smartphone
Switched On: Photography is dead, long live photos
Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On , a column about consumer technology. Portraying the digital still camera as an endangered species has been a popular pastime for years in the cellphone industry, and with the high-resolution stills and high-definition video capabilities of the latest round of smartphones, the argument is more convincing than ever when applied to the casual snapshot. But this week at the World Expo in Shanghai, Canon — a name synonymous with high-quality photography — offered a vision of a device that not only supersedes the digital still camera, but will likely eliminate photography as we know it.
HTC Aria update for AT&T enables mobile hotspot, sideloaded app support (update: disappointment)
Well, this is genuinely awesome: it seems AT&T is pulling back from its ban on third-party sideloaded apps on its Android devices, because HTC has just released an Aria update that enables them (either that or HTC just went rogue here, but we highly doubt it).
Android 2.2 ported to HTC Desire, working quite well
No patience to wait until Q3 for an official Froyo build? Fret not, dear Desire owners, as udK_dev has managed to push out a near-perfect Android 2.2 port that’s working spectacularly well so far. As you’d expect, HTC’s Sense overlay is indeed baked in, and while there are still a few quirks here and there, users seem to be generally pleased with how it’s going
Google’s Larry Page: Steve Jobs is ‘rewriting history’ by saying Android came after the iPhone
Steve Jobs might have thought he was lightly playing down reports that the Apple / Google rivalry had dramatically changed when he said ” they decided to compete with us — we didn’t go into the search business” at D8 , but it appears that his phrasing didn’t sit so well with Larry Page, who told Reuters yesterday that Jobs was doing a “little bit of rewriting history,” and that the “characterization of us entering [the phone market] after is not really reasonable.” Page, who was being interviewed alongside Eric Schmidt, also said that Google had been working on Android for “a very long time” and that the goal was always to develop phones with solid browsers to fill a market void. That’s true, of course — Google purchased Andy Rubin’s Android, Inc
Mysterious Dell Mini 3v outted by Chinese mobile regulator, doesn’t know its OS
Fancy playing a game of “guess the phone?” Dell’s got one for you — the folks over at Chinese mobile regulator TENAA have once again prematurely outed another handset from said computer giant. As usual, there’s no mention on the screen size, screen type or even the OS, but we’re told that this plain-looking Mini 3v runs on both TD-SCDMA (i.e. China Mobile ) and GSM networks (HSDPA supported)
AT&T identifies Alcatel-Lucent as slow upload culprit, fix in the works
As we’d suspected, AT&T isn’t intentionally limiting upload speeds on iPhone 4s in some markets where things suddenly got slow over the weekend . Or that’s the company’s claim, anyhow — and seeing how they’re actually calling out a supplier in the process, we tend to buy it. Specifically, AT&T says that some Alcatel-Lucent equipment is causing uploads to fall back to non-HSUPA UMTS speeds “under certain conditions” affecting “less than two percent” of the company’s customers, and that they’re working on developing a fix
