Category: Mobile Computing

Sony’s “We’ll tell you later” fitness tracker sums up the problem with CES

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One of the issues that is building up around CES is the need for companies to present ‘something big and world changing’ every twelve months. Sony’s announcement of their new fitness and emotions tracker (Gizmodo) feels like a company that has had to find something to present to get the headlines – presumably because another waterproof smartphone and a return to the American smartphone market isn’t enough for the ravenous hordes prowling the show floor for something shiny and ‘new’. The device and associated smartphone app (to be released when? We’ll tell you later) will have other partners involved (we’ll tell

Intel’s SD-Sized computer and the question of power

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There’s something thrilling and ‘living in the future’ with Intel’s announcement of Edison, a computer with Wi-Fi built into the form factor of an SD card at CES (TNW and others). I suspect the team behind Raspberry Pi are pouring over the specs and capabilities this morning to assess the weaknesses and strengths, but there’s something that caught my eye about the Edison. Where’s the power source? It’s all very well having “Pentium-class computing” in this small form factor, but the power requirements of wearable tech coupled with a need for multiple days between charge (at a minimum) are just as

Just how much of a financial cliff did Rovio drive off with Angry Birds Go?

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Jon Jordan puts some numbers on the launch and the income of Rovio’s (rather greedy) freemium karting cart game, Angry Birds Go. While the launch period saw the title perform well, it’s been dropping quickly away from the top of the app downloads and earned revenue charts: Yet as most of the graphs show, the key concern for Rovio will be that while Angry Birds Go! has launched very well in terms of its first three weeks, it’s now tracking downwards in terms of top grossing chart position, particularly on the more volatile App Store. Lots of graphs and stats to

Danger, Chris@Danger, Dot Com, Here’s a bit of Sidekick history

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Chris DeSalvo, one of Danger’s first employees writes about Danger’s smartphone technology at length: I came across a website whose purpose was to provide a super detailed list of every handheld computing environment going back to the early 1970’s. It did a great job except for one glaring omission: the first mobile platform that I helped develop. The company was called Danger, the platform was called hiptop, and what follows is an account of our early days, and a list of some of the “modern” technologies we shipped years before you could buy an iOS or Android device. As you

Reviewing The Russian Reversible Smartphone

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With an LCD screen on one side, and an e-Ink screen on the opposite side, Yota’s prototype smartphone was one of the big winners of CES 2013. Now, a year later, the handset is now on sale in a number of European territories. I’ve taken a closer look at the handset over on Forbes: The easiest way to think about the e-Ink screen implementation is that it is related but subservient to the main interactions on your smartphone. To set up one of Yota’s applications on the e-Ink screen you need to ‘send it to the back’ from the LCD screen… In my time

Start the death-watch on the Android alarm clock app Timely

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Bitspin are the team behind Timely, the popular replacement alarm clock for Android, and they’ve just been bought by Google: We’re thrilled to announce that Bitspin is joining Google, where we’ll continue to do what we love: building great products that are delightful to use. For new and existing users, Timely will continue to work as it always has. Given Google’s previous form in buy-outs, I expect Timely to be removed from the Google Play store in the first weke in April and the Bitspin team assigned to ‘other roles inside Google’.