Breaking news, information, and analysis on the latest mobile phones and mobile technology
Popular Android keyboard Swiftkey is currently pushing its latest update. Aside from the usual upgrades and bug fixes, the update comes with a blast of winter cheer! Swiftkey now includes a fun theme that fits with the winter season. To celebrate the holidays, the keyboard comes in an icy blue with snowy flurries which fly…
Today in the Fall of Western Civilization: I give you the iPotty. The iPotty is a colorful, Fisher-Price-style plastic training potty for toddlers. What sets it apart is its built-in iPad mount. While there have been any number of crass cash-in accessories for Apple‘s tablet, this one might just take the cake. Apparently the world ends not…
Today Synaptics unveiled the latest in its line of affordable capacitive touch screen technology. Courting emerging markets, Synaptic’s latest offering, the ClearPad S2331 and ClearPad S2133 provide full two-finger support and allows for free rotate gestures at affordable prices. The company’s higher end ClearPad S2333 provides five-finger performance as well. Synaptics has increasingly found business in…
The pattern unlock feature has been available to Android users since the beginning. But with the added security feature, one can only unlock directly to the Home screen, not into a favorite app. Today, a Google patent has surfaced that appears to allow unlocking directly to apps with a pattern. The patent shows a functionality…
Synaptic had a few new things to announce at Mobile World Congress 2013 today, with “touch” obviously being the focus. Synaptics’ announcements include the ClearPad 3400 and Single-Layer On-Cell multitouch solution. The ClearPad 3400 is a new capacitive multitouch panel for high-end smartphones, allowing for great precision and accuracy. The ClearPad 3400 still retains such accuracy…
Tactus Technology thinks it has the perfect solution for smartphone users who want a touchscreen device, but don’t want to have to sacrifice the tactile feedback and accuracy advantages that come with a physical keyboard. Demoed at Society for Information Display’s Display Week 2012 and reported by The Verge, this microfluidic prototype display features a keyboard that…
How is that whole Kindle Fire thing working out for Amazon so far? Pretty damn well, actually. According to eDataSource, a market research firm, pre-order sales for the Kindle Fire reached 95,000 on the first day it was made available. That’s a lot of fire. Compared to Apple’s iPad, the number of pre-orders is on the…
Charging $199 for a tablet is no easy accomplishment for any company, yet Amazon hit that golden price point today with the new Kindle Fire. But analyst Gene Munster of Piper Jaffray predicts the company may be sacrificing money to get there. According to him, “Amazon is likely losing $50 per Kindle Fire.” For every…
Pinch-to-zoom, sideways swipes to access multiple home screens, and even touch-sensitive bezels are becoming common occurrences in smartphones and tablets, but a paper being published by the Association for Computing Machinery suggests Android and iPhone are going about gesture-based user interfaces all wrong. The article argues that many gestures are invisible, unexplained, and inconsistent across…
At Mobile World Congress 2011, touchscreen manufacturer and researcher Synaptics have been showing off their new Series 4 ClearPad touchscreen, which not only shaves off a precious millimeter of thickness by being built right into the LCD display (as opposed to being a separate layer on top of it, like usual), it can also work…