Mobile Phone News

SNL on Verizon’s 4G marketing: “It’s an old person’s nightmare”

While it’s pretty much hit-or-miss these days, when Saturday Night Live scores, it still does so with a vengeance.

Last night the sketch comedy show aired a segment that ripped apart Verizon’s 4G LTE marketing confusion, bringing to light the biggest problems facing the smartphone market today when it comes to general consumers.

In short, there are too many devices vying for your attention (many with terrible names), and the advantages of 4G LTE seems … Continue Reading

Spotify takes music quality to the “extreme” on iPhone

If you’re a Spotify user with an iPhone, it’s time to pump up the volume.

The popular music streaming service has added support for extremely high quality 320 kbps music streaming and offline synchronizing — just about the best sound you can get from compressed music files.

Spotify originally offered low quality (96 kbps) and high quality (160 kbps) settings for streaming and syncing on its mobile apps, but an update over the weekend has … Continue Reading

An animated explanation of how your personal data gets tracked and sold

Keeping up with our theme from yesterday’s post about how frictionless it has become for users to give unfamiliar apps broad and permanent access to their data, we stumbled on this interesting video about the personal information people unwittingly share with their mobile phone carriers.

The video comes from Michael Ringley, a graphic designer living in San Francisco. It tracks the life of an MMS message, 28,000 of which are sent every second, and shows … Continue Reading

Instagram makes mobile photo-sharing more hip with filters, enhancements

Mobile photo-sharing service Instagram updated its application today with a new filter, enhancement feature, and a makeover to its user interface.

Instagram lets you take a photo with your iPhone and layer it with different filters for that extra hip look. You can then connect it to your social networks and share it with the Instagram community. Now, the company is introducing a new, sleeker interface that’s easier to navigate. The updates include a new … Continue Reading

For the first time, Apple’s iOS generates more web traffic than Mac OS X

iPhones and iPads now account for more web traffic than Macs, according to a study by ad network Chitika.

Chitika measured the percentage of its ad impressions that were delivered to iOS devices and the percentage going to OS X devices. According to the firm, iOS has been steadily gaining ground since August, 2011, while OS X has lost 25 percent of its market share since September.

As of February, 2011, the iOS market share … Continue Reading

Apples to oranges: Google and Amazon are too timid to copy Apple’s retail success

There is a strange duality in the world of brick and mortar tech stores today. In the last four years CompUSA, Borders, and Circuit City all went out of business. Many expect Best Buy to follow in the near future. At the same time, Apple has opened over 300 retail outlets worldwide. And recent reports indicate that Microsoft, Amazon, and Google plan to follow Apple’s lead.

The new Google store, which Bloomberg reported on yesterday, … Continue Reading

500M cheap VoIP calls propel Rebtel to 15M users

Rebtel, the second-largest voice-over IP calling company behind Skype, announced major milestones today that prove consumers just can’t get enough of cheap phone calls.

The company says that it has surpassed 15 million connected users (it’s unclear how many of those are active) since its launch in 2006. Rebtel users have made over 500 million calls on the service and have chalked up over two billion minutes of international calls.

Rebtel offers mobile and desktop … Continue Reading

Google-branded streaming music device in development, report says

Google is allegedly working on creating a company-branded entertainment device capable of streaming music in multiple locations throughout a person’s home.

The information about the Google-branded device comes from a Wall Street Journal report that cites unnamed people briefed on the project. If true, it would mark the Google’s first attempt at creating a hardware product without the aid of an electronics manufacturing partner. The search giant has historically concentrated its resources on developing web-based … Continue Reading

Google Wallet flaw takes the lock off your mobile money (updated)

Updated with comment from Google at 5:14pm PT.

A new vulnerability in Google Wallet gives thieves access to your funds, even if the application data has been erased.

Google Wallet lets you digitize your credit cards and pay for things using near-field communication (NFC). That is, all you have to do is touch your phone to an NFC device and the item you’re buying is automatically charged to your account. Google has touted that its … Continue Reading

Evernote updates contact app to fix first-version flaws

Every phone has a contact list, but how useful is it? According to Evernote chief executive officer Phil Libin, not very useful at all.

Now Evernote has updated its contact manager, Evernote Hello, in an effort to put those contact lists out of business.

Evernote’s answer to the standard address book is a photo-based contact app for the iPhone, which organizes contacts “visually, chronologically and contextually.” The app got some major updates today that may … Continue Reading

Windows on ARM coming around Windows 8 release, will have Office 15 apps

Microsoft’s plan to bring Windows to ARM chips has been a curious endeavor, mainly because the company hasn’t offered up many specifics about how the new version of Windows will differ from the traditional x86 and 64-bit versions of the operating system.

That all changed today with a nearly-9,000 word blog post by Microsoft’s Windows unit president Steven Sinofsky, in which he divulged a slew of details on Windows on ARM (WOA).

The big takeaways … Continue Reading

Stealth-mode app TimeRazor helps you find time for your favorite events, raises $3.4M

TimeRazor is a mobile application launching in March that will help you find events and offers near you. The company announced today it has raised $3.4 million from private investors.

TimeRazor is tackling the “fear of missing out” or FOMO as the company calls it. It proposes people are often so busy with errands and tasks they need to do, that they miss out on the fun events they want to do. TimeRazor is set … Continue Reading

Send your lover a digital Valentine with Lovestagram

Valentine’s Day is less than a week away, and if you’re looking for a cute and Earth-saving way to show your special someone how much you care, we’ve got you covered*. Kaitlyn Trigger, girlfriend of Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger, created Lovestagram, a simple Valentine creator that uses your Instagram photos.

Trigger built the app as a Valentine’s present to Krieger and has opened it up for everyone to use. She taught herself how to code … Continue Reading

Google’s Motorola bid set for approval, but it won’t be the end of patent wars

Google’s $12.5 billion purchase of Motorola Mobility will likely be approved by the U.S. Department of Justice next week, sources tell Bloomberg, but don’t expect Google to backtrack on Motorola’s contentious patent litigation tactics.

Purchasing Motorola will grant Google over 17,000 mobile patents in addition to the phone maker’s handset assets. Many had expected Google, which has historically argued against the trend of patent litigation from the likes of Apple and Microsoft, to use its … Continue Reading

Mark your calendars: Apple may announce iPad 3 in early March

One year after Apple unveiled the iPad 2, the company is set to announce the iPad 3 in the first week of March, sources have told AllThingsD.

The event will likely be held at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, which traditionally houses Apple’s largest announcements. The timing makes sense for Apple since it launched the iPad 2 in early March last year.

There’s no word yet on when the iPad … Continue Reading

Driving app Waze builds its own Siri for hands-free voice control

In an effort to cut driving distractions even further, the crowdsourced driving app Waze today has added the ability for fully hands-free voice control to report traffic situations — bringing Siri-like functionality to the free app before Apple has released its own Siri API.

Waze’s solution is actually more advanced than Siri in one key way: you don’t need to awkwardly hold down any buttons to activate voice commands. Instead, Waze’s voice controls are activated … Continue Reading

Path-ological: In 2010, founder Dave Morin said Path never stored user data

It’s the privacy snafu that will not die. A day after a developer discovered that mobile social network Path was storing users’ entire address books on its servers, the startup seemed to have defused the incident by apologizing and deleting all the personal data it had stored.

But now Gawker’s Ryan Tate has published an email he got from Path CEO Dave Morin back in 2010 in which the CEO acknowledges that his company looks … Continue Reading

Foursquare for iPhone, Android enhanced with new Explore features and menu info

A hungry sojourner should have an easier time tracking down a good meal if updated iPhone and Android applications from Foursquare deliver on their promise to simplify place discovery.

The New York location-based company, currently in the midst of a rebrand, has shipped colorful Explore tab updates to its most popular mobile applications.

The Explore tab, the home of place discovery, now features smarter search capabilities, a new navigation for quick access to top picks … Continue Reading

Path CEO: We screwed up by uploading your personal data, and we’ve erased it

The CEO of Path, a startup focused on sharing your life with just close contacts, has apologized after a hacker showed that Path’s iOS app uploaded extremely personal data to its servers without permission.

The company’s purpose in uploading that data was to help users better connect with friends and family in Path’s systems. But Path users, naturally, were up in arms that their contacts, e-mail addresses, and phone numbers were taken, and some called … Continue Reading