early « Funlimited

01May

Early Look: BlackBerry 10′s Smart New Take On Touchscreen Typing

As it stands, most of BlackBerry 10 is still shrouded in mystery. Not even the Dev Alpha devices that will be made available to developers offer a glimpse of RIM’s new software — they’re running a modified version of the PlayBook OS instead.

All that said, RIM hopes to whet our appetites with glimpses at some of the nifty little touches that BlackBerry 10 will sport when it sees a widespread launch later this year. TechCrunch went to Waterloo and met with Vivek Bhardwaj, RIM’s Head of Software Portfolio, who took a few moments to give us one such sneak peek — an early look at BlackBerry 10′s keyboard, still a work in progress.

Fine, it doesn’t sound like the most thrilling way to spent 15 minutes, but let’s not forget that messaging and typing have always been a big part of the BlackBerry DNA and it isn’t exactly the kind of thing the company can afford to screw up.

“We feel that no one does this well,” Bhardwaj said of mobile typing.

Thankfully, the keyboard doesn’t disappoint. On the all-touch Dev Alpha device, the keyboard is large and nicely-spaced, with a small gap in between each row to help minimize errant taps. Even at this stage, everything seemed nice and fluid which is a definite plus when the keyboard leans on a few additional touch gestures to work properly.

Swiping to the left across the keyboard deletes your last input for instance, while swiping up changes to the numeric/symbol keyboard. That same swipe up gesture is used when the keyboard attempts to guess the word you’re typing — according to Bhardwaj, users will be able to send those guessed words flying into their messages by swiping from where the word appears over keys.

Normally, it would take a little time for the keyboard to store and recognize specific words that a person may use often, but Bhardwaj notes that there’s a way to jump-start that process.

“It’ll basically do a scan of all your personal history, your email, your SMS, Facebook, Twitter — basically every conversation you’ve ever typed,” he said. One this process is complete, the device will have a solid starting point for the user’s linguistic quirks, though he didn’t mention if users could opt to skip the scan.

Not all of the changes will be immediately apparent to BlackBerry users — in fact, one such improvement is meant to be all but invisible to people pecking out their day’s messages. Bhardwaj revealed to us that there is in essence a second, invisible keyboard that conforms over time to how a user types.

Let’s be honest: we’ve all been there. I suffer from a condition I like to call “beefy thumb,” which renders a solid chunk of my text messages incomprehensible to all but my close friends thanks to mistyped letters. With that second keyboard in place though, the boundaries of each key will subtly change to ensure that users are actually hitting the keys that they intend to.

It sounds like a minor addition, but the impact could be a big one for users — they won’t care how or why they’re getting better at typing, just that they are. RIM is making it a point to woo go-getters who can’t live without quick and accurate messaging, so the notion of a keyboard customizes itself to each user has the potentially to be a real crowd pleaser. Of course, keyboards alone do not a great platform make — Bhardwaj promised that the keyboard would be one of a few aspects that would get the demo treatment during the BlackBerry World keynote, so stay tuned for more.

View full post on TechCrunch » Mobile

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25Apr

So What Did The Early Stages Of Android Look Like?

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The Google v. Oracle trial is turning into a bona-fide goldmine of past Android news as fresh new images originating from the courtroom show a glimpse at what Android looked like in 2007, and what could have been. This is such a far cry from the Android we know today that these shots are almost unrecognizable as a “preliminary” version of the Android… Read more

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10Apr

Jumptap: Early Days For The New iPad Show A ‘Heavy’ But Still Marginal Impact On Traffic

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The new iPad from Apple has so far smashed all previous sales records that Apple held for other models of its tablets, selling 3 million units in its opening weekend, and with sales projections for 2012 at up to 66 million.

But according to some early (possibly too early?) figures from the mobile ad network Jumptap, that is not yet translating into a surge of traffic from the devices.

On the opening day, the iPad represented 0.52 percent of total iPad network traffic. That figure peaked at 2.28 percent on day three, and then declined to 1.92 percent of traffic by day six. In contrast, the iPad and iPad 2 each had 45 percent or more of total iPad traffic, Jumptap says in its latest MobileSTAT Report.

But is this too early to call? It seems that the low numbers are mainly due to the fact that even with sales going strong in its opening days, the total number of new iPad devices is still small compared to the embedded base of iPads.

In Q1 2012 alone, Apple noted that it sold 15.43 million iPad devices, a 111 percent increase over the same period a year ago. That embedded base is bound to outweigh that of 3 million-plus new owners.

What’s perhaps more notable here is where traffic appeared to decline with the introduction of the new iPad. Paran Johar, Jumptap’s CMO, notes that in its network of 107 million mobile users, traffic on the iPad 2 slightly declined after the introduction of the new iPad. That seems to run counter to the idea that the most likely people to upgrade will be those owning the first iPad. But what it might really appear to illstrate is that ~~fanboys~~ early adopters are simply remaining true to form, with the first buyers being those who bought the iPad 2 just when it came out.

Another noteworthy trend picked out by Jumptap in its latest report looks at how WiFi is being used by smartphone owners. It turns out that just as users of the iPad tend to use WiFi more than 3G and 4G connections, the same goes for iPhone consumers, who are opting for it more than Android and BlackBerry device owners.

Jumptap notes that 58 percent of iPhone users turn to WiFi on their devices to use data, compared to 35 percent of Android users and 41 percent of BlackBerry users. Jumptap’s guess: no 4G on iPhones. But others might argue that it has to do with cellular connectivity simply being more patchy on the iPhone than on other devices. It could also be down to data plans still priced at a premium for iPhone owners.

Figures from Localytics last month found that only six percent of iPad traffic on its network was coming from cellular connections.

Jumptap also dove into providing some demographics on users of two comparable gaming apps, Angry Birds and Words With Friends.

While Angry Birds is significantly more popular (20 million daily active users, compared to 7.9 million on Words), Words with Friends appears to attract more monied players: 24 percent of Angry Birds’s user base have incomes of over $100,000, compared to 40 percent for Words. Words with friends also had more Democrat users (75 percent compared to 51 percent for Angry Birds) while Angry Birds users were more tablet friendly and twice as likely to use a tablet as another user, compared to Words With Friends’ users being half as likely to use a tablet.

View full post on TechCrunch » Mobile

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06Mar

In the mood of Agnès b.: ‘Paris graffiti made an early impression on me’

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To celebrate Paris Fashion Week (February 28-March 7), Relaxnews presents a new feature, “In the mood of…” quizzing designers on their style secrets and sources of inspiration. Ahead of her March 6 Fall/Winter 2012 presentation, we enter into the world of French designer Agnès b., who launched her own line and opened her first boutique in 1975. Here, the designer reveals that she would have liked to see a 20-year-old Brigitte Bardot on her runway.

View full post on Fashion News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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23Feb

comScore: Japan, An Early Mover In Mobile, Trails The U.S., Others In Smartphones

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Smartphone users are, country by country, starting to gradually outnumber those who are using feature phones, and at the same time, consumers have passed a different kind of penetration: a majority are now using mobile devices to do a lot more than just make phone calls.

A lengthy annual report out from comScore today, surveying mobile usage across Canada, France, Germany Italy, Japan, Spain, the U.S. and U.K., found that mobile media usage has passed the 50 percent mark, meaning that more than half of us are accessing the web, apps and content downloads on our smartphones. But it’s not always the case that more smartphones always equals more media usage. In fact, the highest usage of mobile media comes from the country with the lowest smartphone penetration.

It’s Japan, where comScore says 76.2 percent of the population is using mobile media services, but where, surprisingly, less than 17 percent have smartphones. This is in contrast to the U.K. and U.S., where the correlation is a little more direct: smartphones now respectively account for 51.3 and 41.8 percent of all devices, and 56.6 percent and 55.2 percent of mobile users are accessing mobile media.

Ironically, it seems that Japan’s early move into mobile content – the i-mode service from DoCoMo, launched in the 1990′s, being one of the very first plays at offering more than just voice and text to users – is partly to blame.

comScore notes that the prevalence of those services and handsets presented a “barrier to entry” for smartphone makers, who perhaps didn’t have as hungry a market to serve. Smartphones are making more headway Japan now, comScore says, with Android and iOS platforms accounting for 94.1 percent of devices sold and more devices coming online at lower price points. (One of those, a Disney Mobile phone with NTT Docomo running a forked version of Android, is pictured here.)

Mobile still a niche player. Japan is not the only surprise in this report. Another is that even with a majority of the people using mobile devices to access media, web usage is still minor compared to PCs. comScore notes that in the U.S. in December, handsets contributed 5.2 percent, tablets 2.5 percent and “other” devices 0.5 percent of Internet access. Together that still only makes 8.2 percent, with computers accounting for the rest. Other countries surveyed had similarly low numbers:

One other interesting disconnect in the research is that although Android is the more popular platform overall, it turns out that Apple accounted for the top three devices sold in the U.S. in 2011, and the top two in the European countries surveyed by comScore. So while Android is the platform winner, Apple wins the day on devices.