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Wearable sims?
Okay, it is just a prototype for the moment but Japanese communication giant NTT Docomo has just announced that they have been working on a new SIM module. This module will basically enable us to use our SIM cards without it being physically inside our mobile phones. This credit card sized module (8 by 4…
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Reality mining, the technology which will change our lives.
Have you heard of Reality Mining? Born out of an MIT academic projet at the turn of the century, Reality Mining is the collection and collating of machine-sensed environmental data through mobile devices with a view to better understand and predict human behaviour and social interactions. In a recent book on the subject called Social…
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A glimpse of the Chinese mobile phone industry
World’s largest-to-be smartphone market Recent figures show that developed countries now have or will have very soon, over 50% smart phone penetration rates, including the USA which is the third most populous nation with 311 million inhabitants. On the other hand, China is still a developing country with poor 3G penetration rates estimated at 22% of the…
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Biometrics: fingerprint recognition coming to a smartphone near you
Over the last few years we have seen on some Windows laptops, biometric sensors that recognize fingerprints. But if we are to judge by the forums users frequently have problems and more often than not they disable recognition. Will it be any different for smartphones companies who are attempting similar biometric checks? There is certainly…
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Promotional messages increase appeal to smartphone owners
Promotional Messaging can be described as a marketing strategy developed by a business in order to promote a service or product. A promotional message can be brought to the public in different forms, such as on product packaging, in a television commercial, in a magazine or newspaper advertisement. But here we are concerned with a specific use of promotional messages…
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Your phone’s nose knows (or will do soon) !
Many web-addicts fell for Google’s recent April Fool the “Google Nose”, an application which would employ ‘photo-audio-olfactory sensory convergence‘ to search for smells! But while the idea caused a lot of amusement, it is not such a far-fetched concept as it once was and some serious studies are being undertaken all over the world to augment…
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Smartphones with flexible screens by the end of 2013? First shots in the electronics war.
A new kind of device Samsung and LG Electronics have been teasing the market for several years about flexible displays but for the moment nothing has yet been commercialized. Things may be about to change with the introduction of the first smartphone with a flexible OLED screen in the fourth quarter of this year. OLED…
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Photography is dead, long live mopho!
Ten years ago Evan Nisselson wrote a short illustrated article on his blog entitled, ‘Why will wireless camera phones revolutionize the photography industry?’[1] In the article he says that mobile phone photography offers a totally different mindset, with an inbuilt communicative function of immediate sharing. It reduces the amount of equipment you need to carry…
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Incremental evolutions
Since the first iPhone there has not been a revolution, every successive product proposes only an incremental change and not only in Apple smartphones. The iPhone story When we look at the evolution from the first iPhone to the iPhone 4S we really become aware that Apple produces nothing else than dreams. The second iPhone, which…
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The cell phone’s paradoxical effects on social relationships
Researcher Rich Ling says in his book New Tech, New Ties “Mobile communication is being used in the pursuit of romance, in the coordination of families, in the exchanging of humor and gossip, and in many other daily situations. In each case, there are ritual forms, there is reliance on co-present understandings, and there is development—and…