Thanks to Samsung’s success with the Galaxy S handsets, it has had to keep most of the Super AMOLED  and AMOLED screens it produces. That has left other manufacturers like HTC without the displays it needs to continue production of phones like the Droid Incredible and the Desire. Instead of waiting for Samsung to increase production, the Taiwanese based  firm is replacing the AMOLED screen on many of its phones with Sony’s Super LCD display.

Check out the video below to see a comparison between the Super LCD display on an HTC Desire, the Retina display on the iPhone 4 and the Super AMOLED screen on the Canadian version of the Samsung Galaxy S Vibrant I9000. To give you some background on each screen, the Desire is 3.7 inches with a resolution of 480 x 800 pixels. Apple’s Retina display comes in at 960 x 640 on the same 3.5 inch sized screen as seen on prior iPhone models. Finally, this variant of the Galaxy S is equipped with a Super AMOLED display that comes in at the same 480 x 800 resolution as on the Desire.

Based on the video, it looks like the iPhone 4’s Retina display comes in first followed by the Super LCD display and then the Super AMOLED screen. While staring at a video is not the best way to make this decision, anyone out there have a different order of placement?
source: IntoMobile

IDC has run its numbers prediction game again, and this time it speculates on the market share of the various mobile operating systems in the next few years. By 2014, it predicts, the “wild card” Android will have reached nearly 25% of all smartphones worldwide – not hard to believe considering the low-tier push that Google is plotting.

IDC also states that the market for Windows Phone devices (presumably both Windows Mobile legacy, if it is still lurking around, and WP7) will expand from 6.8% to 9.8% – again plausible, since Windows Phone 7 hasn’t even hit the market yet. Here we will go out on a limb and say that WP7 will probably surpass the 10% mark, considering the resources Microsoft is pouring into its development, marketing and distribution.

BlackBerry OS is expected to remain almost unchanged from its 17.9% market share, and the biggest loser is supposed to be Symbian, falling from 40.1%, to 32.9%. The other dip, according to IDC, will be in Apple’s iOS market share, which could shrink from 14.7% to 10.9%. The “other” platforms will modestly increase their market share to a combined value of 4.5%.

We wouldn’t even dare to speculate what the mobile OS market will look like next year, let alone in 2014, but that’s what the IDC analyst get paychecks for. Considering the explosive expansion of the smartphone industry expected in the near future, where will the puzzle pieces fall is anyone’s guess.

Apple’s exclusivity with AT&T will be over in that timeframe, so we will be seeing the iPhone on more carriers, which will certainly boost the iOS numbers. Symbian might be declining in its current reincarnation, but Symbain^4 and MeeGo are nearing to replace it in Nokia handsets, and who knows what consumers will find attractive. Samsung is planning to put bada on a third of its smartphones, and it is the number two cell phone manufacturer, so they might stir the market as well. We are also not so sure of BlackBerry remaining unscathed with all the troubles looming over its proprietary email system.

For all we know the smartphone OS market will become increasingly fragmented, but in the end it will be Apple and Google raking in the cash – Apple from the huge margins on its tightly integrated products, and Google from the search revenue generated by Android’s proliferation.

source: eWeek

Another day, another video of Samsung’s Froyo-running Galaxy Tab. This one goes through the interface, and is much clearer than the blurry leak yesterday. The Hummingbird chipset seems to enable buttery smooth interaction, and there is a size comparison between the Galaxy Tab, the iPad, and the Galaxy S smartphone.

All in all, not much is left unknown at this point about the 7″ Galaxy Tab, of which rumor has it Samsung has ordered to suppliers the modest 100 000 units per month for the initial launch to gauge the interest. The only thing for us now is to line up for the official unveiling next week at IFA 2010.
via GSMArena

The constant ups and downs associated with the stock market can get anyone into a dizzying frenzy – even more if they’re unable to access share prices on the go. Well now, it looks as though Google is helping those financial astute individuals a lending hand by unifying the experience of Google Finance across a variety of platforms. Whether you’re using an Android handset, an iPhone, or simply resorting to usuing your personal computer, the experience is now going to be the same across those specific platforms. Google announced today that they are launching the new edition of Google Finance for the Android and iOS platforms which enables anyone to keep up with the constantly changing moods of the stock market. The mobile experience offers all the same features and functionality that you would typically find on their regular site – plus it’s now available as an app in the Android market.
source: Google Mobile Blog

The folks from PocketNow have pitted the IE-based browser of Windows Phone 7 against the current crown jewels – Safari on the iPhone 4, and the Android 2.2 browser on the Nexus One. The WP7 browser seems to have come a long way from the slow buggy experience observed in the early prototypes.

Still running on the LG GW910 (aka Panther) developer’s phone, the browser exhibits page loading, kinetic scrolling and touch gesture speeds comparable to the competition. The mobile Internet Explorer even has some unique features like simultaneous tabs loading. Rotating the view in landscape mode seemed a bit slower than on the other two handsets, maybe due to the transitional animations present in Windows Phone 7. This is still not a final build of the WP7 mobile OS, so the competition should be officially worried – Microsoft seems to have gotten one of the major selling points in any smartphone about right.

Look at the ten minute video below to check out the WP7 browser behavior on the 3.5” screen of the LG GW910.
source: PocketNow

Mobile payments with your cell phone is nothing groundbreaking. Japan has had it since 2004, and today more than 60 million Japanese wave their phones to pay at soda machines, metro entrances and at cash registers at grocery stores.

When you put Apple with its iPhone in the mix, though, things are starting to look serious for the technology to become cool in the rest of the world as well. Apple’s recent hiring of Benjamin Vigier, who has been working on the Near Field Communication (NFC) adoption since its inception in Japan in 2004, might mark the beginning of a wide-spread contactless payment solution in North America.

Mr. Vigier has worked on some of the milestone projects in the cell phone payments area, such as developing the mobile wallet program for the French carrier Bouygues Telecom, and at the flash memory company SanDisk (Visa is offering contactless payments through a special microSD card, for example). He was last heading mFoundry, the payments company that is behind PayPal Mobile, the Starbucks barcode scanning service, and mobile wallet projects for two major carriers and a bank.

Apple, on the other hand, hasn’t been sitting still and waiting for the cell phone payments revolution to find it by surprise. It has filed a bunch of patents in recent months, that cover most possibilities that an NFC chip will present the iPhone and iPod with, such as:

• “An NFC-based mobile payments service that lets consumers make payments to merchants and other consumers via a credit or debit card, directly from their bank account or using credit stored in their iTunes account.
• The ‘iPay, iBuy and iCoupons’ patents, describing a comprehensive mobile payments, mobile commerce and mobile marketing business based around an NFC-enabled iPhone.
• Products+, an NFC-based product marketing and promotions application.
• An airline ticketing and boarding pass application that describes an unmanned, automated airport ticketing and baggage counter kiosk and introduces the concept of an automated security checking process where users of the iTravel app could process themselves through the security clearance system and check themselves in at the boarding gate.
• The Grab & Go patent, designed to make it easy for customers to transfer files between devices such as the Mac, iPhone and Apple TV.
• An NFC-enabled iPod, games controller, TV and iPhone.
• An NFC-based concert, entertainment and sports venue ticketing application that includes exclusive bonus features for users of Apple’s service.”

Benjamin Vigier is the new product manager of Apple’s mobile commerce department now, so exciting times lie ahead for people who have been craving for a while to leave their keys (NFC can also serve as an access card), camera and wallet at home, and replace them with just their iPhone.

And, much like with every other feature that’s been sitting on the sidelines all along (uhmm… FaceTime?), an Apple adoption could mean exponential growth, as long as the carriers are also on the same page. AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon recently signed an agreement with Barclays and Discover to work on partnership standard for contactless payments with your cell phone, fighting behemoth proprietary payment networks like those of Visa and Master Card, which are coming up with their own ideas. Visa even offers an unsightly case for the iPhone that allows for mobile payments, but obviously this is not the road that a design-obsessed Apple will be inclined to take.

All Nokia smartphones will be shipping with NFC chips starting next year, and the first NFC-enabled Android handsets are to arrive in Q4, so the timing is certainly ripe for Apple, if it doesn’t want to be left behind.
source: NFCWorld

Despite an economy that is not exactly surging, smartphone sales set a record of 60 million units sold in the second quarter. There are many reasons behind the strength in sales. For one, prices have been dropping as subsidized prices bring top of the line models down to affordable prices. While Apple shipped 8.4 million iPhones in the period for an impressive 61% year over year increase, marketshare is declining. Apple owned 14% of the smartphone pie in Q2, lower than 4 previous quarters over the past 2 years. The Cupertino based firm peaked at 17% and Strategy Analytics states that it believes that the only way for Apple to increase its marketshare is to sign up other carriers in the U.S. (extending the exclusivity pact with AT&T), Japan and China. The metrics firm also had some harsh words about Apple’s reputation, which has apparently has gone through some tough times during “Antennagate”, and said “The honeymoon period for Apple in the mobile world is clearly coming to an end. We believe Apple may have lost some heartshare in recent weeks because of its perceived mishandling of the antenna problem.”
source: MocoNews

Smartphone applications like Gowalla and FourSquare are signing in millions of people daily,  but they can pinpoint your exact location using your phone’s GPS chip, if allowed. A study by the security firm Webroots revealed that 55% of location-based services users are worried about the privacy implications of using them. Revealing your whereabouts on the Internet can run you into all sorts of problems, not only of the “honey-I-was-working-late” type, when you clearly posted pictures from the pub.

Someone who has sneaked into your circle of virtual friends somehow, might know the exact location of your house from the geotagged photos, and get to business while you are posting vacation pictures, says a Webroots employee. What is even more troubling is that sometimes people befriend complete strangers online, or use location-based services to meet them.

Turning off all applications that monitor your whereabouts, on the other hand, might require some fiddling, especially if you have checked something in a hurry while installing an app, or while setting up your phone for first use. Webroots thinks it will take at least a year for people to learn how to manage their location-based apps, the way it took a year for Facebook users to realize its privacy implications.
source: Guardian via Textually

For those Android 2.1 users just waiting patiently for the Froyo update, hearing about how wonderful Android 2.2 is can only make it harder to sustain your patience without going crazy. Based on benchmark tests using V8 and SunSpider, the Android 2.2 version of JavaScript is three times faster than the speed seen on 2.1. With the SunSpider tests, the JavaScript speed was twice as fast as that seen on the iOS4. Using V8, the difference was even greater with Android 2.2 getting a score indicating a speed four times greater than the iOS4. Much of the greater performance in Android 2.2 is due to the JIT compiler which performs a large number of optimizations that allows Android to run quicker and more efficiently than on other builds. Some Nexus One users, already using Froyo, have commented on the faster rendering of web pages with JavaScript. Just another reason for those holding Android phones expecting the 2.2 upgrade to have to strain very hard to remain calm until it finally comes.
source: Android Authority

When the original iPhone made watching YouTube videos on your phone something that was fun, most cellphone buyers started to demand the same thing on the new models they were buying. While some manufacturers were quick to join Apple, like HTC with the TouchPro and the Diamond, others were slow to add a separate client for YouTube videos. Because handsets lacked flash at the time, and others did not add a YouTube app, the video site developed a mobile version that could stream videos to feature phones and smartphones alike. From the early days when only a few select videos were streamed on the mobile site, the inventory of videos kept expanding and soon the mobile site offered the same videos as the iPhone and HTC app did. Eventually, other manufacturers realized that their customers wanted an application to watch YouTube and most manufacturers obliged.

The Google owned site has updated the service for HTML-5 capable browsers like Safari and Android browsers. Even though both the iPhone and Android phones do have their own apps for the service, the mobile site is said to have a cleaner and better interface and give better performance. YouTube product manager Andrey Doronichev writes,  “[The update] incorporates the features and functionality you’ve come to expect from the .com site, like search query suggestions, the options to create playlists, the ability to designate ‘favorite,’ ‘like’ or ‘unlike’ videos directly from your device,” The mobile site gets 100 million requests for videos a day, the same number that the desktop site was sending out in 2006 before it was acquired by Google. He also notes that the client on the Apple iPhone is optimized for EDGE, not 3G like the mobile site is. This is why YouTube videos look great while playing on the iPhone’s Wi-Fi radio, but not while using 3G. Android models above 2.0 have a High-Defintion option that makes most YouTube videos as clear as if watching on Wi-Fi.
source: YouTube