker at 7.22mm. In order to keep the weight as low as possible Sony resorted to an almost entirely plastic body. That sounds like the recipe for a chintzy-feeling tab, but that’s definitely not the case here. Despite being very light, the Tablet Z has a remarkably solid, premium feel to it. There’s a little bit of give to be felt if you grab the thing by the sides and give it a twist so it may suffer from some long-term issues down the road, but it’s a far cry from some of the overly creaky, plasticky tablets that still pepper the market.

A quad-core Snapdragon S4 Pro chipset and 2GB of RAM are tucked away inside the Tab Z’s waterproof chassis, and my time with the Tablet Z was largely lag-free. When faced with the prospect of putting out tens of devices for public consumption at Mobile World Congress, most companies typically try to do something to keep we nerds from mucking around with them too much. Not so here — I was able to download and install Quadrant from the Google Play Store to get a slightly better idea of what the Tablet Z is capable of. Over the course of three trials the Tablet Z consistently put up scores in the low to mid-7,000s and topped out at 7601 — devices like the Nexus 10 and Asus Transformer Pad Infinity TF700 usually hover around the mid-4,000s.

Granted, this is a synthetic benchmark and doesn’t provide a complete picture of performance, but it’s clear that Xperia Tablet Z is no slouch.

I only really have one gripe with Xperia Tablet Z — the custom UI that Sony has loaded on top of Android. Longtime readers may know that I’m an avid proponent of leaving Android untouched, and Sony’s implementation just doesn’t do it for me. In fairness, it’s lighter and less cumbersome than some of the other overlays currently clogging up other Android devices so you may disagree, but the occasional bit of visual stutter while rifling through menus, and the fact that background images were distorted when set, raised some flags. That said, Sony has added some neat features to help make up for it, such as a universal remote app that doubles as a programming guide, and a revamped new gallery that displays geotagged photos on a globe.

At an early morning press address yesterday, Sony Mobile CEO Kuni Suzuki pointed to a renewed focus on bringing the company’s “cutting-edge technology and resources” to Sony Mobile, and confidently called 2013 a “breakthrough year.” Naturally, it’s too early to tell if that actually pans out, but certainly not impossible. The Xperia Tablet Z is a (hopefully not so) rare return to form for Sony, and here’s hoping that the rest of 2013 is full of products as well-executed as this one.






































View the Original article

Read More

Adobe Debuts Photoshop Touch For Phones, Bringing The Full Power Of The Tablet Version To Your Pocket

Adobe’s mobile Photoshop strategy has so far kept more heavyweight editing capabilities to tablets with Photoshop Touch, and left the iPhone with Photoshop Express. But today the company has officially released Photoshop Touch for iPhone and Android smartphones, which inherits virtually all of the functionality of the more powerful tablet app, with an interface tailored to the smaller screens.

Photoshop Touch for phones brings layers (which decrease to three if you’re editing at max resolution), the popular Scribble Selection feature, which lets you use imprecise finger selection to pick out precise parts of a picture, and also carries over all the filters, paint-strokes sharing and other components that make up Photoshop Touch. There’s also the unique Camera fill feature that allows a user to fill in a layer in their creations using their device’s camera. Projects from the phone version can be synced and edited using Photoshop on either tablets or the desktop, too, thanks to Adobe’s Creative Cloud service.



Clearly a lot of attention was paid to making sure that the functionality of Photoshop Touch was not lost in translation as the app was redesigned for smaller-screen devices, but I asked Photoshop Product Manager Stephen Nelson if we might see more differences introduced into the phone and tablet versions (which sell as standalone apps rather than as a single universal piece of software) down the road.

“One advantage of having them as separate apps is we do have the flexibility for the two products to diverge slightly,” he said. “And diverge in a way that’s appropriate for the context and the device. You’ll notice a few things that are different already about the phone version, just to fit a smaller screen, but I could see it continuing to evolve slightly differently on the phone compared to the tablet.”

Photoshop Touch is priced at $4.99 on the App Store and Google Play, and is available for iPhone 4S or later, 5th gen iPod touch or Android phones running Ice Cream Sandwich (4.0) or later. If you’re a photographer, mobile or otherwise, and want some powerful editing tools in your pocket, this is definitely a worthwhile upgrade from Photoshop Express.



































View the Original article

Read More

Facebook, 18 Carriers Partner To Use Discounted Messages To Lure New Users, Data Customers

Facebook is deepening its relationships with carriers in emerging markets today with a deal that would bring free or discounted data access for people who use Facebook Messages.

The company has done these types of win-win deals in the past. Carriers get to give their customers access to what is probably the most widely-used app in the world, gaining an edge over competitors in the same market. They also potentially lure new customers to sign up for lucrative data plans. At the same time, Facebook gains further reach into many developing countries that have mobile-only consumers, who don’t have access to the desktop web.

The operators in the deal include TMN in Portugal, Three in Ireland, Airtel and Reliance in India, Vivacom in Bulgaria, Backcell in Azerbaijan, Indosat, Smartfren, AXIS and XL Axiata in Indonesia, SMART in Philippines, DiGi in Malaysia, DTAC in Thailand, Viva in Bahrain, STC in Saudi Arabia, Oi in Brazil, Etisalat in Egypt, and Tre in Italy.

Facebook has done similar deals in the past. After it acquired Israeli-startup Snaptu to build mobile versions of Facebook for the long tail of feature phones, it partnered with more than 20 carriers to give their customers more than 90 days of free access to the new Facebook for Every Phone app.

While most of the carriers in the deal are in emerging markets, not all of them are. A few carriers in Ireland, Italy and Portugal are also involved.

Keep in mind that Facebook Messenger’s rival WhatsApp rules in Europe, as many cellphone users turn to it instead of classic SMS messaging to save on their monthly bills. WhatsApp beats Facebook Messenger in market share in many European countries. This could be a small way to get a leg up on their competitor, which is based in Silicon Valley and is backed by Sequoia Capital.























View the Original article

Read More

The Nokia Lumia 720 Is A Stylish Windows Phone 8 Cameraphone For Self-Conscious Fashionistas

The 3G Nokia Lumia 720 slots into Nokia’s Windows Phone 8 portfolio behind its two 4G flagships, the 920 and 820 — with the aim of pushing some of their fancier features down to a more affordable mid range price point. Rather than beefy tech specs, Nokia has focused on polishing two populist areas. Firstly design: the 720 has been gifted with sleek looks — it’s the thinnest Lumia to date (at 9mm), sharing the rounded style and curved screen of the 820 but much more pleasing to hold, being lighter and thinner. The bright Lumia colours come in a matte finish, with the exception of a high gloss white option.

And secondly: the camera. Nokia has not gone as far as adding the PureView branding to the 720′s 6.7 megapixel lens but it’s put in Carl Zeiss optics (and branding), a new f1.9 aperture to boost performance of low light photography, and — to amp up the social networking street cred of the device — it’s added a new digital lens that lets people take enhanced self portraits using the 1.3 megapixel front facing lens.

This vanity filter processes self-portraits to ‘beautify’ the results — using a little digital airbrushing trickery to whiten teeth, smooth out skin tone and so on. Results seemed a bit hit and miss during my brief hands on but it did add a more cartoonish look to self portraits. Nokia said the feature had played well with its target consumers — young, fashion-conscious social networking users — during testing. As for the main lens, it wasn’t possible to scrutinise the low light performance claims during my brief hands on but Nokia is planning on making a big song and dance about its powers, creating a dedicated retail display unit to show off the low light prowess. The sales pitch is that this device puts a ‘proper camera’ in the consumer’s pocket so they don’t need to rely on a having a separate point and shoot.

Elsewhere, the phone’s specs are much the same as the two entry level Lumias — underlining that Nokia is not aiming this phone at the tech spec crowd, but rather going for a mainstream social networking audience. The 720 does have a slightly larger 4.3 inch display than its cheaper siblings, albeit it has the same resolution of 800 x 480. Nokia has added its Clear Black display technology to the 720, though, to improve viewing outdoors in sunlight. Indoors, in the glare of conference center fluorescent lighting, the screen looked clear and crisp, without being especially high res.

Under the hood, the 720 has a 1GHz dual-core Snapdragon chip — the same sized processor as the entry level Lumia 520, along with the same 512MB of RAM. During a brief hands on the device felt no less responsive than its lower priced siblings. As with other devices in the Lumia line Nokia has included its range of software add-ons, including its HERE mapping and navigation software, and its free streaming music service.

The 720 does include NFC but wireless charging is an optional extra — the handset has three metal connectors on the rear which are compatible with a wireless charging cover. Nokia has also made room in the unibody design for an SD card slot – supporting user expanded memory of up to 64GB. On board memory is 8GB. The integrated battery is 2,000mAh.

Nokia is targeting the 720 at the Asia Pacific market initially, with China Mobile signed up to range it. There’s no confirmation as yet of whether the 720 will make it to the U.S. market.








































View the Original article

Read More

Skype Competitor Viber Hits 175 Million Users, Up From 140 Million+ In December

Messaging startup Viber, which lets users of most smartphone platforms send free texts, calls and messages via its app, is continuing to ramp up its user-base. Speaking at the Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona today, CEO Talmon Marco announced  the startup now has 175 million users.

Viber has been around since early 2011 but been growing rapidly in the past 12 months. In December it passed 140 million users, saying it was adding new users at a rate of 400,000 per day. Back in September, it hit 100 million users, after hitting 70 million users in May and 50 million in February.

Viber’s app supports iOS, Android, S40, Symbian, Windows Phone and BlackBerry.

The messaging space is very fragmented globally, but for some context, Line — a messaging app popular in Japan — passed the 100 million user mark last month. Whatsapp, popular in Europe, is estimated to have around 250 million users. And Skype — the grand-daddy of the space — is thought to have around 800 million users, with some 280 million monthly users as of November last year.

“Sometimes services take off because of pure luck… sometimes it’s timing. It’s the soul that you put into this. The proof is in the pudding,” said Marco.

Also today, Marco said Viber has signed a partnership with Indonesian carrier Axis to offer reduced price packages for consumers in that market using Viber’s free messaging services.

Carriers have an uneasy relationship with so called OTT (over-the-top) players like Viber — accusing them of stealing the value by luring customers away from carrier services but Marco said carriers and OTT players can work together to the benefit of both, arguing that the consumer who signs up for the lower cost Viber package with Axis will end up upgrading to more expensive data services.

Billing services could be another area where OTT players could partner with carriers, Marco added.

Discussing Viber’s user-base he said the app is now being used by 90 per cent of the population of Monaco — a wealthy city state and tax haven — which he argued shows that it’s not the reduced price that lures consumers to OTT players, it’s the novelty of the services.




































View the Original article

Read More

LG Plans To Sell 40M Smartphones This Year As It Prepares Optimus G Pro Launch

LG Electronics, which lost market share to Huawei and ZTE last year, aims to sell 40 million smartphones this year as part of its strategy to move away from basic handsets, said Park Jong Seok, the head of its mobile-communications division, before the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. If the South Korean company hits its goal, this means LG’s shipments will rise 52 percent this year. LG sold 26.3 million smartphones last year and 20.2 million in 2011.

LG will rollout the Optimus G Pro in over 50 new countries in the next few months as part of its effort to compete with the iPhone and Samsung’s Galaxy line. The Optimus line’s importance in LG’s efforts to reshape its image as a maker of premium devices is underscored by how quickly it has been introducing new models. That Optimus G Pro’s predecessor, the Optimus G, has sold over a million units since launching in the U.S., Canada, Korea, and Japan back in November.

Kim Ki Young, an analyst at Seoul-based LIG Investment & Securities Co., told Bloomberg that LG’s strategy is similar to that of HTC, which unveiled its One model last week after its market share plummeted by more than half in 18 months, but looks more likely to succeed. “LG’s brand image in the premium league has improved. The company also seems to have higher growth potential than HTC and BlackBerry,” Kim said.

LG’s total phone sales halved in two years after its basic handset models faltered in competition with devices from Chinese manufacturers like Huawei, the Chinese company that overtook LG as a Top 5 vendor in the overall mobile phone market in Q4 2012, according to International Data Corp.






























View the Original article

Read More

Samsung To Debut Its New Galaxy S In New York On March 14 As Rivalry With Apple Heats Up

It appears that Samsung has once again joined a growing list of companies that have decided not to release their flagship devices at Mobile World Congress. Reuters reports that the South Korean electronics giant said it will launch its new Galaxy S smartphone on March 14 in  New York after requests from U.S. carriers. We’ve emailed Samsung for confirmation.

One likely reason why Samsung chose New York for its launch is because, as Reuters notes, it is “Apple’s turf” and rivalry between the two is becoming increasingly intense. Launching in New York instead of at this week’s Mobile World Congress also has the added benefit of ensuring that the latest Galaxy S debut will not be lost amid a sea of noise from competitors.

The Galaxy S series has been a cash cow for Samsung, so it’s no surprise that they would want to save it for special events instead of tagging it onto MWC. Last year, Samsung released the Galaxy S III in London. While the Galaxy S II made its debut at the 2011 MWC, the first Galaxy S launched at the CTIA mobile trade show in the U.S. in 2010.

Samsung may have chosen New York for this year’s launch to give it a boost of good publicity in the U.S. after the lose of a $1 billion patent infringement lawsuit to Apple last summer. Furthermore, Samsung has yet to dominate the U.S. market even though it was top in both worldwide smartphone sales and overall mobile phone sales in 2012. In the U.S., Samsung smartphones continue to lag behind the Apple iPhone in terms of sales.

Though Samsung may plan to release its flagship smartphone elsewhere, it did launch its Galaxy Note 8.0 at MWC, which it is planning to rollout globally in Q2 2013. Samsung did not say how much the tablet would cost, but representatives have said that the price would be “affordable.” Indeed, many mobile makers have made their low-end device launches at MWC, saving premium lines for their own separate events later on. For example, Nokia is expected to unveil its lower-priced Lumia smartphone at the event, while Chinese company ZTE will debut the Grand Memo, one of the world’s first Firefox OS phones (Firefox OS is being heavily targeted at emerging markets).

On the other hand, LG (and Samsung’s main domestic rival) will likely show off its top-of-the-line Optimus G Pro at MWC this week.


































View the Original article

Read More

Hands On With Nokia’s New Entry Level Windows Phone 8 Handset, The Lumia 520 (Heading Stateside In Q2)

The Lumia 520 is Nokia’s new entry level Windows Phone device — costing around $180 before taxes, a far cry from the flagship Lumia 920 and 820 currently up for grabs in the US. The 520 is confirmed for the U.S. market with T-Mobile due to range it in Q2. So what do you get for not-too-many dollars? Besides the latest version of Windows Phone (WP8), Nokia has included a few perks for budget buyers, including its HERE mapping and navigation software, its Mix Radio free streaming music service and its digital lenses camera filters and Cinemagraph animated GIF creator.

Also on board: Nokia’s glove-friendly sensitive touchscreen tech — so the 520 can be poked with a fingernail or prodded with a glove. But of course, this is still a budget device — so it’s more compact in size than the higher end Lumias, with a 4 inch display. It also lacks 4G, NFC and wireless charging. There’s no compass on board either so the 520 doesn’t get to tap into Nokia’s augmented reality City Lens app.

Design wise, as you’d expect, the 520 is certainly the least premium looking of the range — lacking any fancy touches, such as the layered colour-on-colour casing flourish Nokia added to its previous entry level Lumia (the 620). That’s not to say it’s unattractive. To my eye ‘cheap and cheerful’ is a fair description, while its fairly steeply curving sides give it a more angular look than the rest of the range.

The 520 shares the Lumia’s plastic unibody design but unlike the flagship Lumia 920 and 820 it’s a less premium feeling material, with a matte finish. The advantage of this cheaper plastic and smaller size is it feels much lighter of course. Thickness is just under 1cm. The brighter Lumia colours — red, yellow and white — are available as swappable shells sold separately, with cyan and the less stand out black option being the standard retail options.

The screen has a resolution of 800 x 480 — aka the old Windows Phone 7 resolution. It looked bright and clear during a brief hands on but less contrasty than the Lumia 720 (which includes Nokia’s Clear Black display tech). Under the hood the 520 has a 1GHz dual-core Snapdragon chip — giving it the same amount of power as the former entry level Lumia 620. It handled the Windows Phone UI well, feeling fast and responsive during my encounter with it.

On the back there’s a five megapixel lens, which supports 720p HD video recording. While more expensive Lumias have had lots of tender loving care lavished on their camera kit, the 520 sits in Nokia’s unbranded camera category, so set your expectations accordingly. Nokia has included some of the features offered at higher Lumia price-points, including its Smart Shoot feature and the ability to capture wide angle shots but there’s no front facing lens.

Windows Phone 8 is an increasingly attractive OS at these budget price points — where Android hardware can be woefully underpowered. The easy to use Live Tiles interface, embedded Facebook et al social networking and value-add extras (such as 7GB of free SkyDrive cloud storage from Microsoft — and free streaming music from Nokia) compare well against a swathe of budget Androids. While WinPho is still certainly constrained when it comes to choice of apps, here at the low end smartphone price point that’s not such a huge minus. What the OS lacks in apps it makes up for with its polished look and feel — and, in the 520′s case, enough power under the hood to keep the basics feeling slick.




































View the Original article

Read More

Tablets Take Off In 2012 According To Millennial, With Kindle Fire And iPad Mini Seeing Rapid Growth

In a new report from mobile ad platform Millennial Media, the company compiles its data on mobile device share across its network for all of 2012, revealing that tablets in particular accounted for a rising percentage of impressions, with Android devices stepping up their game considerably. The Kindle Fire and Samsung tablets were the big share winners, helping Android slates grab a considerable 41 percent of the tablet mix, compared to 58 percent for Apple.

Millennial didn’t actually break out the overall values of tablet traffic in its 2011 report, but you can see from its February 2011 snapshot that the tablet/e-reader and other category had iOS at 80 percent share, with Android at just 17 percent and other at 3 percent. Android has clearly gained a lot of ground, then, and the main OEMs reaping the benefits of that growth are Samsung, which has 45 percent of the Android tablet share, and Amazon, which managed to acquire 26 percent thanks to the release of the second-generation Kindle Fire line, representing over 500 percent growth from its share in 2011.

Smartphone share also grew during the year, up from 68 percent to 75 percent, with non-phone connected devices (including tablets) also growing considerably as well, from 15 to 25 percent. The feature phone category gave up tons of ground, going from 17 percent to 5 percent share. Overall OS mix, despite Android’s tablet gains, actually didn’t shift all that much, with Android gaining one percentage point overall in 2012 versus 2011, and iOS losing one. BlackBerry remained steady in third, and Windows Phone gained a single percentage point.



Millennial notes that Android continues to take up more places in the top 20 mobile phones list on its platform, while Apple continues to be the market leader with its devices in each respective category, generating an outsized helping of traffic share from just a few core devices. The iPhone ranks number one among mobile phones, growing its share from 14.67 percent in 2011 to 15.59 percent in 2012. Samsung took over the number two spot from BlackBerry with its Galaxy S line, with 4.24 percent of impressions for 2012, growing 182 percent year-over-year.

The iPad mini was among Apple’s strongest performers, growing its share of impressions at an average daily rate of 28 percent within just weeks of its initial launch. Millennial says that’s a new best for the 7-inch tablet category, eclipsing the rapid 19 percent daily average established by the original Kindle Fire during its launch back in 2011. Overall, the picture that’s shaping up looks like it will see smartphone share start to even out as they eclipse feature phones entirely, with tablets making up an increasingly important piece of the pie, if the trends Millennial is seeing continue.



































View the Original article

Read More

Google Glass Targeting End Of 2013 Consumer Release, With Price Tag Under $1,500

Google seems to be looking to bring its ambitious Google Glass wearable computer to market much faster than many likely anticipated, according to the Verge. Google told the site that it hopes to have a “fully-polished” version of Glass available for sale to ordinary consumers by the end of 2013. The cost will be under the $1,500 Google was asking for developer-targeted editions of the headsets put up for pre-order first at Google I/O, and then again earlier this week.

This is the most clear Google has been yet about its public release schedule for the headset-mounted computing device. The company had previously been reported to be targeting a year-end 2013 consumer release, with a price point around that of current smartphones, according to a report from last February by the New York Times’ Nick Bilton. Then in June 2012, Google co-founder Sergey Brin suggested that a rough timeline for developer and consumer availability would put the device in the hands of the general public in 2014.

This time, a Google official has said directly that the company is targeting an end-of-year release date, so there’s little room for different interpretations there, and the credibility of the source isn’t up for debate. Google’s recent release to a broader audience beyond just developers via an application process indicates things might be moving quicker than the company previously expected.

The Verge also got some extended hands-on time with Glass, and notes that it is compatible with iPhone devices as well as Android handsets. They also came away convinced that this is something that Google will eventually be able to turn into a device with mass-market appeal, whether or not it’s quite at that stage by the time it hopefully hits shelves later this year.
































View the Original article

Read More

Built For Entrepreneurs And Investors, Simplr For iPhone Sorts And Prioritizes Your AngelList Feeds

If you do a search for “AngelList” in the Apple App Store, you’ll only get four results – and one is an app featuring quotes from entrepreneurs. In other words, there’s not a lot of selection despite AngelList’s readily available API. That being said, in the past an app called AngelList Wings has served as a useful resource for browsing, searching and following early-stage startups, founders and investors. Today, however, it has some new competition from a mobile app called Simplr.

As AngelList becomes an increasingly important startup community – and now, investment platform, too – the need for more services to better manage and guide your involvement on the site is also becoming more essential for those in the industry. Last month, Wittlebee CEO Sean Percival launched angel5, which he described as something of a “WeFollow for founders,” referring of course to the Twitter user directory created by Digg’s Kevin Rose back in Twitter’s early days.

But angel5 is an editorially curated site of user suggestions, something that Simplr co-founder Lothar Chan-Sew says will be hard to scale the more AngelList grows. Simplr, meanwhile, will make its own recommendations through an automated means.

To be clear, Simplr isn’t only a user directory to compete with angel5, it’s about offering an alternative view into AngelList’s feeds, and soon, more networks, too. ”The app learns your browsing habits and adjusts delivery to allow important topics to come to the forefront,” explains Chan-Sew. The app is starting with AngelList this month, and is working on adding Facebook and Twitter in the near future.

Had the app only focused on these broader, public social networks, I’ll admit that it probably wouldn’t have caught my attention – there are already so many of these news filtration apps out there, including those that look just at social media, as well as those that track news trends across the web. (See for example: Prismatic, Thirst, undrip, Circa, Summify, Wavii, etc.). But as an AngelList stalker myself, the idea that someone was building smart algorithms to learn my preferences specifically for that community has some appeal.

Unfortunately, I’m not a huge fan of Simplr’s user interface, with its black-and-orange color scheme, and still very rough UX. AngelList Wings is definitely the better-looking of the two usable iOS apps for browsing AngelList.



That being said, as a basic utility, Simplr has some advantages. You can jump into the bigger sections like Updates, Investments, People, Startups, etc., and you can drill down into specific locations (e.g. San Francisco, New York) and markets (big data, consumer web, social media, etc.). You can also switch to a view of Status Updates, or you can view your Activity Feed as a whole.

In addition, if you’re focused on tracking activities surrounding specific people (investors or founders) or companies, you can bookmark them using the app’s “SimplrMarks,” which have their own section. This lets you view a feed dedicated to your favorites. In the Settings, you can also switch on or off the “SimplrSort” feature, if you don’t want to see Simplr’s recommended, prioritized stream of updates, in order to view things as they would appear on the AngelList website.

The app did give me some troubles – an error message here and a crash there – so if you’re looking for a complete, near-perfect mobile experience, this is not it. The app feels very beta, but it’s aimed at startup folks right now, and they can handle a little beta-ness, right?

Fremont-based Simplr was co-created by Chan-Sew and CEO Devang Patel, who had both struggled with keeping up with the ever-increasing amount of information available across social networks. They decided to self-fund the app they wanted to use themselves, and are now committed to keeping it ad-free by making it a paid download. For $2.99, if you’re thinking about using it for managing social networks in the future, then be aware that it’s pricier than its more attractive, and typically free, competitors. But thanks to its inclusion of AngelList, the app is something of a rarity right now in the App Store.

Simplr is available for download here.












































View the Original article

Read More