If you cast your minds back to last year, you may remember Google's well-documented purchase of Motorola Mobility for just over $12 billion; it was, after all, quite a big deal. In a year in which software rival Microsoft also made a rather large telecommunications acquisition ($8.5 billion for Skype), the Big G reckoned the buy-out would supercharge its already-successful Android platform. With 700,000 daily activations over the festive period of last year alone, Android has grown to be come a focal point of the web company's business.
Gaining root access on an Android smartphone is one of the first things enthusiasts do when they get their device. The reason is simple: every Android device comes with restrictions (of varying severity) that limit the privileges apps can get on the operating system.
The fundamental difference between how Apple sells its products and how other computer manufacturers sell theirs lies in the sheer product variety within the same general form factor. Apple believes in putting all its resources into making one unbelievably amazing product and updating it once a year while manufacturers like HTC, Samsung, Motorola believe in putting their resources into making a wide variety of amazing products which, naturally, end up looking and feeling pretty similar to one another.
There is no denying that the exchange of small written messages between users through the use of mobile phones is one of the main and most used features on any device. In fact, text messaging is so popular globally that recent reports estimated that a staggering 6.1 trillion text messages are sent annually which equates to a monumental 200,000 messages sent every second.
Photo-editing and sharing apps are a dime-a-dozen on mobile platforms these days. Only a handful of them are original ideas while the rest are mostly half-baked copies that just don’t offer the same experience; apps like Instagram and Paper Camera with their unique ideas go on to reach millions of active users and stay consistently on top of their respective platform’s app market. Today, we came across a new photo-editing and sharing that looks to be “heavily inspired” by Paper Camera, but offers a couple of cool, unique features. Check it out after the jump!
The ongoing spat between Apple and Samsung shows no signs of letting up, with Apple having just filed a motion for preliminary injunction against the Korean LCD specialist's Galaxy Nexus in the US.
The good people at Google have been getting their heads down, with their Director and Managing Counsel of Telecoms and Media, Richard Whitt filing a 'special temporary authority' application to the Federal Communications Commission which will let them test their new next-generation personal communication device outside of a laboratory environment. It all sounds very technical, but just what is a 'next generation personal communication device'?
While popular Android smartphones and tablets received unofficial ports to the latest version of Android i.e. 4.0.3 Ice Cream Sandwich a long time ago, manufacturers are only now gearing up for the official release. HTC has officially stated that most of their top-of-the-line devices will be updated “later this year” and Samsung did say that the Galaxy S II and Galaxy Note will receive ICS in Q1 2012 with updates for other devices to “soon follow”.
While technology, by definition, is meant to solve society’s problems, its proliferation into our daily lives has, arguably, made things more complex than simple. We now spend less time having actual “face time” with our friends and family than we do with technologies like Apple’s FaceTime, Facebook and Twitter (to name a few). We are glued to our smartphones 24/7: constantly looking for information and entertainment, whether it is from checking up on social networks, reading email, texting, playing casual games etc. etc.
Malware on mobile platforms is slowly but surely becoming a real issue. Its existence was basically ignored in the days of weaker smartphones, but with today’s multi-core, multiple GBs of RAM-toting smartphones with “open” operating systems such as Android, it simply can’t be ignored. Because of its flexible nature and lack of strict app-policing by Google, malware is a bigger issue on Android than it is on iOS and Windows Phone 7. A new malware has been discovered for Android, Redmond Pie has learned. This one more dangerous than usual, because it affects between 10,000-30,000 Android smartphones everyday. Details after the jump.
