Author Archive: Gareth

Smartphone market winners and losers

Blackberry maker RIM was the biggest winner in a slowing smartphone market in the second quarter, roughly doubling its market share from a year ago to 17.4 percent, research firm Gartner said on Monday. The market was still dominated by Finland’s Nokia, which sold 15.3 million phones with capabilities like e-mail and navigation, giving it a 47.5 percent share. But this was down from 50.8 percent a year ago as competition intensified in the consumer smartphone market. Read the full report after the break.

Vodafone announces connect to friends Facebook application

Vodafone UK is trialling a unique service that enables all UK mobile users to send text messages from their Facebook profile to friends. The pilot service will be extended later this month to also include picture messages. Vodafone Connect to Friends lets Facebook users send texts and picture messages without having to switch from PC to mobile simply by installing the ‘Vodafone Connect to Friends’ application to their Facebook profile. The application allows users to send messages not only to their online Facebook friends but also to non-Facebook users and groups. Vodafone Connect to Friends can be used by anyone regardless of their choice of UK mobile operator.

Google Android coming to T-Mobile UK

The Telegraph are reporting that the HTC Dream Google Android handset will be coming to the UK exclusively on T-Mobile from November. This is good news as in the UK we have sat and watched the proposed launch in the US without any indication until now that we will see an Android handset. You can read what The Telegraph have to say after the break.

iPhone 2.1 Firmware to be Released Tuesday?

According to arstechnica iPhone firmware version 2.1 will be released on September 9th along with iTunes 8. If the rumours are to be believed we should see a couple of features that are unexpected, please let it be multi media messaging and copy / paste. More than likely it is the enhanced GPS to track your speed and direction which is not what we need, (give us turn by turn directions please) and the push notifications for IM. While this would be a nice addition the strain it would put on an already overworked battery concerns me greatly. Also this is Apples chance to put the numerous bugs to bed with signal strength, call dropping and application crashes. It should be an interesting week ahead and of course you will get all the latest news right here.

HTC Touch Pro vs Apple iPhone – web browser performance

The iPhone has taken a lot of criticism lately on poorly worded advertising and rightly so, we have stumbled across a video comparing the HTC Touch Pro and the iPhone browsers rendering a few different pages over WiFi and the iPhone definitely does the better job. The video shows the Safari browser loads and completes every page well before Opera 9.5. Check out the video after the break to see the differences.

Microsoft job posting hints at cross-platform Zune environment?

A recent job posting from Redmond for a "Software Development Engineer in Test" calls for someone who "dreams about having a mobile phone based entertainment experience powered by a unified entertainment service across devices such as Zune, Xbox and PC." Someone, the ad reads, who will, "create a ‘Connected Entertainment’ experience, realized through the Zune service, that spans multiple devices such as Zune, Xbox, PC and Mobile phones."  We have been saying for a while now that if Windows Mobile is going to compete in the consumer market, this is cristical to it’s success. The iPhone as a standalone phone is nice but it is the surrounding infrastructure that makes it a killer device, App Store, iTunes etc. So if this is to be believed Microsoft could be listening to what Windows Mobile users need at last. Add this to the last job posting for the Skymarket and it is all starting to make sense.

via Engadget

Yet another iPhone killer… this time from LG

The Mobile Weblog have hit us with another attempt at an iPhone killer. Once upon a time, LG released a phone called the Viewty, described as an iPhone killer, which it certainly wasn’t, however it was quite a good phone. I know, I have one. On the back of the Prada II they have announced a successor to the Viewty also. They have called it the KC910.

Two videos of the Archos 5 arrive

Archosfans have posted both an unboxing and a review of the Archos 5. The humourous French site is obviously rather excited by the device, so much so that the videos are quite raw and badly shot (also beware of the music in the second.)

Kinoma Play update now available

We are big fans of the Kinoma Play software here at Mobile Tech Addicts in fact, Gareth has just posted his impressions of the software in the reviews section. Well it is good to see that they have just released an update to the software to address a few issues and would you believe they have actually told you what those fixes are, not like Apples "Bug Fixes" statement. The update can also be done over the air, nice one Kinoma. Full details after the break.