Microsoft has just released their financial results for the quarter ending in June and it appears that all is rosy at Redmond. The company recorded its highest ever revenue – $17.37 billion, which is 8% higher than Q2 of 2010.
Profits rose by the amazing 30% over the same period of last year and reached $5.87 billion. Just about every division of the company had a good quarter, but the Entertainment & Devices division is certainly the most impressive with its 30% growth in revenue, driven by the hugely successful Xbox 360. Read more »
The Viber application that won the hearts of over 12 million iOS users has now landed on the Android Market, doing just about everyone involved a favor. Android users now have another way to make free calls and send free messages (data charges not counting), iOS users can do that with a lot larger portion of their contact list and Viber gets more users. And now that we had a day or so to play with the app we bring you our take on it.
To get started with Viber you need to go to the Android Market from either you phone or your desktop browser and install the free app. You then go through a quick activation process, where you enter your phone number (the only ID you would need) and then wait for an SMS to arrive, containing your activation code. Read more »
Sony Ericsson Xperia PLAY has just got a nice FPS exclusive among the rest of the droids. EA has launched Battlefield: Bad Company 2 for Xperia PLAY via its dedicated game store.
The game has been released for the iOS gadgets since the last December and its price there has been varying between €0.79 and €2.39. Read more »
The original Samsung Wave (which first showcased the SuperAMOLED wonder of a display) is arguably among the best equipped smartphones out there (outside the Android and iOS camps). It’s bound to get even hotter with the release of the Bada OS 2.0.1. It will surely take some time but while you wait, you can try the beta version right now.
The beta brings a set of new features, worth having, like the new UI look, the drag-down widgets screen, the Music and Social hubs, the revamped gallery with stacked albums, the 3D cover flow-like music player, the Dolphin browser 3.0. You might remember the beta landing on the Wave II just a couple of days ago. Read more »
I am slowly starting to suspect that Apple is preparing an iPad Pro device, running proper Mac OS. Where do I get that from?
Well, here’s a mental exercise for you. I’m gonna start throwing a bunch of facts and speculations at you and then I’d like to see whether you are not getting the same gut feeling as me. I’m also gonna try and keep it short, alright?
Yesterday, at a press conference announcing Apple’s amazing quarterly results, Peter Oppenheimer, the company’s COO, briefly mentioned there will be a lot going on in the fall and hinted the company had a “future product transition” on the way.
Another bit we took from that conference is that, unsurprisingly, the iPad business is booming. iPad sales are already surpassing Macs in both numbers shipped and in revenue. Apple has a really hot product on their hands. And it makes you wonder – why don’t they expand it even further? Read more »
Facebook is a fundamental part of every SNS-offering phone these days. It’s still the most popular social network out there and has by far the largest user base of about 750M people (July 2011). So we’re not really surprised that almost every premiere smartphone OS out there is trying to dig into the hype and offer as much as it can to its users.
Sony Ericsson recently introduced a new, deeper way of integrating Facebook in their recent Xperia smartphones (Arc, Neo, Pro, Play, Mini and Ray). They call it Facebook inside Xperia and we are about to see what it’s like. Read more »
Viber, the app that lets you call and text your contacts for free, is now available in the Android Market. It utilizes either your data plan or Wi-Fi connection to place calls and send messages, so instead of using your call minutes it uses your data plan megabytes. And now that the iOS-only restrction no longer applies it can unleash its full potential.
The app is absolutely free and automatically recognizes which users in your phonebook have the app installed, so you can call them free of charge. On Android it’s even supposed to be integrated in the phonebook so you can call without even opening the Viber app, but having tried it on a few handsets we didn’t get that integration. Read more »
The BlackBerry Tablet OS (that’s the PlayBook platform) just got an update to version 1.0.7. It brings an updated BlackBerry Bridge app, portrait mode in pictures app, pinch zooming in videos and extended language support.
The BlackBerry Bridge app is used to connect your BlackBerry smartphone to your PlayBook tablet wirelessly. What’s new with the app is that now you can save email attachments to either a removable SD card or the internal storage of the smartphone. Also you can also download .ZIP attachments to your smartphone for editing or viewing. Read more »
The Google+ app for iOS has finally been approved by Apple. The app brings most of the features found in the Android version, such as the ability to choose your Circles while posting a message, multiple streams so you can see posts from people you follow as well as those you don’t by swiping horizontally on the screen and Huddle for sending group messages.
Unfortunately, there are a couple of caveats to this app. For starters, there is no Hangouts in the iOS version of the app, so you cannot do video conferencing. Read more »
We came across some photos of a device which devilishly looks akin to the current iPhone 4 but runs on a test software and is said to be a prototype of the next, much anticipated iPhone 4S, 4GS, 5 or whatever Apple will call it. According to the person, who leaked this, the device features a 5 MP camera instead of an 8 MP one and runs iOS 4.0, but inside there’s the latest A5 dual-core processor as seen on the iPad 2.
A picture is usually worth a thousand words but in this case we see nothing truly new or interesting. The device has no visible changes to the exterior whilst the software is made for testing purposes and is also old news. Still rumors suggest this could be the N94 – a prototype iPhone 5 with the dual-core A5 processor, 5 MP camera and support for the T-Mobile USA network.
Update: Now that we’ve looked more carefully into the facts, it seems the most likely scenario is that this phone is a prototype or rather a test unit for the last year’s iPhone 4, similar to the one being sold on Ebay not long ago. The original source doesn’t suggest in any way there’s an A5 chip inside plus there’s this thing it runs on the original iOS 4.0. Obviously the fellows over at 9to5mac.com (our intermediary source) have been a little bit overexcited and have reported mainly their own speculations on the matter.
Even though iOS 4.3.4 got jailbroken almost as soon as it was released, it came with a catch. The jailbreak was tethered, which means you cannot restart your device without having to jailbreak again. Unfortunately, it seems things are going to stay that way.
According to a popular iOS developer i0n1c (Stefen Esser, for those not fluent in leetspeak), Apple has not only patched the PDF vulnerability in iOS 4.3.4 but also added more mitigation checks. This prevents Redsn0w from performing an untethered jailbreak and it seems it will stay that way for a while. Read more »
Remember those Galaxy S II smartphones that Samsung so generously donated to the CyanogenMod Team for developing custom ROMs for the device? Well, that gesture wasn’t in vain as the devs have been hard at work and we can now see the fruits of their hard work.
Below you can see the Galaxy S II running on the CyanogenMod 7 along with LauncherPro. Unfortunately, it is still a work in progress and few things aren’t working quite well as of now but the team is working on them and hopefully should release it soon for users to download. Head past the break to check out the video. Read more »
The Android 3.2 Honeycomb update is now official and Google has released an SDK for it. We also have a list of improvements that this update brings along with it and the buzzword seems to be ‘compatibility’, whether it is the compatibility of the current Android smartphone apps on Honeycomb or the compatibility of Honeycomb itself with devices with multiple display sizes.
One of the first major features is a new compatibility zoom for fixed-size applications. This lets you either view the application on the screen in 1:1 aspect ratio or zoom it to fit the screen. Read more »
Sure, we have seen the Wave II run Bada OS 2.0, but Samsung made that v.2.0 release history before it was even released. The Koreans decided to revamp the UI before they let the next major Bada release hit the shelves. Enter the 2.0.1. version, which is a more major overhaul than the name suggests.
And if you were worried that changes run deep enough to prevent the Wave II from getting the nod for an update, you can calm down now. For Mr. Blurrycam has just delivered a video, showing the smartphone running the latest Bada release. Read more »
Google’s new photo-sharing service Photovine has just landed in the App Store. Strangely enough, Google has picked iOS over its own Android to be the carrier of the first mobile app of its new service.
So here’s the deal with this new social/photo service that Google is launching. You can create vines of photos by uploading one and giving it a caption. Your friends are than able to add more shots to the vine, making it a constantly growing album. Read more »
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