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Xiaomi’s Hugo Barra Confirms “No Plans” To Push Its App Store Outside China
Rumors that Google feels threatened by the fast-paced rise of Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi, which has built its own UI atop Android and in China also offers its own app store (rather than pre-loading Google Play), were presumably front of mind for Xiaomi VP and former Google employee Hugo Barra today. Read More
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Waze Becomes One Of Google’s Pre-Installation Options For Android Devices
Crowdsourced driving navigation app Waze is getting a boost from parent company Google at this year’s Mobile World Congress – the free app is now included in the section of apps that make up Google Mobile Services, or the pre-installation software bundle Google offers to smartphone and device OEMs building Android gadgets. The GMS designation means that Waze can join the likes… Read More
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Pebble Reveals Pebble Time Steel And A Smartstrap System Open To Hardware Developers
Pebble announced Pebble Time last week, the next-generation version of its Pebble smartwatch, and today it’s revealing another new product: Pebble Time Steel. This is the stainless steel version of the Pebble Time, boasting the same interface and software, but in a machined metal case that comes in silver, gold and black finishes, and that also manages to add three days to maximum… Read More
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Hands On With Jolla’s Sailfish Slate, The Tablet Without A U.S. OS
Finland’s Jolla, the plucky startup that’s built its own mobile OS, called Sailfish, atop the Mer open source project, is showing off its forthcoming, crowdsourced tablet here at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. It’s the follow up to Jolla’s first device, the eponymous Jolla smartphone, which was released at the end of 2013. Read More
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Silent Circle Wants To Be The Modern Day Blackberry
Blackberry was once the big dawg in mobile phones. It was in the hands of practically every knowledge worker on the planet, but its days of dominance began a precipitous drop after Apple brought the iPhone to market in 2007 and Android followed in 2008, and today it’s a tiny blip on the smartphone marketshare radar. That’s why it’s interesting that a new company, Silent… Read More
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My Friend Will Hate SeeYoo, An App To Say OMW
No matter how far or close by, a good friend of mine always texts to say he’s “20 minutes away” when he’s running late. SeeYou, which calls itself a ‘pre-meeting app’, is almost certainly not for him. Available for iOS and Android, the app lets you alert friends that you are OMW (on my way), chat with them during your journey, and continually share your… Read More
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BlackBerry Wants Startup Hustlers To Buy Its New Touchscreen Smartphone
BlackBerry has gone back to making touchscreen phones again after it unveiled the Leap, a device that the company believes will appeal to young people and startup founders, in particular. Read More
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Led By iPhone 6, Apple Passed Samsung In Q4 Smartphone Sales, 1.9B Mobiles Sold Overall In 2014
If 2014 goes down as the year when smartphone sales globally passed the 1 billion mark (1.2 billion, to be exact, from a total of 1.9 billion mobile phones overall), Q4 will go down as the quarter when Samsung lost its footing as the world’s leader in the category for the first time since 2011. Today, Gartner published its figures for smartphone sales for the year and final quarter… Read More
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Asus Republic Of Gamers G751 Review: Portable Gaming, Emphasis On The ‘Gaming’
As far as gaming computers go, there are bound to be trade-offs: bigger size means better performance, and more portability is going to naturally lead to compromises when it comes to pure gaming muscle. The Asus Republic of Gamers G751 is a top-tier gaming notebook, but it still falls prey to that essential truth about gaming notebooks, making for an experience that stretches the definition… Read More
Mobile Writers
TCTV
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Twitter Vets Launch OneShot, An App For Highlighting And Tweeting Screenshots Of Text
A pair of Twitter vets today launched a handy mobile application called OneShot that makes it easier to share screenshots of text to Twitter, along with your comment and a link to the page in question. The new app also optionally allows you to crop the image, highlight a selection of text, and even add a brightly colored background to make your screenshot stand out better when displayed in… Read More
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Google Launches New Analytics, Monetization Tools For Android Game Developers
Google today announced a couple of new tools for game developers on its Android platform. These include new analytics to help developers better understand in-game player behavior, as well as a number of new monetization features through its AdMob platform. Google also launched a new game-centric Nearby Connections API for Android TV, its nascent smart TV platform. Read More
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Zuck Says “Sure”, Facebook Would Love To Work With Google On Global Internet Access
Connecting the world doesn’t have to be a cutthroat competition, Mark Zuckerberg signalled on stage at Mobile World Congress earlier today When asked if Facebook’s Internet.org access initiative would consider working with Google’s Project Loon, he said “Sure. When we launched the Internet.org app in Zambia with our operator partner there…one of the apps we launched… Read More
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Cloze Debuts A Smart, Personal Assistant App For Managing Your Professional Relationships
Cloze today is rolling out a new application aimed at business professionals. It promises a smarter view of your contacts by allowing you to automatically track email messages, phone calls, meetings, notes, social updates and more in a single application on iPhone, iPad and the web. The idea is to offer individuals whose business requires them to maintain relationships an easy way to… Read More
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PayPal Buys Paydiant, The Mobile Wallet Behind CurrentC, To Raise Its Game v. Google + Apple
PayPal, the payments service with 162 million users preparing to separate from e-commerce giant eBay later this year, is announcing an acquisition today to help build out its mobile business targeting physical merchants, and sharpen its focus in competition with other tech payment hopefuls like Apple and Google. It is buying Paydiant, a startup out of Boston that makes mobile wallet… Read More
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Microsoft’s Keyboard Obsession
Microsoft has a little problem and it’s time we all admitted it. We have to gather the family in the living room, sit down Microsoft in the comfy chair and have a little heart to heart. Everybody can see it, except Microsoft — and it could be time for an intervention. It’s the keyboard thing, Microsoft. Enough already. Design your software to take advantage of a touch screen. Read More
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New Data Shows Mobile Data Consumption Skyrocketing Following Snapchat Discover’s Launch
Word has it that last month’s launch of Snapchat’s “Discover” feature, which connects the messaging app’s users to news stories and other media packaged in a way that’s ideal for consumption in quick bursts, has been driving millions of pageviews per day for its publishing partners. But the evidence pointing to Discover’s popularity has been… Read More
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Android Pay Is Real, And Will Give Developers The Reins As An API
Google’s Sundar Pichai essentially used today’s Mobile World Congress keynote to let the cat out of the bag for a whole host of interesting Google projects, including Android Pay, a new mobile payments framework that will look to succeed where Google Wallet failed. This time, they’ll be mostly leaving the apps themselves to developers, and Android Pay is intended primarily as… Read More
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Apple-IBM Partnership Sprouts Latest Set Of Apps At Mobile World Congress
When Apple and IBM announced a partnership last year, more than a few jaws dropped, but the two have been working together to create a new wave of enterprise-friendly apps — and announced the latest round to come out of the affiliation today at Mobile World Congress. At first glance, the meeting of these two companies may seem a case of technology making strange bedfellows, but they… Read More
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Apple Adds Vehicles To Its List Of Activities In Switzerland, Tim Cook Demurs On Car Rumors
Apple has added language to legal documents (via 9to5Mac) regarding the scope of its company activities to include vehicles, with a generic description that includes automobiles, bicycles, rail, ships, aircraft and more. The specific details aren’t that important, and these are usually made as broad as possible to provide ample legal cover, but the fact that Apple’s lawyers have… Read More
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Sony Does A Tablet With An Add On Bluetooth Keyboard
Sony isn’t done with mobile hardware yet, despite its recent talk of an exit strategy from smartphones. Here at the Mobile World Congress tradeshow in Barcelona it’s showing off a new 10.1 inch Android tablet, the Xperia Z4, coming this June, and a new mid-tier 4G/LTE smartphone, the Xperia M4 Aqua — its first octa-core 64-bit smartphone. Read More
