The tablet market has come up literally in the last 2 years. That’s impressive for a space that didn’t exist for most manufacturers before 2010. Apple has by far taken the bulk of the market share but competition is catching up. Given that smartphone OSes are used to power tablets, it has been relatively easy for many to push out a tablet. However not many have spent the time that Amazon took to build the Kindle Fire. [click to continue…]
Android
With no breakthrough being imminent and rising litigation costs in the long drawn Apple vs Samsung vs Motorola patent issues, Apple finally gave indications that it would like to go for a settlement. As per Dow Jones Newswire Apple is willing to cut deals with its competitors, Samsung and Motorola.
Apple has put some proposals to settle pending litigation in exchange of royalty payments to license its payments. Apple is requesting royalty between $5-$15 per device in atleast one negotiation. But Apple has made it clear that its not getting into a business of royalty and is not willing to  make negotiations with all competitors.  This stance is against Late Steve Jobs stand ‘spend every penny’ to destroy Android. [click to continue…]
Apple is about to announce the iPad 3 tomorrow and the rumor mills are running in full force. Lots of analysis, comparison and the buzz is understandable, but let’s get back to the basics. Last year, Google showed Android 3.0 aka Honeycomb at CES, it took several months for tablets to hit the market. Apps even more. It didn’t get that traction. Google again showed ICS several months back and we are yet to see tablets, apps and updates flow. Part of it is due to the friction between OS maker and manufacturer. The Google model is different from Apple. Agreed. But there is more to this. Microsoft has a similar model and they are managing well with Windows Phone 7 (at least till the Mango release).
It is the architecture of iOS that gives Apple the advantage. Apple did a wonderful upgrade to the iPhone in 2010 with the Retina Display. The pixels quadrupled, from 480×320 to 960×640. And you still had 225,000 apps to choose from. You had an iOS upgrade for the 3GS and the iPhone 4 had an upgraded resolution. How did Apple do this? Well, given that the pixel’s increased in the same proportion (480×2 and 320×2), Apple simply rendered the app that way. They added some beauty by automatically adjusting the fonts (text) and controls (keyboard, navigation). Not a very deep technical solution, but a very well planned architecture. [click to continue…]
Google’s entry into the mobile market has been immensely successful when it comes to numbers. Android is the flavor of the season and while Google has burnt some bridges going to Cupertino, they probably have got a large enough market in exchange. Android and iOS would keep fighting for supremacy and performance and we would continue to talk about it, but whats interesting is the fact that the competition is not just by releasing products, but also creating hype around it, floating comments about each other and some twisted court room fights. [click to continue…]
The mobile industry is witnessing one of the biggest privacy issues of all time and the company in the center of this mess is Carrier IQ. Carrier IQ gives mobile intelligence solutions to telecom companies. So if a carrier wants to track its network performance, using Carrier IQ’s solution they can gather insights about their networks interaction with a subscribers device. In countries like US, carriers sell majority of the devices themselves and thus it makes it easy for them to pre-load CarrierIQ on these devices. The solution runs on the background and gives the user no options to configure its settings or remove it. [click to continue…]
It was always believed that developers on the Apple’s Appstore make more revenues as compared to fellow developers on the Android front.
The fact has been confirmed by analyst Gene Munster of Piper Jaffray, who states that Apple accounts for more than 90% of the dollars spent on mobile apps compared to Android’s meager 7% for the same.
The results of the research are based on the numbers provided by Apple publicly and data from Androlib, which is an applications discovery tool in Android. [click to continue…]
Yesterday Amazon went official with its first touch-screen tablet called the Kindle Fire. This came alongside a new range of Touch enabled Kindles that still feature a e-ink display. However with a dual-core processor and 7″ IPS display the Fire really puts the tablet market on Fire. [click to continue…]
Apple has given Samsung a hard time for sure. The two tech companies have been fighting it out in courts across US, France, Germany, Australia, Korea and a lot of other places. Apple alleges that Samsung’s products are a copy of its iOS line-up and both companies have a bunch of patents added to the list as well. [click to continue…]
With the launch of Google+, Google also introduced its first ever application for Android devices. However, it lacked many key features which many people experienced in the early version. Though, lot of functionalities have been added with the passage of time in the form of regular updates. Recently, another update has been pushed in Android market for Google+ application that adds one of the most important functionality, Resharing of posts.  Through this feature, you won’t need to rewrite any pre-written post from the scratch. [click to continue…]
Google is an internet company, it is a software hub and with todays news, it has a hardware footprint. Google today announced that it is acquiring Motorola Mobility, the company that has dedicated itself to Android development. Motorola is one of the companies that has successfully done a turnaround in the smartphone market and was the only company that Google could have got at a price tag of $12 billion and yet get a huge patents base. Motorola is a company with over 15,000 patents and at the same time it makes some amazing hardware.
Google has a Nexus program under which it works with manufacturers to product pure Google experience Android handsets. The two handsets we have seen under this program is the Nexus One and Nexus S. The former with HTC and latter with Samsung. With Motorola coming into the scene, Google has an opportunity to work even more closely on the hardware and deliver freshly baked Android phones. [click to continue…]
iPhone / iPod touch downloads