Breaking news, information, and analysis on the latest mobile phones and mobile technology
For some time now, test results linking brain cancer from cell phone usage has been a mixed bag. It does. It might. etc. Well, the latest report from the World Health Organization claims that there may be a significant risk brain cancer from cell phone usage. The report says that extensive use of wireless communication…
Nielsen has recently reported the results of their U.S. smartphone market research for April, and concluded that Android now has a 36% share out of all smartphone OSes, with iOS claiming 26%, and BlackBerry 23%. That’s pretty good for Android, but Nielsen has reported that Android has held the same portion for the last three…
The latest Berg Insight‘s report deals with mobile money services. According to the research company, the number of mobile money subscribers in emerging markets is forecasted to grow from 133 million users in 2010 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 40% to reach 709 million users in 2015. At the same time, the…
Although the tablet application market is pretty similar to the smartphone app market, it will develop its own identity in the coming years. Already we have a rising number of smartphone apps specially optimized for the large screens modern tablets offer as well as tablet-only titles. To that end In-Stat predicts that tablet application revenues…
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…
RIM’s first tablet, the BlackBerry PlayBook, has reportedly sold 250,000 units after the first month in stores, and Wedbush Securities analyst Scott Sutherland estimates sales by the end of the quarter (i.e. this month) to be in the 450,000 range. While that sounds decent, Sutherland soured his outlook on RIM. Early pre-launch estimates for PlayBook…
According to a report done on 1,000 people living in the UK over the course of 3 years, it’s expected that by 2015 over 50% of England’s population will use their mobile phone to conduct some sort of transaction involving money, either tapping to pay, thanks to near field communication (NFC) technology, or simply managing…
The Japanese mobile industry is one that’s filled with ridiculous devices made by handset vendors that almost never sell their creations overseas. It’s why many call Japan the Galápagos Islands of mobile. With the introduction of smartphones running iOS and Android however, things have started to change. For all the mind bending spec sheets that…
A recent survey by Nielsen asked 12,000 mobile device owners about the situations where they used tablets, e-book readers, and smartphones. While smartphones and tablets were most commonly used while watching TV, and e-book readers in bed, the most interesting statistic to me was that for smartphones, 28% of owners admitted to using it in…
Do something often enough and it soon becomes second nature. Researchers in Germany are working on using that ability for us to commit an action to muscle memory to design an interface [see video here] that doesn’t require any screens, just the palm of your hand. Take for example receiving an incoming call. If you’re…