It’s funny how in the world of mobile, with all the hugely complex technologies, applications and features that what are seemingly the smallest and simplest things can have a dramatic impact on the user experience. A fact I was recently reminded of when my trusty Nokia Lumia broke after an interaction too many with a [...]

Last August I had what could be best described as a little temper tantrum about the state of the Android Marketplace and the dearth of quality official applications. But a year on I’m more mature (mostly) and so is the Android Marketplace.
When I last wrote on the subject I complained that big news outlets like [...]

Today, NXP drastically revised its 2011 NFC sales forecasts – in fact it more than halved them. This follows several months of NFC excitement in the mobile space as big players clamoured to announce their rival offerings. Haven’t we been on this NFC hype cycle before?
This summer the US operator consortium Isis – comprising AT&T, [...]

This week the ITU officially kicked off the 4G/5G pantomime we’ve all been waiting for. They picked two technologies which are now officially 4G. The unfortunate reality is that the general public will almost inevitably only ever know them as 5G. This situation can only serve to cause confusion in the industry as engineers clash [...]

He’s smarter than your average bear

In 2010 we have seen the emergence of a new category of handsets - the “sub smartphone” (aka the Yogi Phone). Handsets like the Samsung Wave and the HTC Smart exhibit traits of both feature phones and smartphones, positioning them somewhere between the two. Making them either dumbed-down smartphones or souped-up feature-phones, [...]

It’s not fair being an Android user. Not only are our social lives ‘less fulfilling’ than our iPhone toting friends and colleagues, we can’t get an official BBC News app. Or The Guardian. Or Time Out. Or Football Manager. These aren’t niche apps, they’re well respected news outlets and one of the world’s most popular [...]

On Friday, my laptop crashed. Nothing particularly strange or unusual in that. On rebooting, however, it asked me if I wanted to start-up in Safe Mode. I must have had this happen a fair few times in the past, but I just realised, I have absolutely no idea what this actually means. I do sort [...]

This week AT&T became the most recent operator to give its ‘all you can eat’ data offering the chop. The emergence of these cheap restaurant inspired offers originally signalled the end of 3G networks’ lean years and the beginning of the data boom. Their passing introduces the era of tiered offerings which mobile operators hope [...]

This week saw the launch of not one, but two tablets in the UK – the Dell Streak and the Apple iPad.

The Dell Streak is much more of a traditional mobile device, with built-in cellular connectivity and the ability to make phone calls. The iPad conversely is not only physically less mobile (being bigger), [...]

We have just about managed to catch up with ourselves after the whirlwind which was Mobile World Congress last week and have taken a few minutes to reflect on the announcements and hot topics at the show.
On a general note, despite rumors before the show that attendee numbers would be down from last year, the [...]