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- 26 Billion Text Messages Sent During China Spring Festival
- TCTV: Mobile World Congress 2011, Capsule Edition
- Kinoma And Marvell Attempt To Augment Android
- Droid X 2 Specs And Photos Leak
| 26 Billion Text Messages Sent During China Spring Festival Posted: 17 Feb 2011 06:15 AM PST Here’s yet more proof that plain ol’ text messages aren’t going away any time soon. The recent Spring Festival in China (the local name for what’s often referred to as Chinese New Year) saw the country send some 26 billion text messages. That’s billion with a "b," mind you. That number, 26 billion, represents a 13 percent increase over last year. And here’s one last quick stat: China has some 859 million mobile phone subscribers, which works out to 74.5 percent of the country’s population. A survey last year pegged the number of U.S. mobile phone subscribers at 285 million, or 91 percent of the country’s population. You’ll recall that Deloitte said in a report last week that text messaging was as popular as ever, more so than social networks like Twitter and Facebook, largely because they’re seen as more immediate and personal.
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| TCTV: Mobile World Congress 2011, Capsule Edition Posted: 16 Feb 2011 10:03 AM PST
Watch the short video inside, and head to the links below for all our MWC love, plus a gallery of shots from around the conference.
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| Kinoma And Marvell Attempt To Augment Android Posted: 16 Feb 2011 06:05 AM PST
Marvell is a player on the pre-OEM level, providing tech and chipsets to companies putting together devices like handsets, tablets, and e-readers. Kinoma, which I hadn’t heard of until today, is working on a sort of thin OS layer that goes on top of Android and a few other OSes, adding functionality and connectivity while keeping the footprint small and the compatibility level high. But could they be mistaken on where the platform is going? Kinoma right now exists as a separate layer from the OS; you launch into it and it has its own interconnected set of call-outs, search protocols, rich displays, and so on. The Facebook app calls in the YouTube app when a friend links a video, for instance, and it plays in-line without leaving the app. Searching actually runs discrete searches within every application that has a search function and returns the results, sorted by app or library. It’s very well put together and the Android team could learn a lot from it. Or could they? The object of Kinoma seems to be ubiquitous connectivity by using every app as a service and calling those pieces that are required by the user. A marvel of modularity, but while it’s comprehensive, it doesn’t seem… how do I put this — knowledgeable. That is, it’s producing a lot of data for you to peruse (and very quickly and efficiently), but it doesn’t seem to know what you want. Instead of doing or finding just what you want, it seems that Kinoma tends to do everything all at once, and assume that what you want is in that sea of data. If you search for Pandora, for instance, there’s a very good chance you are trying to launch the app. But Kinoma will still query the Twitter app, Facebook, Wikipedia, even CrunchBase, and present that information as equally relevant. You can reorder the result fields, but it seems like giving the user a lake when they ask for a glass of water.
But to be fair, that’s the “full” Kinoma experience, and no one is under any pressure to use it as such. The framework is complete in each piece, since they’re written in near-universal Javascript and XML. It breaks down very easily into components and even single apps could be distributed — say, an “enhanced” Facebook app on handsets with an extra OS layer like Sense. Speaking with Kinoma VP Peter Hoddie, I expressed concern that the look and feel of Android (such as it is) might be interrupted by this service butting in and providing extra whatnot in some places, while apps downloaded from the Market would lack any integration. That’s really more of a problem for Samsung and HTC, though — integrating the framework in a way that doesn’t interrupt the normal Android experience. It also seemed to me that this environment is, in a way, a glorified browser layer with web apps. The interconnectivity and complementary features rather diminish that complaint, though this would be a very bad time to underestimate the versatility of web apps. So what’s Marvell’s piece of this pie? My guess is that they’re going to do some smart deep integration with Marvell hardware, and shop the OS enhancements to OEMs that want to set their Android devices apart. That’s an increasingly difficult thing to do: here at MWC we’ve seen many, many Android devices, and apart from LG’s rather grotesque gestures towards 3D, they are to the end user almost indistinguishable. Being able to say “Hey, in addition to all the stuff our competitors have, our Facebook and YouTube apps are demonstrably better, and also we have this great dashboard, etc.” They do that already to some extent, but most of the “enhancements” provided by manufacturers are worse than useless. Kinoma will also be released with an open-source license and the SDK will be made freely available (you can sign up for the beta here). Whether they’ll actually pull any developers in is an open question, but I’m guessing they need to get a little reach first. At any rate, it’s an interesting platform that, either appealingly or fatally, does not fall in line with current mobile platforms.
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| Droid X 2 Specs And Photos Leak Posted: 16 Feb 2011 05:45 AM PST
The Droid X 2 might be nearing its official announcement. The successor to Moto’s first supersize phone is at least alive and well according to a forum post at The MobiZone where a bunch of pics and specs were posted. The post has since been pulled, but thanks to the wonders of the cache, the info survived for your enjoyment. Cached version of The MobiZone
Sounds great, right? The dual-core CPU, high-res screen and the same UI as the Droid Bionic. Well, Engadget apprently dug up slightly different specs that puts the Droid X 2 at a slightly lower tier with a 1.2GHz single-core CPU, 768MB of RAM and 4.3-inch WVGA (854 x 480) display. Either way, it seems the Bionic is set to live as Motorola’s top VZW offering with the Droid X 2 hitting slightly below it.
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There’s still a full day left at the conference here in Barcelona, but we’ve seen most of what there is to see, and summarized it all up in this video for ease of consumption. Of course, all our coverage can be found at the 
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