If you've even the remotest insight into the mobile app and gaming sphere, you'll undoubtedly have stumbled across Angry Birds on a number of occasions. In fact, you wouldn't even have needed to pick up a smartphone or slab to have encountered the immensely-popular title, and the fact it can be played in Chrome, on Facebook, Windows or Mac suggests nobody has managed to avoid those pesky multicolored poultry.
The battles between Apple and Samsung have taken up a large chunk of blog-space this year, but whilst the Cupertino company may have recently prevailed in the courtroom over its bitter rival, back in the mobile market, it appears the Korean company is making very good headway.
If you can't seem to decide between iOS, Android, BlackBerry or Windows Phone, then worry not, when 2013 comes around there will be another new kid on the block in the form of Mozilla's Firefox OS. Although the company has been seeding early builds of the operating system to developers since summer and actually introduced it to the world during Mobile World Congress, there is little that we actually know about it.
Two days ago we discussed a report from Bloomberg which claimed that Motorola’s next smartphone - to be announced on September 5th at a joint event with Verizon Wireless - would have one very distinctive design feature: an edge to edge, bezel-less display. Later in our post, we provided two pieces of evidence that strongly suggest that Bloomberg’s claim would turn out to be true.
Angry Birds is one of those games which either invokes emotions of extreme joy with mobile gamers, or manages to send you down the other path entirely and frustrate and annoy you to the point of deletion. As an iPhone and iPad owner, the game has single handedly managed to drive me round the bend as well as filling countless hours of boredom with the excitement that comes attached with flinging rage filled birds with varying powers at lethargic and nomadic swine. Regardless of my personal love-hate affair with the Angry Birds franchise, it's an undeniable fact that Rovio has enjoyed phenomenal success with the game, and if the latest teaser is anything to go by, then it looks like we could be in for another installment.
If you were one of the many people around the world who took the plunge and purchased the Google Nexus 7 when it was first announced during the annual I/O conference back in June, then congratulations on making a great decision. Google has managed to work together with ASUS to design and develop a rather fantastic little tablet that really manages to sit in a class of its own within its size category. Google may not be everyone's company of choice, but they have managed to release a product that has immediately become one of the best tablets on the market for the price point it sits at.
The Galaxy S III handset brought with it a wide level of excitement from Android users who couldn't wait to get their hands on the powerful new device, but also from the wider technology loving community who couldn't wait to see which direction Samsung had taken with the successor to their insanely popular Galaxy S II smartphone. Judging from the sales figures of the S III, it doesn't look like consumers have been disappointed with the hardware, but there was one feature that was widely expected to be included, and was notably missing in action at release.
The TabletSMS application that is available from the Google Play Store is an extension to the extremely popular DeskSMS service that users have been enjoying on their Android devices for quite some time. For those that may not be familiar with what DeskSMS brings to the table, it is basically an installation that allows users of Android smartphones to send and intercept messages from a variety of services such as network texting, Google Talk or GMail. The app has been extremely popular due to the fact that it essentially allows users to send text messages that originate from their number, using popular messaging browsers or chat clients like Trillian or Beejive.
Although it has become one of the most hotly contested industries in the world at the minute and is potentially an extremely stressful market for manufacturers to be involved in, consumers should be taking the opportunity to sit back and reap the rewards and device choice that is coming out of the smartphone industry. It's becoming increasingly difficult to actually keep up with all of the different device launches and announcements, but generally speaking, the large manufacturers like Apple and Samsung make sure their products get noticed.
This may start a flame war, but in my opinion there is no doubt that smartphones released after 2007 have a design that is, in one way or another, inspired and influenced by the design of the original iPhone. Physical keyboards are almost completely dead, front side of smartphones are quite often dominated by their display etc. etc.
