A number of new research studies into the effectiveness, responsiveness and overall quality of smartphone and tablet touchscreens has found that Apple Inc. is still leading the pack. Mobile ad company Agawi has been putting a number of popular iOS and Android devices through their paces in an attempt to measure the performance of the touchscreen technology on the device, with the results putting the fruit company way ahead of the competition.
Google is as serious about its Android smartphone and tablet platform as it can be, and the latest “discovery” by François Beaufort is a definite testament to that. The Chromium expert noted a feature in the latest beta of Google Chrome for desktop that allows developers to control their Android devices directly from their desktop, thanks to an experimental screencast feature that Chrome beta carries.
Apple's iPhone 5s, as is so often the case with new, flagship smartphones launched by the Cupertino company, brought quite a few new and exciting features unprecedented in the mainstream smartphone market, and as well as being the first to include a 64-bit processor, the aluminum-clad handset's 'Touch ID' fingerprint sensor is also the first of its kind. Now The FIDO Alliance, a cluster of almost fifty companies pooling ideas on an eventual successor to the traditional password, reckons that Android devices could soon start to see something similar to Touch ID in as little as six months.
Just yesterday, a little digging by Ars Technica revealed that Samsung had rigged its Galaxy Note 3 device for benchmark tests in order to make it appear as though it performed at higher levels than it did. But while Samsung may have born the brunt of the criticism - not less since, this has happened before with the International Galaxy S4 - the problem doesn't begin and end with the South Korean company. Nope; as it transpires, many of the market's well-respected vendors like to, shall we say fine tune certain aspects of a device's make-up to reflect favorably when those benchmark apps are running, and the fully classified list, as collated by AnandTech, makes for very interesting reading.
iOS 7 has been out for the best part of 24 hours now, and already, adoption rates have surpassed that of the latest version of Android, and is now on more than 26% of devices out there. Of course, with more Android devices in the world, this isn't the fairest of comparisons, but with more than one quarter of iPhone, iPad and iPod touch devices running iOS 7, it's clear that Apple has the edge when it comes to getting its consumer base on the latest and greatest software.
The name Cyanogen is synonymous with the Android homebrew community, and many would argue that CyanogenMod is the best version of Android available. Featuring all kinds of additional features as well as removing much of the cruft that none of us really want in our daily dose of Android, CyanogenMod is great if you want a near-stock version of Android on your non-Nexus device.
We finally saw an end to the long drawn out affair that was Microsoft's courtship of Nokia a few days back when it was announced that the Redmond firm would be buying Nokia, or at least the interesting parts of it. Microsoft's biggest Windows Phone partner, Nokia, has arguably been the one OEM that has thrown all its weight behind the Windows Phone platform, and with good reason. Microsoft famously paid a small - or not so small - fortune to get Nokia to make Windows Phone handsets exclusively and it was perhaps only a matter of time before a purchase was made.
Nokia has been one of the leaders in smartphone innovation for a long time, before the Finnish giant lost out to iPhone and Android, so much so that the whole hardware division of Nokia was acquired by Microsoft just a few days ago. I have personally always strongly believed that Nokia would’ve done well to keep up with the changing market trend and combined their remarkable hardware with Google’s open source Android to make the perfect smartphone. While that never happened owing to the company’s partnership with Microsoft, it might come true now, as Nokia’s Asia Pacific (former) CEO, Thomas Zilliacus, has spun off a new company from Nokia with the aim to do just that.
If the smartphone was the biggest growth market in technology over the last five years, then wearable technology is quite possibly going to be in the same boat from this point forward, especially if all the rumored devices do actually see the light of day.
Kickstarter often throws up some intriguing products, particularly of the tech variety, but seldom do we see the kind of buzz and excitement around a start-up project than with Pressy, an Android-targeting peripheral recently launched on the site. With the initial goal already met five times over in the first two days alone, it's fair to say that this tiny device has the potential to become something huge, and if you read on, you'll find out just why.
