Looks like this whiteout winter may finally be waning. Time to soak up a little sunshine; so grab your bike, backpack, rod, oars, harness and a Pocket Ranger official State Park Guide app for Android or iOS and get yourself outside. Why a Pocket Ranger app? Because it’s stuffed full of info about anything and everything related to state parks in your area — for free.
U.S. District Judge Robert Scola believes Apple and Google-owned Motorola are more interested in using litigation as a business strategy than they are in resolving patent disputes. Both companies accused each other of infringing patents related to wireless technologies back in 2010, and today the case is still on going.
“The parties have no interest in efficiently and expeditiously resolving this dispute; they instead are using this and similar litigation worldwide as a business strategy that appears to have no end,” said Judge Scola in an order dated yesterday. “That is not a proper use of this court.”
You can get some pretty cool gadgets that can be remote controlled by your smartphones and tablets, such as helicopters, cars, and even tanks. But who wants one of those when you can control the real think?
At the Hack in the Box security conference in Amsterdam this week, Hugo Teso, a pilot turned IT technician, demonstrated the ability to remotely hijack an airplane using a smartphone and a radio transmitter.
Microsoft is planning a new lineup of Surface tablets that includes a 7-inch model designed to compete with Apple’s iPad mini and Google’s Nexus 7, The Wall Street Journal reports. The device will enter mass production later this year, according to people familiar with Microsoft’s plans, but it’s unclear when the company will bring the new slate to market.
Now that former Apple retail chief Ron Johnson has been fired from his CEO gig at JC Penney, there’s a lot of talk about whether or not the man who created the juggernaut of Apple’s retail experience will return to Cupertino, to fill the very role he vacated back in 2010.
In an interview with Bloomberg, former Apple CEO John Sculley was asked about what Ron Johnson should do now. Sculley notes that one of the best things about our business culture is that we allow people to fail, and that hiring Johnson would be a coup by any company.
First headhunter on the list? It should be Samsung, says Sculley.
Piper Jaffray has once again asked the teenage blight upon our fair nation to stop popping pimples and sexting for a second to tell them what gadgets they want to buy next year. And, duh, it’s the iPhone.
Thanks to those leaked screenshots that appeared on Tuesday, we’re pretty confident that Google Babel is no longer just a rumor, but a real product that’s patiently waiting to get its grand unveiling. And according to sources that are familiar with Google’s plans, it’s worth getting excited about.
They claim Babel aims to be “everything we have ever asked for in a unified messenger service,” with cross-platform syncing and a “first class iOS experience.”
Google has been stepping up its game with app curation in Google Play. TechCrunch has discovered that a record 60,000 apps were pulled from the store in February alone. Coincidentally, Google just launched a major redesign of Play today that focuses on highlighting great Android apps.
While not all of the bad apps are being pulled by Google directly, many of the deletions are related to spamming and other Google Play terms of service violations. You don’t normally think of Google when you hear about an app being pulled, but Apple isn’t the only one who regulates its app store—the two companies just do things differently.
Google Glass looks like the coolest piece of technology since the invention of the iPhone. Even though a ton of businesses will probably ban it, we can’t wait to try Sergey Brin’s new eyewear out.
Google Glass seems like it came right out of Star Trek, but the way this technical masterpiece works is actually pretty simple. Martin Missfeldt created the following infographic that lays out all the details on how Google Glass works so you can impress your friends with your scientific knowledge. Take a look:
EE has announced plans to double its 4G LTE network speeds in ten U.K. cities by the summer. The move will boost headline speeds to 80Mbps, and increase the average speed to 20Mbps for both new and existing subscribers. The carrier says this is part of its ambition to “stay one step ahead” as rival carriers prepare to launch their own 4G networks in the coming months.
Babel, a new chat service rumored to be on its way from Google, has been shown off in a bunch of leaked screenshots ahead of its official unveiling. The images reportedly come from a Google employee, and they show Babel running on a desktop. Not only do they confirm the service’s name, but also a number of its features.
WhatsApp has denied that it is holding sales talks with Google following reports that the company is on the verge of a $1 billion buyout. One source claimed last week that the hugely popular cross-platform messaging service has been in talks with Google for the last 4-5 weeks, but WhatsApp’s business development lead, Neeraj Arora, denies any discussions.
The iPhone 5 is set to launch on T-Mobile this Friday along side T-Mobile’s new “uncarrier” no contract strategy. Not wanting to get left behind, Virgin Mobile is planning to win over T-Mobile’s pre-paid customers by offering them $100 to switch sides.
In a new ad campaign called “Retain Your Brain” Virgin is offering $100 to T-Mobile customers to move their number over to one of its unlimited plans that start at $35 a month and could result in $334 of savings over two years.
There are a couple of cross-platform messaging apps that will help you bridge the divide between your friends on iOS and Android, but over the last year, WhatsApp has become the most popular option, and it’s caught the attention of Google.
A new report claims that Google is in talks to buy WhatsApp for $1 billion, but the talks have been going on for four or five weeks and haven’t been finalized yet.
The App Store and Google Play continued to drive mobile app downloads during the first quarter of 2013, while BlackBerry World and the Windows Phone Store remain “distant challengers.”
That’s according to the latest figures from Canalys, which say a whopping 13.4 billion apps were downloaded across these four stores over the last three months, raking in $2.2 billion in app sales, in-app purchases, and subscriptions.
Google’s got an Android problem, and a big one. And it’s a problem Google shares with us fans of Google content-delivering services, such as Google Search, YouTube, Gmail, Google+ and others.
That problems is that companies like Amazon and Facebook increasingly hijack Android to divert user attention away from Google services and toward their own or their partners’.
This post isn’t about the problem, which I’ve written about extensively here, here and here. It’s about the solution.
Still, let’s understand both the problem and the solution.
How low will Apple go?
First, Apple CEO Tim Cook was forced to grovel and kowtow to the Chinese Communist Party over their obviously false and politically motivated claims about Apple’s warranty.
Now, Apple is being publicly insulted and used by Facebook.
There is no way Steve Jobs would have put up with this kind of humiliating abuse.
Here’s what’s going on.
Real Racing 3 is set to get its first update since hitting the App Store back in February, and it’s going to be a big one. In addition to adding two new cars, users will see more than 100 new events, a new game mode, and iCloud save syncing. EA has published a teaser trailer ahead of the update’s release, which shows off the new cars.
Google has confirmed that it will drop WebKit for its own rendering engine called Blink in “around 10 weeks.” The company has already begun testing Blink in Chrome Canary builds — the beta version of its popular browser — but it will rollout the change to stable Chrome builds with version 28 for both desktops and Android devices.
Samsung has today announced its estimated earnings for Q1 2013, and it looks like the Korean electronics giant is set for another record quarter, exceeding Wall Street expectations. The company has forecast a 53% rise in profit to 8.7 trillion won ($7.7 billion) for the three-month period between January and March, driven by smartphone sales.
Today Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled “Home,” his company’s new experience on Android devices. Rumors leading up to today’s event said that Facebook has been working on its own Android device in conjunction with HTC, and that has turned out to be true.
Zuckerberg started by explaining how modern smartphones are built around different apps that communicate with people, and that Facebook wants to switch that paradigm and focus on people first. Home allows you to quickly interact with your Facebook account anywhere from your device, including the lockscreen.
Rovio has today announced that it will be bringing the hugely popular Facebook game Angry Birds Friends to Android and iOS. The game is very similar to the rest of the titles in the Angry Birds series, only it has a strong focus on social gaming rather than playing alone.
Given that Samsung clearly likes to follow in Apple’s footsteps, it comes as no surprise to us that it is set to open 1,400 Apple-esque Experience Shops in Best Buy stores throughout the United States.
The Korean company is aiming to give potential customers the opportunity to get their hands on its mobile products and “experience how the devices connect together to enrich their lives” before they decide to purchase them. Specially trained “Samsung Experience Consultants” will also be there to offer post-purchase support.
Madfinger Games announced a massive update to its flagship First Person Shooter (FPS) game on iOS and Android today. There are new maps, weapons, and game content, each of which was created directly from player feedback, including the new “friends” feature.
Rookie players now have a new Special Tutorial mode, while veterans will be glad to see new booster packs for speed, armor, damage, accuracy, and invisibility, along with several game optimizations, bug fixes, and new gamepad support.
Android may have a larger share of the smartphone market than iOS, but Apple’s Safari browser is still king of the mobile web. According to the latest market share data from Net Applications, Safari accounted for 61.79% of the mobile web traffic throughout March.