4K mobile gaming is here

More is coming. 

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4K gaming is coming to an Android tablet near you
// The Verge - All Posts

Qualcomm announced its Snapdragon 805 processor back in November, but it wasn't until today that we could try out its promise of Ultra HD graphics for ourselves. The American chipmaker has built its own 4K tablet — spanning a 3,840 x 2,160 resolution — to demo the graphical capabilities of its latest chip and the consequent benefits of owning a 4K Android device. That tablet is on show here at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

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Find: Google will start teaching people how to build their own smartphone parts this April

Project ara lives!


Google will start teaching people how to build their own smartphone parts this April
// The Verge - All Posts

Google announced today it will host the first Ara Developers’ Conference this April. The series of three conferences will show developers what they will be able to do with the company's modular phone project. This is the first word of Project Ara's future since Google announced plans to sell off Motorola for $2.91 billion to Lenovo in January. Phonebloks, a community of modular smartphone supporters working with Google, put out the video below about the project's most recent updates.

The first conference will be held online with a a live webstream and an interactive Q&A. A limited number of people will be able to attend in person at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. According to the project's website, the...

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Find: Motorola Watch and New Moto X Coming

The wave of watches has begun: pebble, samsung, motorola, apple...

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Motorola Press Event at MWC: New Watch and Moto X Coming
// AnandTech

Despite Motorola’s current state of flux regarding their acquisition by Lenovo, there are plenty of products in the pipeline.  At the press event this evening, Rick Osterloh made a couple of interesting statements.  The first is the position of wearables, and that Motorola is in the process of developing a smartwatch.  The focus for the watch will be making it stylish – their current issue with current devices is the lack of style and finding a device that people actually want to wear.  Motorola will try and fix this.

Also, for the briefest of moments, the panel was asked regarding the next version of the Moto X.  The answer was simply ‘sometime in the summer’.



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Find: Mozilla aims for the emerging world with plans for the $25 smartphone



Mozilla aims for the emerging world with plans for the $25 smartphone
// Ars Technica
In Barcelona today, Mozilla announced its Firefox OS plans for the next year. The highlight: plans for a line of smartphones starting at $25 each, bringing HTML5-powered smartphones to billions of people who can't afford more expensive devices.

Central to this plan is a partnership with Chinese fabless semiconductor designer Spreadtrum. The company has designed a trio of chipsets built around the ARM Cortex A5 processor.

While a $25 smartphone might be a step down from the high-powered phones of Samsung and Apple, Mozilla is positioning its new products at an audience that currently only has feature phones. As such, it's not a step down, it's a step up.

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Find: Google’s “Project Tango” is a smartphone with Kinect-style computer vision




Google’s “Project Tango” is a smartphone with Kinect-style computer vision
// Ars Technica

Google is launching yet another crazy moonshot project. This one is a prototype called "Project Tango," which squeezes 3D computer vision technology—similar to that used in the Xbox Kinect—into a smartphone. The device is being cooked up by Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP) group, which just moved over from Motorola. Johnny Lee, the Technical Program Lead at ATAP, described the project:

Project Tango strives to give mobile devices a human-like understanding of space and motion through advanced sensor fusion and computer vision, enabling new and enhanced types of user experiences – including 3D scanning, indoor navigation and immersive gaming.

The computer vision is enabled by a new co-processor from Movidius, called the "Myriad 1." The chip was designed from scratch to bring Kinect-style computer vision to smartphones, where size and power-draw are a huge challenge. In fact, the man quoted above, Johnny Lee, is a former Microsoft employee and worked on the Kinect technology before jumping to Google. Google's goal with Project Tango is to produce the hardware, ship the phone out to developers, and see what they come up with. TechCrunch, which was pre-briefed on the device, says Google is giving the device out to 200 developers, and signups for access start today. Developers that apply will have to pitch their ideas to Google. 

My favorite video.

The computer vision isn't meant to enable Leap Motion-style hand waving for input, but to let the phone know where it is in 3D space. The rear of the phone is packed with sensors that would allow the device to "scan" a room and build a 3D model of it, which apps could interact with. This sounds like Google is making an augmented reality platform that could really tell what is in a room, instead of crudely guessing the room geometry based on a 2D camera feed. 

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Find: E-Z-2-Use attack code exploits critical bug in majority of Android phones

Attack targets android browsers. 

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E-Z-2-Use attack code exploits critical bug in majority of Android phones
// Ars Technica
A screen showing the status of a Metasploit attack exploiting a vulnerable Android handset.

Recently-released attack code exploiting a critical Android vulnerability gives attackers a point-and-click interface for hacking a majority of smartphones and tablets that run the Google operating system, its creators said.

The attack was published last week as a module to the open-source Metasploit exploit framework used by security professionals and hackers alike. The code exploits a critical bug in Android's WebView programming interface that was disclosed 14 months ago. The security hole typically gives attackers remote access to a phone's camera and file system and in some cases also exposes other resources, such as geographic location data, SD card contents, and address books. Google patched the vulnerability in November with the release of Android 4.2, but according to the company's figures, the fix is installed on well under half of the handsets it tracks.

"This vulnerability is kind of a huge deal," Tod Beardsley, a researcher for Metasploit maintainer Rapid7, wrote in a recent blog post. "I'm hopeful that by publishing an E-Z-2-Use Metasploit module that exploits it, we can maybe push some vendors toward ensuring that single-click vulnerabilities like this don't last for 93+ weeks in the wild. Don't believe me that this thing is that old? Just take a look at the module's references if you don't believe me."

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Find: Ubuntu phones to ship this year from two manufacturers




Ubuntu phones to ship this year from two manufacturers
// Ars Technica

Canonical has announced that the first Ubuntu-powered phones will ship later this year, with devices coming from two manufacturers: BQ in Spain and Meizu in China. According to Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth, both companies have a track record of breaking into new markets with mid-to-high-end phones. Shuttleworth said while Canonical was happy to work with "household names," the company initially wanted to find partners for whom Canonical can be a "significant part of their story."

Details of the phones that the companies would build were not on offer—though Canonical said that more information would be available at Mobile World Congress next week. But Shuttleworth pointed to the companies' existing products as an indication of what the future would hold. BQ has pushed the use of dual-SIM phones, while Meizu has followed a strategy of only having a single hardware model in the market at a time. The latter's current MX3 is reasonably high-end, with a Samsung Exynos Octo processor and a peculiar 1800×1080 screen resolution.

While both companies have only sold into a few markets with their existing models—BQ focused on Europe and Meizu on China, Hong Kong, Israel, and Russia—the Ubuntu devices will be available globally when bought online.

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Find: iOS Dominates Enterprise Market



iOS Dominates Enterprise Market
// Daring Fireball

File this one under “Ways that iOS-vs.-Android is not like Mac-vs.-Windows”.



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Find: Smartphone Sales Beat Feature Phones in 2013



Smartphone Sales Beat Feature Phones in 2013
// NYT Bits
Researchers at Gartner said that in 2013, worldwide smartphone sales neared 1 billion units sold and surpassed the sales of feature phones for the first time.

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Find: Yearly global smartphone shipments top 1 billion for the first time




Yearly global smartphone shipments top 1 billion for the first time
// The Verge - All Posts

More than one billion smartphones were shipped worldwide in 2013, the most ever shipped in a one year period to date. According to data from the International Data Corporation, vendors shipped 1,004.2 million smartphones in the 12 month period, an increase of 38.4 percent from the 725.3 million units shipped in 2012.

Among vendors, Samsung held a massive lead over its competitors in global smartphone shipments, moving 313.9 million handsets in 2013 and increasing its market share slightly from 30.3 percent to 31.3 percent. Apple scored a comfortable second place, with 153.4 million smartphones shipped. But according to IDC data, the Californian company's percentage of the global smartphone market slipped between 2012 and 2013, dropping...

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Find: As fast mobile connections surge, 2G begins its long, slow global decline

As fast mobile connections surge, 2G begins its long, slow global decline
// Gigaom

For all of the 3G and LTE activity we’ve seen around the world in the last decade, 2G has proven to be a very resilient technology. The vast majority of the world’s mobile phones are still linked to plain old GSM and CDMA networks, but in 2013 we hit a tipping point. 2G’s growth stopped and began what will surely be a grinding decade-long decline into obsolescence.

This figure from TeleGeography (which creates the always fascinating annual map of the world’s submarine internet infrastructure) shows that 2G subscriptions leveled off in 2011 and 2012 at around 5 billion, but in 2013 2G exhibited its first drop, falling 3 percent to 4.8 billion total connections.

TeleGeography 2G decline

Don’t try to pawn off your old talk-and-text phone as an antique just yet, though. 2G still has plenty of life left. According to TeleGeography, there will still be 3.5 billion connections in 2018, roughly the same amount of 3G connections.

Cisco Systems today released its comprehensive Visual Networking Index of global mobile traffic patterns, and its figures also shows 2G beginning its long decline in 2013 after dominating the world with 68 percent of all connections. Cisco puts the crossover point between 2G and 3G much earlier — sometime between 2015 and 2016 when both 2G and 3G devices will have about 46 percent market share and LTE devices will make up the remaining 8 percent.

Cisco VNI 2014 subscription type

So why is 2G sticking around so long? Part of the reason is that much of the world is still using mobile phones as actual phones, and there are really no technologies better optimized for making voice calls than GSM and CDMA. 2G is also cheap. Whenever a new generation of mobile technology emerges, the previous generation of gear, chips and devices is discounted. In emerging markets carriers are taking advantage of GSM’s low costs to build big networks and put cheap phones in the populace’s hands.

And just because many parts of the world are limited to 2G connections, it doesn’t mean carriers and developers aren’t making the most of the meager voice, SMS and slower-than-dial-up data speeds they have at their disposal. SafariCom has built a veritable mobile financial services empire in East Africa using SMS and pokey GPRS speeds. Here in the so-called advanced western world, the only thing I can really buy in a store with my $650 LTE-connected smartphone is a cup of Starbucks coffee.

2G is going to stick around for awhile as did ‘1G” analog networks before them. Those 2G networks aren’t just highly useful to the people who use them, but it also takes a long time for new mobile technologies to reach a global critical mass. Just look at Cisco’s numbers. In 2018 – eights years after LTE first launched – Cisco expects LTE connections to account for just 15 percent of total subscriptions.



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Find: Lenovo takes over Motorola: the latest news on Google's big sale

Wise. Google wasn't going to best samsung at cheap hardware. Though they keep project alta, which could, some day. 

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Lenovo takes over Motorola: the latest news on Google's big sale
// The Verge - All Posts

On January 29th, Google stunned the smartphone industry when it announced plans to sell Motorola Mobility to Lenovo — less than two years after completing its own buyout of the American handset maker. Lenovo is paying $2.91 billion in cash and stock for Motorola, and the Chinese manufacturer has high hopes; it expects to sell 100 million smartphones within a year of finalizing the acquisition. If successful, the purchase will give Lenovo an immediate stake in the US smartphone market.

Google will keep the vast majority of patents it acquired in the original Motorola deal, and it's also bringing Motorola Mobility's Advanced Technology and Projects group onto the Android team. The announced acquisition must pass a number of regulatory...

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