Category: Mobile

Twitter has launched updates to its iPhone and Android apps, adding new a handful of new features.

Now when you add a photo to a tweet, you’ll get a full preview, as opposed to a cropped version.

Twitter’s Misha Lushin writes on the company blog, “We’ve also redesigned the experience to make it easy to share a photo from your camera roll: simply click the photo icon on the bottom right corner of the Tweet box. With fewer steps needed to share photos, you can more easily share what’s going on in your life and quickly return to marveling over that gorgeous sunset.”

Tweet a photo in under six seconds with our new mobile update! vine.co/v/bY5dEjLxeJd

— Twitter (@twitter) May 29, 2013

When you compose a tweet, you will now see your avatar and username, and if you tweet from multiple accounts, it’s now easier to select which on eyou want to use (by tapping the avatar).

“You can still add or remove your location from individual Tweets right from the Tweet box,” says Lushin. “Tagging your location is a handy way to save characters and provide context.”

Android users will now get more details about interactions on Twitter in the Notifications Drawer. If you swipe the notification, you can expand it, and see more details.

Twitter has also removed the borders around timelines on the iPhone app, as it had previously on Android. This way, tweets fill the screen.

There has been a lot of speculation about the success of BlackBerry’s new BlackBerry 10 smartphones. Using a wide variety of methods, some analysts have claimed that sales of the new smartphones are going strong, while others say they are fairly weak. One thing that’s clear, though, is that BlackBerry’s newest devices seem to be hits in France. According to French wireless provider SFR, the BlackBerry Q10 is the best selling smartphone on its network. The handset is outselling the Galaxy S4, HTC One, Lumia 520 and even the iPhone 5. Furthermore, the BlackBerry Z10 is also outselling the iPhone 5, Sony Xperia Z and Galaxy S III. SFR has more than 21 million subscribers and is the second largest wireless provider in France. If similar trends are occurring on other networks, BlackBerry may finally have its first hit in quite some time.

There’s a lot to like about Samsung’s flagship Galaxy S4 smartphone; it’s the fastest-selling Android phone ever for plenty of great reasons. As awesome as the phone is though, there are some things about it that are absolutely maddening. For me, Samsung’s keyboard might be my biggest qualm where core functionality is concerned, namely because it doesn’t support an auto-correct function. Luckily for users like me who can’t survive without auto-correct, there’s an easy (and free) way to fix this huge omission.

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Given that Samsung likes to compare its devices to “a precious stone glittering in the dark or countless stars sparkling in the night sky,” it’s not surprising that the company is hard at work coming up with ways to make its designs even more magical. The Korea Herald reports that Samsung’s management team met this week to discuss their design strategy for future smartphones and tablets, which is currently being called “Design 3.0.”

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Netflix apparently doesn’t think much of the BlackBerry platform. The streaming giant has created apps for various TVs, video game consoles, set-top boxes, Blu-ray players and mobile devices including the iPhone, iPad, Android phones, Android tablets, Amazon’s Kindle Fire lineup, Barnes & Noble’s Nook lineup and Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform. Netflix has not, however, built a BlackBerry app — and some BlackBerry users are furious.

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T-Mobile finally began carrying Apple’s iPhone lineup last month after more than five years of waiting, but the nation’s No.4 carrier is hardly done building out its smartphone lineup. According to TmoNews, T-Mobile plans to launch two more leading smartphones next week. First up is the HTC One, which BGR recently reviewed and called the closest thing the world has ever seen to a no-compromise smartphone. BlackBerry’s first next-generation QWERTY phone, the BlackBerry Q10, is also said to be launching next week. Both phones will reportedly debut on June 5th and the Q10 is expected to cost $99.99 up front followed by 24 monthly payments of $20. Pricing for the HTC One is unknown for the time being, but it should be in line with other flagship phones offered by T-Mobile.

Samsung invited members of the press on Monday to an event on June 20th in London to showcase new Android and Windows products. The Wall Street Journal has confirmed with its sources that the rumored Galaxy S4 mini smartphone will debut at the event, alongside several other new products. The latest rumors suggest that the handset, which is expected to be a scaled-down version of Samsung’s popular Galaxy S4 smartphone, will be equipped with a 4.3-inch qHD display, a 1.6GHz dual-core Exynos 5210 processor, an 8-megapixel rear camera and Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean with Samsung’s TouchWiz interface. Earlier reports claimed the Galaxy S4 mini will be released in mid-July.

A new report suggests that HTC may be looking to get a jump on Apple by offering a “Liquidmetal” smartphone later this year. According to Digitimes, HTC is considering adopting amorphous metal alloys for a new smartphones that would debut in the second half of 2013. The company will reportedly partner with Taiwanese chassis maker Jabon International to help manufacture the device. Apple has long been rumored to be interested in using Liquidmetal alloys in future iPhones. The company has reportedly begun hiring chassis manufacturing experts to help incorporate the technology into future products, and last year extended its partnership with Liquidmetal Technologies for an additional two years. Sources speaking to Digitimes note, however, that market demand for aluminum smartphones such as the HTC One remains strong and “full adoption of Liquidmetal is unlikely to occur in the short-term.”

More smartphones are sold in China than in any other market right now, but Apple just hasn’t been able to establish itself there as it has in most top markets around the world. According to new data from Strategy Analytics picked up by The Korea Herold, Samsung bested several competitive local brands in the first quarter of 2013 to become the top-selling smartphone vendor in China. Samsung sold 12.5 million smartphones in China last quarter according to the firm’s data, topping No.2 Huawei’s 8.1 million units and No.3 Lenovo’s 7.9 million units by a huge margin. Apple sold just 6.1 million iPhones according to Strategy Analytics, good for the No.6 spot behind ZTE (6.4 million) at No.5 and Coolpad (7 million) at No.4. Apple is reportedly planning to launch a new mid-range iPhone alongside its flagship iPhone 5S later this year in an effort to better address markets like China, which are dominated by low-cost handsets.

Samsung’s flagship smartphone will be faster on Verizon than any other network in the United States. Mike Haberman, vice president of network support for Verizon, confirmed to Bloomberg that the Galaxy S4 will be the first device to support the carrier’s Advanced Wireless Services (AWS) spectrum, which will more than double the smartphone’s data speeds. The AWS frequency won’t be supported at launch, however, and will require a software update to enable it. Verizon is using existing AWS airwaves and those it acquired from cable companies last year to build its next-generation network in major markets such as New York over the next few months. The expansion will help increase capacity of its existing LTE network and allow supported devices to access faster data speeds. The Galaxy S4 is available now from Verizon for $199 with a new two-year agreement.

Circa, the mobile-only news service founded by Cheezburger Network CEO Ben Huh, announced on Tuesday that it is hiring Thomson Reuters social-media editor Anthony De Rosa to be the media startup’s editor-in-chief. Circa co-founder and CEO Matt Galligan said in an interview before the announcement that De Rosa will be building out the company’s editorial team, which will be based in New York rather than San Francisco, where the rest of the startup is headquartered.

De Rosa also said in a separate interview that he will be adding some new elements to Circa’s news repertoire — including a possible move into more traditional reporting. Galligan said that De Rosa was the company’s only choice for the editor-in-chief position, given what he has accomplished since he became the social-media editor at Thomson Reuters, and his status as a leading source of breaking news during events like the Boston bombings:

“I spoke with Anthony little over a year ago when we were getting Circa started, and gave him some ideas of where we were going, what our thoughts were about where we were going to take news. He was recommended to me by a bunch of people, because he’s always been on the forefront of thinking about this stuff and where news should move… we wanted somebody who could add editorial leadership but also push us forward.”

Reinventing the idea of a news story

As we described in a post last fall, Circa was founded by Galligan and Huh as an attempt to reinvent the news-consumption experience for a mobile device: it provides a summary of the top news stories in a number of categories — but unlike Summly, the news-summarizing app that was acquired by Yahoo earlier this year for an estimated $30 million, Circa’s story summaries are created from third-party news reports by an editorial team of human beings rather than by algorithms.

One of Circa’s unique features is that readers can “follow” or subscribe to a specific story and then get regular updates when there is a new development: instead of having to rewrite the entire story, the way many traditional news outlets do, Circa simply updates the existing entry and alerts users, who can then go directly to the new information. The feature is proving to be popular, Galligan said: during the Boston bombings, close to 30 percent of users subscribed to updates.

De Rosa, who has been social-media editor at Thomson Reuters since July 2011, said he was intrigued by Circa’s “follow” model, and also by other aspects of the service — in part because of a conversation he had with Huh at a media-industry event called NewsFoo before the company was even created. De Rosa said that he and the Cheezburger CEO (who was originally trained as a journalist) shared many of the same thoughts about the future of news.

“I was really interested in a lot of the principles behind it, and I think both of us share the ideals behind what Ben was trying to do — the concept of trying to transform the traditional article format, making articles more useful, thinking about presentation and timeliness, that was distilled into Circa shortly after that.”

Circa may move into traditional reporting

Circa came out of a broader news-reinvention project that Huh started called Moby Dick, which brought together a number of ideas about how news has to change for a digital and mobile age — including theories about how the traditional article format is no longer as useful a way of distributing information to news consumers, something journalism professor Jeff Jarvis and others have also written about (including Dave Cohn, the former Spot.us founder who was the founding editor at Circa and will now be De Rosa’s boss).

De Rosa said that in addition to helping build the editorial team — which currently stands at 11, some of whom are located in foreign countries so that Circa can have a 24-hour news flow — he wants to explore the idea of having Circa staffers do more of their own reporting, rather than just assembling stories based on reports from other news outlets. That extra reporting would likely involve calling primary sources to confirm information, he said.

“There’s no immediate desire to do original reporting, but that might be something I will push for — it doesn’t necessarily mean boots on the ground, but I definitely want to see the newsroom verifying information for themselves, so if we can contact primary sources and make sure that we feel comfortable about the information we’re putting out, I definitely want to ensure that our newsroom’s doing that.”

Both on Twitter and in comments to The Atlantic Wire, former Reuters.com editor Kenneth Li — who hired De Rosa — said that his departure was “heartbreaking” for the wire service. Former Thomson Reuters technology editor Peter Lauria (now at BuzzFeed) said something similar.

Heartbreaking. big loss for us. Big get for @circa RT @Circa: Introducing our new Editor-in-chief: @antderosa. blog.cir.ca/2013/05/28/cir…—
Kenneth Li (@kenli729) May 28, 2013

Big get 4 Circa..big loss 4 Reuters..big congrats 2 AnthonyRT @Circa: Introducing our new Editor-in-chief: @antderosa blog.cir.ca/2013/05/28/cir…—
Peter Lauria (@peterlauria3) May 28, 2013

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flick user Jan-Arief Purwanto and Shutterstock / wellphoto

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Does Google really need a Nexus 5? The company already unveiled a version of Samsung’s popular Galaxy S4 smartphone running stock Android during Google I/O, and reports suggest a new version of the HTC One running stock Android will soon be released. While recent analyses suggest Nexus devices aren’t big sellers for Google — Nexus 4 sales reportedly totaled just 375,000 units in all of 2012 — the Galaxy S4 running stock Android costs $650 and HTC’s stock One will likely be just as expensive. As such, it stands to reason that Google will want to release an affordable new Nexus phone for Android fans similar to the Nexus 4, which starts at just $299 with no service contract. If a Nexus 5 does launch this year, however, it won’t be built by LG according to a new report.

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The third generation of the phablet that started it all was expected to launch later this year, of course, but a Samsung executive reportedly just confirmed the device for the first time. Korean language ETNews says it spoke with an unnamed Samsung exec who confirmed the Galaxy Note III will launch later this year. The anonymous official also discussed several exciting new features that might be included on the Note III, such as optical image stabilization and 3x optical zoom. Samsung’s next Note will also reportedly have a slimmer body, which will be appreciated considering the first two Note phablets were certainly on the thicker side. The report doesn’t state when the new Galaxy Note III will be unveiled, but the device is expected to debut at the annual IFA trade show in September.

Unlikely though it may be, a new report claims that Apple’s upcoming iPhone 5S will be a bigger upgrade than most are expecting when it launches this fall. Chinese gadget blog WeiPhone on Tuesday reported that Apple’s next-generation iPhone will sport a tweaked design with a narrower bezel around the display. And despite the fact that the iPhone 5’s Retina display is still among the best in the business, the site claims the iPhone 5S (or iPhone 6, as the site says it could be called) will include a new Retina display that packs twice as many pixels into a panel that is the same size as the current model’s display. BGR previously revealed that a number of internal components have been redesigned for the next-generation iPhone, but a significant external redesign is not expected. WeiPhone, which has reported accurate details about unannounced Apple products in the past but has also issued some reports that didn’t pan out, says the next iPhone will debut in September.

A wellspring of interest in quadcopters for commercial applications is advancing globally. From Airware’s recent $10.7 million round from Andreessen Horowitz to the launch of AngelPad’s DroneDeploy, quadcopters are one of the hot, hardware trends that founders and VCs are latching onto.

This experimentation is also happening on the other side of the world. Russia’s UVS Avia is building higher-end microdrones to examine nuclear reactors and waste sites, along with doing search-and-rescue in remote areas.

They built a quadcopter that weighs about 1 kilogram, can fly above 100 meters and has at least 1 hour of battery life. It costs a hefty $40,000, but that’s because local Russian taxes effectively double the price and because they target government and military clients. Commercial drones for hobbyists cost a few hundred dollars, but often only have about 15 minutes of battery life. So far, UVS Avia has sold a “few dozen” drones.

It can be equipped with infrared vision, night vision or radiation protection to fly over sites like nuclear reactors or to monitor nuclear waste.

“Civilian versions weigh about 100 grams, while this is a kilo, which is a lot,” said CIO Maxim Shaposhnikov. “Everything is stronger and better.”

While the hardware for these drones is being commoditized, Shaposhnikov says the real advantage in the future will come from software.

“Normally, even for military use, all drones are managed by humans,” he said. “But our idea is to make the drones completely automatic, like maybe they could fly for months and charge automatically.”

The other thing they want to add is the ability for drones to communicate with each other. He said, you could eventually get 100 or more drones to monitor an entire city in a completely automated process.

“We think the whole industry is going in the same direction,” he said. “In five years, it will be really cheap to make drones, but the intelligence should be really advanced. New batteries are being developed that will allow a five hours of battery life. Everything is moving ahead, so software will be the key.”

The company has raised about 3 million euros in funding from private angels.

Growth at the high end of the smartphone market might be slowing, but it seems like nothing can stop the low-end smartphone market. Smartphones out-shipped feature phones for the first time in Q1 this year and according to market research firm DisplaySearch, smartphones will continue to dominate basic cell phones for the rest of 2013. The firm sees smartphone shipments hitting 937 million units this year, handily topping the 889 million feature phones expected to ship. By 2016, smartphones shipments will hit 1.45 billion units thanks to growth in emerging markets, and smart handsets will make up an estimated two-thirds of the global cell phone market at that time.

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Earlier rumors suggested Nokia might be working on exciting new photography technology for its upcoming smartphones, and now a Nokia executive has seemingly confirmed as much. BGR sister site BGR.in interviewed Nokia smartphone boss Jo Harlow, who confirmed that “computational photography” functionality is being investigated for inclusion in upcoming Lumia smartphones. “If you look at where imaging is going, computational imaging is an area of exploration,” Harlow said. “Being able to capture even more data — data you cannot even see with the human eye that you can only see by actually going back to the picture and being able to do things with them.” Halrow added that available computing power had previously been a barrier to bringing Lytro-like technology to smartphones like the company’s Lumia Windows Phones, but “changes in the processing capabilities of smartphones opens it up as an area of exploration.”

According to various reports, Samsung is working on half a dozen different versions of its new flagship Galaxy S4 smartphone, including a more manageable variant called the Galaxy S4 mini. While the smaller S4’s release date remains a mystery, the phone has now been confirmed by Samsung, albeit accidentally. In Samsung’s official app catalog for the United Kingdom, the Galaxy S4 mini with model number GT-9195 was listed among Samsung’s supported devices ahead of its launch. The listing has since been removed, but a screenshot follows below. The Galaxy S4 mini is expected to feature a 4.3-inch qHD display, an 8-megapixel rear camera and Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean when it launches this summer.

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Samsung has yet to officially confirm the Galaxy S4 mini, but the smartphone’s brief appearance on the company’s app store earlier today backs up rumors of a summer launch. The listing was spotted and screencapped by TGspot (link via Google Translate) before it was removed.

The Galaxy S4 mini appeared with the model number GT-I9195 as part of a line-up of Samsung smartphones on the company’s app store site. The handset is a smaller, cheaper version of Samsung’s fastest selling phone, which recently hit 10 million channel sales less than a month after its international launch on April 26.

Samsung has positioned the Galaxy S4 as its iPhone challenger and a smaller version may help attract new customers who were previously but off by the phablet‘s 5-inch screen. Though Samsung has yet to announce a release date for the Galaxy S4 mini, a summer date would give it a head start over Apple’s fall lineup of new products, potentially including the iPhone 5s.

The appearance of the smartphone on Samsung’s apps site is the latest leak backing up rumors of the phone’s imminent release. Two weeks ago, photos purportedly showing the Galaxy S4 mini were posted by Sina Weibo user PunkPanda, who has leaked authentic photos of unreleased Samsung devices in the past. The photos appeared to confirm previously rumored specs, including a 4.3 inch gHD display and a 8-megapixel rear camera.

Heads up, Android fans. If you took the plunge and backed the rather sleek Shine wearable activity tracker from Misfit Wearables, you may want to get your money back. According to a recent update posted to the project’s Indiegogo listing, the Founders Fund-backed company has decided to drop Android support from the final version in a bid to better focus on polishing the experience for iOS users.

Seriously, that’s the only reason they gave, which is likely little consolation to the backers who were originally told that the Shine would support certain devices running Android 4.1 and up when the thing officially launched. But let’s back up a moment first — in case you haven’t been following the Misfit Wearables odyssey, the Redwood City/Vietnam startup aimed to inject some style into the world of personal activity tracking with the $99, quarter-sized Shine doodad that could seamlessly sync your motion information to a slew of supported smartphones. It’s not entirely unlike what you would do with a Jawbone Up or a Fitbit, except that the hardware involved was designed to be as unobtrusive as possible — a welcome quality for a device you’re meant to wear all day long.

There’s no firm count on how many Android users wound up backing the project, but I’d wager there’s a decent chunk of them considering that the project raised more than eight times the $100,000 funding goal the team was originally shooting for. For what it’s worth, the decision seems to have been made fairly recently — a response on the Misfit Wearables Facebook page posted on May 8 confirmed to one fan that the team intended to have Android support ready for the masses when the Shine officially launches in July.

That said, the team has been working on the Shine Android app for at least a few months now, and they provided a first glimpse at the app in the form a of a render (see above) before ultimately putting it on the back burner. I’ve reached out to Misfit to see if they would clarify the issues they’ve been having on the Android front, and I’ll update if/when they respond.

Sad to say it’s hardly the first time a purveyor of fitness gadgets has decided to drop support for Google’s mobile operating system. Despite claiming that an Android version of its FuelBand syncing app was in the works for the better part of summer 2012, Nike unceremoniously pulled the plug on the project earlier this year noting that it would instead focus on building out the Fuel experience for iOS and the web.