Tuesday, January 31, 2012

TELUS, Bell and Rogers Releasing the Galaxy Note February 14th, Samsung To Announce Its New Mystery Device & What`s The Future of Your Mobile Phone

The Future of Your Mobile Phone
“The mobile operator community is conventional. 99.9 per cent of their turnover, up until about three years ago, was purely consumer handset driven. From a growth point of view, now, they’re lucky if they get maybe 110 per cent but that is it. They can’t grow any further.”
Pocket-lint

Samsung Galaxy Note

TELUS, Bell and Rogers Releasing the Galaxy Note February 14th for $249.99 on a 3-year
First out of the gate with the official release date and pricing is big box retailer Best Buy showing the Note will be available to the masses on Tuesday, February 14th for the 3-year contract price of $249.99. Best Buy also notes the Rogers logo on their info page, but doesn’t have any pricing info.
MobileSyrup

Motorola Announces New RAZR With an Unlockable Bootloader
On Monday, Motorola announced the RAZR Developer Edition on the company’s community blog. The device is essentially the same as the current RAZR, but with one special feature: an unlockable bootloader.
BGR

Samsung Is Spending Millions To Announce Its New Mystery Device During The Super Bowl
Samsung has a special promoted tweet running today that teases its upcoming Super Bowl ad. We’ve known the ad was coming for several weeks now, but today we learned that it will be used to unveil a new Samsung device.
Business Insider

Thursday, January 19, 2012

Symbian Belle Coming Soon, Sony Ericsson Swallows $317 Million Pre-tax Loss & Official Wikipedia App Comes to Android

Symbian Belle Coming Soon
It has been a long time in the making, but Nokia has finally confirmed the arrival of their latest and greatest OS in regards to Symbian. Nokia took to their twitter page and said “Nokia Belle will be on the way next week”.
SmartPhoneEnvy

Nokia Lumia 800

Another Nokia Lumia 800 Battery Update Coming in Two Weeks
Nokia said on Twitter Wednesday that a second software update will roll out to Lumia 800 devices over the next two weeks. It is largely expected that the update will help fix the poor battery life that has plagued some, but not all, Lumia 800 users.
BGR

Sony Ericsson Swallows $317 Million Pre-tax Loss as End Draws Near
Sony Ericsson’s tearful breakup continues with more woe as as the venture had to eat a pre-tax loss of €247 million (roughly $317 million). Bosses cited “unfavorable macro-economic conditions” and the Thai flooding as the reasons for the loss.
Engadget

Official Wikipedia App Comes to Android
In addition to being able to view every article in mobile-friendly format, you can save them for offline use later. You can also use your GPS to search for nearby articles (like we saw in Wikitude). You can also share articles through the official Android channels, which is convenient.
MobileSyrup

Tuesday, January 3, 2012

Blippar Raises Seed Funding From Qualcomm For Mobile Augmented Reality Technology

Blippar, the UK startup behind an eponymous mobile image recognition and augmented reality platform, has landed seed funding – the size of the investment was not disclosed – from Qualcomm Ventures.

The startup, which is based in London, says the seed funding serves as a springboard for a bigger Series A funding round it expects to close in early 2012.

Like other augmented reality startups like Layar and metaio, Blippar’s technology turns a smartphone’s camera into a ‘lens’ that shows virtual information on top of real-life objects, be it a link to a website, a digital coupon, a video or another type of promotion.

Blippar says it has seen hundreds of thousands of consumer downloads in the first 7 months since its debut in the UK, and that major brands like Tesco, Nestle, Samsung and Unilever have already orchestrated campaign ‘blipps’.

CrunchBase Information

blippar

Qualcomm Ventures

Information provided by CrunchBase

iOS Closes Out The Year With 52% Mobile Web Market Share, Canadians Downloaded 41 Million Apps Between Christmas and New Years Eve & Are Text Messages Declining Worldwide?

iOS Closes Out The Year With 52% Mobile Web Market Share
According to end-of-the-month data from statistics provider NetMarketShare, iOS users ended up with a 52% market share of mobile web browsing in December 2011. More simply put, that means that over half of the mobile web browsing last month took place on an iOS device. Android, meanwhile, had a 16.2% share, behind Java ME at 21.27%, which fell into second place.
TechCrunch

Verizon Droid 3

DROID 3, LG Revolution, and All of Verizon’s 4G LTE Hotspots to Be Discontinued in January, Report Claims
In 2011, carriers and manufacturers were releasing smartphones at such short intervals that within weeks, your once new and high-end device would most likely already be outdated. Unfortunately, it looks like things won’t be slowing down in 2012. After a mere six months on the market, Verizon Wireless has issued an end-of-life discontinuation for the Motorola DROID 3.
BGR

Canadians Downloaded 41 Million Apps Between Christmas and New Years Eve
Overall, amongst all tallied countries, there were 1.2 billion apps downloaded in the iOS and Android app stores, the US taking the lions’ share with 509 million downloads. Still, considering our tiny population, 41 million apps is a metric tonne, and shows how app-addicted we all are. Total app downloads were 60% above the December weekly average.
MobileSyrup

Are Text Messages Declining Worldwide?
It may seem like everyone, everywhere is sending text messages these days. But according to a Forbes report, texting may be on the decline across various countries.
Mashable