smartphone

Some speculations in the media say that Nokia and Microsoft may announce their new smartphone on August 17. The rumors are based on a joint invitation sent by the two companies Monday for a “party” scheduled for this date. The party will be held in Cologne, Germany.

The invitation does not specify what the event will be all about. It only mentions that there will be a live act, great djs, and free grub. Still, this fact gave some feed for the speculations that the event will be crowned with the announcement of Nokia's first Windows Phone 7-based smartphone.

Smartag, a division of Identive Group, announced that it gained an order from "a leading mobile handset manufacturer" to design and supply more than one million NFC tags within a period of 6 months. The tags will be included in-box with each purchase of an NFC-enabled smart phone. The company didn’t name the smartphone maker.

A new survey by PriceGrabber revealed that 1/3 of American consumers want to buy an iPhone 5.

"Our survey data confirms the strong following Apple has built around its iPhone, with more than one-third of consumers planning to upgrade to the latest model only a little over a year following the release of the iPhone 4," said Graham Jones, general manager of PriceGrabber.

China Unicom to launch its own smartphone line later this month. The new line of mobile devices are meant to rival Apple’s iPhone as well as Android handsets, as reported by the company spokeswoman.

A new smartphone called Wophone runs a proprietary operating system, announced by the company in March. Being the second largest mobile carrier in China, China Unicom has 180 million users. It faces strict competition in an app store business from Apple and Android vendors.

According to a survey conducted by Retrevo 34% of iPhone owners believe they have a 4G enabled smartphone because of “4” in the iPhone 4 name. Supposedly they are get deceived by the previous models 3G and 3GS.

Meantime, 42% of Blackberry users also believe their phones are 4G, but that is impossible. On the other hand, 61% of iPhone owners disregard if their phones are 4G enabled and they will buy the following iPhone model irrespective of the feature. Blackberry and Android users are also interested in the new iPhone, regardless of 4G speeds.

According to a new survey from the Pew Internet and American Life Project more and more American users have smartphones. However, a significant 40% of them still prefer simple mobile phones to make calls and do text messaging with no need in an app store or Angry Birds.

The survey found that over 35% of adult Americans use some models of smartphone including an iPhone, BlackBerry, Android, Windows Phone 7, or WebOS device.

AT&T announced Monday that it is launching its HTC Status smartphone this week on July 17. The phone with a dedicated Facebook share button will go on sale in AT&T stores for just $50. The smartphone is mostly targeted at young consumers who spend a lot of time browsing social networking services.

A Torino designer Antonello Falcone offered his concept of the upcoming next generation Jesus Phone, iPhone 5.

Falcone expands the screen size to 4.3” occupying the whole front surface of the device. The frame is now thinner and unseen. The case is made of aluminum and glass while it is just 8.4 mm thick.

The Home button placed under the screen is now a touchpad sensor surface. Instead of pressing it a user will make some gestures to operate it.

John Carmack from id Software was talking about the future of mobile gaming, reports The Register. He explained why “why tablets, smartphones and cloud-gaming services such as OnLive will become the dominant gaming platforms.”

"It’s unquestionable that within a very short time, we’re going to have portable cell phones that are more powerful than the current-gen consoles," he said.

Pictures of the upcoming Nokia phone on Windows Phone 7 platform leaked the Internet. The images were published by the Hungarian website TechNet. Earlier Nokia unveiled its plans to launch first Windows Phone 7 smartphone this year, while the sales are scheduled for the next year.

The handset codenamed Sea Ray almost absolutely replicates recently announced N9 excluding the flash light placed in another corner and camera button on the side. The smartphone runs Windows Phone 7 Mango.

Nokia announced its first and last MeeGo running smartphone N9 this week in Sigapire.

Nokia CEO Stephen Elop said that the commercial launch will take palce later this year. As you know Nokia abandoned its plans to further support MeeGo after it entered into a partnership with Microsoft to adopt its Windows Phone platform for all its mobile devices. However, Nokia decided to unveil one of the models it was working on.

The N9 handset features a large touchscreen and comes in black, cyan and magenta colors.
 

A designer Dorian Darcourt has offered his concepts of the oncoming next generations of the iPhone. The main idea that differs its concept from the current iPhone 4 is a larger screen resolution within unchanged body size.

In the first concept the screen diagonal is about 4” while it fits into the old housing body due to the thinner edges. The rear camera is placed opposite to the flash cell. Instead of the conventional home button there is a touch pad under the screen. One more innovation was a more stylish silver color instead of a white case.

According to the forecast made by Cisco within the framework of its Visual Networking Index global Internet traffic will grow four-fold by 2015 to 966 exabytes a year, or a zettabyte (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes) while the number of devices connected to the Internet will increase to 15 billion.

Suraj Shetty, Cisco's vice president of global service provider marketing, predicts that the average resident of the United States will have 7 networked devices in 2015 while in 2010 there was one connected device for every human on the planet.

Enthusiasts using HTC phone decided to “modify” their Android device to make it run Ubuntu operating system. People at the XDA Developers forum have worked on HTC Desire to boot Ubuntu natively.

The new firmware was developed by "Bergfex" and was originally based off a Ubuntu developer thread for the Desire HD from late last year. The procedure of hacking involved putting zip files in particular places like SD card and PC and then switching the phone to the bootloader mode. After that the phone is connected to the computer and restarted to get the old ROM loading.