Smartphones Articles on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

Apple's mobile partner in China announces its own iPhone rival

by Dana Franklin (Mar 1st, 2011)

The parent company of China Unicom, Apple's sole partner for carrying the iPhone in China, revealed plans on Monday to release its own mobile computing platform. Dubbed "Wophone," the platform will compete directly with Apple's iOS and Google's Android. Last year, Apple partnered with China ...

Lonely Planet launches audio walking tours in London

by Mike Schramm (Feb 18th, 2011)

This is a cool new feature in travel apps that I'd like to see a lot more of: Lonely Planet has released some walking audio tours as apps on the App Store. Unfortunately, all of the tours so far are just based in London, but the apps will walk you around some of London's most interesting areas, ...

Flaming Lips create tune for 12 smartphones

by Mike Schramm (Feb 17th, 2011)

This is a little trippy. The band Flaming Lips once released a studio album containing four CDs designed to be played all at the same time. Flaming Lips has upped the ante and uploaded 12 different clips to YouTube, which are all supposed to be played on 12 different smartphones at the same time ...

Apple, ASUS top PC World satisfaction survey

by Mike Schramm (Nov 29th, 2010)

Apple has garnered yet another win in a customer satisfaction survey -- this time it's PC World conferring the honors onto Cupertino, as Apple has topped both the laptop and desktop categories for most reliable and well-supported computer products. PC World says that Apple also did well in its ...

Apple grabs nearly 50 percent of handset industry profits

by Sam Abuelsamid (Nov 2nd, 2010)

For the better part of a decade, Apple has consistently shown that having a comparatively small market share by volume is no impediment to making money, and lots of it. Despite the company's PC share hovering in single digits through most of the 2000s, Apple has been far and away the most ...

AT&T trains retail staff on non-iPhone smartphones

by Sam Abuelsamid (Oct 23rd, 2010)

When the iPhone burst upon the world three and a half years ago, the smartphone landscape was very different from the one we see today. Palm Treos, Blackberries and Windows Mobile were the dominant players; they were mainly selected by geeks and people that needed them for business. In the ...

T-Mobile FCC memo cites Android app that caused network chaos

by Michael Rose (Oct 19th, 2010)

Remember, back in 2007 -- you know, Year One BTAS (Before The App Store) -- when Steve Jobs gave Apple's rationale for keeping the iPhone a closed platform versus allowing native app development? "Cingular doesn't want to see their West Coast network go down because some application messed up," he ...

iControlPad going into production (again), 3000 units in first run

by Mike Schramm (Aug 25th, 2010)

After a few fits and false starts, the image above shows the iControlPad in what's purported to be its final production form, according to inventor Craig Rothwell's Twitter account. Pricing hasn't been announced yet, and sales are supposed to start sometime in September, but Rothwell says the unit ...

iPhone grew more than Android in May

by Mel Martin (Jun 1st, 2010)

At least that's the word from Net Applications, the company that measures visits to clients websites. The latest report says the iPhone not only keeps a large lead over Android, but it actually enlarged its global share last month, going from 30.4. At the same time, Android increased from 5.3. If ...

Apple is unconcerned with NPD's smartphone report

by Mike Schramm (May 14th, 2010)

If Apple is losing any sleep over those recent smartphone numbers, it's not showing it. Their official response to the recent news that Android is selling more phones than iPhone OS could adequately be defined as: "meh." Spokeswoman Natalie Harrison says that the survey was "a very limited report," ...

Frog Design releases 1983 tablet prototypes

by Mike Schramm (Jan 25th, 2010)

It's this week! It's almost a sure bet that we'll finally, after all of these years, see the Apple tablet unveiled this week, and to celebrate, Frog Design (the company responsible for many of Apple's designs back in the day) has given Wired some old shots of prototype tablets from the Cupertino ...

Study: Android and iPhone users show same usage trends, heavy app usage

by Mike Schramm (Dec 28th, 2009)

A study put together by analytics firms comScore and Compete says that while Android and iPhone users probably aren't the same people, they certainly act like it. Usage patterns line up almost exactly across the board, differing by only a few percentage points in categories from social networking ...

iPhone and Android now total 75% of U.S. smartphone web traffic

by Mel Martin (Nov 23rd, 2009)

It's a rather stunning number from AdMob in an October report. The firm reports on web requests from thousands of sites world wide. In the latest report, Apple has 55% of the domestic Smartphone traffic share, and Android has 20%. Interestingly, the Blackberry share dropped 2% to a 12 percent share, ...

MS software architect: Apps don't make the phone

by Mike Schramm (Nov 19th, 2009)

This sounds an awful lot like sour grapes to me: Ray Ozzie, Microsoft's chief software engineer, told a Professional Developers' Conference earlier this week that it wasn't the apps that would make or break the smartphone platforms. Of course, that's what most press and blog outlets seem to be ...

iPhone usage metric for Flickr drops big time

by Mike Schramm (Sep 15th, 2009)

We've posted before how popular the iPhone is as a camera on Flickr, with people uploading tons of photos, both shot by and straight from the iPhone. But now, The Next Web has covered a huge drop in photos referencing the iPhone over on the popular photo sharing site. The suspected culprit? Flickr ...