MobileCrunch |  |
- Leaked Keyboard-less HP Device Said To Be Like “an EVO with webOS”
- Apple Makes Toyota Pull Scion Theme For Jailbroken iPhones
- Nokia To Show “What’s New With Symbian” On April 12th
- Fring for iOS and Android Get Group Video Calling (If You Can Squeeze Into The Beta)
- Pre-Paid Android: Boost Mobile To Launch Samsung Galaxy Prevail for $180 (Sans Contract!)
- Too Lazy To Count Calories? Now You Can Just Take A Picture Of Your Meal
- T-Mobile Adds 10 More Cities To Its HSPA+ Roster
- Own A Massive Company? Xigo Wants To Be Your Billshrink
| Leaked Keyboard-less HP Device Said To Be Like “an EVO with webOS” Posted: 05 Apr 2011 11:10 PM PDT
While Palm’s early marketing efforts and their decision to launch exclusively on Sprint may not have made webOS’s pre-HP life any easier, there’s one thing that just straight up hurt them: the hardware. Be it design issues (the razor sharp lip on the original Pre) or underpowered specs (see: the Pixi), Palm got off to a pretty rough start on the hardware front and nothing they’ve released since has really been enough to get’em past that. But this… this might just do it. PreCentral just nabbed the image above from an unnamed (but thus far dependable) source. Alas, there’s not much to be said about it beyond what can be gathered from the photo, though the original source says its like “an EVO with webOS”. Uh, sold. There are a few codenames being thrown around with this one, ranging from “Mansion”, to “Stingray”, to “Windsor”. My sources have previously told me that the “Mansion” codename was just nonsense churned out by the rumormill — and given that the Pre 3 is dubbed the “Mantaray” behind closed doors, the “Stingray” name fits this one pretty well. Think that’s a front facing camera on the face, or a proximity sensor? We’ll dig for more information on this guy, if only because I really want one.
|
| Apple Makes Toyota Pull Scion Theme For Jailbroken iPhones Posted: 05 Apr 2011 04:53 PM PDT
As part of a marketing campaign (what isn’t these days?), Toyota’s super-hip Scion brand decided to put out a Scion theme for the iPhone. But wait, you say, there’s no such thing as an iPhone theme. No indeed! This theme was only installable by jailbroken iPhones and only downloadable through the Cydia black market app store. Now, looking at the theme (above), I can’t say it’s much of an argument for jailbreaking. If anything, it’s a warning to the curious. But Apple took umbrage that this attempt at viral marketing essentially condoned that unforgivable act, and have asked that Toyota pull it. And pull it they did. Not a great loss, but kind of an interesting interplay.
|
| Nokia To Show “What’s New With Symbian” On April 12th Posted: 05 Apr 2011 11:34 AM PDT
With even Nokia pretty much giving up on Symbian, it’s rather tough to get excited about the platform at this point. With that said: they’ve got something new to show, and they’ll be showing it at an event in London come April 12th. As big as Symbian may be, it is a quickly sinking ship; might whatever they announce be big enough to plug the cracks in their hull? [MadForTech Via Engadget]
|
| Fring for iOS and Android Get Group Video Calling (If You Can Squeeze Into The Beta) Posted: 05 Apr 2011 10:56 AM PDT Hah! Look at you video calling with one person at a time. You might as well be using a rotary phone! All the cool kids are video calling with 3 friends at once. Okay, it’s not so much the “cool kids” as it is “people who have finagled their way into fring’s limited beta program“, as fring’s still testing the waters with this feature. While quite nifty, I’d be curious as to how much use it actually gets. Most people seem to have a pretty hard time finding a reason to video call one person at a time; how often will you need a bunch of brady bunch heads babbling at each other?
|
| Pre-Paid Android: Boost Mobile To Launch Samsung Galaxy Prevail for $180 (Sans Contract!) Posted: 05 Apr 2011 09:14 AM PDT
Boost Mobile was supposed to hold a big ol’ event tonight where they’d be unveiling their next phone, but it looks like they may have just spoiled their own surprise. Details just went up on their own site for a brand spankin’ new Android handset: the Samsung Galaxy Prevail. Here’s what we know so far:
Is it a mega-spec’d superphone? Nope. But at $179 — and considering that that’s without a contract — it’s a pretty dang solid smartphone for dirt cheap. This’ll be Boost’s second pre-paid Android phone, with the heavy duty Motorola i1 being their first (though it seems they’ve stopped offering that one, at least online). Looking for the bubble-burstin’ product page pictured above? Here’s the link.     [Thanks Kyle!]
|
| Too Lazy To Count Calories? Now You Can Just Take A Picture Of Your Meal Posted: 05 Apr 2011 08:13 AM PDT
Wow. If this app had been pitched to us on the 1st, I would have been sure it was an April Fool’s joke. Coming in a few days later, however, it seems almost genius. Given that my job of sitting in front of a computer and blasting out gadget news isn’t exactly an active one, I’ve gotta be fairly careful to avoid packin’ on the pounds. At one point this entailed keeping a fairly detailed journal of meal calorie counts tediously pulled ingredient by ingredient from a time-wrecking databases. As you can probably tell from my unenthusiastic tone and use of words like “tedious” and “time-wrecking”, that didn’t last too long. If this Meal Snap iPhone app works as promised, however, I might just go back to keeping track. The idea: Take a picture of your food, send it in to Meal Snap, and after some techno-sorcery and number crunching, it’ll spit out a rough estimate of the calorie count and track it for you. Is it a precise science? Hardly. Even in the screenshot above, you can see that there are some pretty wild variations. A “Small handful of cashews”, for example, comes back as being anywhere from 150 to 614 calories. Still, having some idea of what you’re taking in is still far better than not having any idea at all. You can find MealSnap on the App Store for $2.99 right here [iTunes link].
|
| T-Mobile Adds 10 More Cities To Its HSPA+ Roster Posted: 05 Apr 2011 06:59 AM PDT
Still anxiously awaiting T-Mobile’s HSPA+ network (the one they market as “4G” because it’s pretty dang fast, but technically isn’t 4G because it’s fancied up 3G tech?) in your home town? Cross your fingers: 10 more cities are getting it this morning. Is yours one?
Over all, T-Mobile’s HSPA+ network is currently hittin’ around 167 markets, with a good chunk of the major cities accounted for. You can find the full list right over here. As for when that HSPA+ signal will click over from 21 mbps to 42 mbps as they promised at CES: they’re still working on it. [Via Phonescoop]
|
| Own A Massive Company? Xigo Wants To Be Your Billshrink Posted: 05 Apr 2011 06:40 AM PDT
If you’re a family of 3 or 4 people, it’s pretty easy to figure out if you’re spending too much on your phone bill. Pop into something like Billshrink, plug in your credentials, and away you go. If you’re a company with 20,000 employee phones to your name, it’s a different story. Running BillShrink 20,000 times probably isn’t going to cut it, so shaving costs usually requires dumping anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand bucks into a specialized “Telecom Expense Management” (or, as the cool kids call it, TEM) service. This morning, a company called Xigo is looking to turn that TEM market up on its head. Beginning today, they’re offering a free, automated service built to analyze the wireless bills of companies with as many as 50,000 phones under their belt.
Now, Xigo’s not new to this. In fact, they’ve been around for around a decade — they’ve just been operating under a different name: Invoice Insight. They’re taking the product they saw as most profitable over the last decade, automating it, and making it free. Now, why would they go and do that? It’s all about capturing a market, and as they put it, “building that initial set of trust”. Right now, the vast majority of their customers — and the majority of the TEM market’s customers, really — are Fortune 500 companies. The small-to-medium business market, they say, has gone untapped. So they’re providing the tools for these smaller companies (again, “smaller” being defined as 50 to 50,000 cell phones) to get what they need now, in hopes that one day they’ll need something more customized or larger scale and come right on back. As of this morning, Xigo will offer three services:
As another route to bringin’ in the cash via the free products, Xigo also mentioned that they’ll be able to monetize the (non-identifiable) data they bring in via the free products. There’s “very little data on mobile spend” out there, they say, and companies will pay to know things like how much their peers in the industry are paying on average. (And for those wondering, because I know I was: there’s no fun story behind the Xigo name. They brainstormed on branding for a few months, then eventually went all “blank canvas” with a name that doesn’t mean anything)
|
| You are subscribed to email updates from MobileCrunch To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610 | |
No comments:
Post a Comment