The 3G Nokia Lumia 720 slots into Nokia’s Windows Phone 8 portfolio behind its two 4G flagships, the 920 and 820 — with the aim of pushing some of their fancier features down to a more affordable mid range price point. Rather than beefy tech specs, Nokia has focused on polishing two populist areas: the handset’s design and its camera. → Read More
Facebook is deepening its relationships with carriers in emerging markets today with a deal that would bring free or discounted data access for people who use Facebook Messages. The company has done these types of win-win deals in the past. Carriers get to give their customers access to what is probably the most widely-used app in the world, gaining an edge over competitors in the same market. → Read More
The last time I bought an LG smartphone — the unabashedly brown G2x — I had to return it after a few weeks because it would randomly reboot if I so much as looked at it funny. From then on, I convinced myself that I just couldn’t buy another LG phone. They just weren’t worth the headache.
After playing with LG’s Optimus G Pro here at MWC, I’m starting to rethink that decision. → Read More
Opera just announced that it would spin off its advertising business into a brand new entity called Opera Mediaworks. Fully owned by Opera, the new subsidiary will consolidate under one roof multiple recent acquisitions, such as Mobile Theory, 4th screen or Admarvel. The Norwegian-based company claims that the new entity is now the world’s largest mobile ad network. → Read More
The Lumia 520 is Nokia’s new entry level Windows Phone device — costing ~$180 before taxes and coming to the U.S. in Q2. So what do you get for not-too-many dollars? Besides the latest version of Windows Phone (WP8), Nokia has included its HERE mapping and navigation software, its Mix Radio free streaming music service and its digital lenses camera filters and Cinemagraph animated GIF creator. → Read More
Mobile device management startup AirWatch has raised a massive series A round of $200 million, led by Insight Venture Partners. The startup competes with others such as Good Technology and SAP’s Afaria in the mobile device management space. This rides the current “bring your own device” (BYOD) trend, where companies are supporting employee-owned devices such as smartphones and laptops in the… → Read More
After co-investing in Mambu, a SaaS for alternative finance providers, earlier in the month, today sees Runa Capital fund another finance-related startup: An $8 million Series A round for uBank, a mobile payment service that currently targets Russia and the wider CIS region.
The new capital will be used to “accelerate” product development and marketing, and for further global expansion. The… → Read More
Ahead of its Mobile World Congress press conference today, Nokia CEO Stephen Elop sat down with TechCrunch to talk about the company’s dual OS strategy, expanding product portfolio and the evolving competitive landscape of smartphones and smart devices. → Read More
Ginger Software is on a mission to become the go-to spell-checking tool for Android. This week, the Israeli makers of natural language technology designed to help native and ESL speakers better express themselves, released its latest free mobile app for Android, called the “Ginger Keyboard.” Simply put, the Keyboard is a straightforward, easy-to-use proofreading app that allows users to correct… → Read More
Google, sans a big Android stand but with the largest global smartphone share for its mobile platform, may not be making as much news as in year’s past at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, but Yandex, the search and cloud/mobile apps company often called the “Google of Russia,” is. Today the company released Yandex.Store, an alternative, customizable, native app store for Android devices… → Read More
Nokia is taking one more step to push its mapping and devices services as a standalone business. Today, the company announced during the handset maker’s press conference at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona that it would be rebranding all of its Nokia-branded mapping and navigation services as “HERE” going forward. → Read More
Nokia has announced two new Lumia smartphones at its Mobile World Congress press conference – broadening its Windows Phone 8 portfolio to five devices and filling in some of the pricing gaps in the mid and lower end of the range. The two 3G newcomers to the Lumia line are the mid-range Lumia 720 and the new entry level 520, which will cost $180 before taxes. → Read More
Nokia has unwrapped a new handset — not a fancy smartphone but a budget feature phone: the Nokia 301 (pictured left) is an $85 mobile that doesn’t have a touchscreen or a Qwerty keyboard but does pack HSPA (aka 3.5G) and includes some enhanced camera features, as well as supporting YouTube streaming video via Nokia’s cloud Xpress browser for the first time. → Read More
It appears that Samsung has once again joined a growing list of companies that have decided not to release their flagship devices at Mobile World Congress. Reuters reports that the South Korean electronics giant said it will launch its new Galaxy S smartphone on March 14 in New York after requests from U.S. carriers. We’ve emailed Samsung for confirmation. → Read More
LG Electronics, which lost market share to Huawei and ZTE last year, aims to sell 40 million smartphones this year as part of its strategy to move away from basic handsets, said Park Jong Seok, the head of its mobile-communications division, before the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. If the South Korean company hits its goal, this means LG’s shipments will rise 52 percent this year. LG sold… → Read More
Apple hasn’t done much to change the way iOS works at its core, in terms of navigating within and between apps and the home screen. In fact, iOS is maybe the mobile OS that has remained the most fundamentally the same since its introduction, at least among those that are still in active use.
But while Apple hasn’t been making huge changes to the basic iOS user interface, third-party developers… → Read More
Flash back a month or so to CES — NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang officially pulled back the curtain on the company’s new Tegra 4 chipset, and called it the “world’s fastest mobile processor.” It was a hell of a claim to make, but the company did little to justify it at the time aside from pointing to its array of Cortex A15 CPU cores and its “72 GPU cores.”
Fortunately, NVIDIA is much chattier here… → Read More
A calendar is a tool created many millennia ago, a tool that is vital to our very functionality as intelligent beings. Yet, when technology has ventured far beyond a simple grid of numbers, the Calendar applications we use haven’t seemed to evolve beyond that.
Sunrise, a new application built by ex-foursquare engineers, finds a way to turn a traditionally consumptive tool (the calendar) into a… → Read More
Firefox OS, the new, HTML5-friendly mobile OS from Mozilla, is today taking a big step forward in its strategy to become a viable third player in the smartphone landscape currently dominated by Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS. Mozilla is announcing that 18 carriers have now committed to its Open Web HTML5 device push; the launch of the Firefox Marketplace app store to aggregate content for the… → Read More
Chinese mobile maker Huawei has confirmed a new addition to its Android family: the Ascend P2. The P2 is the sequel to last year’s relatively mid-range P1 but puts more power under the hood — with a quad-core 1.5GHz chip — and pairs that power with a more modestly sized screen (4.7 inches) than the pair of phablets Huawei unboxed at CES. → Read More
The Galaxy Note 8.0 — the newest device in Samsung’s many-sized range of tablets, unveiled today at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona — has just managed to trump Apple’s iPad Mini in the small tablet category with one-tenth of an inch more of screen space (more on the device in our hands-on). At the same time, Samsung is also introducing a few new services and features — including expanded… → Read More
It’s that time of year again — mobile nerds and enthusiasts of all stripes have begun to descend upon Barcelona for Mobile World Congress, and naturally a TechCrunch contingent has set up camp in Spain to cover it all.
Or, we’ll try anyway. MWC is a behemoth of the show, packed to the brim with enough phones, tablets, and apps that it’s enough to make even the more ardent mobile nerd’s… → Read More
Yes, you can fix that smashed iPhone on demand now. That means no visits to the Apple store, or intensive DIY efforts. A YC alum called iCracked launched a real-time, iPhone or iPad repair service a little over a month ago. Think of it like an “Exec” or an “Uber” for your broken iPhone that you can order straight to your door. With hardly any publicity at all, the service… → Read More
After unboxing a pair of phablets at CES, Chinese mobile maker Huawei looks to be lining up a new flagship smartphone in its Android-based Ascend P line, ahead of the Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona. Its MWC booth has a sign for an as yet unreleased Ascend P2 handset. → Read More
Drawbridge, a Kleiner Perkins- and Sequoia-backed startup aiming to improve mobile and cross-device ad targeting, has raised $14 million in Series B funding. AdAge actually broke the news earlier this week, but a source with knowledge of the deal told me that the story got one crucial detail wrong — the new funding actually valued Drawbridge at $99 million, more than double the $45 million that… → Read More
The number of gadget-related thefts in major metropolitan areas has only continued to rise, and the number of resolved cases simply can’t keep up. However, it would appear that Apple is now working directly with the NYPD to help return iThings into the hands of their rightful owners.
The NYPD has formed an official team which will work directly with Apple to track down stolen iThings, mostly… → Read More
If you do a search for “AngelList” in the Apple App Store, you’ll only get four results – and one is an app featuring quotes from entrepreneurs. In other words, there’s not a lot of selection despite AngelList’s readily available API. That being said, in the past an app called AngelList Wings has served as a useful resource for browsing, searching and following early-stage startups, founders and… → Read More
Google seems to be looking to bring its ambitious Google Glass wearable computer to market much faster than many likely anticipated, according to the Verge. Google told the site that it hopes to have a “fully-polished” version of Glass available for sale to ordinary consumers by the end of 2013. The cost will be under the $1,500 Google was asking for developer-targeted editions of the headsets put… → Read More
For almost as long as Apple’s iPhone has been in existence, analysts have claimed to see visions of a low-cost version of the device aimed at developing and prepaid markets. It’s easy to see why these visions have grown in magnitude and gained a more vocal following over the years: entering that market would, in theory, broaden Apple’s potential appeal by hundreds of millions of new customers. But… → Read More
A handful of cases seem to have leaked out for the forthcoming Galaxy S IV smartphone from Samsung. Since the phone has not yet been announced, we should approach each and every one of these cases with a hearty helping of salt. However, sometimes case makers get their hands on information we don’t quite have, such as dimensions, meaning their cases can shed some light on what’s coming next.
In… → Read More
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