Holiday Gift Guide »

Simon Sage’s education largely surrounded writing, technology and online community, leading him to begin his blogging career at www.BlackBerryCool.com and to quickly discover a vibrant and active community surrounding BlackBerry and mobile technology. In exploring RIM’s platform, he has learned what enterprises are looking for in mobility as well as what makes the innocuous BlackBerry so appealing to them. Recently Simon’s been covering RIM’s gradual move into an already-crowded consumer market, and the impact of burgeoning challengers, such as the iPhone, as well as long-time leaders, like Nokia, on BlackBerry’s advancement.

With plenty of content under his belt, Simon will be branching off a bit to see what other smartphone manufacturers are working on while still using BlackBerry as a barometer. At IntoMobile, you can count on his posts being even-handed, well-informed and thought-out.

RSS

Posts by Simon Sage

TeleNav announces HTML5 maps, complete with voice guidance and turn-by-turn navigation

Now here’s an interesting move. TeleNav, a big name in the GPS space, has just announced that their turn-by-turn GPS service is going to be delivered through HTML5, making it wholly usable in just about any modern mobile browser. In the same fel swoop, TeleNav will be opening up this code to developers, so they can embed maps and directions into their pages for free. Consumers will also enjoy the service for free, which will include voice guidance, rerouting, points of interest information, and live tracking. This is a pretty … Read more

iPhone-safari 2 months ago

Simon Sage

LG announces Prada 3.0 for fashionistas

After a few stray glimpses, LG and Prada have announced their next joint effort. The Prada 3.0 has a 4.3-inch 800 x 480 Nova display, 8 megapixel camera with LED flash and 1080p video recording, dual-core 1 GHz processor, and 8 GB of on-board storage (plus microSD). NFC is Currently, it’s running Android 2.3, but an update to 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich is planned. As you might expect, the phone has a very distinctive style about it. Though there’s nothing too outrageous about the Prada 3.0 – in the end … Read more

LG-prada-3 2 months ago

Simon Sage

Sony Ericsson Nypon may be a smaller Arc HD

We’ve been seeing a lot of the Sony Ericsson Arc HD, code-named Nozomi, but it may have a smaller, nearly-identical brother called the Nypon. The only telling difference between the above picture and those we had seen earlier is the placement of the front-facing camera; otherwise, it has the same stark, blocky design, and single silver band for navigation keys. While the Nozomi has a 4.3-inch 1280 x 720 touchscreen, the Nypon LT22i here will only be 4 inches and 960 x 540 resolution – which by any everyday consumer’s … Read more

SonyEricsson-Nypon 2 months ago

Simon Sage

Skype for Android updated with photo and video sharing

Sometimes you can’t always launch into a full-blown mobile video call, but the latest update to Skype for Android ensures you can still share what’s going on with friends. The 2.6 update to Skype now enables picture- and video-sending over Wi-Fi or 3G. There are some added optimizations for devices running on an NVIDIA Tegra 2 chip, which should improve battery life and video quality. Skype’s app for Android added video calling support relatively recently, and has since expanded device support. While VoIP might be Skype’s bread and butter, they’re getting their … Read more

Android-Skype 2 months ago

Simon Sage

BlackBerry OS 7.1 to introduce Device Analyzer to diagnose problems

The leaked BlackBerry Bold 9900 OS from a few weeks ago that enabled mobile hotspot had another subtle addition. This is a new BlackBerry Device Analyzer, which can diagnose the status of wireless signal, e-mail connectivity, battery life, processing speed, and miscellaneous hardware components.  Although it looks fairly user-friendly, it wouldn’t be surprising if carriers had access to the data generated by this app in some way in order to improve customer service much like Carrier IQ tries to (minus the privacy concerns). In fact, given RIM’s history of working … Read more

BlackBerry-deviceanalyzer 2 months ago

Simon Sage

Carrier IQ itemizes what exactly they’re monitoring

Carrier IQ has come under a lot of fire about how much data its monitoring service collects, and governments are concerned about whether there are any privacy violations occurring. Manufacturers like Apple and RIM have been quick to distance themselves from the company, while others like HTC and Samsung may be liable for their involvement with Carrier IQ. In response to the backlash, Carrier IQ has released a 19-page document explaining what exactly their app does, and what it doesn’t do. Its primary goal is to inform wireless network operators … Read more

CarrierIQ-heatmap 2 months ago

Simon Sage

BlackBerry PlayBook hack adds USB host

So far, the Dingleberry jailbreak for the BlackBerry PlayBook has only really provided access to a limited Android Market, but now that it’s been out for awhile, some other folks have managed to create USB host access. That means with a chunky little USB-to-microUSB adapter, you can plug in standard pen drives and access files. Although having to carry around that clunky adapter isn’t ideal, I guess it’s better than having a thicker tablet to accommodate full-sized USB. There’s certainly some utility for being able to swap around files more … Read more

BlackBerry-PlayBook-USBhost 2 months ago

Simon Sage

10% of U.S. consumers own a tablet, two thirds are iPads

A recent survey by Kantar Worldpanel concluded that 10% of American consumers over the age of 16 own a tablet of some kind. Of course, the iPad accounts for about two thirds of that, but over the last six months, iPad’s share of sales has shrunk to 50%. As a case in point, 10% of respondents said they were planning on picking up the Amazon Kindle Fire in the next year. According to the research, 72% of iPhone owners intended to buy an iPad, meanwhile other research has indicated that … Read more

tablets 2 months ago

Simon Sage

Rogers LTE network expands around Toronto and Vancouver

Earlier this year, Rogers flipped the switch on Canada’s first LTE network in Ottawa, which then spread to Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. Now LTE coverage surrounding the major Canadian hubs of Toronto and Vancouver will get some expanded coverage. Around Toronto, Brampton, Vaughan, Richmond Hill, and Markham will now get service, and out at the other end of the country, West Vancouver, North Vancouver, Port Coquitlam, Delta, Langley, Surrey and Maple Ridge will be able to tap into wireless data speeds averaging between 12 – 25 Mbps. That means by the end of … Read more

Toronto-LTE 2 months ago

Simon Sage

BlackBerry: the phone even muggers won’t steal

A mugger preying on students near Columbia University has apparently been on the hunt for iPhones, but don’t worry BlackBerry owners – he’ll just toss your phone back at you in disgust. An unnamed suspsect apparently bumped into two students, both of whom had BlackBerry smartphones, and left empty-handed. A smattering of similar reports illustrate similar situations. A recent NYPD report says small handheld gadgets like smartphones account for over half of local robberies in October. iPhones aren’t the only Apple product popular among robbers; elsewhere, thieves recently jacked 125 … Read more

mugger 2 months ago

Simon Sage

Facebook for Android more popular than most of Google’s apps

Nielsen just released some stats on Android app usage over a single month, and you might be surprised to hear that though Google apps dominate the top 10, one outside app has manage to wedge itself into the number two spot. After the Android Market (which is an understandable first destination for smartphone owners),  the app most likely to be used over the course of 30 days was Facebook. The trend was consistent across three age brackets, ranging from 18 to 44, with Gmail, Google Search, Google Maps and YouTube … Read more

Android-nielsenapps 2 months ago

Simon Sage