China Mobile, you’re doing it wrong. TelecomAsia reported that China Mobile, the world’s largest mobile phone operator, wants a big slice of the app revenue pie. Real big. They seek nothing less than 50% of all revenue generated by mobile apps from third-party developers. That’s considerably larger than the likes of Apple and Google’s Android, which both limit their cut to 30% of the generated income from app sales. China Mobile, moreover, hasn’t figured out how to build incentive for developers to focus on their products, so taking such a big cut is a slap in the face at best.
China Mobile is opening their store-front to all of their mobile operating systems, aside from the iPhone, which has exclusivity with Apple’s market. The people of China can expect to see an empty marketplace when it launches on their phones in September of this year.
[Via TelecomAsia, Picture Via net_efekt]
Each Friday for the foreseeable future, we’ll be showcasing a handful of recently launched applications from the iPhone App Store. Generally, we’ll highlight the best apps to hit our inbox, shining a guiding light on the gems that might otherwise get lost in the endless torrent of app releases. Unfortunately, the best apps to hit our inbox this week .. really weren’t very good. Read. Comment. Enjoy.
Listen up, 2.5mm-to-3.5mm headset adapters. You too, crappy shape changers required by an absurd chunk of the worthwhile phones out there: We’re through. Game over. Just like voicemail and hand shakes, we’re officially declaring war on any middleman component required to pump audio from a cell phone to decent headphones, along with the phones that use them.
There was a time when this sort of thing was acceptable. It was only a few years ago. Most phones were hitting the shelves with but a few hundred megabytes of storage space, while standalone audio players touted capacities that all but the most dedicated downloaders had a hard time filling. Then came microSD and its high capacity variant, allowing users to pack up to 16 gigs of data (soon to be 32 gigabytes and, with the eventual evolution of SDXC, up to 2 terabytes) onto a card roughly the size of your thumbnail. Then came the iPhone which, whether the decriers like it or not, made much of the general populace give a damn about what their cell phones could do. With 3G networks up across the country and 4G networks beginning to roll out, audio streaming and on-the-go music downloads are becoming commonplace.
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Well, it’s about time! After a few missteps, Verizon has finally gotten their act together and managed to get a much needed software update for the Blackberry Storm through testing. Right now, it’s still unknown what the soon-to-be released 4.7.0.148 software will do for all you patient Storm owners out there, but what we do know is when you can get your mitts on it: you can download it directly from RIM this Sunday, May 31 at 3 PM sharp. For those of you who are a little less motivated, it’ll be available as an OTA update starting at 10 PM that same night.
For all the good it’s bound to do, it’s puzzling that no one has let slip what this will fix. Storm owners, what do you want to see taken care of before you ditch your trusty handset for a Storm 2?
EDIT: Not minutes after this was posted, one of BGR’s trusted ninjas came through with the change log. Take a look after the jump!
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Truth be told, I’d be more inclined to buy one of those old people cellphones than something like this (or the iPhone for that matter!) The ITG xpPhone, which will debut at Computex, is, yes, a cellphone that, yes, runs Windows XP. Yes. As a Mac user, the only reason I’d boot into Windows XP is to fire up uTorrent, or play Team Fortress 2, neither of which I see running too well on the phone.
Almost immediately after we opened our tips line, someone whispered to us that France Telecom was prepping the HTC Hero for launch on Orange UK and Orange France sometime in the last week of June. This was the first time this source had contacted us, so we were a bit wary; we dug a bunch, couldn’t find any leads, so we held off on posting it.
Now, a second, entirely unrelated source has come forward saying that they’ve heard the same thing: Last week of June, Orange UK/France. It’s by no means absolute proof, but it seems a bit too coincidental to be a complete sham. With the HTC Hero already making its way into promo videos, a release roughly one month from now doesn’t seem too deep in the crazy zone. Assign this rumor whatever grain of salt keeps you comfortable – we’ll keep our eyes pealed.
Whether it was an intentional leak or someone just missed the “Private” button, we’re not sure – but for just a few hours today, a promo video for the as-of-yet unannounced HTC Hero found its way online.
It was taken down pretty quick, but not before the guys over at AndroidCommunity managed to snatch it up for reposting. It doesn’t show much we haven’t seen already (Rosie UI, interface changes, and that the Hero has one hell of a chin on it), but it does give us a glimpse at the color schemes that we might be seeing later: Neon Yellow, Red, Orange, Pink, White, Turquoise, and good ol’ Black.
Video after the jump.
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The majority of those awesome Japanese cell phones I keep blogging about unfortunately never leaves this country (at least in legal ways). But this may soon change, as Japan gets older (which results in a rapidly shrinking customer base) and is severely hit by the recession. Especially Sharp seems to now be bullish about bringing some of their cell phones to America and other areas.
Sure, your grandparents never seemed like the most tech-savvy people on the block, but a recent release by The Seniors Coalition aim to change that. According to them, not only do old folks know their stuff, they want to change things for the better.
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It seems like all the attention these days is focused on smartphones. The reality is, not everyone who needs and uses a cellphone wants a pocket-computer and/or to pay for the hefty data services required to take advantage of said smarties.
With that in mind, it’s nice to see that Samsung is still working on improving its more standard fair / “dumb” phones, if you will. The recently released Alias2 is a primary example of Big Sam’s innovation-meets-pedestrian-handset tactics.
Like its older sibling, the Alias2 sports a dual-hinge allowing the phone to flip open like a traditional clam-shell, as well as in landscape orientation. But unlike like its blood-brother, the most intriguing (not to mention, innovative) feature of this second-gen, messaging-centric flip phone is the inclusion of Samsung’s “Magic Key” e-ink (think Kindle-tech) back-lit keypad.
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As anyone who has spent some time with any recent HTC-made Windows Mobile phone ought to know, HTC has a serious knack for taking mobile OSes and customizing them – and there’s no better OS for that than Android. After cranking out the Dream and the Magic with only limited modifications, all signs indicate that HTC is going all out with the tweaks on the upcoming HTC Hero.
Over the past few weeks, a build of the HTC Hero ROM has been floating around, albeit closely guarded, amongst the developer community. A hacker going by the name of Haykuro would port it to the G1, then demonstrate the new features on video. Eventually the build leaked without without Haykuro’s permission, and it spread like wildfire. It’s a buggy beta build and lacks some of the features we’ve already seen (like the Rosie UI home screen), but it’s relatively functional and gives us a sneak peek at some of the cool things to come from the future HTC Android devices.
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Now here’s an app many creative professionals might find useful. The DSLR Remote iPhone app lets you trigger your camera’s shutter, adjust almost any of its settings, and view photos it’s taken. The catch, unfortunately, is that the camera needs to be wired to a computer for this to work. Even so, I can think of plenty of situations where this could come in handy, though admittedly there are few where a professional would absolutely need it. Still, the more tools you have, the more versatile your whole setup is, and who wouldn’t want to snap pics via their iPhone anyway?
With handsets like the Storm 2 and the Blackberry Tour coming down Verizon’s pipeline, it’s sort of hard to get excited about anything else they’ve got. That’s not about to stop LG though – they’re poised to launch three new handsets on Big Red within the next few days. Let’s take a look:
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Bombarded with dozens of news sources and code-heavy web sites, mobile news browsing seems to be a daunting task at best. Even on Wi-Fi, some of the most powerful mobile phones take their sweet time rendering. Searching for a solid application that can handle aggregation of popular and trusted news sources can be just as tedious as actually reading news on a mobile phone. Tedium, however, may have come to an end for us Android users with the release of Handmark’s Express News. With 10,000-50,000 downloads, Express News has maintained a 4.5/5 score to an often-critical crowd. With all the buzz on this product, we figured it was time to give it a run.
First it was AT&T mouthing off about carrying the Palm Pre and now Verizon’s CEO Lowell McAdam is stating that VZW will begin selling the Palm Pre “over the next six months or so…” Also mentioned was the Storm 2 by McAdam, which will also go on sale in the same time frame. Side note: Palm shares went up 11 points while Sprint’s went down 3 points after this announcement.
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Google’s Andy Rubin, Mr. Android himself, remarked yesterday that we can expect to see 18 Android phones in the US by the end of the year. That’s way, way, way up from “one” last year. We may even see 20 Android phones this year, all coming from eight or nine different companies.
Per a Fortune blog, the Palm Pre syncs “seamlessly” with iTunes. It’s not that shocking considering there are apps that add this functionality to many MP3 players and smartphones. However, this is the first phone besides the iPhone of course that has this ability out of the box. Don’t expect to load your iTunes Music Store purchases on the phone as it can’t handle the DRM. Your what.cd downloads will work fine though.
An “also-ran” is, literally, “a horse that does not win, place, or show in a race.” The world loves an underdog but it never loves an also-ran. It forgets about an also-ran.
And so we reach nearly the end of Palm Pre madness and I’m afraid to report that after all the magic, all the tears, all the joy the Palm Pre will be just another phone. It won’t save Palm, it won’t change paradigms, and it won’t send the iPhone hegemony crashing to its knees. The Palm Pre will launch with a whisper, not a bang.
Digital Leisure has just launched Space Ace for the iPhone/Touch. This game, for those of you too young to remember when games were groundbreaking and amazing and worth spending money on, used a laserdisc to display little cartoons that played when you tapped the buttons or controller correctly. Obviously this is about as intuitive as a do-it-yourself colostomy kit but dammit look at those graphics. Space Ace and Dragon’s Lair came at a weird point between consoles where “photorealistic” was becoming a distant reality but “ugly and blocky” was the status quo.
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Pah! Cupcake. Any true sweets connoisseur knows that the cupcake is at the bottom of the dessert totem pole, only ranking above those nasty red/white mints they chuck in alongside your bill. We’d take a delicious, engulfed-in-glaze donut over a cupcake any day – and so would Google.
At today’s Google I/O conference, Google gave folks in the audience a sneak peak at Android 2.0, which they’ve aptly named “Donut”. It’s still fairly early in development, but they’ve already nailed out a few features that look pretty damn delicious.
The new stuff on display:
- Android Search: Like the iPhone 3.0 software, Donut will be able to search across all local files. Unlike the iPhone OS, however, Android Search will be able to jump online at the touch of a button. (The Pre will be able to do local/online search as well – so we’d imagine that Apple’s already cracking away at squeezing in a websearch button)
- Text-to-speech API: Google has had text-to-speech in their own Android widgets for some time now. Donut will open up the text-to-speech APIs to all, allowing third party devs to roll it into their own apps. According to Google, it should play friendly with plenty of voices and accents
Google also plans to open up a bunch of other new APIs with Donut, though they’re remaining mum for today. We expect to hear more about those in tomorrow’s keynote.
