Monday 17 November 2014

BlackBerry Classic Smartphone Hearkens Back To Company’s Heritage

BlackBerry has lost most of its once dominant market share (in the U.S.) arguably because it has refused for so long to change and adapt to the way modern touchscreen smartphones were being built.
In its decline, the company has decided that instead of fighting from a position of retreat against other touchscreen smartphones, it would aggressively push what once made BlackBerry phones iconic -- their design, solid build, and of course, physical QWERTY keyboard, all now made to work with the modern and advanced BlackBerry 10 operating system.

Samsung Wants To Start Galaxy S6 From Scratch With ‘Project Zero’

Samsung hasn't been doing too well financially over the last few quarters. Its sales have fallen, and its profits have sharply declined by as much as 60 percentyear over year. Samsung has been getting quite a bit of criticism over the design and materials of its Galaxy S3, Galaxy S4 and Galaxy S5 devices, but the company didn't seem willing to pay attention to that criticism as market inertia and big advertising budgets continued to make its phones successful.

Samsung Gear VR 'Innovator Edition' Coming Soon

Owners of the Galaxy Note 4 will have a new toy to play with early next month with the launch of Samsung's Gear VR Innovator Edition. Like Google's Explorer Edition, this version of Samsung's VR headgear allows users to check out the hardware before the retail release. Presumably, Samsung is looking for user feedback to fine-tune the hardware as well as developer feedback regarding apps designed specifically for this headset.
According to some very small print on the product page, this Innovator Edition was created for "innovative consumers, specifically VR enthusiasts, developers, mobile experts and professionals, and early technology adopters." The drawback with this headset is that it depends on the Galaxy Note 4 for its content, which sports a 5.7-inch screen with a 2560 x 1440 resolution.

Your Next Android Phone Might Come With This Incredible Camera

It’s hard to imagine the cameras in our smartphones getting even better than what we’re used to today.
With phones such as the Galaxy S5 and HTC One, we can shoot super detailed images, edit them and adjust the focus afterwards, and use both the front and rear cameras at the same time.

The War Is Over: Samsung Has Finally Capitulated To Apple — As These Two Phones Launched Last Night Show

The end of the war was dramatic, although it was months coming: Samsung reported a staggering 20% drop in sales and an even worse 49% collapse in its profits because its flagship Galaxy S5 phone — one of those big Android phablets — just failed to sell in the last quarter.

Why Sony's Smartphone Woes Should Worry Samsung

Before Apple became its nemesis, the major foreign rival for Samsung Electronics was Sony. The Japanese company was far ahead of Samsung in developing innovative devices that consumers craved, and Samsung’s rise as a global power neatly coincided with Sony’s decline. Samsung is the top television brand around the world, for instance, while Sony’s TV business has lost money year after year. Samsung is the world’s top smartphone, while Sony has just 3.5 percent of the market worldwide.

Thursday 13 November 2014

7 Benefits of Smartphone’s to Small business

Smart phones are considerably the fastest growing devices today. Especially when you wanted to stay in touch with your contacts, they provide you more mobility than notebooks and laptops. With the increasing number of users day by day, it has become a huge opportunity for the business to utilize this revolutionary innovation to promote their brands and extend their market opportunities.
Although smart phones are used everywhere but they are designed for business professional to optimize their work and to get their accomplishments on time. Of course they are not fully equipped with functionality that laptops or notebooks provide, but still they are very useful for the small business communities.
Here are some of the advantages to use smart phones for Small Businesses.

Organizing your tasks

One of the key features of smart phone is maintaining your schedule and keeping you up to date about the upcoming events and to manage your daily tasks more efficiently. It gives you the power of communicating everywhere, even if you are away from your office or home. You can personalize your data according to your priorities and preferences.

Everything is on your Fingertips

The best feature of smart phones is that, you can access anything from anywhere. Everything is on your fingertips. You can edit or create your documents and organize your appointments through your phones while you are on the move. It provides you the latest updates from business world; you can access maps and find out locations, weather report and other relative information.
You can link with internet for email and web access, or connect to your computer network remotely to access relevant data, wherever you are, making it easier for remote workers, or a mobile workforce to stay in touch with the business. It’s possible because the web access is faster than the previous mobile devices we had in past.
Smart phones also give you quick access to your banks, it allows you to make immediate payments with just simple clicks, and there are different Apps available for making online payment through your mobile devices.

Keeps You Update on Social Media

Most importantly it empowers you to stay updated on social networks. You can receive updated news and events with the business community or friend and family. You can have access to latest business news and can easily identify the market opportunities for your business.

Integration with Business Software

It also allows integrating your business application with your smart phones to stay connected with business activities and receives up-to-date report of your financial and business operations.

Business Presentation Easier

Another key feature in most of the Smartphone devices are that they give you video input and output. So you can view your business presentation and videos in your gadgets. For business users, it would be great to be able to connect your phone to a TV or computer monitor and show PowerPoint presentations or display whatever is running on the phone’s display.

High Security

For normal consumers, it’s all about features, but for the business users the concentration is more about the security of their data and official information. So they prefer more privacy about the business activities. Smart phones, nowadays gives you more powerful security options and they can maintain your activities, and personalize according to your desire. Like Blackberry, this gives you the option for encrypted messages so no other person can access the information without your permission.

Check out our previous articles!

Smart phones are now becoming the necessity for today’s business environment. Once there was a time when you could not leave your laptop for business trips. But you can do it now, because of smart phones you can never be disconnected with your business activities no matter how far you go from your offices.
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Smartphones Present Both Risks and Opportunities for Hospitalists

The near-viral adoption of smartphone technology in hospital settings has made headlines recently, raising concerns about distracted physicians, data security breaches, infection hazards from bacteria on devices, and even misplaced devices. Critics also note the problems will be multiplied as electronic health records gain traction and become even more linked with handheld devices.
Russ Cucina, MD, MS, a hospitalist and medical director of information technology at the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF) Medical Center, says these issues aren’t new, and they’ve been successfully addressed in other industries for years.

iPhone 6 & 6 Plus demand exceeding supply, iPhone 5s selling well as Apple dominates smartphone sales

New data shows the iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus and iPhone 5s were the top three selling smartphones at all four major U.S. carriers over the last month, giving Apple complete dominance of its home market.

The latest monthly wireless store survey from Canaccord Genuity analyst Michael Walkley shows that Apple's flagship 4.7-inch iPhone 6 was the best selling smartphone at AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile in September and through the first portion of October. The larger 5.5-inch iPhone 6 Plus also came in second at all four major U.S. carriers.

BlackBerry Provides Enterprise-Grade Secure Messaging

Back in February during Mobile World Congress, BlackBerry Limited revealed a new family of BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) products and services built for enterprise customers called the eBBM suite. Now the company is introducing an enterprise-class messaging app called BBM Protected that's part of that eBBM suite. Read: Mobile Device Management: 2014 Vendor & Comparison Guide

What happens when your friend’s smartphone can tell that you’re lying

In just a few weeks, the next installment of “The Hunger Games” will arrive in movie theaters. The latest in a long line of films to depict a future all-knowing or controlling government — think “1984” or “Minority Report” — the dystopian tale will likely be a runaway hit. But the power to seem all-knowing – or at least know more than do now – may soon lie in technology that’s already in the palm of your hand.

The Truth About Parenting And Smartphones

Recently, journalists and researchers have been blaming smartphones for bad parenting. They want us to put down our devices and focus on our children. But they’ve got it all wrong.
It is no wonder that anxiety plagues the modern human. We seem hopelessly confused. We love our tools; we can’t stop creating new technologies, always disrupting our current comfort level with a new solution to a previously inconsequential problem. However, we also love to hate our tools. We blame them for our dissatisfaction. In particular, we’re conflicted about the way we’re tethered to our smartphones.

How Smartphones Work

Isn’t it great when science fiction becomes science fact? If you’re a little older, you probably wanted a communication device just like the one Captain Kirk used in the TV series “Star Trek” when you were growing up. Kirk and the crew of the USS Enterprise could talk over vast distances with these personal communication devices. Without the “communicator, the order to “beam us up, Mr. Scott” would have fallen on deaf ears, and we all know what would have happened to Kirk if he didn’t have any bars on his device.

Why Successful People Never Bring Smartphones Into Meetings

You are annoying your boss and colleagues any time you take your phone out during meetings, says new research from USC's Marshall School of Business, and if you work with women and people over forty they're even more perturbed by it than everyone else.
The researchers conducted a nationwide survey of 554 full-time working professionals earning above $30K and working in companies with at least 50 employees. They asked a variety of questions about smartphone use during meetings and found:

When to Introduce Your Child to a Smartphone or Tablet

From the time they can grasp an object in their hands, children reach for electronic gadgets of all kinds, particularly our cell phones and computers. When you start noticing more child-size fingerprints on your iPad than your own, it may be time to consider introducing your child to a handheld wireless device.
A smartphone is a high-tech cell phone that runs its own operating system, allowing the user to talk, email, surf and take high-resolution photos and videos. A tablet computer does everything your laptop does but in a small, portable flat form with a touch screen. Here are some helpful tips on when and how to introduce your child to one or both of these technologies.

Can Smartphones Make Kids Smarter?

It should come as no surprise to parents that as "smartphones" (cell phones with advanced capability such as Internet and full keyboard) become more popular, the number of children with access to mobile technologies is also increasing.

Wednesday 12 November 2014

Are Smartphones Turning Us Into Bad Samaritans?

Busy with our tablets and smartphones in public places, we may be losing our sense of duty to others

By 

Smart Phones for Smart Kids

This year more than 750 million educational apps for mobile devices will be installed world-wide.

By 

Using Smartphones in the Classroom

Tired of telling students to put away their phones? A veteran teacher shares tips for using mobile devices as learning tools.

Ken Halla knows a thing or two about using technology in the classroom.
For the past 5 years, the 22-year teaching veteran has worked to transition his ninth-grade World History and AP Government classrooms into a mobile device-friendly environment where students can incorporate the latest technology into the learning process. Along the way, Halla created three of the most used education blogs in the country—“World History Teachers Blog,” “US Government Teachers Blog,” and “US History Teachers Blog”—to help fellow humanities teachers incorporate more technology and more device-based learning into their own classrooms.

The Five: Smartphone security

Your smartphone carries a lot of things that an identity thief would love to have: stored passwords to online accounts, banking information, email addresses and phone numbers. How can you make sure your phone's private data stays private? Adam Levin, cofounder of the Identity Theft 911 website and former director of the New Jersey Division of Consumer Affairs, offers these tips:

Beware of the latest WhatsApp charging hoax - what you need to know

Regardless of what you hear, WhatsApp is free to use for the first year. Thereafter you must pay an annual fee of $0.99, which is around 69p. You will not be charged any more than this for using the service, and you don't need to do anything to make sure it keeps going. Trust us: WhatsApp is not short on users. ReadWhat are the two blue ticks in WhatsApp? WhatsApp read message update explained.
Below you can read about yet another WhatsApp hoax that surfaced earlier this year.
Many WhatsApp users have suffered from a chain letter hoax this week, right on the tail of the app’s acquisition by Facebook on 19 February and a major server outage on Saturday evening. This is the latest in a series of hoaxes that have plagued WhatsApp since its inception.
WhatsApp users have been receiving convoluted messages claiming to be from the app’s founder, “David D. Suretech.” (Brian Acton and Jan Koum are the actual founders of WhatsApp.) The spam claims that the company will soon charge 37 cents per message to any “inactive” users. The only way to avoid this, the hoax claims, is to pass the message along to ten other users, establishing yourself as an “active” user and therefore entitled to free service.
One version of the message reads: ”Hello, I. Am DAVID D. SURETECH founder of Whatsapp. this message is to inform all of our users that we have only 53million accounts available for new phones. Our servers have recently been very congested, so we asking for your help to solve this problem. We need our active users to forward this message to every single person in their contact list in order to confirm our active users that use WhatsApp. If you do not send this message to all your contacts to WhatsApp, then your account will remain inactive with the consequence of losing all your contacts. The automatic update symbol on your SmartPhone Will appear with the transmission of this message. Your smartphone will be updated within 24 hours, and will feature a new design; a new color for the chat and the icon will change from green to azul. Whatsapp will begin to charge unless you are a frequent user. If you have at least 10 contacts send this sms and the logo will become red on your platform to indicate that you are an active user. Tomorrow, we wil begin to take messages for whatsapp for 0.37 cents. Forward this message to more than 9 people in your contact list and the what's app logo on your will turn blue meaning that you have Become a free user for life.
According to the WhatsApp website, the app is free to use for the first year. After that milestone, users will be charged $0.99 (£0.59) on an annual basis.
WhatsApp has made no comment on this latest hoax. The official response to a similarly worded bit of spam in January was: “Please understand that this is a hoax and there is no truth to it.”
Pradeesh VS, General Manager at IT security company ESET Middle East, told Gulf News that there is no security issue and the best course of action is just to ignore or delete the message.
“The senders are just misusing,” he said. “As of now it does not harm any user.”
WhatsApp has experienced many similar chain-letter hoaxes since it started five years ago – a style that has been around since the dawn of the Internet.
This latest confusion comes right on the tail of Facebook's deal with WhatsApp, comprising of $4 billion (£2.4 billion) in cash and $12 billion (£7.18 billion) worth of Facebook shares. A major server outage came soon thereafter on Saturday evening.
“Sorry we [sic] currently experiencing server issues. We hope to be back up and recovered shortly,” the company Tweeted. A couple hours later, it said: “WhatsApp service has been restored. We are so sorry for the downtime…”

Motorola and LG vie to be first with Android 5.0 update

The race to upgrade smartphones to Android 5.0 (also known as Lollipop) is on, with LG Electronics and Motorola vying with Google's Nexus devices for bragging rights.Motorola Mobility has posted upgrade details and instructions for second generation models of the Moto G and Moto X, and on Wednesday at least some unlocked Moto G's were able to download the upgrade.

Are Smartphones Ruining the Restaurant Experience?

Your smartphone is the scourge of restaurants. Customers snapping photos of food and dawdling on Facebook at meals have slowed down table service by an hour over the last 10 years, as an anonymous post on Craigslist’s “rants & raves” section recently alleged. The writer claimed that his restaurant, located in Manhattan’s Midtown East and serving “both locals and tourists,” had studied security footage from July 2004 and compared with a tape of a recent Thursday this month. The takeaway: Today’s technologically distracted diners take longer to order, longer to eat, and longer to pay—and then they blame the restaurant for the wait! “We are grateful for everyone who comes into our restaurant,” the aggrieved restaurateur wrote, “but can you please be a bit more considerate?”
In almost no time, the indignant andnow deleted Craigslist screed set the Internet alight. A post on Distractifytranscribing the entire complaint quickly racked up more than 750,000 shares and 2,600 comments. “Smartphone use in restaurants prompts Craigslist rant,” announced the BBC. “Cell phones slowing down service in restaurants. Wait times have doubled because customers are too busy with their screens,” blared the Daily Mail. “Why you should (really, seriously, permanently) stop using your smartphone at dinner,” proclaimed theWashington Post.
Tempting as it can be to take anonymous, unsubstantiated Craigslist rants at face value, we decided to do a little digging on this one. Let’s take a closer look at some of the specific claims made by the post about customers in 2014:
26 out of 45 customers spend an average of 3 minutes taking photos of the food.
14 out of 45 customers take pictures of each other with the food in front of them or as they are eating the food. This takes on average another 4 minutes as they must review and sometimes retake the photo.
9 out of 45 customers sent their food back to reheat. Obviously if they didn’t pause to do whatever on their phone the food wouldn’t have gotten cold.
27 out of 45 customers asked their waiter to take a group photo. 14 of those requested the waiter retake the photo as they were not pleased with the first photo. On average this entire process between the chit chatting and reviewing the photo taken added another 5 minutes and obviously caused the waiter not to be able to take care of other tables he/she was serving.
Three minutes to take photos of food? That’s a long time to take a casual snapshot or two. So is four minutes to take and review additional photos with friends, all while a presumably hot and delicious meal is sitting in front of you. “I think this is clearly a fake—the whole scenario is made up,” says Luke O’Neil, a food industry writer for publications including Slate who spent more than 10 years working in the restaurant business. “It seems like one of these things that’s designed to make a point.”
Smartphones have undoubtedly become a hot-button issue for the restaurant world in recent years. Some chefs have publicly decried phone pics and social media forruining the dining experience, while others have banned the use of devices in their dining areas altogether. But is cellphone use really causing massive disruptions to restaurant service?“I haven’t noticed that,” says Patrick Duxbury, general manager at TAO Downtown in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. “We are a very busy restaurant—we service well over 600, 700, 800 diners a night—and I don’t necessarily think we’d be able to do that if smartphones were in our way.” As a common venue for celebratory dinners, birthdays, and bachelorette parties, TAO Downtown does take lot of photos, Duxbury says, but that’s “absolutely not” bad for the restaurant. “Those pictures go up on social media, some of them instantly on Instagram and Facebook, and it gets us out there,” he says.
Other chefs, waiters, and restaurateurs echo this sentiment. John Kapetanos, owner of Ethos in Manhattan’s Midtown East—the same neighborhood as the anonymous Craigslist poster—says maybe 10 percent of his customers ask the waiter to take a group photo; it’s a favor that takes less than a minute and doesn’t slow down service. Over the 12 years Ethos has been in business, Kapetanos says cellphones have added maybe five to 10 minutes to the average table time, but that he doesn’t mind as long as diners at one table aren’t bothering those at another. Jean-Marte, a waiter at a French restaurant in Midtown who declined to give his last name, concurs that taking photos of customers doesn’t slow his stride. He adds that smartphones can even be quite helpful when dealing with foreign tourists who don’t understand the menu. “It’s easier for them to go on the website or on Yelp, and they can show you a picture and say, ‘This is what I want,’ ” he explains.
In late 2012, food and restaurant consulting firm Technomic conducted a study of how consumers were integrating their phones into the dining experience. Roughly 30 percent admitted to taking photos of their food, while 9 percent said they had paid through mobile. “There’s no doubt that consumers are taking time to use their mobile devices in restaurants,” says Mary Chapman, director of product innovation at Technomic. “I anecdotally have not seen it impact timing, and really, if someone is taking pictures of your food and posting it, and your food is delicious-looking, it can only be good for your restaurant.”
Smartphones, in other words, might be a bit annoying, but on the whole restaurants agree that they’re more of a boon to business than a hindrance—and certainly not the impediment the Craigslist post made them out to be. “It’s just part of our lives now,” says Michael Scelfo, chef and owner of the recently opened Alden & Harlow in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “Back in the old days, if you wanted to pay with your credit card, someone had to physically go and carbon-copy it and write information on it. Now they can swipe it on their phone tableside. How much time does that save?”
Then again, the Craigslist post clearly hit a nerve with restaurant-goers and restaurant workers alike, perhaps tapping into a shared fear that the more time we spend with our smartphones, the less we make for each other. Even if our phones aren’t slowing down service, who really wants to be sitting at a table full of people who are too busy Instagramming their food and checking their Twitter feeds to have a conversation? That’s a reflection on us, rather than the restaurant. But it might just make people grumpy enough to blame the staff.

Is your smartphone making you fat and lazy?

Were you planning on running this morning, but wasted too much time reading Twitter messages on your iPhone? When you do make it to the gym, do people give you the evil eye because you sit on a weight machine and text with a friend?
If you answered yes to either question, you may be turning into a "hyper-connected" couch potato.

Smartphone Sales Lifted by Low-Cost Handsets in Emerging Markets: IDC

Global smartphone sales grew at a healthy pace in the third quarter, boosted by low-cost handsets in emerging markets, industry research showed Thursday.
The research firm IDC said global smartphone shipments jumped 25.2 percent from a year earlier to 327.6 million in the quarter, and were up 8.7 percent over the second quarter.

Tuesday 11 November 2014

Samsung Galaxy 'A Series' Production Issues Delayed, Limited Launch: Report

The global launch of Samsung's recently unveiled metal-clad Galaxy A3 and Galaxy A5has reportedly been delayed due low production yields for the full metal bodies, but will still hit "select markets" including China in November.

Samsung Reportedly Developing a Brand New Series of Smartphones

After recently introducing the Galaxy A series of smartphones with the launch of theGalaxy A3 and Galaxy A5, Samsung is reportedly all set to introduce another new smartphone series.
According to Sammobile, Samsung might finally 'ditch' long naming conventions with the launch launching a new series of smartphones. The report, citing 'reliable sources', suggests that the company will soon introduce a new smartphone range with single-letter naming convention, similar to that of the Galaxy A series.

BlackBerry CEO Says Will Launch Fewer Devices, Focus on Profitability

BlackBerry, which has completed the first phase of its two-year turnaround plan, is now focused on profitability and will not spread itself thin by attempting to launch too many new devices, its chief executive said.
John Chen, who took the reins at the struggling mobile technology company in November 2013, has moved rapidly to try to get the one-time investor darling back on track. The company has sold assets, struck partnerships to lower manufacturing costs and broaden app offerings, and raised cash via the sale of real estate holdings in its home town of Waterloo, Ontario.