Category: Mobile Phones

According to an article by Scott Canon of the Kansas City Star, Sprint Nextel confirmed yesterday that it intends to lead the way in the US transition to NFC.

For those of you who don’t know, NFC stands for “near field communication” and is a technology that, when included in our cell phones, turns them into a type of mobile payment device. Using specially-designed checkout terminals or readers, a person can swipe their phone to pay for goods and services.

All HTC fans will be beside themselves with excitement at the news that the company has just sent out invites to an exclusive event scheduled for Tuesday April 12th in London. That’s next week for those who can’t read calendars, by the way. The Taiwanese company is, as yet however, giving no indications as to precisely what will be going on at the event, but we’re presuming it will be something exciting anyway.

We don’t know about you, but while the saying is that “less is more”, we kind of think that a little goes a long way. This is the main problem with all the hype over the web OS 3.0, due for release by HP. We were ‘teased’ by this impending device with the TouchPad last year, if you consider being teased to be quite the right word for being given so little information as to be a fairly pointless exercise.

The Blackberry Playbook is finally being released in the United States on the 19th of April after many months of increasingly tiresome speculation. The Playbook will be the first such tablet device from Research In Motion. The Playbook should, considering some of its specifications, be a reasonable enough contender in the marketplace, yet Research In Motion have taken what appears to be a worryingly slapdash approach to some of its features – namely, native applications.

Sprint CEO Dan Hesse and senior vice president of government affairs Vonya McCann are not impressed by the proposed merger between AT&T and T-Mobile and are saying that the company intends to fight in the courts to prevent it from actually happening, but does he have a leg to stand on? Hesse reckons the merger will hurt consumers by reducing competition and certainly, Sprint makes some good points in their official statement on the matter.

Apple’s new and much anticipated iPhone 5 may not be being released until fall, according to speculation. Take it with a pinch of salt if you will, but it seems the rumour mongers have been in overdrive thanks to the fact that Apple’s iPad 2 event, which was held earlier this month, featured not so much as a mention of the iOS 5. Rumours then circulated that a preview of the heavily hyped device would finally be given sometime in April, but the people at TechCrunch are now claiming that the first look at that device will now not be given until the summer, probably in June. If that turns out to be the case, then it would seem the actual release date for the item would not be until the fall.

A bill, which is currently being drafted by Oregon Senator Ron Wyden, will, if accepted, apply local privacy protection to a person’s geo-location information.

The citizens of Monterey Park in the northeast of Calgary in Canada are engaged in a fight to stop a cell phone tower being built in their community – for the second time. Homeowners in the neighborhood are outraged by plans by Shaw Communications to erect a twenty five meter high cell phone tower in the parking lot of a local church.

I guess some Chinese citizens just cannot wait. The iPad 2, which has just been launched here in the USA, is already being sold on the Hong Kong grey market at double the price.

According to Zokem, a mobile analytics company, people who use Android and iOS (iPhone) spent as much time using their applications as they do sending text messages. The average user uses 15 apps per month; with 95% of Android/iPhone owners visiting their respective apps stores to download an average of 2.5 apps per month.