NASA: Your smartphone is as smart as the Curiosity rover
While the Mars Curiosity rover is the most complex machine NASA has ever sent to another planet, the computer that runs it is no more powerful than the one in your smartphone.
The robotic rover, which landed in the Gale Crater on Mars early Monday morning, now is being put through a series of tests to make sure all of its systems are functioning properly after its more than 350-million-mile journey from Earth. It may be several weeks before the SUV-sized robotic rover is ready to begin its trek across the Martian surface.
Curiosity is on what scientists hope will be a two-year mission to find out if the planet has or ever has had what it takes to support life, even in a microbial form. The rover also will look for signs that humans could one day live on Mars.
While Curiosity is on a major scientific mission, the rover itself is something of an engineering marvel, too, according to the men and women who built it. Read more...
LG working on Retina-beating 5-in. smartphone display
LG Display has introduced a 5-inch full HD LCD panel for smartphone displays -- the highest resolution mobile panel to date, the company said on Monday.
The widescreen panel is based on AH-IPS (Advanced High Performance In-Plane Switching) technology and has a 1920-by-1080 pixel resolution or 440 pixels per inch (ppi), according to LG.
That compares to Apple's Retina display, which has 264 ppi on the new iPad and 326 ppi on the iPhone 4S.
With the 16-by-9 aspect ratio, the panel is also 0.5 inches larger, and 2.2 times denser in pixels compared to the preceding 4.5-inch panel at 329 ppi and a 1280-by-720 pixel resolution, according to LG Display. Read more...
Onion Browser brings encrypted mobile browsing to the iPhone
In an era when security is at the top of our minds, mobile web browsers seem to be lagging behind. There are few options for secure web sessions on smartphones, but a new iPhone app called Onion Browser is changing that. Onion Browser connects to the Tor network to encrypt all your data.
The Tor Onion router network is essentially a series of virtual tunnels that your connection will bounce through before reaching the destination. While connecting through Tor is slower than a non-tunneled connection would be, it has the upshot of making it almost impossible to monitor your activity online — it’s the closest you can get to anonymity online. Read more...
Google exec hints of Android 5.0 release this fall
Google isn't offering much information about the forthcoming Android 5.0, even though there are rumors saying that the new version of the operating system will be available on a smartphone by early summer.
It's more likely that it will be rolled out in the fall, based on comments made by Hiroshi Lockheimer, vice president of engineering for mobile at Google. He spoke with Computerworld at Mobile World Congress here on Monday.
"After Android 4 comes 5, and we haven't announced the timing yet, which we're still sorting out," Lockheimer said. "There's a lot of engineering work behind it still, and there's also just the question of how to time it." Read more...
Panasonic Eluga is a lightweight, waterproof, and oddly-named Android smartphone
Back in December, Panasonic announced that it was preparing a full-on global assault on the smartphone market. Up first is Europe, where the company’s opening salvo will be fired in a 4.3″ shell. That phone has now gotten official as the Panasonic Eluga.
An interesting choice in names, to be sure, but it probably has something to do with the phone’s aquatic exploits (like the whale that rhymes with Eluga). It joins the ever-increasing list of waterproof and dustproof phones, though it’s anything but whale-like in terms of weight at just 103g. That makes it lighter than even the waifish NEC Medias N-04C. Hardware details are very thin at this point, but Panasonic has revealed that the Eluga’s 4.3-inch display packs 540 x 960 pixels — no word on whether it uses an OLED panel as previously rumored. Read more...
RIM collapsing as Apple iPhone wins the enterprise
As speculation turns to iPhone 5 comes news that Research In Motion (RIM) is dead. Sure, this might sound harsh but the company's move to replace its leadership seems unlikely to bring it back from the brink. Apple [AAPL] has unleashed forces RIM has been unable to match.
Fall of the giant
What’s the news? Company co-CEO's, Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie have stepped down. RIM now has a new CEO, ex-COO, Thorsten Heins. The fightback -- such as it is -- begins with two new model phones scheduled for introduction later this year, hopefully.
These moves reflect declining BlackBerry sales, declining satisfaction levels, decline across the board at the world's once leading smartphone company.
Think back and you'll recall a time when RIM devices seemed to exude rubber-clad cool: if you didn't have a BlackBerry you wanted one, and business users who did possess them loved them so much they'd work in bed with them, creating armies of BlackBerry widows in the process.
Apple made your widows smile
Apple's focus on users meant those BlackBerry widows ended up with their own electronic gadget to use at bedtime, and when their business-focused husbands saw what they were doing, they wanted a little iAction too. Read more...
Analysis: Apple struggles to take bigger bite out of China
Apple Inc's share of China's booming smartphone market has risen sharply in the past two years, but for now the company that sells the iconic iPhone is being outpaced by nimble rivals.
It is not that Apple's iPhones and iPads are losing favour among Chinese consumers. The iconic products are flying off the shelves at Apple's five flagship stores in Shanghai and Beijing, unauthorized sellers, and even from fake shops dressed up to look eerily like the real thing.
The problem facing Apple seems to be timing.
Network technology is not sufficient to fully support iPhone and iPad capabilities, while other handset makers supply phones that support the various mobile standards used in China. Read more...
Samsung: We have ‘high hopes’ on beating smartphone sales estimates in 2011
Korean electronics giant Samsung believes it will surpass internal sales estimates for its Android and Windows Phone handsets in 2011, ending the year with a flourish as its competition begins to downgrade their forecasts on dwindling demand, Reuters reports.
Samsung has sold more than 30 million of its Galaxy S and S II smartphones over the past year, leading the company to leapfrog Finnish mobile rival on smartphone sales for the first time since it began its push to market devices powered by Android and Windows Phone.
The announcement by an unnamed executive at a company press conference comes at a time when Samsung’s smartphone rival HTC has downgraded its sales target for the fourth quarter, citing increased competition from the Korean vendor and its Cupertino-based rival Apple:
“We are pinning high hopes…on achieving sales higher than our previous plan.” Read more...
Samsung delays new Android model release after Jobs’s death
Samsung Electronics Co said on Monday it had delayed the launch of a new smartphone based on Google's latest version of the Android operating system while the world pays tribute to Apple co-founder Steve Jobs who died last week.
The delay also comes as an intensifying legal battle between Apple and Samsung reaches a crucial point this week, when the two technology giants will meet in courtrooms in the United States, the Netherlands, Australia, South Korea and Japan.
Samsung had planned to introduce the new product based on the Ice Cream Sandwich system, which will unite the Android software used in tablets and smartphones, at its Mobile Unpack event in San Diego on Tuesday.
"We decided it was not the right time to announce a new product while the world was expressing tribute to Steve Jobs's passing," a Samsung spokesman said. Read more...
Apple’s device dominance drives e-book price-fixing lawsuit
A Seattle law firm has targeted Apple in an e-book price-fixing lawsuit partly because of the company's dominance in smartphone and tablet sales, the firm's managing director said.
Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro, a Seattle law firm, has filed a nationwide class-action lawsuit accusing Apple of conspiring with five top publishers to illegally fix the prices of e-books. The publishers named in the lawsuit, filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, are HarperCollins Publishers, Hachette Book Group, Macmillan Publishers, Penguin Group and Simon & Schuster.
Apple's strong market share in the smartphone and tablet businesses gave it the power to drive up e-book prices across the industry, including at rival seller Amazon.com, said Steve Berman, managing director at Hagens Berman. "Apple was the catalyst to all of this," he said Wednesday. Read more...
Google leaves Android App Inventor to the open source community
Last month's surprising closure of Google Labs may have its first significant casualty: Google has announced it is ending support for App Inventor for Android, but the company is ultimately leaving the fate of the project to the open source community.
Released in July of last year, App Inventor for Android was designed to enable nontechnical users to easily create Android smartphone apps, albeit ones that are relatively limited in functionality. The project hasn't enjoyed much in the way of broad success that could equate to future profits, which is why Google is cutting support for it along with the other slacker projects in the shuttered Labs.
However, Google recognizes that App Inventor has garnered success in the educational space, so the company plans to make the code open source and to "[explore] opportunities to support the educational use of App Inventor on an open source platform," according to the official Google App Inventor blog. Read more...
AMD sitting out smartphone market
Advanced Micro Devices is not immediately chasing the market for smartphones as it does not align with the company's strength in technologies like graphics, an executive said on Monday.
Smartphones are constrained on battery, pixels, and screen space, and AMD has other areas it can focus on in order to grow, said Rick Bergman, senior vice president and general manager for AMD's product group during the Pacific Crest Securities Technology Leadership Forum in Vail, Colorado. The company sees an opportunity to apply its graphics and chip technologies to tablets, where customers are demanding better video and battery life. Read more...
Hands on: The Google+ Android app is a winner
If you're a Google+ user with an Android smartphone or tablet, here's a simple piece of advice: Download the Google+ Android app right now. It's so well-designed, simple and straightforward to use, you would have thought that Google+ was designed to be a mobile service from the beginning.
(iPhone and iPad users now have their own app as well; check out "Google+ iPhone app: 5 things you need to know").
The home screen offers icons for all the most important parts of the service: Stream, Huddle, Photos, Profile and Circles. (Huddle is an extra that's not included in Google+'s Web interface; more about that in a moment.) Unfortunately, there is no Hangouts videoconferencing feature, which Google should consider adding in an upcoming version -- especially considering that many Android tablets and an increasing number of Android smartphones include a forward-facing camera for mobile videoconferencing. Read more...
U.S. Army wants soldiers to have advanced smartphones, wireless technology
As the U.S. Army ponders how to give every soldier a smartphone loaded with apps for military purposes -- and be able to support global communications not only with commercial cellular networks like Sprint, Verizon Wireless, or AT&T -- it is also exploring how it can quickly set up its own wireless network almost anywhere in the world.
"The vision we're looking at is, every soldier is issued a phone," says Michael McCarthy, director of operations at the Brigade Modernization Command, Mission Command Complex, at Fort Bliss, Texas. Here the testing of commercial smartphones and tablets has been going on for several months, sometimes with soldiers toting them along for general administrative duties and training, or even taking them out in field exercises in the rugged desert surroundings. Along with McCarthy, Ed Mazzanti and Col. Marissa Tanner are leading the project the Army calls "Connecting Soldiers to Digital Apps." Read more...
Bionic’s ‘coming soon’ release date sparks Android fan zeal
Summer smartphone releases have become as commonplace as new summer movies. But the movie industry does a much better job of scheduling and keeping a definitive release date.
Case in point: the Motorola Droid Bionic was announced in January by Motorola with Verizon saying it would be available by the end of June.
The Droid Bionic device remains unavailable in July, and according to evidence unearthed by Android Central it likely won't appear until Aug. 4. The news site posted an unidentified screen shot that referred (correctly) to July 14 as the store appearance of the Droid 3 and then listed Aug. 4 as the start of Droid Bionic sales.
Meanwhile, an unreleased advertising flyer from retailer Best Buy, which surfaced on the This is My Next tech news site, stated that the Droid Bionic is "coming soon." The flyer described the device as an "all-powerful, unstoppable machine" with a "superfast dual core processor" with dual camera video chat capabilities. The flyer also said the device can pull files wirelessly from desktop systems, and can be used as a TV remote control. Read more...