Logging The Cyber World

After some earlier teasing, LG Electronics fully detailed its Optimus G Pro Android phone today, a high-end model with 5.5-inch screen, LTE networking, and a quad-core 1.7GHz processor.

LG often sells its phones first in its home market of South Korea, and it looks like that’s the plan for the Optimus G Pro, too. But it’ll arrive in other areas, too, including North America and Japan in the second quarter of 2013, LG said in an announcement a week ahead of the Mobile World Congress show. That’s where the South Korean company will show off the phone and announced three lower-end L-series Android phones, the Optimus L7 II, L5 II, and L3 II.

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Tags: galaxy s3, phone launching, samsung, smartphone, Verizon

If you’re waiting to buy the Samsung Galaxy S III on Verizon, you’ll have to wait a few more days. Verizon has silently moved the phone’s launch date from July 10 to July 12, which is this Thursday.

Verizon didn’t give any reason for the delay, and it appears the postponement only affects the in-store launch. According to Engadget, preorders are still being fulfilled, and some of the blog’s readers have reportedly already received the device.

What may have happened is that the number of preorders was larger than Samsung anticipated, and stock intended for delivery to Verizon’s retail locations was redirected to fulfill preorders. Without the carrier’s confirmation, we just don’t know.

PC World

Tags: android, handsets, ios, samsung, smartphone

Samsung (005930) Electronics Co. sold more than 40 percent of all Android mobile phones in the first quarter as the South Korean manufacturer became the world’s largest handset maker, research company Gartner Inc. said.

Global handset sales declined 2 percent to 419 million, dragged down by a drop in low-end handsets, Stamford, Connecticut-based Gartner said today in a report. Smartphone sales rose 45 percent, the researcher said.

Samsung, which also makes screens and other hardware used in smartphones, has profited from its ability to offer devices running Google Inc. (GOOG)’s Android software at a wide range of prices. Android is currently installed on 56 percent of new smartphones, more than twice Apple Inc. (AAPL)’s share. The prospect of even cheaper Android models led customers in Asia to postpone purchases, the researchers said.

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Tags: android, intel, olpc, os, studybook, tablet

Companies have been trying to transform education with computers for decades, with mixed results. But there is new enthusiasm for the possibilities represented by tablets, and Intel has a new entry.

The chip giant on Tuesday is introducing what it calls the studybook, a portable device with a seven-inch touchscreen that is encased in particularly rugged plastic. Like its prior entries in education, Intel designed the device but expects it to be branded, customized and sold by hardware companies to reach students in emerging and industrialized countries.

Pricing is expected to be established by those partners, and may depend on factors such as software and hardware add-ons. But the tablets should start at less than $200 each, says Kapil Wadhera, general manager of Intel’s education market platforms group.

Wall Street Journal

Tags: at and t, lumia 900, nokia, smartphone, windows mobile

Happy Nokia Lumia 900 release day, Windows Phone 7 fans! Only, there should really be an asterisk by that title, because plenty of interested purchasers are going to find it difficult to actually get their hands on Nokia’s “flagship” device today.

Why’s that? “For reasons known only to AT&T executives,” writes VentureBeat’s Dylan Tweney, “the Nokia Lumia 900 launches in the U.S. today, Easter Sunday.”

In other words, plenty of AT&T stores and Microsoft stores aren’t going to be open today. Worse, there isn’t a blanket “We’re all closed on Easter Sunday” policy for either AT&T’s or Microsoft’s retail shops: If you’re interested in grabbing a Lumia 900, you’re going to have to put in some foot time and trudge over to all the various stores in your local area to see who’s open — unless you want to just start cold-calling every store within a 50-mile radius, that is.

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Tags: 3D holograms, 3D projected game, amazing ipad 3, apple, ios, ipad 3

It isn’t too tricky to nail down near-term changes in smartphones and tablets. Faster processors, faster wireless, higher resolution displays, bigger batteries, updated software… there is a fairly short list of predictable upgrades. When you start looking at several years down the road, though, the advances get a bit trickier to nail down. We’ve grown accustomed to Apple’s multitouch devices looking mostly the same ever since the first iPhone. But will they look the same five years from now?

The above video bets that they won’t. Though it brands itself as a concept video for the iPad 3, this is more like an iPad 7 demo. Some of its features could be here within the next few years, but others would be more at home in a Star Wars prequel than in any actual product we’ll see in the next decade.

More here Geek.com

Tags: android, comscore, ios, samsung, US mobile market

The latest comScore report shows that Android is still dominating U.S. mobile subscriber market share ahead of Apple’s iOS.

The report, which measures mobile market share for the U.S. during a three month period ending November 2011, provides an average among over 30,000 U.S. mobile subscribers.

According to comScore, 234 million Americans age 13 and over used mobile devices in the three month period, and 91.4 million of them are smartphone owners. Android-based devices took the lead position with 46.9 percent share in the smartphone market. Apple took second place with 28.7 percent, followed by RIM (16.6 percent), Microsoft (5.2 percent) and Symbian (1.5 percent).

Daily Tech

Tags: apple, htc s3, itc, mobile wars, patents war, samsung

The move reverses an earlier decision by an American judge and relates to a part of HTC called S3, which specialises in audio compression technology.

HTC purchased S3 in July; its shares fell 4.9 per cent on the news after the ITC, which has the power to block the import of products, said it considered that its investigation was now closed.

S3 was among a number of companies still in dispute with Apple, and Google itself has sold a number of patents to HTC so that the mobile-manufacturer can sue Apple over a range of ongoing issues. Samsung, which supplies chips for a range of Apple products, is also the subject of a number of Apple disputes.

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Tags: applidium, crack apps, iphone 4s, Siri, siri protocol

It’s been a trying month for Apple’s security team: First, a researcher pokes a hole in the company’s tight control of its App Store. And now another group of hackers claim they’ve cracked its newest crown jewel and Google killer, the voice command and search tool Siri, to run on any device–potentially even Google’s.

“Today, we managed to crack open Siri’s protocol,” reads a blog post by a group of French security researchers and consultants at the Paris-based firm Applidium. “As a result, we are able to use Siri’s recognition engine from any device. Yes, that means anyone could now write an Android app that uses the real Siri! Or use Siri on an iPad! And we’re going to share this know-how with you.”

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Tags: apple OS, iOS 5.0.1, iphone, iPhone Battery issue, smartphone

iOS 5.0.1 has landed, and the iPhone 4S experience is better as a result. Thanks to the update, the battery life bug which had been causing a large amount of pain to a small percentage of iPhone 4S users, is gone. The laundry list of other official improvements in 5.01 is brief: additional multitasking gestures for the iPad 1. Something about smoothing out the iCloud experience. That’s all well and good. But it’s what’s not on the list that’s of intrigue at this point. Other companies do it as well, but Apple in particular is known for slipping additional, under-the-radar improvements into their .x.x software updates. Why not announce it? Maybe it’s something the company want to advertise as having been a previous deficiency, but wants to improve upon nonetheless. That means iPhone 4S users now get to spend the next few days looking for other subtle signs of improvement in their iOS 5 experience. Did Apple, for instance, add refinements to the way in which Siri works? Perhaps some of the built-in apps launch just a bit faster on the 4S now than they did before. The search begins for what else iOS 5.0.1 has brought to the table.

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