If you follow the rumors surrounding Apple, you know that the company is reportedly working on a television. That television, rumors suggest, will come with iCloud support, apps, and perhaps even Siri. More importantly, it’ll deliver the kind of image quality often not found in today’s televisions. However, like so many other Apple products, it’s highly likely that the television will boast a high price tag.
Nokia has big plans for PureView, including thinner handsets and Windows Phone support, though there’s more than just branding that’s getting in the way of slimming the smartphone camera tech. We grabbed some hands-on playtime with the Nokia 808 PureView in Germany this week, at the headquarters of long-time photography partner Carl Zeiss, where we not only discovered just what the camera is capable of, but some of the decisions – technical, product and otherwise – behind the PureView concept. And make no mistake: if any one thing signifies Nokia’s potential salvation in the mobile industry, PureView is it.
Happy Thursday, everyone. Friday's right around the corner and that means the weekend is almost here! But for now, we're chugging along to give you the tech news you need to know. First out of the gate today - Comcast boosts data cap to 300GB, adds tiered plans. And speaking of data, let's go to mobile news - T-Mobile announced contract-free data passes. And in other major mobile news, the HTC Evo 4G LTE is set for a May 23 release.
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RIM is in a heap of trouble, but you wouldn’t know it from the attendance at BlackBerry World in Orlando earlier this month, where literally thousands of people packed a giant conference room to hear CEO Thorsten Heins’ keynote address, meet with RIM account teams, and attend developer events. These weren’t just holdouts from RIM’s government or enterprise base, either; RIM allowed BlackBerry World alumnae to skip some lines, and the “SpeedPass” lines were 20x shorter than the regular ones. RIM has been growing rapidly some global markets, and many of the attendees appeared to hail from these locales, where the BlackBerry brand – and BBM in particular – are hallmarks of upwardly mobile youth.
Intel's Thunderbolt connection is nearing its end as almost an Apple exclusive, with the high-speed connection set to proliferate on 3rd Gen Core Ivy Bridge PCs through 2012. Bundling DisplayPort and PCIe channels into a single connection, Apple has already used Thunderbolt to its advantage in its Thunderbolt Display, and now Anandtech has had some playtime with one of the first PC motherboards to natively support the tech.
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Here's a rumor that just won't die: Apple's coming out with an affordable 7-inch iPad. This time the perpetrators are iMore, citing the usual anonymous sources. The claim that the smaller iPad is due in October of this year, and that Apple is aiming for a retail price between $200 and $250. The exact screen dimensions aren't mentioned, but they're using 7 inches (a popular Android tablet size) as a sort of conceptual generic. They claim that the cheapest model will start at 8GB.
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Samsung’s new Galaxy S III isn’t short on superlatives – its quadcore chip and HD Super AMOLED display spring to mind – but the biggest upgrade is surprisingly in software, not hardware. There’s no denying that the Galaxy S III raises the game from the Galaxy S II, bringing the new flagship up to scratch in competing with HTC’s One X and steeling itself for the incoming iPhone 5. Yet, while Samsung excels in hardware, it’s software and ecosystem which took the focus of the company’s launch.
Happy Wednesday, everyone. I hope your hump day is going well - the first hump day of May. As we forge our way through another month, there is no shortage of technology news. Although most of the Blackberry World news has come to a close, there's still some residual stuff to talk about. For example, RIM is close to hiring a new marketing chief. Also, after all the excitement about Blackberry 10, existing customers will be disappointed to know that there are no Blackberry 10 upgrade plans for existing phones. Moving on to a different subject, the world of retail - Target drops eReaders left and right.
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As the Mac App Store passed 1 year in business earlier this year, so too has the store this month passed the 10,000 applications - with some surprising entries sitting at the top of the charts this week. Some unsurprising entries into each of the three "top" lists on the Mac App Store are Apple-made apps OS X Lion, iPhoto, and Keynote. You'll find several apps you may have never heard of before today as well, especially in the "Top Free" section of the store. This digital app store is distributed with all Mac OS X installs, and takes cues from the iTunes App Store on how the software business is evolving to a click-and-download model as fast as you can say environmentalism.
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Samsung has ousted Nokia from the cellphone top-spot, taking the number one position in handset sales worldwide, according to research firms. New figures from IHS iSuppli and Strategy Analytics confirm that Nokia has finally slipped from its perch at the top of the cellular tower, the company’s dwindling sales over the past few quarters driving it down to 22.5-percent marketshare in Q1 2012; in contrast, Samsung took 25.4-percent of the worldwide mobile phone marketshare in the same period, while Apple’s stellar iPhone sales recently have pushed the company to 9.5-percent of the global marketshare.
We can't exactly call this breaking news, but for the first time, a Samsung officially has gone on record mentioning the name "Galaxy S III." Yes, even though the Internet has been positively aglow of news stories about the new device, and Samsung has been providing teases for weeks, no one at the company had actually said the name of the impending device. So all this means is that we won't be in for a huge surprise in the naming department.
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Augmented reality is headed into the museum today, though as a way of making science exhibits more engaging rather than relegating the tech to the history books. London’s Science Museum has teamed with Top Gear presenter James May and app developer DigiCave to use Qualcomm’s Vuforia augmented reality system to put a virtual guide on key exhibits. Nine of the Science Museum’s most prized items now get a personal tour by May on your iPhone, iPad or Android device; check out our hands-on with James May Science Stories after the cut.
