Market research firm IDC has just released their quarterly report on the top selling smartphones (or “converged mobile devices”, as they call them) in the US for the fourth quarter of 2009. RIM and Apple dominate the list in an almost absurd manner, but a few welcome surprises managed to sneak their way in.
Want to test your mobile expertise? Make a mental list of what you’d wager were the best selling phones at the end of 2009, and then click through to see how many you got right.
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If you’ve been camping outside of your local T-Mobile store ever since word first got out that they’d be replacing busted trackballs on a handful of BlackBerry models, you should probably run to the store and grab some more supplies. Looks like things have been pushed back a few days.
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When it comes to bar-shaped smartphones, it takes a good amount of effort to design something visually appealing. There’s really only so much you can do with a flat slab – and whatever can be done likely already has.
With that said, there’s just something about this handset, the Qisda QCM-330. I’m not sure what that “something” is, but I like it.
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HTC’s no stranger to stuffing ridiculous mechanisms into smartphones. I mean, have you seen the HTC Tilt — or better yet, the HTC Universal?
Looks like they’re at it again, if this just unearthed patent is any indication.
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Two things.
First of all: No, the image has absolutely nothing to do with the post. It was between “Stock photo of a bunch of survey check boxes” and this picture of a cat with a human smile – which would you have chosen?
Second: Please take this reader survey. We’re working on some awesome new stuff moving forward, and knowing a bit more about our readers would really help make it happen. It’ll only take a moment, and I’d really appreciate it.
When Nexus One owners were suddenly blessed with multi-touch support on their handsets, we saw the same comment posted just about everywhere we looked: “Great! Now when will the Droid get it?”
The answer, it seems, is today.
I’ll admit it: When the oh-so-damned-clever coding community managed to get an SNES emulator running on the N900 at fullspeed with features like TV-out, I got all kinds of excited. Hell, even Nokia was excited about it until they got smacked by the Mighty Hand of the Law for showing it.
Well, it just got even better.
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If you’re using the backup encryption method introduced in iPhone OS 3.0 and your password is something like “cat”, “sex”, or “tetherball”, you should probably change it to something a bit more complicated. There be hackers wantin’ your goods!
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If you’d captured all the drool we’ve drooled over the X10 since it first got detailed so many months ago, you’d have a pool deep enough to swim in. A very nasty pool that you shouldn’t actually swim in, but a pool nonetheless.
Today, UK wireless carrier Vodafone has announced that they’ll soon be carrying the Sony Ericsson’s first Android phone on their shelves. Whats more, they were nice enough to narrow the known launch window down from the previously set 3-month span of “Second quarter” down to just 1 month.
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Wuh-oh! Considering its popularity and the number of handsets floating around out there compared to the number of security exploits discovered thus far, I’d say Apple has done a pretty good job of keeping things locked down.
As this just-discovered flaw proves, however, nobody’s perfect.
The Sony Ericsson Vivaz (previously known as “Kurara”) still doesn’t have an official release date, but it looks like someone in Sony Ericsson’s camp has been playing with one lately. The company just released a pair of sample videos, marking the first time anyone outside of SE has seen footage shot on this handset. Now, given that one of the flagship features of this handset is its 720p video recording mode, we didn’t exactly expect the camera quality to be garbage – but hot damn are these videos impressive.
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When the HTC Trophy made its first appearance on that leaked 2010 roadmap back in early December, we said that it looked like a T-Mobile HTC Dash with a touchscreen.
Now that we’ve got a clearer picture and a bunch more specs on it, however, it looks more like a… well, a T-Mobile HTC Dash with a touchscreen.
Okay, look. I wasn’t going to post about these, because every bit of attention these things get will make it that much harder for me to acquire them before they sell out. But then this little nagging voice in my head (which sounds like a freakish cross between CrunchGear editor John Biggs and my mother) started saying “But, Greg! It’s your job! You have to post awesome things that people will be interested in!”
Damn you, responsibilities. Damn you to hell.
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Consider this a PSA from one person with a jailbroken iPhone to another: Don’t upgrade to the just released iPhone OS 3.1.3.
The iPhone dev team — the guys who make all of this jailbreaking stuff possible — have just confirmed that the PwnageTool and redsn0w jailbreak/unlock tools do not work with iPhone OS 3.1.3. In this endless (and really, mostly futile on Apple’s part) game of cat-and-mouse, it’s almost certain that the ridiculous talented folks in the iPhone hacking community will find their way in in no time flat – but in the mean while, hold off updating. It’s all minor bug fixes anyway.
Two new TV spots for the Pre Plus have just made their way out, and it looks like Verizon has taken a decidedly.. different approach to marketing Palm’s handset than they did with the Motorola Droid.
Lets compare, shall we?
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Step-by-step, Motorola’s next Android phone for Verizon, the Devour, is inching itself onto the shelves. First came the rumors, then came the spy shots, and now..
Fun Fact: if you were to run a Google Image Search for “bada” at the time I published this post, you wouldn’t find a single image relevant to Samsung’s bada operating system until the third page, otherwise known as “that page that no one goes to because they’ve given up hope.”
Maybe that’ll change once Samsung shows off a smartphone running the operating system – which, if this statement from ol’ Sammie themselves is any indication, might be as soon as two weeks from now.
HTC’s been pretty good about celebrating the open-source spirit of Android. Whenever they release a new Android device, the source code for whatever goods they added on top of the stock firmware comes pouring in before too long.
It took just a bit over two months, but HTC has just released the code bundle for the Verizon Droid Eris. If you’re wondering, “Great! What does that mean for me?” then hop on behind the jump.
Take the Palm Pre. Smash Android on to it, add a few buttons, and maybe tone things down in the “Good looks” department a bit. Know what you’d get? Probably not – because this is the first time we’ve seen it.
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Good news, everyone! Firefox is officially available for Maemo devices, like the Nokia N900!
What’s that you say? Firefox has been available for Maemo for a while now? Sure, but now it’s official.
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Cut to the Fox green room, as Peter Klein, CFO of Microsoft, prepares for an interview with Fox Business News
Flack: Okay Peter. You can talk about pretty much whatever you want during this interview. Windows 7, Bing, whatever. Just don’t talk about Windows Mobile 7.
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When the Toshiba TG01 launched way back in July of last year, it seemed like an absolute beast of a handset – and you know what? It still does. Packing a 1Ghz processor into an ultra-slim handset behind a big ol’ 4.1″ touchscreen, the TG01 is still right on the cutting edge if we’re only counting the hardware specs.
Leaked roadmaps made us expect the sequel, the TG02, would launch sometime at the end of last year – but that obviously hasn’t happened. Just when we thought the project might have vamoosed, handset numero dos cruises on through the FCC.
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Take the T-Mobile myTouch, and strap on a physical QWERTY keyboard. Give it a light tap with an ugly stick, and then convert the trackball into an optical trackpad. What do you get? The myTouch Slide.
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As is to be expected of any device that the masses get excited about prior to it actually existing, the iPad has torn the Internet in two. Some love it, seeing it as the first iteration of an eventually world-changing device; others just don’t see a point. “It’s just a big iPhone,” they say, “and I already have an iPhone!”
These iPhone owners are exactly who should be the most excited about the iPad – even if they don’t plan on buying one. Even before its release, the iPad has heralded a number of changes on the way for iPhone OS – and presumably, the iPhone itself.
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Everyone loves the feeling of a brand new BlackBerry trackball; you slide your finger across it, and it rolls in place like a hamster in a ball on top of a sea of butter. A few weeks later — primarily on the older devices — it starts to get a bit chunky; within months, it feels like the inside of your BlackBerry is filled with sand.
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