Wireless Archive

Samsung has delayed its first Tizen phone yet again (this one).

While few people will care about this delay, there is one small group to whom this will be devastating news.

In all seriousness, nobody - not even Samsung itself - sees Tizen as a serious option or competitor to Android, and this news only serves to make that even clearer. Certain people keep trying to posit Tizen as some sort of huge threat to Android or as a sign that Samsung is seriously considering dumping Android (presumably thereby crippling Android and Google), but anyone with even the remotest bit of sense realises this makes about as much sense as a software patent.

No amount of wishful thinking is going to make Tizen happen.

This is exactly the kind of stuff I want to see from BlackBerry: instead of trying to copy everyone else and build yet another black glass slab, they should build on their strength and go from there. The Passport looks to be exactly that. I have no idea if anyone cares or if it's too late, but I love this thing.

A few days ago, the crazy BlackBerry Passport reared its... Square head. Over the weekend, Crackberry.com posted a review of a pre-release version of the device.

This seems to be the device BlackBerry should have put out years ago. It's different, it's fresh, yet retains what makes a BlackBerry, well, a BlackBerry. This is exactly the kind of device us hardware keyboard lovers need.

Bring it on, BlackBerry. Do it. Release it. Everywhere.

Meanwhile, some claim AOSP is a "featurephone" and a "barebones husk". It's always nice to see reality beat punditry.

Carsten Munk, chief research engineer at Jolla, announced the third 'Early Adopter Release' of Sailfish for the Nexus 4. Let me stress that this is very much still a work-in-progress, and your device may explode or kill hummingbirds. This release brings Sailfish for Nexus 4 up to par with version 1.0.7.16 that's current for Jolla phones.

If you have a spare Nexus 4 lying around, this might be a good moment to give Sailfish a try.

You know what? I kind of like this thing. It's crazy, unconventional, and it certainly has charm. I'm very curious if I will ever manage to get to handle one - I have yet to even see a BlackBerry 10 device to begin with, sadly.

At long last, Amazon.com has entered the mobile phone market, as expected. The impressively spec'ed "Fire Phone" stacks up with a 4.7" Gorilla Glass display, a 2.2Ghz CPU, 2GB of RAM, and a 13 Megapixel camera with f/2.0 aperture, certainly very competitive with today's Android flagships. Amazon has, quite wisely, included a number of hardware and software features and services that set it apart from the competition. The Fire Phone also boasts unlimited cloud storage of photos.

The Fire Phone has stereo speakers and a hardware camera button that help it stand out from the crowd. Prime customers? You all get the motherlode of content, so you'll be testing those speakers with access to a million songs recently made available via Amazon Prime Music. And if you're not a Prime member? Gotcha covered! You get one year of Prime for free (existing Prime users are extended a year).

Amazon has included their now-trademark Mayday Button, which provides 24/7 support. While this may seem unnecessary, take for example iOS 8, where there are literally dozens of new features to potentially confuse a user, or Android, where major version jumps change the entire UI of the phone. A dedicated support mechanism is a novel and likely welcome addition to the smart phone lineup.

A new service called Firefly that, much like Shazam, can not only listen, but "see." Optical recognition can help you identify (and subsequently purchase) books, TV shows, movies, games, music, and products. And the best part? There's an API for third parties to tie into it. This is going to be a very interesting feature.

Dynamic Perspective is billed by Amazon as "A custom-designed sensor system that responds to how you hold, view, and move your phone." It looks pretty amazing, and appears to give you not only standard gyroscopic control, but also a unique Z-axis subject distance, making for some very interesting effects and system responses to twisting, tilting, and peeking. You can read more about this feature and get the SDK on the Fire Phone developer's page.

The Fire Phone is available today for pre-order and is exclusive to AT&T, where it is free with AT&T Next, $199 on contract, or $649 off-contract.

It's a holiday in The Netherlands today, so I'm a bit late with this, but Jolla has released another Sailfish update today, and it's a big one. The headline feature of the new update is that it enables the phone's 4G support for all countries. So, if you have 4G, your Jolla phone will now use it. The hardware was obviously available from the beginning, but it was never enabled until now.

Aside from 4G, this update packs a whole lot more - most importantly, it fixes a major annoyance with the Sailfish browser. The browser did not keep its tab contents in memory, so each time you switched to a tab, the page had to be reloaded. This has now been addressed, and tabs stay in memory properly.

These are just two of the many, many improvements, new features, and bug fixes in this update. Us Sailfish users know where to get it.

Android's biggest weakness is the horrible upgrade situation. Where iOS and Windows Phone users are generally always running the latest version, Android users generally have to settle for whatever version the likes of Samsung and HTC bothered to release for their device. This is a horrible situation for developers and user alike, and, in my view, should be Google's number one priority.

Unless, of course, you're running a custom ROM. This morning my Find 5 greeted me with an update notification, but that's normal - I get a new OmniROM OTA delta update every morning. This time, however, something was different: the version number clearly stated this update would bump my Find 5 from Android 4.4.2 to 4.4.3. As it turns out, the OmniROM team is already pushing 4.4.3 to all the devices it officially supports (52 phones and tablets).

A mere three days after Google pushed 4.4.3 to AOSP.

This is just one of the many, many reasons you should be running a custom ROM. Aside form the fact that a proper custom ROM is lighter and cleaner than the crappy OEM ROMs, they are also more secure because they tend to be up-to-date. In addition, warranty is not an issue because, at least in the EU, rooting and custom ROMs do not void your warranty.

As an aside - the fact that a single person, Xplodwild, can make sure Android 4.4.3 runs on 52 devices within a matter of days of the code becoming available is all the proof you need (in case you still needed it) that carriers and OEMs are simply incredibly incompetent at doing their job. Sure, they have to provide warranty and service so some form of delay is understandable because they require more testing, but the way they refuse to update most, if not all, of their devices in a timely manner or even at all should be a crime.

Interesting and detailed review of the OnePlus One by AndroidCentral, but this paragraph stood out to me:

In my view, it's exactly this lack of "design flair and features" that sets it apart from the competition. There's no fake leather, no fake metal backplate, nu buttons on the back, no super-sized gimmicky protruding camera sensors, useless fingerprint scanners, double camera sensors, heart rate monitors, flair guns, flamethrowers, fishing poles, and god knows what else the established players shove into and onto phones these days.

It's a minimalist device focused almost entirely on a smartphone's most important aspect - its display. And it's exactly this minimalism that makes it stand our from the pack.

Finally.

I want one of these, like, right now. Not only is it an alternative operating system backed by a huge player, it's also very likely to become a rarity a few years down the line. A great and fascinating addition to my collection.

iTnews points to a study performed by Joseph J. Mueller and Timothy D. Syrett of IP firm WilmerHale, and Ann Armstrong of Intel, which concludes that for an average $400 smartphone (no subsidies), patent royalty costs may be higher than component costs.

Let me repeat that last line for you - savour it and let it sink in.

Bingo. This is exactly why the patent system will never change: this construction benefits the large players immensely. Smaller players will have a hard time keeping up with the patent costs, since they most likely won't have much to barter with patent-wise. The result is less competition for established players.

The SD Times reports about Cider, which allows iOS applications to run on Android. From the research paper:

It's developed by the Department of Computer Science at Columbia University. They have a video of it too.

Despite the fact that even some of Samsung's own devices with just 512MB RAM run KitKat just fine, the company still claims the international Galaxy SIII's and SIII mini's 1GB of RAM is not enough to run KitKat.

Do not buy Samsung phones.