Displaying items by tag: Smartphones

Well, with all of the news about Apple’s next round of products we thought we would chime in with our take on this. Warning Apple fans the following article is not based on analyst WAGs (wild ass guesses), but on information that is available publicly and, well through other means. Right now far too many analyst firms are looking to bolster their portfolios by talking up products from Apple that do not even have firm or realistic specifications attached to them. We are talking about Apple’s rumored iWatch, 12.9-inch iPad and large screen iPhone. All three of these are rumored to hit the market in September as Apple tried to catch up to the rest of the world and offer the same style of product that is already out there.

New photos of the upcoming Microsoft Windows Phone device have leaked. This time the represent the new cheapest device on this mobile platform, Luma 530 which will be the successor of the famous model 520 which is currently the best selling Windows Phone device.

Chinese smartphone manufacturer Xiaomi has proudly announced that their flagship model Mi3 has surpassed 10 million copies sold. The unit started selling in October last year and is at the moment available only in five countries: China (excluding Hong Kong), Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines.

It seems that Microsoft and Google have caved to government demands for “Kill Switches” in their phones. For those of you that might wonder what a Kill Switch is, it is an embedded mechanism that can render a phone inoperable from a remote location. Through the use of simple commands you can shut down the ability to make calls, receive data etc. and in some cases these switches would automatically turn on location features to allow the phones to be tracked.

Imagine opening up a webpage when suddenly you see a notice saying all of your files have been locked. You have a limited amount of time to send a ransom or you will lose all of your data. This is what many people faced when the CryptoLocker Malware hit the PC world by surprise. Even now with many command and control servers down this threat still looms out there. Now imagine that instead of your PC it was your phone. The number of people that actually backup their phones in any real way is very small. A bit of malware like this could be disastrous to some.

Since the arrival of Windows Phone 8.1 users have reported issues with WhatsApp, primarily in the area of unreliable notifications. This has resulted in the withdrawal of the application from the Windows Phone Store.

Rumors about the new iPhone are coming from all over the internet. First, the Taiwanese media unearthed information that the new Apple smartphone should be launched in August this year, earlier than usual. However, Apple is a company known for keeping the tradition, so they will probably not do something out of ordinary this time.

The company IDC announced this week that the deliveries of tablets in the 2014 were worse than expected, primarily due to the rise in popularity of smartphones with big screen (phablets). New revised forecasts now claim that by the end of this year will be supplied 245 million tablets (previous forecast predicted the delivery of 260 million tablets).

IDC announced expectations for the future of the smartphone market. There are no major surprises, but one rather disappointing one is BlackBerry. In fact, analysts predict that the Canadian manufacturer this year will cut their deliveries in half compared to last year. Current year will end with a share of only 0.8%, down from last year's 1.9%, while until the 2018., BlackBerry will drop to 0.3%.

A few photos that claim to show yet unknown model of Lenovo mobile phone appeared on Chinese social network Weibo. Apparently these are the photos from the presentation within the company,which one of the guests was able to smuggle, and sell to the public. From them we can clearly see the new flagship model from Lenovo, allegedly with the name Vibe Z2 Pro.