Posts tagged mobile devices
Polls show Canadians optmistic about RIM’s future
Jan 31st
by Nestor E. Arellano
I was taking drive to Leamington, Ont. this weekend in my lawyer friend’s car when our conversation took a turn towards the one topic that people ask you about lately when they know you’re a tech journalist – what do you think about RIM?
Nestor Arellano
They want to know what new bit of info I have on the company, and I – lacking anything new to add to what they have already read online – attempt to turn the tables on them and try to get them to voice out their own thoughts. Read the rest of this entry »
Avoid these mistakes when upgrading your cell phone contract
Jan 30th
by Kye Husbands
We all know a thing or two about getting what we want in a negotiation and when it comes to cellphones everyone has a tip.
Some believe they know how to get the carriers to kneel to the ground, while others feel like its an exercise in high blood pressure. Either way, these tips will help you avoid a few common mistakes before making that call. Read the rest of this entry »
6 things RIM needs to do to turn its fortune around
Jan 5th
by Kye Husbands
Seems like every blog we do of late is about RIM, because it’s difficult to watch a giant go down without a real fight. We have long communicated that BlackBerry desirability – ideal phone choices by customers at myCELLmyTERMS when creating a proposal – has been steadily declining to under 10 per cent at the end of the last quarter.
The Financial Post is reporting that RIM lost more marketshare in the US, going from 7.1 per cent to 6.5 per cent. Why this really sucks, is that the smartphone market is still growing by leaps and bounds, so losing market share in a growing market is a real sign of trouble, but trouble has been brewing for over a year, as we watched the desirability fall to all time lows of under 10 per cent on our network.
The solution seems so simple however, rally all of your staff to get get some new phones out to market and as soon as possible. For RIM getting ahead of the curve in the smartphone space would be ideal, but the challenge with waiting for the right pitch to hit a home run is that you miss out on all the RBI opportunities. It’s a gamble and a big one to wait for perfection in an ever changing space and some things are a must have, but let’s hypothesize for a sec.
What does RIM have to do with the BlackBerry to get ahead of the curve:
- Quad-core phones would be nice
- 18MP Camera or something crazy like that (front and rear facing)
- HDMI output or something of the sort
- New Operating System (BlackBerry 10K) with improved usability all the way around and snappy. (i.e. Not like OS 6.0 which freezes all the time)
- Improved virtual keyboard – (BTW – Please move the world icon from where it is, somehow I always found a way of switching to chinese when sending an email)
- Some real wow factor (ex. like a Virtual Assistant, A few killer apps, bigger screen phones)
I don’t have all the answers and neither does RIM, so let’s hope that they do the right thing and get a few phones out to market that are good enough to lay a solid foundation and build on that. Clearly we can’t expect everything at once like a vibrant developer community and thousands of apps, but we need to see some evidence of work being done to spark confidence.
BlackBerry gets it right with Curve 9360
Dec 7th
by Yale Holder
For fans of the BlackBerry Curve series, the 9360 model gets a decent grade for its purpose - a value based messaging cell phone. Its affordable at $50 on a 3 year contract or $350 without any contract or tab discount. Let’s review some of the key features of this phone as compared to its predecessor.
What I like?
The curve always seems to be short changed compared with the BlackBerry Bold models and always seems to have something missing – a camera with no flash – 3G with no Wi-Fi or vice versa, and the design wasn’t too slim or sleek looking. Well RIM fixes most of these issues with the Curve 9360, here are the key features that I do like: Read the rest of this entry »
NFC the next big thing? Do it right – embed privacy from the start
Dec 4th
by Dr. Ann Cavoukian
There was a lot of buzz about Near Field Communications (NFC) at The Future of the Internet Congress this week in Ottawa. NFC is an emerging short-range wireless technology being built into the latest generation of smartphones, allowing users to bridge the real and virtual worlds with simple “Tap ‘n Go” gestures.
Ann Cavoukian, Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario
NFC holds tremendous potential to change the way we interact with our physical environments, acquire and share information, access facilities, and pay for goods and services (to name just a few interoperabilities), using now-ubiquitous mobile devices.
Illustrative Uses Cases
At the Congress, I made available a new paper, entitled Mobile Near Field Communications (NFC) “Tap ‘n Go” – Keep it Secure & Private, that examines the technology’s potential in four illustrative use cases:
Alleged PlayBook hack leading RIM to fork in the road?
Dec 1st
by Nestor E. Arellano
As if the ignominy of having to slash the price of its first tablet device where not enough, Research In Motion it appears now has to investigate reports that company’s supposed iron clad operating system has been cracked by a trio of hackers identified only as xpvqs, neuralic and Chris Wade.
Nestor Arellano
A Twitter post by Wade claimed that PlayBook had been rooted. “I will be releasing an installer for it in a week,” Wade tweeted.
neuralic, then posted a video of the root which they named DingleBerry, on YouTube. Here’s the video which shows what appears to be a PlayBook’s backlighting features being controlled through a laptop. Read the rest of this entry »
Securing the Ubiquitous iPhone
Nov 21st
by Claudiu Popa
According to popular expert opinion, there are seven areas in today’s mobile devices where vulnerabilities can create security or privacy breaches. Nowhere is this more rational than in the paragon of mobile digital success: the iPhone.
Claudiu Popa
Nothing short of a juggernaut, new versions of the quasi-ubiquitous device have all but evaded attempts at hacking it by consistently introducing innovative new features and by leveraging a strategy of built-in obsolescence.
It follows then that each of these areas corresponds to ways to specific security controls at that level, tactically building a ‘defense in depth’ approach to securing the iPhone. In the name of brevity, here are these safeguards: Read the rest of this entry »
Who needs a Quad-Core mobile device for work?
Nov 10th
by Joseph Fieber
Nvidia’s Tegra 2 dual-core processor powers many of the phones and tablets on the market, and it’s similar to the one found in Apple’s iPad 2. That could change soon, as Nvidia has announced its Tegra 3 quad-core processor, which makes its debut in Asustek Computer’s Eee Pad Transformer Prime tablet. Generally, more is better, but does your company really need a quad-core mobile device?
Eee Pad Transformer Prime
The specs
With a design based on the ARM Cortex-A9 processor, the Tegra 3, code-named “Project Kal-El”, boosts by up to three times the graphics performance and five times the overall performance of its Tegra 2 predecessor. The graphics boost is largely due to a 12-core Nvidia GeForce GPU, which lends itself to dynamic rendering of textures and lighting in high-resolution 3D environments, and also makes possible 1080p high-profile video at 40 Mbps. Running at up to 1.3GHz, the extra horsepower comes primarily from the additional two cores, but is also helped by improving the memory bandwidth by three times and doubling the speed of the image signal processor.
Windows Mango – Nokia Lumia 800 and 710
Nov 8th
by Yale Holder
Let’s face it, Nokia and the North American market are like oil and water – they don’t go well together. In fact, Nokia has lost significant market share over the last 2 years largely to Apple and Android devices. But can its partnership with Windows turn these fortunes around?
Nokia, currently the largest handset maker by volume, is set to debut its latest devices from its new partnership with Microsoft. Microsoft’s Windows Phone OS hasn’t done too well either, losing significant market share in the US from 20 per cent market share in Sep’09 to about 6 per cent in Jul’11.
Windows recently released their new OS “Mango” which will debut in Europe and Asia before making its way toNorth America. Two phones are likely to be debuted by Nokia include the Nokia Lumia 800 and Lumia 710 both look impressive on first view (see specs below). Read the rest of this entry »
9 nifty apps for the BlackBerry Bold 9900
Sep 15th
By Nestor E. Arellano
Research in Motion’s BlackBerry Bold 9900 is probably one of the company’s finest smartphone in recent years. Although its look may not be as bold as expected and its operating system, the OS7 might be the last of the series before RIM moves on to the QNX platform, the 9900 has a lot going for it.
The new Bold is the thinnest BlackBerry ever and yet it packs a 1.2GHz, single-core
Nestor Arellano
Snapdragon processor from Qualcomm that leaves the processors in previous generations of BlackBerrys in the dust. The OS7 actually provides a better user experience than older versions of the operating system and the touchscreen works well with the BlackBerry 7 browser.
But to truly enjoy the phone you need to have the apps. Read the rest of this entry »
