Nokia has today announced the Lumia 925, a new Windows Phone flagship that will be hoping to steal market share away from Apple and Samsung in 2013. The device boasts an aluminum frame and offers an 8.7-megapixel rear-facing PureView camera — both of which are firsts for Nokia’s Windows Phone devices.
The official SoundCloud apps for Android and iOS have today been updated to add support for Google+ Sign-In, allowing you to use your Google+ account in place of Facebook or Twitter. What’s more, there’s also support for Google+ sharing.
Google has been forced to hand over Android source code documents sought by Apple in an ongoing patent-infringement lawsuit against Samsung.
The search giant initially argued that it was not required to give up the documents and that it would be too burdensome to collect them, but U.S. Magistrate Judge Paul S. Grewal in San Jose, California, has given the company two days to give them up.
Google Babel, the new communication service from Google, has been renamed Google Hangouts ahead of its public debut at Google I/O next week, according to an unnamed Google employee. Babel had been its name internally throughout the service’s development, but that moniker has now been dropped by Google.
Android doesn’t look like it’s about to lose any of its market share to competing platforms any time soon. During the first quarter of 2013, Google’s platform powered a whipping 59.9% of all smart mobile devices sold as total shipments hit 308.7 million units.
Apple’s iOS, on the other hand, was installed on just 19.3% of devices — despite the success of its iPhones and iPads.
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An amicus curiae or amicus brief is when someone who is not a party in a lawsuit offers information that bears on the case but that has not been solicited by any of the parties. It’s used mostly as a way to make sure that various issues that wouldn’t otherwise come up are heard in court, in hopes against an overly broad legal ruling that might have widespread repercussions. Amicus curiae means “friend of the court.”
Got all that? Good. Maybe now you can understand Apple’s issue with Google trying to issue an amicus brief urging the U.S. Federal Court of Appeals to overrule Apple’s request for a sales ban on Samsung devices. Friend of the court? More like co-defendant.
Gameloft has today launched Blitz Brigade, a new online multiplayer game, on Android and iOS. It’s a class-based first-person shooter that’s clearly heavily influenced by Valve’s Team Fortress titles, and it’s a whole lot of fun.
Facebook is reportedly in advanced talks to acquire mobile navigation app Waze for between $800 million and $1 billion. Talks between the two companies began around six months ago, and a term sheet has already been signed, according to business daily Calcalist.
Apple wants to see documents related to Android source code in its ongoing patent infringement suit against Samsung. The Cupertino company has asked U.S. Magistrate Judge Paul S. Grewal to force Google to hand over the information, which it is allegedly withholding improperly, Bloomberg reports.
Google has begun integrating its notification center into Chromium for Mac, paving the way for Google Now for OS X. The Chrome OS feature was first ported to Chromium and then Chrome Canary for Windows back in March, but this is the first time it has been spotted on Mac.
For the last couple months the Internet has been chalk full of rumors that Apple is losing its edge, and that the iPhone isn’t as cool as it once was. Maybe some of those rumors are right, maybe not, but Apple’s ex-Ad Guru, Ken Segall, predicts that the iPhone’s biggest years are still ahead of it.
In a recent blog post, Segall speculates that the iPhone will follow a similar development cycle as the iPod. For the first few years Apple has worked on evolving and perfecting the device, but 2013 will be the year that Segall thinks we’ll finally get an iPhone Mini, iPhones in color, and maybe even a big iPhone.
The RunKeeper apps for Android and iOS have today been updated to add a number of new features, the biggest of which is support for the Pebble smartwatch. Users can now see all kinds of data, such as their pace and the distance they’ve ran, with a quick glance at their wrist while they’re on the go.
Viber, the popular cross-platform messaging service for smartphones, is no longer just for smartphones. The company has today launched new desktop applications that allow you to chat with friends; send stickers, emoticons, and photos; and make calls from a Mac or PC.
Rovio has launched a new service called Rovio Accounts, which allows you to pick up your saved games on any mobile device. So if you complete ten Angry Birds levels on your Android smartphone, you’ll see the same progress when you login on your iPad.
Rovio Accounts isn’t just compatible with Angry Birds, but other titles from Rovio as well. The service will initially launch worldwide inside The Croods, as well as in the original Angry Birds game for iOS in Finland and Poland.
You may remember a post I wrote a while back about the Pentagon’s plan to get mobile devices working on military networks, and how we were able to ascertain that yes, they were working on testing iPhones and iPads and no, they were not planning on jettisoning support for Blackberry devices.
According to Spencer Ackerman at Wired today, iPads will finally have passed the rigorous security review set out by the US Military at the Pentagon in about two weeks, allowing the Apple-powered mobile devices onto the military networks. The Security Technical Implementation Guides (STIGs) for BlackBerry 10 devices and Playbook tablets, along with those for Samsung’s Knox Android phone, have already been released.
While Google Glass is already compatible with iPhone, some of its killer features — including turn-by-turn navigation and text messaging — require a companion app that’s currently only available on Android. But according to one Google employee, Glass will soon be able to offer these features no matter what device it’s connected to.
The Galaxy S4 has been cleared for government use by the U.S. Department of Defense, with Samsung’s new Knox security software deemed safe for military use. It’s the first Android-powered smartphone to ever win DoD approval, and it gets it ahead of Apple’s iPhone.
Google brought its intelligent Google Now service to iOS earlier this week with an update to the Google Search app, and for many, the feature works very well. For a lot of others, however, Google Now appears to be causing a significantly negative impact on battery life — as we reported on Wednesday.
Google has since responded to these reports, calling them “incorrect” and insisting that Google Now does not have a battery drain issue.
When you buy a 16GB iPhone, iOS 6 takes up roughly 1GB of space on the device, leaving about 15GB or so to spare. Buy a 16GB Samsung Galaxy S4, on the other hand, and you get just 8.49GB!
Why? Samsung says all the bloat is because of the nonsense, half-baked “software features” they keep on baking in.
Just over a month after acquiring Summly for $30 million, Yahoo! has gobbled up another smartphone app. This time it’s Astrid, a pretty task management client for Android and iOS, which has a strong focus on sharing. Astrid announced the news on its blog today.
The International Data Corporation (IDC), an firm that analyzes tech trends around the globe, released its quarterly Worldwide Tablet Market Study today, showing that tablet sales show no signs of slowing down any time soon.
The study shows that tablet shipments have increased 142 percent year over year for Q1 2013. Tablet shipments totaled 49.w million units in this first quarter, surging past the entire first two quarters of 2012 combined.
All tablet makers saw huge gains in the tablet space, though Apple’s overall share of the market is decreasing. The iPad is still the world’s largest tablet being sold, with 19.5 million shipping in the last quarter, up from 11.8 in last year’s Q1, an increase of 64 percent.
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I’m not a big fan of screen protectors; partly because they’re real pain in the ass to apply, and partly because I’ve never felt like they really added much to the equation.
But if there was ever a screen protector to get me to change my mind, its Tech21‘s new Impact Shield. The company demoed its new protector for me over Skype recently, and I came away thoroughly stunned: The protector has a strange, almost magical way of protecting the screen from not only scratches but impacts — and is self-healing. It’s also applied onto a screen in a very different manner than most other screen protectors.
Although it’s been less than a year since it’s debut, and though it was widely criticized at its debut for a beefy $329 price tag and a low-resolution display, the iPad mini has quickly become the one 7-inch tablet to rule them all.
A new supplier report out of Asia puts the iPad mini’s triumph into sharp relief. Not only is the iPad mini pretty much the only 7-inch tablet that isn’t running headfirst down a profitability cliff in a race to crater at the bottom, it’s actually putting iPad sales to the knife.