Category: Mobile

Mobile

Japan: the country where flip-phones refuse to die

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As reported on Engadget. BY MAT SMITH The buttons are easier to type on, the battery lasts longer, it’s familiar. No, we’re not talking about BlackBerry this time, but the Japanese feature phone. Glorious, folding forefather to the smartphone, and the form-factor that gave birth to gara-kei, a shorthand phrase for “Galapagos phones”. It’s a negative term pointing to devices that simply wouldn’t survive outside of Japan. However, it’s not stopped the country’s biggest carrier, NTT…

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Design Military Mobile

The absurd military infographics you can find on Google

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As reported on The Verge. By Cassandra Khaw Paul Ford has an offbeat fascination with military infographics. “No matter how abstract they are, these pictures describe systems that the U.S. military uses to make optimal, efficient decisions about killing other humans,” he writes on Medium. The diagrams showcased in the article are complex and esoteric, proving comical by their complete lack of context with phrases like “Publish Subscribe Broker” and “COCOM ‘Living Plans.’” He even discovers a…

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Culture Mobile

NYC inks deal to put train tickets on smartphones

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As reported on Engadget. BY ALEXIS SANTOS Part of New York City’s train system is set to get a 21st-century kick in the pants. Digital tickets that live on commuters’ smartphones will soon be introduced thanks to a deal inked between the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) Board and Masabi, one of eleven companies that offered to build such a system for the city. The pact follows a — presumably successful — trial conducted between Masabi and the…

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Mobile SmartPhone

Paperfold is a foldable, transformable smartphone prototype

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As reported on Engadget. BY EMILY PRICE If Kyrocera’s folding smartphone Echo didn’t have enough screens for you, try this on for size. The Human Media Lab at Canada’s Queen’s University has created a fully functional smartphone that uses not two, but three different snap-together e-ink displays. The result is a gigantic device called PaperFold, that can do some pretty awesome stuff, especially with maps. You can display driving directions over all of the screens for easy planning, or fold the displays together…

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Mobile SmartPhone

Sony Xperia Z2 Review: A Waterproof Android Smartphone That Goes Beyond Gimmicks

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As reported on TechCrunch. by Darrell Etherington Posted 13 hours ago Twitter Shares Test New All-Time Lows After Its Q1 Earnings Fail To Excite Investors Sony hasn’t had a great time of it in the U.S. smartphone market over the past few years, and it recently announced that its new flagship, the Xperia Z2, would only be made available to U.S. customers unlocked via its website. But the Z2 is still a solid device, and a contender on more…

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Mobile

Samsung blurs the line between phone and camera (again) with the Galaxy K zoom

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As reported on Engadget. BY CHRIS VELAZCO Last year, Samsung tried something a little kooky: it made a mash-up of a middling smartphone and a solid point-and-shoot camera (you know, the kind smartphones have nearly driven to extinction). The resulting chimaera was called the Galaxy S4 Zoom, and it was… not great. To absolutely no one’s surprise, though, Samsung’s fixation on fusion is still going strong and the company’s trying to crack the code again with a new camera/phone combo called…

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Google Mobile

Google’s Project Ara wants to revolutionize the smartphone industry within a year

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As reported on Engadget. BY BRAD MOLEN The night before Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP) division was supposed to show off the one and only functional Project Ara prototype to a room full of eagerdevelopers, someone dropped the phone and broke the display. At any other product reveal, this worst-case scenario would be a nightmare come true. Not to Google: The company made lemonade out of a lemon by turning it into a selling point for the modular smartphone.…

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Google Mobile

Here are some of the crazy phones you can build with Google’s Project Ara

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As reported on The Verge. By Jacob Kastrenakes Google is starting to show developers what they need to do to create swappable parts for its upcoming modular smartphones, currently called Project Ara. On Ara’s website, it’s just posted the Module Developers Kit, which contains the information that manufacturers need to get started on creating modular parts. “Ara’s success is predicated on a rich, vibrant, and diverse ecosystem of modules from a myriad of developers,” one document in the kit…

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Business Mobile

BlackBerry is willing to stop making phones if they keep losing money

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As reported on Engadget. BY JON FINGAS BlackBerry CEO John Chen has long made it obvious that he wants to turn a profit by 2016, but it’s now clear that nothing will stand in the way of that goal — not even his company’s smartphones. While devices are still part of the plan, Chen tells Bloomberg and Reuters that he wants to avoid depending on them for revenue, and may “not be in the handset business” if the hardware doesn’t make cash.…

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Article Mobile

Switched On: Return of the digital hub

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As reported on Engadget. BY ROSS RUBIN In the heyday of Palm organizers, when even the speeds of 3G data seemed like a distant fantasy, a debate raged as to whether the future of pocket devices could belong to one or two devices. Those who favored two devices argued that you didn’t really want all the bulk and battery consumption of a pocket computer in a small device that you wanted to use primarily to make…

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