Category: Mobile

Samsung’s Galaxy S4 is less likely to remain your life companion if you drop it on the ground. The latest durability tests released by smartphone insurance vendor SquareTrade have found that the Galaxy S4 is more fragile than both the older Galaxy S III model and Apple’s iPhone 5. SquareTrade found that while the Galaxy S4 “proved slightly more water resistant than its predecessor,” it “actually performed worse in most other categories” by breaking more easily when dropped and by being more difficult to grip.

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If you want a bullish sales projection for the new BlackBerry Q10 smartphone, look no further than BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins, who projects that the company will sell “tens of millions” of the devices in the coming months. Bloomberg reports that while speaking at the Milken Institute conference in Los Angeles on Monday, Heins claimed that the company has seen “very, very good first signs already after the launch in the U.K.” this week and explained that the Q10 is “going into the installed base of more than 70 million BlackBerry users so we have quite some expectations” for sales of “tens of millions” of units. The Q10, which is designed to look more like iconic pre-touchscreen BlackBerry phones, includes 3.5-inch display, a 1.5GHz dual-core processor, an 8-megapixel rear-facing camera, a 2-megapixel front-facing camera, 2GB RAM, 16GB internal storage and a 2,100 mAh battery.

After more than six years, it definitely feels like time for Apple to freshen up the look of iOS. Unfortunately, a new report suggests the revamped look iOS 7 is said to be getting may be “unsettling” to longtime iOS device users. 9to5Mac cites multiple unnamed sources in claiming that iOS 7 will indeed feature the “flat” user interface redesign that had been rumored in earlier reports. According to the site’s sources, however, the new look isn’t just flat — it’s “very, very flat” to the point that it is reminiscent of Microsoft’s Windows Phone user interface and current iOS users who enjoy the look of the software might not like it. “The interface loses all signs of gloss, shine, and skeumorphism seen across current and past versions of iOS,” one source told the site. While the look may be surprising, 9to5Mac says the new version of iOS will be just as easy to use as earlier versions of the platform.

Samsung’s newest flagship smartphone is now available on AT&T, T-Mobile and Sprint, and will be coming to Verizon later next month. The Galaxy S4 comes in 16GB, 32GB or 64GB models, however users may want to splurge for the higher capacity models. Geek.com discovered that nearly half of the internal storage for the 16GB model is used even before the device is powered on for the first time. Samsung has bundled together a number of preloaded applications on the handset such as S Health, S Travel and its ChatOn messaging service, among others, that take up a total of 45% of the 16GB Galaxy S4. Despite the fact that it is advertised to include 16GB of internal storage, in reality users are left with a mere 8.82GB of available space. Luckily the Galaxy S4 supports expandable storage of up to  64GB of additional space, so it is recommended that users bypass the entry-level model or purchase a microSD card.

Do you think that the Samsung Galaxy S4 is just a plastic slab with a big, beautiful display? Well Samsung executives want to dispel you of that mistaken notion, because the Galaxy S4 is much more than a smartphone: rather, it’s a “life companion.” In a new video promoting the Galaxy S4, Samsung execs explain how the Galaxy S4 is “more in sync” with your life and was created “with more emotional elements in mind.” Samsung product designer Jongbo Jung also compares the Galaxy S4 to “a precious stone glittering in the dark or countless stars sparkling in the night sky” and says that his design team was influenced by “these elements in nature.” The end result, says Samsung vice president of UX design Sungsik Lee, is that the Galaxy S4 makes every user’s life “richer and fuller.” The full magical video is posted below.

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It looks like iPhone fans may not have to wait until the fall to get their hands on the new iPhone 5S after all. French blog Nowhereelse.fr has published a leaked document from Japanese carrier KDDI showing that preorders for the iPhone 5S will start on June 20th with a release date expected for sometime in July. Of course, this could just be a placeholder date that the carrier has put down to coincide with Apple’s annual WWDC event in June, so there’s a good chance that the new smartphone still won’t launch until September. According to earlier rumors, Apple has been having trouble implementing new fingerprint sensor technology in the iPhone 5S, which could result in its release getting pushed back to September.

There’s apparently a fair amount of pent-up demand for QWERTY keyboard smartphones in the United Kingdom. Seeking Alpha reports that U.K. retailer Carphone Warehouse has seen strong demand for BlackBerry’s new Q10 smartphone during its launch weekend that is significantly higher than the demand it saw for the BlackBerry Z10 smartphone released earlier this year. According to the report, Carphone Warehouse sold out its entire stock of 2,000 BlackBerry Q10s over the span of just 90 minutes, which comes out to around 22.2 phones sold every 60 seconds. The Q10, which is designed to look more like iconic pre-touchscreen BlackBerry phones, includes 3.5-inch display, a 1.5GHz dual-core processor, an 8-megapixel rear-facing camera, a 2-megapixel front-facing camera, 2GB RAM, 16GB internal storage and a 2,100 mAh battery.

An image published on a Chinese website over the weekend supposedly reveals Samsung’s upcoming Galaxy Note III phablet. According to MyDrivers, the next-generation Note smartphone will be equipped with a 5.99-inch full HD 1080p display, 3GB of RAM, 32GB of internal storage, a microSD slot and Android 4.2.2. The report also claims that the handset will feature an eight-core Exynos 5410 Octa processor with the Cortex A15 cores clocked at 2.0GHz and the Cortex A7 core at 1.7GHz, considerably higher than the international Galaxy S4’s clock speeds of 1.6GHz and 1.2GHz, respectively. Earlier rumors have suggested that the device may include a flexible and shatter-proof display and better build quality compared to Samsung’s previous plastic smartphones. The Galaxy Note III is expected to debut at the IFA Trade Show in September. The alleged image follows below.

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Big, beautiful displays are Samsung’s calling card and the image quality experts at DisplayMate confirm that the new display on the Galaxy S4 is bigger and more beautiful than any Samsung smartphone display to date. In fact, DisplayMate claims that the Galaxy S4’s display doesn’t just give Samsung’s smartphone line an incremental boost, but instead represents “a major enhancement and improvement over the Galaxy S III” and is “a good reason to consider trading up” all by itself.

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Google on Friday changed one of its Play Store policies to prevent apps from being updated outside of its marketplace. The company states that “an app downloaded from Google Play may not modify, replace or update its own APK binary code using any method other than Google Play’s update mechanism.” The change comes shortly after Facebook tweaked its Android application to allow users to update it without using the normal Google Play update system. It could be a coincidence, however it would appear that Google is worried that other developers might have followed suit and would therefore become less dependent on its Play Store.

Vendors such as Samsung, HTC and LG have turned to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 600 processor to power their flagship devices. The chipset has been praised for its high-end performance and efficient power consumption, and Qualcomm is promising an even better user experience with its Snapdragon 800 processor. The company’s upcoming chip is similar to the 600 version with its four cores that are clocked asynchronously, however it can maintain a clock speed of up to 2.3GHz and includes a new Adreno 330 graphics processor that is capable of supporting 4K resolution playback at 30 frames-per-second.

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Sony is reportedly preparing to launch a new flagship Xperia smartphone in the near future. According to the Xperia Blog, the Xperia ZR will be equipped with a 4.6-inch display, either a 1.5GHz quad-core Snapdragon S4 Pro or a Snapdragon 600 chipset and a 13-megapixel rear camera. The handset will also reportedly include 2GB RAM, 8GB of internal storage, a microSD slot and a 2,300 mAh battery, and will be capable of sitting in more than 5 feet of water for up to 30 minutes without being damaged. Unlike similar high-end devices, however, Sony’s new smartphone won’t include a full HD display and will instead reportedly feature a 720p panel.

While Google’s Android operating system has a lead over iOS in overall market share, it faces a hard barrier that blocks its ability to expand its lead much further: The loyalty of iOS users. AllThingsD points us to a new survey from the Yankee Group showing that 91% of iPhone users plan to buy an iPhone for the next smartphone while just 76% of Android users plan to stick with Android. Granted, this means that the majority of Android users are loyal to their platform but not to the same extent as Apple fans are loyal to the iPhone. Going forward, the Yankee Group thinks that the iPhone will expand its share of the mobile market and overtake Android, although it doesn’t think Android’s current market share will significantly deteriorate. Rather, most of the gains for iOS will come at the expense of non-smartphone operating systems that are slowly phased out over the next few years.

While BGR found Samsung’s Galaxy S4 to be a top-notch smartphone, other publications have given the device decidedly mixed reviews, typified by Walt Mossberg’s criticism of Samsung for producing software that is “often gimmicky, duplicative of standard Android apps, or, in some cases, only intermittently functional.” There’s likely no company that is more relieved to see the Galaxy S4 getting so-so reviews than HTC, whose HTC One flagship phone has received across-the-board acclaim but is also in danger of being outgunned by Samsung’s all-powerful hype machine.

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Samsung cleaned up in the first quarter. The South Korea-based vendor raked in record profits between January and March, and market research firm Strategy Analytics helps illustrate just how dominant Samsung has become in terms of shipment volumes. As the company’s lead in the smartphone market grew last quarter, so too did its share of all global cell phone shipments. According to Strategy Analytics, Samsung shipped 106.6 million mobile phones worldwide in Q1 2013 to capture 28.6% of the global market. Those stats are up from the same quarter last year, when Samsung shipped 92.5 million units good for 24.5% of the market.

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As supersized smartphones from Samsung continue to get more and more unwieldy, it’s not just rival handset makers that are being forced to rework their offerings in response. A recent report draws attention to an interesting phenomenon brought on by the phablet craze currently sweeping the world: Smartphones have become so massive that clothing companies actually have to reengineer their pants in order to accommodate these huge new handsets.

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Vendors doing battle in the global smartphone market last quarter saw the distance grow between Samsung, the market leader, and the rest of the pack. Market research firm Strategy Analytics is always among the first to issue quarterly shipment estimates and now that Samsung’s Q1 results are on record, the firm has made its numbers for the March quarter available. According to Strategy Analytics, Samsung shipped an estimated 69.4 million smartphones globally in Q1, representing 56% growth over the year-ago quarter, to take a record 33% of the global smartphone market. The South Korea-based juggernaut grew nine times faster than Apple, which sold “a lackluster 37.4 million iPhones worldwide.” Apple’s market share fell to 17.9% in the first quarter from 22.8% in the same quarter last year.

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IDC is the first of the big analyst companies to come out with quarterly mobile device shipment numbers that indicate Q1 as the first quarter where smartphones have outnumbered more basic feature phones in worldwide shipments: in a total market of 418.6 million devices, 216.2 (51.6%) were smartphones. But it is was a kind of tipping point of another sort, too: it is a sign of how Apple is not the juggernaut that it once was.

(BTW… for those of you keeping track, this is not the first quarter where Android has all but dominated the top-five rankings, save Apple’s presence. That happened in Q4 2012, according to IDC’s figures.)

Samsung shipped nearly 71 million smartphones in the quarter, giving it a market share of almost one-third of the whole of the smartphone sector (32.7%). Apple, meanwhile, shipped 37 million devices — just over half as many as Samsung, for a market share of 17.3%. With all others in the top-five — LG, Huawei and ZTE — still with less than 5% market share apiece, Samsung and Apple remain a strong top-two.

But looking at the pattern of growth something else comes out: Apple only grew its volumes by 6.6% over the same quarter a year ago. In fact, in that regard, that growth puts it far behind not only Samsung (at 60.7% volume growth), but also behind LG (110.2% growth); Huawei (94.1%); and ZTE (49.2%). As a point of comparison, Samsung and Apple were more nearly level a year ago, in Q1 2012, (44 million versus 35.1 million in Q1 2012), and respectively saw growth of 267% and 89% in shipment volumes — the only two that increased:

Today:

A year ago:

As we’ve pointed out before, shipments to those who sell devices are not the same thing as sales to users, but it is an important barometer for where the wider market is going. (The most recent figures from Kantar Worldpanel, which track sales, spell out how the difference between Android-based and Apple sales is not as wide as 2:1 in every market, but is in fact significantly wider in some.)

It’s notable that Nokia, BlackBerry, and HTC whose shipments were on the decline last year but still enough to keep them in the top-five, are now out of the picture altogether. It also shows that Nokia’s sub-10 million sales of smartphones, with 5.6 million Lumias, are not big enough figures to break out of the sizeable ‘others’ category.

With Apple still shipping more than three times as many devices as its next-closest competitor, LG, even if things continue as they are today, it will likely still be some time before it gets overtaken by the others in the list. Its performance also was enough to keep it in place as the world’s third-largest mobile handset maker overall, in a list otherwise dominated by companies that make both smartphones and feature phones:

IDC notes that LG, which shipped 10.3 million smartphones in the quarter, a rise of over 110% over the year before, was helped by three factors in the last quarter. The first of these was the popularity of the Nexus 4 device it created with Google; the second was the success of its lower-priced L Series (15 million sold in this category alone since launched); and the third was its LTE line. These three point to how those Android handset makers that can create strong enough and distinctive handsets that are set apart from the rest of the Android crowd can continue to pull away from the crowd.

Apple’s iPhone brand has never been seen as anything other than premium, and true to type, it is still not playing at the same level as others smartphone industry in creating new models that aim at the “cheap smartphone” market.

CEO Tim Cook did not discuss the prospect of a new, low-cost device, on Apple’s earnings call this week — the focus remains on selling older models, namely the iPhone 4, in markets like China as a route to bringing new smartphone users on to the platform. Other handset makers like Samsung, Nokia and many “others” are building out portfolios that hit not only at high-end users but those looking for entry devices priced at closer to $100 or even less. Some handset makers, specifically in emerging markets, are targeting only this market.

On the other hand Cook also left open the possibility that whatever comes next may be something different altogether: the “really great stuff” coming out in the autumn and in 2014 could be another iPhone. Equally, it could be something else altogether, and not a handset at all.

Image: Flickr

SumUp, one of the many European mobile card reader startups targeting small businesses — and taking advantage of Square’s continued absence to acquire users and build out a business — has taken another step designed to expand its reach by announcing a partnership with Revel Systems, a maker of iPad POS software.

Revel Systems provides iPad-based tills to more than 400 chain stores and restaurants throughout the U.S., Canada, Australia and Saudi Arabia but it’s aiming to expand into Europe, hence the tie-up with SumUp. After launching last August, SumUp has now rolled out to 10 European markets.

Revel Systems will be using SumUp’s API, which it made available in fall last year, to process debit and credit card and cash payments in Europe. In other markets the company uses payment gateway USAePay, and says it can also integrate directly into Mercury Payment Systems.

In Europe the SumUp mobile payments app will come pre-loaded on Revel Systems tills and users will also get SumUp’s black card reader — which plugs into the iPad to take card payments. The partnership won’t bear instant fruit for SumUp on the customer acquisition front but as and when Revel Systems builds up its customer base in the region, SumUp will also make gains.

Commenting on the tie-up in a statement, John Doe, CEO of Revel Systems, said it chose to partner with SumUp to offer flexibility to its retail customers — but did not specify what it offered over and above other European mobile payments startups such as iZettle and Rocket Internet’s Payleven.

“SumUp’s technology is aligned with ours because it’s lightweight, secure, and speedy. SumUp is a natural partner for us,” he said. “We’re always looking to forge new partnerships with those businesses that aim to enhance the overall customer experience. Our users are also certain to appreciate the easy SumUp sign-up process and pay-as-you-go billing. We’re looking forward to working with SumUp as we expand to new markets.”

As with the myriad mobile payments players targeting small businesses, SumUp does not charge a monthly fee to businesses using its system but rather takes a 2.75% per card reader transaction charge. SumUp accepts Visa, Mastercard and recently added support for Amex in the majority of its markets.

The Revel Systems tie-up is not SumUp’s first b2b partnership aimed at building out its business. The company has previously announced partnerships with German taxi hailing app Taxi.de and an odd job software platform provider.

Vine co-founder Dom Hofmann has confirmed to The Verge that the popular video sharing application is coming to Android. Twitter released Vine for the iPhone in January and since then it has become one of the most downloaded applications in Apple’s App Store. Vine allows users to create short video clips with a maximum length of six seconds that can be shared with friends across different social networks. Android users have been asking when, if ever, Vine would be released for their devices and while Hofmann didn’t give a specific date, he said Vine will be coming “soon” to Android devices.