Mobile Archives - Page 10 of 15

Confirmed: Sprint Nexus NOT AOSP

Questions have been raised since the Galaxy Nexus landed on Verizon which/what is AOSP and what isn’t. Well just now, Jean-Baptiste Queru just took to Google+ to explain that the upcoming Sprint LTE version isn’t going to be AOSP.

The short answer is: the Sprint Galaxy Nexus is not supported in the Android Open Source Project.

The long answer: the release process for the Spring Galaxy Nexus is similar to that of the non-yakju variants of the GSM Galaxy Nexus (e.g. yakjuxw, yakjuux, yakjudv…), which makes that device similarly impossible to support in AOSP. There are no source files, no proprietary hardware-related binaries and no factory images available for the Sprint Galaxy Nexus. In addition, since it’s a CDMA device, it would probably be limited by the usual CDMA licensing issues that have been affecting the other CDMA devices.

Samsung Rumored To Launch Cloud Storage Service Alongside GSIII At Unpacked On May 3

Since the beginning of Android, handset makers and even companies such as Amazon have tried to compete with El Goog themselves when it comes to media sales. HTC rents movies and other types of media to users of their newer devices, and Samsung has Media Hub, which is relatively the same thing. Amazon has launched their own cloud music store and app store to compete with the Play Store as well, and has been pretty successful at gaining traction for both services.

Samsung, however, is reportedly planning on releasing their own cloud storage service during their GSIII Unpacked event on May 3. This cloud service is rumored to store any type of media for its users, and will likely charge for high amounts of storage but still give users around 5 GB of storage to start with. It is still not yet clear as to whether they will charge for the service right off the bat or give users a small amount and charge them to use more space. The service will also provide users with different types of media to purchase, such as music and movies, and will deliver purchased media to Samsung devices such as laptops, smartphones, tablets, etc. With the announcement of their new Smart TV’s at CES, it is also expected that the service will deliver and integrate with those as well.

Samsung has also reportedly partnered with Microsoft to bring the service to countries outside the US, making it a possibility that if the service launches it will be available globally from the start. When taken into account that Samsung is selling millions of phones outside the US, this would be a very smart decision for the company. Samsung’s Unpacked event is being held in London on May 3, and “S-Cloud” may very well be launched alongside the long-awaited “Galaxy S III”. Stay tuned for more updates on the event.

Verizon Q1 Earnings Call Boasts Best Growth Since 2009

Verizon has no need to worry with the results of their latest earnings call. The Q1 results for the nation’s largest network boasts 7.7% service revenue increases, but the real hitter is the 21.1% increase that they gained in data services revenue. Likely thanks to their 4G LTE network, this is the best growth and data service revenue that Verizon has recorded in the last 3 years.

Verizon can also boast that their 4G LTE network covers more than 2/3 of the US, giving a good percentage of the people with 4G LTE smartphones access to the network to the launch of the DROID and the gain of the iPhone Verizon has had plenty of devices for users to choose from in the smartphone realm since 2009, 3 years ago. Also, with the 4G LTE network a success, Verizon has offered customers the fastest data experience with some of the best devices in the US. They have also added 500,000 new post-paid customers, which will increase their revenue even more over time.

Mini Review: HTC One S for T-Mobile

HTC sent us their latest device for T-Mobile (announcement is coming shortly from NYC) the One S. This device is part of “the new HTC” a return to form by the Taiwanese company after a devastating 4Q 2011. After an onslaught of very similar models across the “high-end” of the Android OS market the brand was becoming diluted. Last year saw (in the US) the launch of Thunderbolt 4G, Evo Shift 4G, Droid Incredible 2, Merge, Sensation 4G, Evo 3D, Status, MyTouch 4G Slide, Rhyme, Hero S, Wildfire S, Amaze 4G, Evo Design 4G, Vivid, and lastly the Rezound. 16 phones, nearly half of which were considered high-end devices. HTC Chief Financial Officer Winston said “We simply dropped the ball on products in the fourth quarter.” Q1 2012 was a huge disappointment as our sister site TheDroidGuy reported two weeks ago.

So, how about the One is it “the one“?

Hardware

Beginning with the first touch I thought, this feels like their mid to low-end devices – SPECTACULAR. I mean that in all sincerity. I loved the quality and construction of both the Status AND the Radar 4G (Windows Phone 7) devices. They were constructed out of solid pieces of aluminum. I was baffled why two of the best devices were made of this amazing metal but not the “halo” devices like Sensation 4G, Amaze 4G, or Evo 3D. The screen is a 4.3″ SuperAMOLED qHD (960×540) resolution*. It comes with Android 4.0.3 (Ice Cream Sandwich) and Sense 4.0 HTC’s custom UI overlay. The phone is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 CPU, 1GB DDR2, and it operates on T-Mobile’s HSPA+ (42 Mbps) network. It also comes with Bluetooth 4.0, Wi-FI 802.11 b/g/n, and HDMI via MHL connector (not included). The storage is non-expandable 16GB (available space is split into 2.2 GB system and 9.9 GB external partitions). HTC has teamed with Dropbox to provide an additional 25 GB of “free” storage – if you don’t include data usage, that is.

The battery, which you cannot remove, is 1650 mAh. This is significantly smaller than the Motorola Droid Razr 1780 mAh (another device without a removable battery). It remains to be seen if this was a mistake or a HUGE mistake on the part of HTC. I’ve never personally owned a HTC device without owning at least one additional battery for it.

Visual/Audio

One of the top selling points for this reviewer is the new HTC ImageSense which “improves every part of the camera including the lens, the sensor, the software, and integrates a new custom HTC ImageChip. Inside it has an 8MP lens with f/2.0 aperture capture. The Rezound shipped with a f/2.2 aperture (smaller is “better”). The camera can be used to simultaneously shoot both video and still shots which I’ve tested extensively. It works amazingly well and is flawless during video playback.

HTC also focused on the sound output in the One S using Beats By Dre Audio to handle the processing of audio. Unlike the Rezound the One S did not come with Beats headphones. The Beats audio has been made available across the range of listening situations that I have used it for. The Rezound’s Beats output was limited to HTC Music and HTC watch. I was severely disappointed with that experience on the Rezound and appreciate that HTC addressed that issue.

Software

HTC launched the One series with Android’s latest 4.0.3 ICS (Ice Cream Sandwich) and their custom UI Sense 4.0. I somewhat jokingly and somewhat seriously commented about my feelings regarding (the unofficial) Sense 3.6 leak for the Sensation 4G a few months back in this video (no need to watch, honestly). I won’t lie – I hated it. I still have a very strong dislike of Sense 3.6 but I’ve come to love Sense 4.0.

Sense 4.0 has followed the lead set by ICS yet still maintains a very familiar feel to the Sense that people have grown accustomed to. When you first turn on the device and the home screen loads the ubiquitous HTC Sense Clock widget greets you at the top of the screen. It looks, refreshed, almost different but isn’t. Well, it is ever so slightly different, it is now using the Roboto font (I believe) – if it is not Roboto then it is a different font than it always has been. The full suite of widgets are pre-loaded from HTC.

So far I’ve truly enjoyed the HTC One S in the short time that I have had it. I only received it on Monday so I cannot, in good conscience, give a full review. I will say that this is one of the fastest phones I’ve used to date, both in benchmarks and in real-world use. There have been very few cases of the phone ever stuttering or seeming to be unresponsive, swiping from home screen to home screen is fast and fluent. Music playback is great, I have yet to playback any video, web browsing is quick. It’s impossible to judge battery life in such a short period of time and to do so would be unfair because of the amount of use it gets. I will say that I have been relatively impressed with battery life so far. I used it a lot yesterday and I only needed to put it on charge one time towards the end of the day.

Mini Review thoughts:

Strengths:

Gorgeous design

Weight and Thinness are nearly perfect (clearly personal opinion)

Camera is spectacular (incredible in low-light situations)

Weaknesses:

Non-expandable memory

Non-removable battery

Extremely slippery

*INTERESTINGLY the resolution shows up as 540×888 in my favorite app for system information Elixir 2 – this application has NEVER been wrong before, so I’ve pinged the developer for some insight. Also it is a PenTile display: The use of a SAMOLED screen means that my biggest gripe with the Galaxy Nexus (though less noticeable here, surprisingly) is the use of the pentile matrix for the pixel layout. I’ll do a separate post regarding PenTile displays tomorrow.

Kansas Startup Front Flip Takes Their Virtual Scratch Card Platform National

In Overland Park Kansas, home to Sprint, a new startup called Front Flip has been trying out a new and fun way of engaging customers and increasing loyalty in Kansas, Chicago, Columbia, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis, New York, Orlando, Phoenix, Philadelphia, San Antonio, and St. Louis. As we’ve reported with startups like Lokalty and FreebeeCards the loyalty, rewards and engagement space is heating up big time right now. Part of the reason is because local merchants are becoming tired of killing their margins with daily deals sites that only attract a customer one time, and that one time is typically at a loss.

That’s one of the reasons why Front Flip co-founder and CEO Sean Beckner created Front Flip.

“The market is ready for a change. Daily deal programs aren’t building customer engagement or rewarding loyalty — in fact, they have rather the opposite effect,” Beckner said in a release. “Front Flip’s mission is to help businesses engage with their customers in a fun and exciting way both inside and outside the store by increasing understanding and building customer loyalty.”

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3 Fort Lauderdale Entrepreneurs Launch MyNyte A Mobile Nightlife Social Startup

Three young entrepreneurs in Ft. Lauderdale have teamed up to launch an innovative new social mobile startup called MyNyte. The focus is to answer the question “What are you doing tonight” and then team up with your like-minded friends to do the same thing. Essentially, the app helps eliminate the hours of planning, phone tag, text tag, email tag, voicemail tag and any other kind of tag you can play as you plan your evening.

This app is pretty hot, how hot? Well Tyrese for one has been tweeting about it. MyNyte’s co-founder Jimmy Caylor says that Tyrese isn’t the only celebrity that’s checked out the app. A social mobile startup like this could not have picked a better market to introduce itself in as south Florida. We all know that Miami, South Beach and Fort Lauderdale are the hubs for night-time entertainment.

The three guys that founded MyNyte are no strangers to nightlife and the partying scene. Through their own personal experiences and the experiences of their friends they’ve made sure that MyNyte has everything taken care of.

Planning your night- MyNyte helps you scout the perfect places. Whether you’re looking for an upscale night of martinis, cocktails and lounging or you’re looking for the hottest clubs with the best people MyNyte uses your profile to match you up with the action.

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Pocket Is The New ReadItLater, And A UI Refresh And Performance Updates Come With It

ReadItLater has always been one of my personal favorite apps, so much so that we featured it as the “App of the Week” a few months back. Now, the application has been updated to version 4.0, and with that has received some pretty big changes. ReadItLater is now known as Pocket, and is based around the concept of “pocketing” all of the information you want to see but cannot get to at the moment. ReadItLater has always been able to save multiple types of media, but it never differentiated them from each other so most people just assumed it was for articles.

With this update, however, Pocket is trying to show users that they can save anything with the app, and they should use it for anything. With this update the developers added a filter for the things you save that automatically group your items into their respective areas. This makes it really easy to find what you’re looking for when you go back to view everything that you have saved.

Along with a name change, Pocket has also completely refreshed the look and functionality of the app. Now you can star items, archive them, and even edit items in bulk, whereas before you had to do each individual piece at a time. This makes it much easier to use the app and get through the content that you want to see, and the content that you don’t have much interest in. They have also upgraded the performance of the app with improved syncing and faster downloading as well. The full list of changes is below with a Play link to grab the update as well, and be sure to check it out because it is definitely a much better app.

New name: Read It Later is now Pocket! Use your existing RIL username
New Content Filter: Automatically filters content so that you can quickly switch between articles, videos and images.
Clean and simplified viewing experience with fewer toolbars and a redesigned full-screen mode.
Easier to Organize: Favorite, Tag, Archive, Delete and Bulk Edit
Available on all major platforms, including Android, Kindle Fire, iOS and a powerful web app.
Improved syncing, faster downloading, and more

Play link

Michigan Startup: FetchNotes Brings StickyNotes To Your Mobile Phone

Ann Arbor Michigan based FetchNotes is a new note taking mobile app. However they aren’t looking to challenge the likes of Evernote or Catchnotes. Co-Founder Alex Schiff says that they are looking to bring sticky notes to the mobile phone. Think more along the lines of three to four word notes not three to four page notes.

“We see ourselves as competing more with a phone’s native notepad than Evernote,” Schiff explained to Xconomy. “The problem with most of the note-taking software is that it focuses on long-form note taking. Ours is geared toward three-to-four-word notes, not three-to-four-page notes.”

Schiff and co-founder Chase Lee met at a entrepreneurship practicum at the University of Michigan. Their first idea was for an ideas marketplace startup. Schiff says he quickly learned that his idea “really sucked” and then he and Lee started looking at how people capture notes and to do items.

Fetchnotes has a variety of ways to jot down your note. Users can text, call and email notes on the fly from their mobile phone and then quickly recall them from the mobile app. Schiff admits to texting his own ideas to himself and then later putting them in a word doc.

“One day, my Blackberry’s notepad erased a year’s worth of ideas. I was very distraught.” Schiff said

Like Evernote and Catch Notes you can tag your notes and keep them organized using a hashtag system. With Fetchnotes emphasis on short notes the hashtag would be much more effective than it is on Evernote. The different ways to input a note definitely set Fetchnotes apart from the rest of the pack.

Fetchnotes is currently bootstrapped and working on a seed round at the moment. They do have a staff of 9 right now and Schiff and Lee are still enrolled as Juniors at the University of Michigan. They’re hoping that Fetchnotes will be the goto app for short notes.

source: Xconomy

Des Moines Startup: Freebee Cards About To Launch, Making Customer Loyalty And Engagement Fun

A new Des Moines based startup called FreebeeCards is preparing for launch. They are launching May 15th in Des Moines and they are currently signing up merchants and users, for what promises to be a fun and exciting new way to build customer loyalty and engagement.

Freebee Cards was founded by CEO Ken Lazzaro who is a consultant in the reward/loyalty card and credit card processing space so he has experience with this kind of thing. How did he come up with Freebee Cards? Their marketing guy Todd Razor told us in an interview:

“Ken’s consulting company, which educates and helps business owners implement gift card, loyalty and credit card processing programs, was working with the owner of a women’s clothing boutique in Austin, Texas. Ken had just sold the business owner a point-of-sale system, and she was also very interested in increasing customer loyalty. Ken’s company approached her about offering preloaded gift cards with varying values of $5, $10, $25 and $50 to customers in her area.

She loved the idea of consumers having to visit her store to find out the value of the cards. Yet a concern over not being able to measure the customer acquisition cost stopped her short of running that program.

Ken soon realized that developing an electronic version of this gift card marketing concept would allow merchants to track customer shopping habits, as well as open a direct line of communication to make special offers, reward customer loyalty and collect candid feedback outside of the public’s view.

It snowballed into an idea for a website and FreebeeCards was born.”

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Denver Startup: Closely Gives Small Businesses A Competitive Edge With Perch Dashboard

As a small business owner how do you keep track of what your closest competitors are doing? Do you wear blinders and pretend they aren’t there? Do you shop at competitor locations to see what they’re doing? Do you plant spies? Do you set up Google alerts?

While some of these things (except wearing blinders), may seem effective, they all involve time and most small business owners don’t have that. Luckily there is a Denver based startup called Closely that is looking to simplify the monitoring of your competitors in one easy to use dashboard they’re calling Perch.

Perch is currently in a closed beta. The founders at Closely are hoping that Perch will give local merchants a snapshot of competitors marketing activities and help merchants build ideas of how to respond.

“We found that the majority of businesses don’t quite yet understand the level of activity surrounding them,” Closely CEO Perry Evans told Street Fight in an email. “As the application that they learn to rely on for daily tracking and watching, we’re in a front row position for helping them participate.”

Evans, started his career in technology as head of the Mapquest publisher group so he’s very familiar with the benefits of LBS, group deals and the other technologies that are preying and benefiting local merchants.

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Leesburg VA Based Startup: Time Razor Promises You’ll Never Miss Out

Time Razor, a Leesburg VA based startup just recently took their project out of stealth mode. The company is venture backed and puts a new spin on events, and time management. TimeRazor was founded by Barry White (no relation to the R&B singer), who has a mixed background mostly in real estate development. However in the hustle bustle world of the DC suburbs we’re sure a developer knows a thing or two about time management.

What TimeRazor ultimately does is cut out the noise from other similar event recommendation apps. Through their proprietary software and algorithms TimeRazor combs through over 300,000 events a day and serves up suggestions and updates for events that the user would actually like to attend. They call this technology the “distillery”.

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Chicago Startup: iFindit Takes On Real Social Discovery

We’ve heard about hundreds of social discovery apps. You’re familiar with the type, punch in your account info for Foursquare, Twitter or Facebook and find people near you. That’s what we are used to when it comes to “social discovery”. Well there’s a relatively new startup out of Chicago that helps users connect with real their real “social” environment.

We’re not talking about finding new people who share the same interests as you. We’re talking about things like food, shelter and medical care.

Here’s how the founders of iFindit describe themselves on their web page:

The application aims to assist social workers, case managers, providers and residents. iFindit was built to serve Chicagoans by providing quick information regarding access to food, shelter and medical care in their area.

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