The last few weeks have been dominated by the announcement of new hardware from Apple and Nokia in the form of the iPhone 5 and the rather gorgeous looking Lumia 920, respectively. Media events held by Nokia and Apple concentrated on introducing the world to the two new pieces of kit and have succeeded in raising excitement levels for the future of the industry. Apple's new iPhone and the Lumia 920 are sure to be extremely successful in their own right, but it's also worth paying some attention to what the world's largest smartphone vendor - Samsung - has in store for us.
There’s no better stress reduction tool than taking control of something that you can fling at other objects in order to bring about total annihilation and creating utter chaos as you do it. Luckily for the designers and developers over at Rovio, they understood our need to break stuff and brought the fantastic Angry Birds title to our mobile and desktop devices which in turn catapulted them to the top of the iOS, OS X and Android charts. So what do you do after gaining so much success with a bunch of rage-filled birds? You take the next logical step, turn the tables around and release Bad Piggies.
Despite all the negative comments about its neither-a-phone-nor-tablet display size, the Galaxy Note is now among Samsung’s more successful products. According to official figures released in June, the company sold a cool 7 million units of the device seven months since its launch. Samsung later announced the technically improved Galaxy S III-based Galaxy Note II. Now, while the next Galaxy Note announcement is months away, the folks over at Concept Phones have come up with an interesting mockup called the Galaxy Note X. Check it out after the jump.
The iPhone 5 event has been and gone, and although Apple didn't really announce anything that hadn't already been leaked or speculated about beforehand, it was deemed to be a major success. The immediate depletion of the pre-order sales stock confirms that Apple has a commercial success at hand in the for of the iPhone 5, but now that the excitement is over, consumers need something else to get their teeth into and get excited about.
We definitely live in a world where we all value the benefit of receiving something for nothing, which is why a lot of the most popular mobile apps are ones that are entirely free of charge to download and don't cost anything to use. Consumers may not immediately see the value in developers building software that isn't monetized, but a lot of times, the work is supported by investors or finances that come from advertisers meaning that savings can be passed onto the consumer. The AireTalk app is a great example of a free of charge piece of kit, but it also has a ton of functionality as well.
Announced four days ago, and all set to be launched on September 21st, five days from now, the iPhone 5 will be competing directly against Windows Phone 8 based smartphones like the Nokia Lumia 920 and Android based smartphones like the Samsung Galaxy S III and HTC One X. We’ve already compared the former two against the iPhone 5, and now it’s time to compare it against the One X.
After four iterations, Apple has upped the display size of the iPhone from 3.5 to 4-inches, with an appropriate increase in resolution (1136 x 640). It is arguably the biggest feature of the iPhone 5 for most people, as the other big feature - 4G LTE - is still restricted to limited to a select number of cities in the U.S. and Europe.
Mobile devices are not just great for calling, SMSing, browsing the web, sending e-mails and increasing productivity, but are also more commonly being used as high-spec gaming machines. With even your average smartphone or tablet device packing in multiple cores, one can immerse oneself in console-standards of gaming, and year by year, we're seeing many of the big publishers embracing mobile.
S Voice for Galaxy S III may look and work a lot like Siri for iPhone 4S, but it has been shown in multiple tests that both voice-based services are, in most ways, inferior to Google Now that comes built-in with Android 4.1 Jelly Bean.
One of the great things about the smartphone industry is its diversity and contains a number of different mobile operating systems as well as a plethora of devices being pushed to the market by a variety of different manufacturers. There is no definition of a one-size-fits-all device with each new handset offering its own set of features and abilities that appeal to different user sets. One of the frustrating things from a consumer perspective is appreciating 95% of what a device offers, but wanting to make the additional 5% up with options from a different device.
