Articles about Mobile

Mobile World Congress has wrapped up in Barcelona, Spain and now we're left to sort through the torrent of information that came out of the event. There were countless announcements made for all manner of mobile news, with new phones taking center stage in the midst of the chaos. Microsoft was prominent at the event, with several things to reveal.

There was the unveiling of the Lumia 640XL, a mid-range device that qualifies as a "phablet" with its 5.7 inch screen. It even comes with a 13 MP rear camera, a feature that the Lumia line is famous for. It's a step up from the Lumia 640, which is a scaled down version. The screen is still large at 5 inches, while the rear camera is a solid 8MP. Both phones are expected to be available soon via AT&T.

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Yesterday, commentary "Do Chromebooks matter anymore?" popped up in my social network feeds. Preston Gralla rightly wonders, when looking at how the laptops have fallen off Amazon's top-seller lists, IDC shipment forecasts, and what happened with netbooks. While being a Chromebook fan, I must admit to similar misgivings.

So today, I emailed Stephen Baker, NPD's vice president of industry analysis: "Are Chromebooks just the next netbook wave? Low-cost, lean configurations, and education adoption all look similar to me. Do you see any parallels to suggest Chromebook is little more than the next netbook and it's headed for the same destination: Short-term appeal that vanishes? Or is there longevity here, based on sales numbers?" His answer is reason for this post.

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Businesses are increasingly keen to turn to mobile solutions, but this often presents problems in terms of integrating functions and keeping corporate data secure.

Launched at this week's Mobile World Congress, MobilityLab's WorksPad combines enterprise file sync and sharing, a fully-featured office package (Polaris Office Enterprise core) and a corporate email client in one app.

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Microsoft is now in firm control of the Lumia brand of Windows Phone, which it purchased from Nokia last year. Aside from a slight rebranding, not much about the handsets has changed, and that's a good thing as far as the hardware goes. Perhaps not so much for other aspects, such as apps, but that's not what we're looking at right now.

With Mobile World Congress winding down in Barcelona, Microsoft has announced a potentially important partnership with mobile giant Deutsche Telekom. The deal is aimed towards bringing the phones, as well as cloud services such as Office 365 and OneDrive, to more markets.

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YU Televentures, a Micromax Mobile-owned smartphone brand, grabbed headlines late last year for launching the Yureka smartphone. The Yureka packs in mid-range specification and runs on Cyanogen OS while maintaining an enticing affordable Rs 8,999 ($140) price point. The company is now working on the second iteration of the popular Yureka smartphone, YU’s co-founder Rahul Sharma confirms to BGR India.

Codenamed “Project Caesar”, the smartphone will come with improved specification, which Sharma doesn't want to reveal just yet. On the software front, it will run on Android Lollipop-based Cyanogen OS 12. Sharma noted that the smartphone will be launched in April.

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One of the advantages of advertising on digital platforms is that it reveals information about the devices and apps being used to view ads. This is useful for marketers but also echoes some general industry trends.

Digital advertising specialist Millennial Media has released its latest Mobile Mix report charting the use of its platform over the past year. The results throw up some interesting patterns. Among them are that Samsung saw the greatest number of impressions on the platform in the past year, unseating Apple who had previously been the leader.

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A new report from security company FireEye, based on analysis of over seven million mobile apps during 2014, reveals that mobile users are being targeted from a number of directions.

Risks on the Android platform include malicious apps that steal information once installed, legitimate apps written insecurely by developers, legitimate apps using insecure but aggressive ad libraries, malware and aggressive adware that passes Google Play checks and is assumed to be safe, identity theft, and premium rate phone and SMS fraud.

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The change in Google's narrative over the past few months has been very interesting to watch. The recent "Peak Google" proclamations remind me of Facebook's post-IPO narrative in 2012. Conventional wisdom back then was that Facebook's decline was imminent as mobile was not a meaningful part of their revenue. Of course, Facebook's app install ads and other mobile initiatives disproved that narrative in short order.

Some observers even make it seem as though Google's growth has seen a major slowdown in 2014. Interestingly, both Google's revenue and operating profit growth accelerated in 2014. This isn't to say that mobile does not pose a challenge to Google. It does, but it is important to understand exactly what those challenges are and the way forward. By looking at Google's financial reports, their biggest challenge is a decline in operating margins. This has been triggered by increase in search advertising on mobile, which delivers lower CPCs. While consumers used search on PCs for more involved research on products/services, the interaction window for mobile search is shorter. Lower ad engagement led to fewer bids on keywords and consequently, lower CPCs and margins.

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We all worry about protecting our information, but how do we know which activities or locations are most likely to put it in jeopardy?

Digital rights management company Seclore has produced an infographic showing the four places where your data is most at risk. Unsurprisingly perhaps some of these are areas where you have the least control.

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Samsung has announced that it has started mass-production of 128 GB ultra-fast embedded memory. Described as an industry first, the memory is based on the Universal Flash Storage (UFS) 2.0 standard and is 2.7 times faster than the commonly used eMMC 5.0.

With performance of 19,000 IOPS (input/output operations per second), the memory offers sequential read and write speeds comparable to SSDs. Despite this, the memory draws half the level of power of existing mobile memory.

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If you curse the speed of your mobile data connection, prepare to shake with fury, turn green with envy, and yearn for a time machine. Forget 3G, forget 4G; at the University of Surrey in the UK, researchers have harnessed the power of 5G to establish a data transfer rate of one terabit per second.

At this speed it would be possible to download a Blu-ray quality video in under a second, but it's likely to be some time before we have the chance to experience these sorts of speeds via our handsets.

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A new report from IDC and enterprise mobile specialist Amdoc's OpenMarket reveals that taking an ad hoc approach to mobile messaging is harming return on investment.

The findings reveal that 62 percent of businesses have more than one messaging platform deployed and 78.5 percent have more than one instance of the same platform active across different departments.

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Up to now smart glasses have been a bit of a gimmick, but they could soon be making a major impact in the enterprise market, allowing workers to communicate as they carry out tasks.

Eyewear technology company Vuzix has announced a partnership to use its Vuzix M100 Smart Glasses for the EyeSight platform from wearable software specialist Pristine. Customers taking advantage of the combined Pristine and Vuzix platform will benefit from impressive video quality, strong integrations into safety goggles and a vertically adjustable camera, useful for surgery and hands-on repair tasks.

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The use of mobile devices for business presents a new set of challenges both for IT departments and the broader enterprise. This is leading many companies to turn to enterprise mobility management (EMM) solutions to secure their data and devices.

But how effective are enterprises at looking after mobile data and how will they need to adapt to the needs of new legislation? We spoke to Ryan Spence, Director of Enterprise Mobility Management for managed service company MOBI to find out.

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Mobile cyber threats are more common and more sophisticated than ever before, with a number of high profile threats in the past year.

According to a new report from security companies Check Point and Lacoon Mobile Security, this means mobile devices are growing into a serious threat to the enterprise.

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