Combine cheap sensors, smartphones and supercomputers and you have a water quality monitoring project that could go viral. MoboSens, a project from a university research lab is worth a look. Read more »
AT&T set a new Q1 record for smartphone sales and connected 365,000 tablets. It saw its prepaid customers fall away, but recorded an overall net subscriber gain of 291,000. Read more »
5G is still just the merest twinkle in the mobile industry’s eye, yet the blogosphere is now using the term to describe T-Mobile’s forthcoming network. Just as with 4G, we’re conflating technology with marketing, and we need to stop. Read more »
Tuesday morning’s outage is the second multi-hour problem Apple iCloud and online services users have experienced in the last two weeks. Read more »
Last week, Nokia CEO, Stephen Elop, alluded to the company’s next hero move, which appears to be a flagship Lumia phone for Verizon. Watch for the Lumia 928 at a price that undercuts the HTC One and Samsung Galaxy S 4. Read more »
The mobile market has been good to ARM Holdings, which designs the chips that power most smartphones and tablets. The company is growing revenues and nearing 1,000 licensees. Read more »
Produced by the obscure Spanish outfit Geeksphone, the Keon and Peak are the first devices to ship bearing Mozilla’s HTML5-centric operating system. Prices start at $119 before taxes. Read more »
A model that combines thumb movements with English-language tweets created a new keyboard layout to optimize thumb typing on tablets. Typing with KALQ was 34 percent faster than on QWERTY. A free Android app will be released in May. Read more »
By the end of March, Apple was selling more iPhone 5 devices as a share of iPhones than in December. But at the same time, the share of older model phones it is selling has never been higher. Read more »
New investor Foundation Capital led the round bringing with on board Twitter veteran Anamitra Banerji. Kik is evolving from a texting clone to an HTML5 app platform, which has helped drive big growth in recent months. Read more »
After being removed from the App Store last fall for violating Apple’s rules, the app discovery service returns. The most notable difference from the old app is a switch from a Popular list of apps to a new Stream list. Read more »
January through March sales are always slower compared to the holiday buying period. And all of Apple’s major products — iPhone, iPad, iPad mini, Macs — were refreshed in the fall, leaving Apple with no major new device release during the quarter. Read more »
Tumblr is inching toward profitability with a new mobile ad offering, announced Monday. Ads will appear directly in the content streams on users’ Android and iOS apps. Read more at paidContent »
Sprint is juggling its two competing buyout offers. It’s appointed a special committee to evaluate Dish’s proposal on one hand, but it’s not delaying its wedding date with SoftBank on the other. Read more »
Big Blue says UrbanCode’s software works well with its own Worklight mobile application development platfrom to speed up the creation and deployment of mobile (and cloud) apps. Read more »
Presenting a clear comparison of multiple local and long-distance transport options by price and duration is no mean feat. But Waymate has even greater ambitions, allowing trip booking from within its service. Read more »
DISH Network’s bid for Sprint could result in a revolutionary combination of video and mobile delivery and wireless broadband. But DISH needs Clearwire’s spectrum more than it needs Sprint’s network. Read more »
When it comes to mobile mail, today is one of the best times in recent memory to find a better solution. But changing email habits, even when they’re bad, turned out to be tougher than I expected. Read more »
HTC’s flagship phone is here for some, but not for the most passionate consumers that would likely provide the company free marketing. TweetDeck is getting pulled from Google Play soon and I’m still debating my Galaxy Note 8.0 purchase. Read more »
With its team nearly doubled, Tandem plans to invest in more early-stage startups in more places while still maintaining its focus on mobile. Read more »
IBM is reportedly in talks to sell it’s server business to Lenovo. As it ditches commodity hardware again, where is IBM’s fortune going to be made? Mobility and data. Read more »
The HTC One is available today, but only from two U.S. carriers: AT&T and Sprint. T-Mobile announced price plans and availability while those who pre-ordered the $649 HTC One Developer Edition only got an email: Their phones are delayed. Read more »
Prepaid mobile giant TracFone had a massive quarter, adding 839,000 subscribers and even beating out Verizon Wireless. TracFone didn’t say why, but not coincidentally its Straight Talk brand and partner Walmart began selling the iPhone 5. Read more »
Platform companies from Apple to OpenTable take a commission from developers or merchants. But figuring out how much to take has huge repercussions on the business explains Benchmark’s Bill Gurley. Read more »
Google continues to quickly iterate its Chrome OS platform, with the latest developer build showing a much improved Files app. And it is an app; something called a Packaged App that can have more functionality than a web app. Read more »
Apple confirms the anonymized information may be kept “for up to two years.” But when Siri is turned off all the user data is deleted. Read more »
From smart fabrics to sensors that are powered by the very vibrations they measure, researchers and companies are hard at work figuring out how to make the most of the energy around us. Read more »
Despite flat year-over-year WIndows revenue, Microsoft logged a 19 percent profit year over year. Not too shabby for the much maligned company. Read more »
After selling low-cost tablets for a half-dozen years, French company Archos is shrinking down its mobile device expertise into a trio of Google Android smartphones ranging in price from $99 to $249 without a contract. Read more »
MoPub’s report says the share of ad buying on Apple phones increase 12 percent between January and March. Android tablets saw less than 1 percent of money spent on ads for the quarter. Read more »
When was the last time you logged into LinkedIn’s mobile app as a way of browsing the news or killing time? You might not have given the app much thought before, but the company’s recent push toward news might change this. Read more »
Apart from Los Angeles, this week’s expansion mainly targets smaller cities and towns, but Sprint is going urban once again this summer with a big 120-city push. Read more »
OpenSignal is expanding its mobile networking crowdsourcing project from Android to the iPhone. Though OpenSignal uses that crowdsourced data to generate its own detailed metrics, there’s plenty in the app for consumers as well. Read more »
The newest Weather app for iPhone and iPod touch to hit the market uses gorgeous photography, well-designed informational icons and simple navigation. And it’s from Yahoo. Really! The company also has a new take on email for tablets. Read more »
Verizon’s generated some impressive activation numbers in the normally slow first quarter: 5.9 million LTE devices; 7.2 million smartphones; and 4 million new iPhones, half of which were the LTE-capable iPhone 5. Read more »
The Nokia CEO has revealed a major upcoming Lumia launch in the U.S., with “a season of new product introductions” to follow. The revelation comes hot on the heels of news of rising Lumia sales. Read more »
Twitter’s new #Music app will be available on the web and in the iTunes store on Thursday. The app integrates music from iTunes, Spotify and Rdio and lets users tweet songs from the app. Read more »
Nokia sold 5.6 million Lumia smartphones in the first quarter of this year, up from 4.4 million in the previous quarter. Its shareholders are still losing money – but less than expected. Read more »
Despite the shuttering of its only announced customer, ST-Ericsson, the German AR firm Metaio says it expects its dedicated processors to be in mobile devices by the end of the year. Read more »
The subject happens to be dining, but what Ness is up to is really about maximizing the accuracy of personalization. Read more »
