News tagged ‘Blackberry’

Along with a special press conference, dedicated to iPhone 4 antenna issue, Apple published a special page about the problem (here = http://www.apple.com/antenna/). You may remember we wrote about a series of videos posted on this page, where the company tried to convince everybody that almost every smartphone has an antenna issue. RIM's BlackBerry Bold 9700, Samsung's Omnia II, HTC's Droid Eris and Nokia's N97 were taken as examples. Now these videos are deleted from the Apple's site, though they are still available at the company's official YouTube channel.

After the press conference Apple's competitors claimed that their phones do not experience signal attenuation as much as the iPhone 4 and were dissatisfied by Apple's way of solving the antenna issue.

Research in Motion's Chief Executive Officers Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie have released an official statement on the Apple's latest press conference, where the company showed the antenna issue on BlackBerry 9700 to prove that such a problem a normal thing for every smartphone. Both of the directors were stunned that Apple mentioned RIM in order to justify their mistake:

"Apple's attempt to draw RIM into Apple's self-made debacle is unacceptable. Apple's claims about RIM products appear to be deliberate attempts to distort the public's understanding of an antenna design issue and to deflect attention from Apple's difficult situation. RIM is a global leader in antenna design and has been successfully designing industry-leading wireless data products with efficient and effective radio performance for over 20 years. During that time, RIM has avoided designs like the one Apple used in the iPhone 4 and instead has used innovative designs which reduce the risk for dropped calls, especially in areas of lower coverage. One thing is for certain, RIM's customers don't need to use a case for their BlackBerry smartphone to maintain proper connectivity. Apple clearly made certain design decisions and it should take responsibility for these decisions rather than trying to draw RIM and others into a situation that relates specifically to Apple."

Using a popular BlackBerry and iPhone messenger WhatsApp you can now make use of its new ability to forward individual messages or delete them.

WhatsApp is a smartphone to smartphone messenger and it currently runs on BlackBerry and iPhone. With the help of push notifications utilized by this application you can instantly receive messages from your colleagues, friends and family. It’s a great alternative to SMS because WhatsApp allows you to send and get messages, audio notes, pictures and video messages without having to spend a cent. All WhatsApp features are included in the base price and you won’t need to make any extra purchases for the application.

The new version of WhatsApp features:

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According to Mobile Mix Survey, conducted in May by advertising agency Millennial Media, 56% of all developers in the USA write software for Apple’s mobile platform iOS. This is almost as twice as more than Google’s Android developers. 5% goes to Nokia’s Symbian and 4% of devs work on software for RIM’s BlackBerry OS.

But there are more surprising facts unveiled in the survey.

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New reports made by Mac Stories and PadGadget reveal new data on App Store. Here are the most interesting facts:

1. Over 2,100 titles in the Apple's App Store are iPad games;
2. 78% of all iPad apps are paid (which is almost equal to 80% value of previous Moblix report);
3. Almost 75% of all 225,000 iPhone apps are also paid;
4. 2,5 months needed for iPad apps library to reach the 10,000 milestone (For comparison, it took five months for iPhone apps and 11 months for Google's Android Market to get the same result).
5. Currently iPad apps store is the third biggest after iPhone and official Android apps store.
6. RIM's BlackBerry App World, Nokia's Symbian platform and HP's Palm/webOS have less than 7,000 apps.

It is important to note that Google currently forbids putting Android Market on non-smartphone devices, so there is no opportunity to compare the actual numbers of Android and iPad apps.

Yesterday we posted information about smartphone sales in the last quarter 2010, and as you remember Android-based phones become more popular than iPhones. Now it became known that Apple's spokespeople commented on this data.

In its research NPD group studied over 150,000 completed surveys, that were undertaken online every month in America. Apple's representative Natalie Harrison thinks it is not enough data to make precise conclusions:

"This is a very limited report on 150,000 U.S. consumers responding to an online survey and does not account for the more than 85 million iPhone and iPod touch customers worldwide."

It is unknown why Harrison mentioned iPod touch when discussion was about smartphones market, but according to Reunters last week Harrison had referred to the IDC research. The latter also reveals that Apple losing its positions, but this time worldwide, with Nokia and BlackBerry sales ahead in first and second spots respectively.

NPD Group had recently revealed their new study, which shows that iPhone OS became the second most selling OS last quarter in US. To be precise 28% of all handsets sold were Android phones, and iPhones made only 21%. Research In Motion's Blackberries hold 36 percent of market.

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According to a report by Marketwatch (which in turn refers to a figures revealed by Strategy Analytics), smartphones now take 18% share on the market of all mobile phones.

"Sales are driven by healthy operator subsidies, competition between vendors, and a rising number of cheaper models built around operating systems such as Google Inc's Android and Nokia Corp's key smartphone platform Symbian."

It is interesting that different smartphone makers sometimes compete on different markets. Strategy Analytics reveals that Nokia shows good results in India and China while Motorola focuses more on US.

As we wrote before, Motorola raised up its profits after producing its Android-based Droid/Milestone, which is frequently called the closest rival to Apple's iPhone.

Nokia's purpose is to gain the leadership on the markets that are only emerging. In the first quarter the company has 21.5 million smartphones sold, but these are mostly cheap models that were shipped primarily to South America and China. North America remains a "problem child" for Nokia. The company's sales make 40% of all the sales in this quarter.

RIM has 10.6 million BlackBerries sold and takes second place with its 19.7% share.

Globally Apple has 16,4% market share in selling smartphones in this quarter and became a mobile vendor number one in the US. The company made record 8.8 million iPhone sales. Among all mobile phone makers Apple hold 3% global market share.

MOTO Labs conducted a new touchscreen test with a number of the most popular smartphones: Apple iPhone, HTC Droid Eris, Motorola Droid, Google Nexus One, Palm Pre and Blackberry Storm 2. The results were expected - iPhone has a first place and is followed by Google Nexus One.

The test was made by 7mm and 4mm robotic fingers for accordingly medium and light touch imitation. Moto Labs reports iPhone screen to have straight and accurate lines but with weaknesses at the edges of the panel. Nexus One with Droid Eris has a "solid performance". The results are almost the same because both of the devices are manufactured by HTC. As you remember, Apple filed a lawsuit about infringing their touchscreen-related patents earlier this month.

The results for the other smartphones can be seen on the picture below.

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The Wall St. Journal published a small article about Adobe Chief Executive Shantanu Narayen's talk at the Goldman Sachs technology conference this week. Adobe's CEO spoke on his view of why the iPad wasn't equipped to play Flash:

Narayen said Apple's decision likely had everything to do with its business model as it tries to keep a proprietary, closed system so everything goes through its iTunes store, and has nothing to do with the Flash technology. He said about 85 of the top 100 Web sites in the world use Flash, and 75% of the video on the Web today is in Flash, including Google Inc.'s (GOOG) YouTube, News Corp.'s (NWS) Hulu and broadcasters such as ABC and Fox.

Flash will be on every Android device sold at the end of the year. It will also be on Nokias, Palm Pres, Windows Mobile, Blackberries and just about anything else with an ARM Cortex processor. Not to mention 98% of all the Macs and PCs (and Windows/ChomeOS Tablets) throughout the world. It looks like Apple has it's own vision of what is good and bad for the business.

Despite the fact that Steve Jobs and Apple representatives were not to be seen at the Mobile World Congress (Barcelona, Spain) this week, Apple CEO won the top title “Mobile Industry Personality of the Year.”

Among the other winners (19 categories) were BlackBerry (the creator of Enterprise Server 5.0) and HTC (for their HTC Hero).

The famous actor and humorist Stephen Fry hosted this week’s ceremony. He proclaimed himself to be Apple fan and was impressed with iPad after having seen it at San Francisco demonstration.

The annual Pwn2Own hacking contest is coming up next month. During the event competitors will be given the chance to win cash prizes.

The competition will start on March 24 at the CanSecWest security conference in Vancouver, British Columbia. This year, hackers will take on an iPhone 3GS, a Blackberry Bold 9700, an unspecified Nokia smartphone running the Symbian S60 platform and a Motorola, most likely a Droid, powered by Google 's Android. A successful hack must result in code execution with little to no user-interaction. Any exploited phone wins its attacker $10,000 in cash.

Media research firm Nielsen released its lists of top U.S. mobile phones, sites, and brands for the first ten months of 2009. The iPhone 3G took the top spot among mobile phones with 4.0% of the market. The iPhone placed slightly ahead of Research in Motion's BlackBerry 8300 series at 3.7%, and well ahead of the remainder of the pack, which was led by Motorola's RAZR V3 series at 2.3%.

Apple also made an appearance on Nielsen's list of top ten brands accessed via mobile networks for the January-September 2009 timeframe, taking tenth place on a list topped by Yahoo! and Google.

Here are the results:

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What is the coolest brand? Austin Martin or iPhone?

Apple has taken three of the top five places in this year’s CoolBrands list, with the iPhone at top of the poll, Apple itself in third place and the iPod securing fourth place in the list. This list was led by Aston Martin for the last three years.

BlackBerry improved, made it to 7th place, while the BBC’s iPlayer was the only new entry to take a top 20 slot. Google’s YouTube was recognised as the number one online brand.

Here is the full list:

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The Environmental Working Group (ewg.com) analyzed the radiation emissions from 1,268 cellphones.

Apple’s iPhone 3G has a maximum SAR of 1.39 W/kg when held at the ear. You can compare that to the 1.19 W/kg SAR for the iPhone 3GS. The lower the SAR the safer the phone is. The best phone was the Samsung Impression which had a max radiation of just 0.35 W/kg.

“The FCC limit for the head (SAR of 1.6 W/kg) is just two-and-a-half times lower than the level that caused behavioral changes in animals (SAR of 4 W/kg),” says the representative. “Thus, the brain receives a high exposure, even though the brain may well be one of the most sensitive parts of human body … and should have more protection.”

Here is a list of EWG’s top 10 phones, based on low and high emissions:

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