Research In Motion's BlackBerry OS is clearly struggling to maintain relevance in the current consumer market, but with all three of the major mobile operating systems having taken steps to implement some description of voice-recognition functionality, it appears BlackBerry will also be joining the party, too.
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VLC Media Player from VideoLAN has long stood out as the media player of choice among consumers. Famed for handling just about any media format you could care to throw at it, it’s certainly the best in the business, and although the VLC Media Player app was tossed from the App Store by Apple, VideoLAN as bounced back, offering an iteration for Google’s Android platform.
With a considerable amount of ground to make up already on the various app hubs available from the likes of Apple, Microsoft needs to deliver the goods with its Windows 8 Store, and the Redmond company has now released details via the MSDN Blog of how its new store will distribute apps.
As primarily an iOS user (with quite a bit of time for Android, mind), I have had very little experience with Microsoft's Windows Phone platform. In fact, apart from toying around with a Lumia 800 (which, by the way, I did rather enjoy), I have to confess to being a bit of a noob when it comes to the platform, but nevertheless, I am as excited as any with the prospect of Windows Phone 8.
Firefox's well-documented six week release cycle means as soon as one version arrives, the beta of the next edition is no more than a couple of days away. True to that motif, just two days after Firefox 14 was released for Windows, Mac and Linux, Firefox 15 beta has arrived, which, among other things, takes care of a few nagging memory leaks.
Sparrow, the creator of those very popular iOS and OS X applications, has just been acquired by Google, in a move which will certainly raise more than a few eyebrows. Sparrow has dedicated its existence on making some altogether great apps for Apple's platforms, but it is the Big G that has decided to swoop for the start-up, and Sparrow will now join the Gmail team to "accomplish a bigger vision."
With the final chapter in the trilogy of Christian Bale's Batman - Dark Knight Rises - having launched worldwide yesterday, the iOS title also made its way over to the App Store to supplement its box office release. Now, casually late as usual, the Android iteration is available to download over at the Google Play Store at the cost of $6.99.
As well as making any tech fan shudder, the drop tests of our much loved gadgets serve an educational purpose, because despite most consumers getting carried away with nice displays, sharp cameras and other great hardware features, few actually take into consideration how quickly it can all be lost with one spillage or drop on the floor.
As important as the hardware specification of a smartphone or tablet may be, it's not necessarily the end-all, be-all, and the software it runs can be an even more significant factor in the overall quality and popularity of a device.
Earlier on this week, we learned European carriers were stockpiling nano-SIM cards in anticipation for the launch of the next-generation iPhone. For those who missed the previous report, the nano-SIM removes all needless plastic from the micro-SIM, saving those precious extra millimeters within a mobile device for more important hardware.
