Mobile Phones Archive

  • IDC and Gartner award smartphone growth prizes to Apple and Google

    IDC and Gartner award smartphone growth prizes to Apple and Google

    Posted on May 19, 2010 | No Comments
    Get ready to rumble, the latest Gartner and IDC smartphone numbers are out to give us a pretty good idea of how things shape up globally. Remember, IDC measures vendor shipments while Gartner measures actual handset sales to end users. So what does the data tell us? Well, to start with, in terms of smartphone devices, Gartner claims a 48.7% increase in smartphone sales of 54.3 million units in Q1 2010 compared to Q1 2009 -- IDC pegs growth at 56.7% on 54.7 million units for the same period. Both estimates easily outpace the 17% or 21.7% growth in worldwide units of mobile phones moved according to Gartner and IDC, respectively.

    IDC's list of top 5 smartphone device makers (pictured above) has Nokia at the number one spot repeating its 39.3% share as it did in Q1 of 2009 while RIM is down slightly from 20.9% in 2009 to a 19.4% market share in 2010. Apple (up from 10.9% to 16.1%) more than doubled its device shipments in the last year as HTC (up from 4.3% to 4.8%) and Motorola (up from 3.4% to 4.2%) all managed to increase their shares on higher volumes.

    Regarding smartphone OS market share, Android's global numbers echo its success in the US jumping from a 1.6% market share to 9.6% in just one year. Gartner claims that sales of Android-based phones increased 707% year-on-year to displace Windows Mobile in the top 5 for the first time. Apple's iPhone OS also saw growth from 10.5% in 1Q09 to 15.4% in 1Q10 as both RIM (down from 20.1% to 19.4%) and Symbian (down from 48.8% to 44.3%) dropped. See the OS numbers broken down into a no-nonsense table after the break.

    Continue reading IDC and Gartner award smartphone growth prizes to Apple and Google

    IDC and Gartner award smartphone growth prizes to Apple and Google originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 19 May 2010 04:44:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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  • Skype has new plans for you to choose from

    Skype has new plans for you to choose from

    Posted on May 5, 2010 | No Comments
    Skype, Skype, Skype. Starting tomorrow, it's going to be a little bit cheaper to call your overseas friends and family with Skype thanks to a new set of subscription plans up on offer. An example plan: unlimited calls within the U.S and Canada to both landlines and mobile phones for $2.95 per month. That's quite affordable, yes.

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  • Zettabyte = really big number

    Zettabyte = really big number

    Posted on May 4, 2010 | No Comments
    One number that wasn’t affected by the recession was the size of the digital universe, which grew 62% in 2009 to around 800,000 petabytes. However, the petabyte, or 1000 terabytes, is quickly becoming an obsolete unit for measuring the amount of information in the world. To remedy this we will begin to use the zettabyte, or a million petabytes (we skipped the exabyte, or 1000 petabytes). According to IDC, humanity’s total digital output is expected to pass 1.2 zettabytes this year, or 1,200,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes.

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  • Rumours of a 3D Motorola Handset Rise From Below

    Rumours of a 3D Motorola Handset Rise From Below

    Posted on April 27, 2010 | No Comments
    3D is pretty hot right now. There's the movies, the TVs, the games, the handhelds, and, well, why not the mobile phones? Photos of a rumoured 3D phone by Motorola surfaced today, and while the screen on the device looks 2D on my monitor, there is reason to believe that the screen is, in fact, a 3D thingo.

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  • Japan’s DoCoMo announces new mobile projector for cell phones

    Japan’s DoCoMo announces new mobile projector for cell phones

    Posted on April 22, 2010 | No Comments
    It's not that there's a shortage of mobile projectors, but when DoCoMo (Japan's biggest cell phone carrier) announces [JP] a model for its 55 million customers, it deserves a mention. DoCoMo specifically suggests using the F01 with Fujitsu's uber-cool "Separate Keitai", a cell phone that breaks into two parts (and that's currently available on the Japanese market only).

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  • Deadline Extended for Compulsory Phone Registration in Mexico

    Deadline Extended for Compulsory Phone Registration in Mexico

    Posted on April 15, 2010 | No Comments
    Last week, we reported on the looming deadline facing customers of Mexican telcos, where they were made to register their personal details or else face disconnection. At the time of that post, there were still tens of millions of customers that needed to register. One week later, the deadline has come and gone, and while 1.49 million mobile phones were registered at the last minute, around 30% of mobile phone users have still failed to do so. Cofetel, the Mexican regulator, has come out and said that rather than disconnecting the unregistered accounts immediately, additional time will be granted to process all the last-minute registrations. Cofetel will continue to register all applications “that enter the system on time and in the correct manner”.

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  • Review: HTC HD2 on T-Mobile

    Review: HTC HD2 on T-Mobile

    Posted on April 8, 2010 | No Comments
    Features:
    • Tethering enabled
    • Striking 4.3-inch screen
    • 1GHz processor
    • 5-megapixel camera with flash
    • $199 with 2-year contract
    Pros:
    • Amazing screen
    • Great media features
    • Thin and light
    Cons:
    • Windows 6.5 with no current upgrade path
    • A bit big
    • Includes two Transformers movies
    Short Version Pity the poor HD2. It's one of the most amazing phones I've seen all year but like some ultra-evolved dinosaur at the end of the Cretaceous period, it was born just as a cataclysmic asteroid (Windows Phone 7) was about to change the entire ecosystem. Still, for someone looking for a great media phone and one of the best Windows Mobile Phones I've ever seen, you could do worse.

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  • T-Mobile MyTouch to get wire-free charging

    T-Mobile MyTouch to get wire-free charging

    Posted on March 25, 2010 | No Comments
    PureEnergy is selling their WildCharge wireless charging solution at select T-Mobile stores and will be offering a special charging pad for the MyTouch, T-Mo’s popular Android phone. This is one of the first wireless charging solutions out there and, in addition to the Palm line, one of the first carrier-approved wireless charging solutions. Click through for [...]

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  • Video: Android hacked in place of Windows Mobile on a Touch Pro2

    Video: Android hacked in place of Windows Mobile on a Touch Pro2

    Posted on March 11, 2010 | No Comments
    While a lot of people are pretty pumped about Windows Phone 7, there's are some people who definitely are not: everyone stuck on a now antiquated Windows Mobile 6.5 handset. Microsoft has already confirmed that if your phones running 6.5, it's not going to be running 7 any time soon. If you can't join'em, beat'em, right? There's a new project in the works which aims to breath new life into old Windows Mobile 6.5 phones.. by replacing the whole OS with Android.

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  • Opera Mini 5 beta gets a non-Java version for Windows Mobile phones

    Opera Mini 5 beta gets a non-Java version for Windows Mobile phones

    Posted on March 4, 2010 | No Comments
    Opera Software has been busy lately, releasing fresh finalized and beta products on a near-daily basis. This morning, the company announced that it has released a native version of Opera Mini 5 beta for handsets running Windows Mobile 5 and 6. Interestingly, the new WinMo version of Opera Mini does not require Java. That basically means any Windows Mobile phone can accommodate the app. Despite not requiring Java, Opera Mini 5 beta for Windows Mobile includes the same feature set as the Java-based version.

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  • ‘Scuse me guv’nor. You seem to have forgotten your teeth

    ‘Scuse me guv’nor. You seem to have forgotten your teeth

    Posted on March 2, 2010 | No Comments
    Everyone considers the airport to be quite the hassle. The waiting, the unpacking, the undressing. But we suffer through it daily for some sort of sense of security. The British though, apparently don’t have that sort of time to waste. A recent study by Airport Parking and Hotels revealed that an alarming array and number [...]

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  • Should mobile phones be subject to warrantless police search?

    Should mobile phones be subject to warrantless police search?

    Posted on February 19, 2010 | No Comments
    At what point do you consider something "unreasonable"? Let's say you're pulled over while speeding—do the police have the right to search your mobile phone? And let's say they do, and they find other verboten material on the phone? Should you also be on the hook for that, on top of your speeding ticket? It's a pretty important debate, and it's one that going on right now.

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  • Motorola wants mobile phones and TV to share a stronger bond

    Motorola wants mobile phones and TV to share a stronger bond

    Posted on February 18, 2010 | No Comments
    You know what I was thinking the other day? “It would be so rad if I could get MOTOBLUR to work on my TV.” And now, Motorola is doing exactly that by working on a platform to get its cell phones to play nice with TV set-top boxes. To get things kicked off, MOTOBLUR, the Android [...]

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  • NEC chip helps make cell phone displays viewable outdoors, saves power

    NEC chip helps make cell phone displays viewable outdoors, saves power

    Posted on February 17, 2010 | No Comments
    If you've ever got upset about not being able to view what your cell phone screen displays while you are outside your house, NEC's new color-compensation chip is probably good news for you. The chip, which is specifically made for LCDs for mobile phones, helps to make them easier to view in bright outdoor settings.

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  • New NEC chip helps make cell phone displays viewable outdoors, saves power

    New NEC chip helps make cell phone displays viewable outdoors, saves power

    Posted on February 17, 2010 | No Comments
    If you've ever got upset about not being able to view what your cell phone screen displays while you are outside your house, NEC's new color-compensation chip is probably good news for you. The chip, which is specifically made for LCDs for mobile phones, helps to make them easier to view in bright outdoor settings.

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