Given the documented ability of mobile apps, search, and social networking to lift sales, it makes forehead-smacking sense for retailers to shift their focus away from sales lost to showrooming into harnessing the shopper’s in-store wireless experience for themselves and their brands. Read more »
Wi-Fi has moved from an at-home convenience to a public service as mobile devices continue to take over. Here’s a look at the new opportunities to connect with consumers, and how businesses can easily screw it all up. Read more »
Can one Bluetooth speaker serve three purposes? The Coda One does, ranging from hands free speaker in the car to a wireless music player to portable handset for large phones and tablets. Read more »
Certification for WiGig products meant to stream data over short distances at up to 6 Gbps may not happen in 2013 after all, which could delay products well into 2014. Read more »
Another year has come and gone with more mobile advances than ever before. What’s in store for the year ahead? Our mobile staff looks a five trends that are likely to affect hardware, software and services in the fast growing mobile space. Read more »
As a general rule, prices of technology-driven products and services tend to fall over time. But what’s happened with broadband prices is a clear exception. Read more »
How do prices, speeds and rates of adoption for broadband in the U.S. stack up with the rest of the industralized world? Not as well as you might think. Here are some key facts on the state of broadband. Read more »
According to Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom, increasing speeds of the mobile app experience immediately encourages people to use the apps more. When mobile broadband speeds inhibit speed, app makers have to speed things up on their end. Read more »
Better batteries are the holy grail of mobile technology, but in a connected, wireless world antennas deserve some love too. Many recent breakthroughs, such as a sesame-sized antenna that could deliver 20 Gbps Wi-Fi are just as important in driving innovation. Read more »
The FCC halted the deregulation of special access charges, prices companies like Sprint and T-Mobile pay to connect their wireless networks to the Internet. Verizon and AT&T own those circuits, and the FCC wants to know if they charge their competitors a fair rate. Read more »
NFC, or near-field communications, is often synonymous with wireless mobile payments, but the technology has other uses too. You can pair Bluetooth devices by tapping them, for example. Or you can go cable-free with this NFC keyboard found in Japan… if you can afford it. Read more »
Once everyone has a smartphone, it’s clear that if you want to know where someone is, you just have to find their phone. GM is counting on that, testing a wireless pedestrian system in vehicles that uses Wi-Fi Direct to detect and avoid walkers and bicyclists. Read more »
Though AT&T’s smartphone penetration is well over 60 percent, it keeps activating new smart devices at a rapid clip. AT&T remained the carrier of choice for iPhone customers. It added 3.7 million iPhones in the second quarter, 22 percent of which came from competitors. Read more »
In the coming months you will soon start receiving unsolicited text messages when storms hit or other natural disasters are anticipated thanks to a new wireless emergency alert system signed into law this spring. Here’s what you need to know when the alerts roll in. Read more »
I used to use Bump, the mobile app that wirelessly transfers data between two smartphones, but over time, I uninstalled it. Now it’s not only back on my phones, but has a coveted home screen spot thanks to the latest share-to-desktop feature. Read more »
The over a decade-old company that makes the building blocks — chips, gear and software — for ZigBee-based wireless networks is finally being acquired. Austin-based chip company Silicon Labs announced on Monday that it has acquired Boston-based Ember for $72 million. Read more »
T-Mobile is still struggling after its planned acquisition by AT&T fell through. In the first full quarter after the proposed merger was scuttled, the nation’s fourth largest carrier managed to gain only 187,000 customers; most from lower revenue businesses, such as prepaid and M2M. Read more »
Apple devices have enjoyed wireless music playback through AirPlay speakers, but Windows users generally have been left out in the cold, until now. Aperion’s Aris wireless speaker lets Windows 7 and Windows 8 Consumer Preview computers pipe tunes wirelessly using Microsoft’s “Play To” feature. Read more »
The humble text message turned 20 years old this weekend, and other than an excuse for cake, the birthday is a great chance to look at how carriers innovate and why they are getting crushed by over the top services now that times have changed. Read more »
Nokia Siemens Networks plans to show off gigabit wireless speeds using the variant of of LTE-Advanced network that Clearwire plans to deploy. But don’t get too excited, too soon. These aren’t real world speeds and they’re not for handsets. Read more »
Too slow, America. While Congress and the FCC have spent forever deciding what to do with white spaces on the spectrum, the English city of Cambridge has gone ahead and rolled out the first active city-wide network. Read more »
Vodafone, the world’s largest mobile group, is buying its fellow British firm Cable & Wireless Worldwide to — making a huge payday for chief executive Gavin Darby, who only joined at Christmas… after quitting Vodafone. Read more »
Here’s a nifty Japan-only product that looks like a small wireless keyboard. But it pulls double duty: Hold the device up to your ear and it works as a wireless handset for VoIP, Skype or other audio chat applications on mobile devices. Read more »
Apple loves controlling the entire experience of its products, and for the iPhone and iPad, the biggest uncontrollable element is a customer’s wireless carrier. Having a say in the SIM card, in theory, pushes Apple closer to the goal of controlling every aspect of its devices. Read more »
The industry has moved beyond starry-eyed soothsaying about a world of 50 billion connected devices to start talking about how these mammoth networks of objects and appliances would actually work and how they would be managed. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Amid the various upgrades announced for Apple’s new iPad was a hot new wireless technology. You might think I’m referring to the tablet’s 4G LTE mobile broadband support, but I’m not. I’m talking about the far less sexy, but no less important, inclusion of Bluetooth 4.0. Read more »
Martin Geddes thinks the telecom industry has reached its peak. As he explains, telecom is like the railroad business at the height of the railroad barons. It has acquired its maximum share of the economy, and the only way now is down. Read more »
This year’s Mobile World Congress event kicks off this Sunday, and there will be a bevy of wireless developments, news and devices. Without a doubt, everything will be focused on connectivity and mobility, but what specific devices might we see? Here’s what we expect. Read more »
Tablets represent the next evolution in the advancement of mobile computing, and by 2015 or 2016, the tablet will begin to replace the laptop and the desktop operating systems market will begin to level off or perhaps decline. Our latest forecast examines these trends in detail. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
In the near future, getting your smartphone, tablet or laptop connected to a Wi-Fi hotspot won’t be an exercise in frustration. The Wi-Fi Alliance will begin to certify wireless devices for its industry-wide Passpoint initiative this July. Goodbye to splash-screens and network-specific log-ins! Read more »
Forrester says 1 billion consumers will have smartphones by 2016, with 257 million of them in the U.S. That’s not just a big trend. It’s forcing companies to rethink their IT strategy as the world goes increasingly mobile first. Read more »
Google is asking the Federal Communications Commission for permission to test a mysterious Wi-Fi and Bluetooth-enabled “entertainment device,” in employees’ homes in four U.S. cities. So inquiring minds want to know, what exactly is it and is Google trying to build its own devices? Read more »
T-Mobile may soon begin restricting roaming data usage to cut down on the amount of packets its customers consume off the carrier’s networks. If true, the new caps could affect many of T-Mobile’s customers, though the size of the impact on each customer may be small. Read more »
New Hanover County in North Carolina became the first county in the United States to deploy a Super Wi-Fi network, but the real question is will it also be the last? The technology is not as healthy as the pomp and circumstance surrounding the launch indicates. Read more »
Intel’s wireless ambitions go beyond smartphones and tablets. It’s set its sights on the guts of the mobile network as well. By embracing a new network design concept called Cloud-RAN, Intel believes it can reshape wireless network to make the best use of its chips. Read more »
Virgin Mobile will begin to reduce the mobile broadband speeds of smartphone users on March 23, following a similar path as T-Mobile, AT&T and others who have offered unlimited plans. Facing huge demand for mobile data, the days of truly unlimited plans appear numbered. Read more »
Today wireless charging for cell phones is pretty kludgy. But the idea — and eventually the goal of Powermat — is that one day the cell phone companies will embed the company’s wireless charging tech right into the phone itself, making wireless charging a whole lot more simple. Read more »
Sending a bit over a wireless network is 200 times more expensive than sending a bit over wireline, which explains some of the high costs and limits of wireless data plans. How can operators drive down these prices so wireless doesn’t lose its luster? Read more »
Broadcom is expected to show off silicon that offers 1.3 gigabit Wi-Fi at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show to help prepare home networks for the era of whole-home video streaming. The multi-gigabit Wi-Fi offers a 2x improvement over today’s top Wi-Fi data rates. Read more »
As the market for Bluetooth 4.0 health monitoring gadgets is about to kick off next year, some companies are wasting no time, announcing products now. Wahoo’s new BlueHR heart monitor will debut for $79.99 and uses the low-powered wireless protocol with several existing iPhone 4S apps. Read more »
