Smartphones

LAS VEGAS--We think mobile digital TV is going to be a hot topic at CES 2010 and Samsung and Sprint are kicking things off by announcing that they will showcase this technology on the Samsung Moment in the Washington D.C. and Baltimore areas during the first quarter of 2010.

The trial handsets will be equipped with Samsung's Mobile DTV Chip, which will allow Moments to receive live TV programming from local broadcast stations, and, unlike MediaFlo, there is no additional cost to the user. That's right: it's free!

The Open Mobile Video Coalition is promoting Mobile … Read more

LAS VEGAS--On Wednesday, Research In Motion debuted a new accessory called the BlackBerry Presenter that allows you to make PowerPoint presentations right from your smartphone.

Designed for on-the-go professionals, the BlackBerry Presenter is a small (3.4 inches by 2.4 inches by 0.9 inch) hub that provides connections for hooking up your BlackBerry to a projector or monitor via VGA or S-Video (cables not included) port. It also supports 24 animation and 55 transition styles of PowerPoint 2003 and 2007, and you can even set the time between transitions.

The BlackBerry Presenter is not compatible with the BlackBerry … Read more

So now we know the full story of the Nexus One. After the newest Google Android device was sighted last month, Google formally released the handset to the world Tuesday morning.

Though the Nexus One's specs are promising--particularly the Snapdragon processor and the enhanced voice control capabilities--it's not necessarily the best Android phone yet. Indeed, the real story of the Nexus One is not its design or features, but how it is being sold.

As my colleague Tom Krazit points out, Google is changing the way cell phones are sold in the United States. Google alone will sell … Read more

T-Mobile officially announced today that it has boosted its entire 3G network to HSPA 7.2, which is nice timing for one of the first carriers to offer Google's Nexus One (and especially since the Nexus One currently only supports T-Mobile's 3G bands). HSPA 7.2 promises to deliver three to five times the speeds of current 3G networks, and, best of all, this will apply to all existing 3G smartphones as well. Nice one, T-Mo.

We knew it was coming, but we had to wait for Google to spill the news before we could talk about it with authority. And the company did so Tuesday morning at a press conference at the Googleplex in Mountain View, Calif.

As expected, the Nexus One is a new Google Android phone that offers an inside designed by Google and an outside designed by HTC. According to Google's Mario Queiroz, the Nexus One is a "superphone" where the Web meets the cell phone. "It's an exemplar of what mobile phones can do with Android," he said. The handset will be available first for GSM carriers like T-Mobile, but a Verizon version will follow.… Read more

Was 2009 the year of the smartphone? Or will it be 2010? Either way, a new Forrester report confirmed a surge in smartphone ownership last year and expects more growth and more competition this year.

Around 17 percent of mobile phone subscribers now own smartphones, up from 11 percent at the end of 2008 and 7 percent at the end of 2007. Those numbers are even more impressive than they sound, Forrester said Monday, because new technologies typically enjoy a growth spurt in their first year and then trail off in subsequent years. Smartphones are doing the reverse.

In 2009, … Read more

Smartphones aren't just smart, they're personal computers. Unlike a desktop or even a laptop PC, those devices and other mobile phones can easily slip out of a pocket or purse, be left in a taxi, or get snatched off a table. They let you store photos, access e-mails, receive text messages, and put you one browser click away from potentially malicious Web sites.

In effect, gadgets like the Apple iPhone and those running Google's Android software can be as risky to use as PCs, except that the wide variety of mobile platforms has deprived malicious hackers of … Read more

Do you believe in smartbooks yet? Smaller than Netbooks, running custom OSes and miniature smartphone processors, these newly-coined devices are supposed to offer the best of smartphone convenience with the form factor of a Netbook. They're ready to start appearing on the scene, and Lenovo has one of the first with their Skylight.

With a 10.1-inch screen, it's not exactly a supersmall device compared to an iPhone--but it is much thinner than nearly any Netbook. With built-in 3G and Wi-Fi, Lenovo promises a seamless browsing experience. The OS, however, is not Windows, or even Ubuntu: it's … Read more

Gesture-recognition interfaces for cell phones are closer to reality with technology from the University of Tokyo that lets you operate your phone or mobile device without laying a finger on it.

Researchers at the Ishikawa Komuro Laboratory have created a "vision-based input interface for mobile devices" through which users can type words by pointing in the air. There's no dialing demo in the video below, though that would presumably be just as simple.

Unlike gestural interfaces such as MIT's SixthSense, the system does not require special colored finger markings to track gestures.

A single high-speed camera … Read more