Articles about Post-PC Era

Tomorrow, Apple holds a media event where the next iPad is expected to launch. There are rumors aplenty, with the most consistent being higher-resolution display -- 2048 x 1536. That's mighty big for a small screen. While the Apple Fan Club banters around rumors like Depression Era kids kicking tin cans, I wonder about the fundamental question: Why does iPad need a high-res display?

It's not an idle question; 2048 x 1536 is unusually high resolution in computing. My Lenovo ThinkPad T420s display is 1600 x 900. Apple's 15.4-inch MacBook Pro is available with resolution up to 1680 x 1050. Then there is 1080p, which is 1920 x 1080. By many measures, iPad with greater-than HD resolution would be exceptional. That's nice to have, but do you really need it on a 9.7-inch screen? Someone does, and Apple is right to go after the market opportunity. For starters: Education, healthcare and publishing. Simply put: An iPad HD would be a transformative product.

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Wow, Windows Phone is so bleeding-edge that Nokia's hot new 41-megapixel camera phone runs Symbian. You know, that "burning platform" CEO Stephen Elop dumped for Microsoft's mobile OS. Perhaps that burning should have had different context, as hot for high-brow hardware. Because a 41MP camera always with you is smokin'. I'm on fire. Aren't you?

The Finnish-phone maker announced the Nokia 808 PureView during Mobile World Congress today in Barcelona, Spain. The 41-megapixel camera phone might just be the showstopper -- that despite Microsoft's Wednesday event launching Windows 8 Consumer Preview. There's some real software and hardware innovation here that shows Nokia isn't dead yet and shouldn't have turned over so much research and development to Microsoft. The lost R&D is Elop's doing, and again supports my contention he's killing Nokia.

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While smartphones are commonplace in the developed world, market penetration in developing countries remains poor. Mozilla aims to change that, and is leaning on two international wireless carriers to make that happen. Both Telefonica and Deutsche Telekom are pledging varying degrees of support for its Boot-to-Gecko (B2G) initiative.

Boot-to-Gecko is Mozilla's browser-based mobile operating system. It uses Web standards like HTML5 at its core peppered with borrowed code from the Android operating system. The end result is an open platform that requires little in the way of raw power to provide users with a full smartphone experience -- perfect for producing phones cheaply.

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Samsung wasted no time announcing new devices during Mobile World Congress 2012, and what a strange lot, too. There's a projector phone and successors to the original Galaxy Tab that, by the specs, are last year's models. That's right, Galaxy Tab 2 has no quad-core processor for you.

Galaxy Beam stays in the past, too, running Android 2.3, rather than newest version Android 4.0 -- aka Ice Cream Sandwich.

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It's Mobile World Congress, where handset manufacturers announce phones they won't ship for months. HTC will do a little better, offering the new HTC One family of smartphones starting in April. Flagship handset One X is loaded for bear, with 1.5GHz quad-core Nvidia Tegra 3 processor and 4.7-inch 720p display.

Is it me, or does the One X look a little like a beautified HTC Titan II but running Android, packing more cores and offering higher-res display? Or perhaps these HTC phones all kind of look the same. Whatever, the One family (pictured), particularly the X, looks lots like HTC trying to regain some of its Android mojo.

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The practice of data speed throttling and the reasons behind it look less sanguine now following the results of a study showing that on average there is little difference between the data usage of the top five percent on both tiered and unlimited plans. So now what's the excuse?

I have been beating the drum against throttling for much of this month on the pages of BetaNews. First was my response to AT&T's unfair treatment of long-time customers. Then Cisco came out a week later with a study that shows consumers are using more data than the carriers lead us to believe. AT&T of course responded to this, blaming you for its bandwidth issues.

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Finally, an analyst firm comes clean about the cell phone market's volatility. Gartner and IDC continue to make outrageous predictions -- like Windows Phone as No. 2 smartphone operating system in 2015 -- despite many earlier forecasts being drop-dead wrong. But comScore says pretty much anything can happen and likely will.

That's a stunning assessment, considering Androids' and iPhone's 2011 success, as highlighted in comScore's "2012 Mobile Future in Focus" report. iPhone 4 -- right, not 4S -- was the top-acquired phone in the United States and five combined Euro countries (Germany, France, Italy, Spain and United Kingdom) last year. Android led among smartphone operating systems.

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Handset manufacturers aren't exactly rushing Android 4.0 out the door for recent smartphones. At least Sony has something for the cheery fan set who can't wait but might not want to install a rogue ROM. Today the consumer electronics giant posted an Ice Cream Sandwich beta ROM for 2011 Xperia phones.

The software can be applied to Xperia arc S, neo V and ray running Xperia software 4.0.2.A.0.42. However, the beta ROM isn't recommended for everyone. "Even though a lot of the basic functionality of this ICS beta ROM is working, you should only download and install the beta version if you are an advanced developer", according to Sony's mobile developer blog.

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There is some truth to Microsoft's "Googlighting" video -- that somehow every Google product feels like a work unfinished. Good Example: Google Docs for Android, which today got some features that should have been there in the first place. Collaboration is one of Google Docs headline features. But that feature lacked for something on Android phones or tablets. Today's update essentially brings more parity between the desktop and mobile clients.

"We want to give everyone the chance to be productive no matter where they are, so today we’re releasing a new update to the Google Docs app for Android", Vadim Gerasimov, Google software engineer explains. "We've brought the collaborative experience from Google Docs on the desktop to your Android device. You'll see updates in real time as others type on their computers, tablets and phones, and you can just tap the document to join in". Well it's about time.

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Well, that's what many of you say.

Last week I asked: "Are you bored with Windows Phone?" Simple reason: Windows 8 and Windows 8 on ARM share in Metro a similar tile-like user interface, and I had seen some user complaints about being bored with WP 7.5. I asked the question in anticipation of Windows 8 Consumer Preview, which Microsoft promised to release by month's end.

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That's my question for you this Tuesday morning, following new rumors about Office for iPad and its imminent release. Over at The Daily, Matt Hickey insists Microsoft has nearly finished development and "the app will soon be submitted to Apple for approval". The software supposedly has capabilities from Excel, OneNote, PowerPoint and Word and inherits characteristics from Windows 8's Metro UI.

Whoa, can this really be a good idea, Office on iPad?

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Say you are building a mobile operating system. What are the major applications you build into that OS? Email, calendar, and contacts apps right? Not Research in Motion. The company that built its business on business productivity failed to include that in the original PlayBook OS.

Fast forward to today. RIM attempts to right the sinking ship and fix the disastrous initial release of Playbook OS 1.0 with the second version of that mobile operating system. You guessed it: the signature additions to the operating system are those native email, calendar, and contacts apps missing from RIM's first try.

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Taiwanese smartphone maker HTC acquired cloud services provider Dashwire in August for approximately $18.5 million with the outward intention of integrating the company's cloud services into its still-in-beta HTCSense.com mobile backup, storage, and content management service.

For over four years, Dashwire has run a service that allowed mobile users of various operating systems to back up their photos, videos, contacts, settings, and messages to the Dashwire cloud.

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I know that BetaNews readers aren't indicative of the general population. You made that clear when answering our October 2011 browser poll you came out big time for Chrome. Google's browser is most popular among you, but really ranks third in global usage share, according to Net Applications.

Respondents to more recent poll "Microsoft Store is taking pre-orders for Nokia Lumia 900. Will you buy this Windows Phone?" answered resoundingly yes. If your responses were the measure of success, Microsoft and Nokia already would be kicking Android and iPhone butt down the hill.

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If you hate wireless data throttling, thank Cisco for making your argument against the practice that much easier. The telecommunications company says it expects at least 100 million smartphone users to exceed one gigabyte of data monthly in 2012. That is a large group of users with significant data needs.

But wait -- wasn't I just told that the average user doesn't need gigabytes of data, you ask? Yes you were: I wrote about it last week as part of the bigger story of AT&T's plan to screw its longtime customers with unlimited data plans, and the topic has been covered ad nauseum by the tech media at large for years.

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