As an Android, Blackberry or Nokia user, you may not know that an app called Carrier IQ is logging literally everything you are doing on your smartphone including keystrokes, SMS messages and HTTPS sessions. Other articles on Carrier IQ report that this information is being sent to the carriers.
Apparently, there is no way for a user to turn Carrier IQ off without replacing the operating system.
A former Justice Department prosecutor has told Forbes that this is “likely grounds for a class action lawsuit” as it violates federal wiretapping law. This story is beginning to get a significant amount of attention online.
To see Carrier IQ in action, watch the 17-minute video posted to the PC World article.
Chairseven and App Creation Network recently announced the beta availability of Cinefy, “a mobile video editing and effects platform for iPhone where users create and share videos mixed with high quality visual effects,” according to the press release. “Cinefy empowers users with no editing skills to quickly insert footage, add music and apply visually stunning effects with its intuitive and simple interface.”
The app offers branded effects packs which opens a marketing opportunity for TV and game studios to promote in an engaging way and possibly draw “massive viral exposure.”
Users can export their videos to their device’s camera roll in addition to Facebook, YouTube and Vimeo. Cinefy will eventually be available for iPads and Android devices.
To help create soundtracks, Friendly Music has teamed up to provide a catalog of songs, “offering 100 percent legal and all rights-cleared music for personal and custom online media creations.”
Microsoft lost trust from its hardware partners with the Zune MP3 player which ultimately caused the product to fail. The new Facebook phone could be equally disastrous by pinning HTC against its current software partners.
HTC has strong relationships with Google for Android OS and Microsoft for Windows Phone 7, relationships that could be jeopardized in moving forward with a Facebook phone.
“One of the key standout features for Windows Phone 7 is social networking and in particular, Facebook integration (Facebook and Microsoft are partnered),” reports Digital Trends. “Google, on the other hand, is at war with Facebook with Google+, and monetizes Android after-the-fact with services like Google+.”
“Right now Apple, Microsoft and others spend lots of time on Facebook, but they aren’t likely to continue if they view Facebook as a potential competitor,” suggests the post. “Facebook should be focused on building the best Facebook app for every major platform.”
In a related survey conducted by AllThingsD, results suggest an overwhelming number of readers had little to no desire for a Facebook phone (81 percent indicated no interest and 12 percent said they would consider it).
In a soon to be published survey, Gartner reports that 46 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds would choose Internet access over having their own vehicle.
“The car used to be the signal of adulthood, of freedom,” says Sheryl Connelly of Ford. “It was the signal into being a grown-up. Now, the signal into adulthood for teenagers is the smartphone.”
“Mobile devices, gadgets and the Internet are becoming must-have lifestyle products that convey status,” explains Gartner’s Thilo Koslowski. “In that sense these devices offer a degree of freedom and social reach that previously only the automobile offered.”
Connected cars may help change this emerging trend — cars that can take pictures and make calls and interact with social networks.
“In other words, to entice teenagers, Ford and other automakers need to make their cars more like smartphones,” suggests The New York Times.
Here’s another interesting tech project in the works through funding platform Kickstarter…
Peter Seid and Phu Nguyen of Seattle have launched Romotive to build robots that are “able to learn, grow, and change, both by adding new hardware modules to the platform, and more importantly, by bring to people everywhere a true ‘app store’ for robots, where robots can quickly gain functionalities based on the app they are running (and you can even code your own),” according to their Kickstarter page.
The first is Romo, which offers a platform mount for your iOS or Android phone and treads that allow for mobility. Users can download Romo-specific apps that allow for a variety of games and other abilities.
“Romotive builds accessible, highly functional, and flexible robotics platforms that are powered by a supercomputer already carried by millions — the smartphone,” explain the founders in their vision statement.
Seid and Nguyen have included a short video on their Kickstarter page that describes some of the robot’s possibilities.
The Walt Disney Company is working to replicate the success of “Angry Birds” with its new “Where’s My Water?” iPhone and iPad game.
Since its September 22 release, the game has proven rather successful, even taking the top spot from “Angry Birds” for three weeks.
“The logic is pretty simple; games are a cost-effective way of not only testing new characters, but also building a fan base for a potential movie,” reports Market Intelligence Center. “Developing the game cost a couple of hundred thousand dollars and about seven people. The time to build the game was less than eight months.”
The article points out that the financial risk is minimal when compared to a feature animation project: “Animated movies can easily run in excess of $100 million to produce, so each one is big gamble. If the game continues to find success, Disney can start to plan an animated movie around the game knowing they already have a fan-base for the movie’s characters. Disney will also be able to use its merchandising muscle to create and sell all kinds of toys and clothes around the game’s characters before it ever gets a movie into theaters.”
ETCentric staffer Phil Lelyveld adds: “Entertainment technology must now be defined VERY broadly. The ‘Halo II’ launch incorporated thousands of calls to pay phones into a coordinated transmedia market development campaign.”
Facebook has selected Taiwanese phone manufacturer HTC to build a smartphone code-named “Buffy,” after the television vampire slayer.
Ironically, the device will run a customized OS from its main competitor, Google’s Android, and integrate a number of Facebook’s services, many of which will run as HTML5 apps.
“Facebook only recently chose HTC, after also considering at least one other potential hardware partner — Korea’s Samsung,” reports AllThingsD. “That means the products themselves are still a ways from hitting the market, potentially as long as 12 to 18 months.”
According to a Facebook spokesperson: “Our mobile strategy is simple: We think every mobile device is better if it is deeply social. We’re working across the entire mobile industry; with operators, hardware manufacturers, OS providers, and application developers to bring powerful social experiences to more people around the world.”
Although other companies have released phones with dedicated Facebook buttons, Buffy is expected to provide deeper integration, “bringing friends and social activities deep into the mobile interface.”
It has been suggested that Amazon should consider releasing a smartphone version of the Kindle Fire.
The belief is that a Kindle Fire phone would stand the best chance to compete directly with Apple’s iPhone, based on the tablet’s affordability, recognizable brand name and unlimited publicity through its connection to the Amazon retail store.
“Most important, Amazon has already done a lot of the heavy lifting required to build a phone,” writes Harry McCracken in a related Time article. “It could simply repurpose much of the effort it’s poured into the Kindle Fire tablet, and then add phone-specific features.”
“But this is all just hypothesis at this point,” comments TG Daily. “Amazon will be plenty busy with the Kindle Fire for some time to come.”
Yet it remains an interesting idea. “I wondered why no company has taken up the challenge of building…well, the iPhone of Android phones,” writes McCracken. “Something that’s elegant, approachable, uncluttered, and respectful of the consumer’s intelligence. Any bundled services would need to be beautifully integrated rather than just shoveled onto the phone indiscriminately, as the apps on Android handsets often are.”
Apple released an iOS update on Thursday designed to fix the problem that iPhone 4S users running iOS 5 have been experiencing with regards to battery life.
However, many iPhone owners have reported the update (iOS 5.0.1) has had no effect in fixing the issue.
“A small number of customers have reported lower than expected battery life on iOS 5 devices. We have found a few bugs that are affecting battery life and we will release a software update to address those in a few weeks,” Apple said in a statement.
Based on the language of the statement, especially noting the generic phrase “a few bugs,” Digital Trends suggests the company may not know the cause of the problem.
“The recent iOS software update addressed many of the battery issues that some customers experienced on their iOS 5 devices,” said Apple spokesperson Trudy Muller, adding: “We continue to investigate a few remaining issues.”
The new “Harry Potter” Blu-ray disc will include an UltraViolet download from Flixster, now that Warner Bros. has added a new feature to the UV service.
“Today, the updated Flixster app enables users to not only stream movies available on UltraViolet, but also download them to iPads and iPhones, a feature that was missing from Warner’s initial movie releases on UltraViolet,” reports CNET.
When fans purchase the three-disc Blu-ray/DVD combo “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2,” they’ll also have access to a copy they can maintain in the Flixster cloud.
Warner Bros. became the first studio to adopt UltraViolet, with its release of “Horrible Bosses” last month. “Warner boasts 21 percent of the DVD market, the largest share of any of the major studios,” indicates the article.
According to Canaccord Genuity analysis of Apple’s third quarter, the company “captured more than half of the handset industry’s overall operating profits — 52 percent…And it managed it with only a 4.2 percent global handset unit market share,” reports The Wall Street Journal.
“With the iPhone, Apple is doing to the smartphone business what it has done to the PC business with the Mac: Generating a disproportionate share of profits relative to revenue,” suggests the article.
With other manufacturers faltering and iPhone 4S sales soaring, Apple may hit 60 percent of the industry’s operating profits soon.
According to AllThingsD: “…with the iPhone 4S the top-selling smartphone at AT&T, Sprint and Verizon, and its international rollout in full swing, it seems pretty clear Apple has a very good chance of hitting that big number — and soon.”
Shall I Buy is a free iPhone app with the goal of combining instant social feedback for shoppers to make better purchasing decisions and possibly combat buyer’s remorse.
A shopper can share a video, picture, price and location to engage potential followers and incite comments, and allows sharing of links through Facebook and Twitter.
“The app is done simply, taking heavy styling cues from Instagram, but in doing so it’s effective and easy to use,” reports TheNextWeb.
The post cites two potential downsides: 1) By default, users receive a great number of push notifications, and 2) It would be helpful to have “a way to configure notifications inside of the app itself,” rather than going to the website.
Robert Scoble equates it to “Foodspotting for everything else.”
Nokia unveiled its Kinetic Device smartphone prototype at the recent Nokia World Conference in London.
The screen of the concept phone “is controlled by the way that it is bent or twisted or flexed, not by the way it is touched,” reports The Huffington Post.
The video shows how bending the phone inwards and outwards controls zoom and twisting it controls volume and playback.
“It’s built entirely out of plastic, which includes the bendy and attractive AMOLED display up front, and contains only the hardware required to power it and to sense user input,” explains This Is My Next in a related post. “It all looks somewhat unwieldy when you’re observing it, and it’s not all that easy to describe, but adapting to the control scheme takes only a few seconds and once you know what you’re doing, it becomes extremely natural. Honestly, bend-to-zoom is miles ahead of pinch-to-zoom in terms of intuitive human interaction.”
No word yet on whether Nokia has plans to develop a commercial version.
A recent study by EyeTrackshop showed that Apple’s iPhone 4S and iPad 2 “drew more glances and held people’s attention longer than Google Android devices from Amazon, HTC, Motorola and Samsung,” reports Forbes.
The study showed participants a picture of six smartphones and five tablets. EyeTrackshop’s software tracked where subjects’ eyes went, in what order and how long, using webcams.
“EyeTrackshop said the results equate to respondents dwelling on the iPhone 4S 42 percent longer than the other phones and on the iPad 138 percent longer than the other tablets.”
Additionally, a follow-up survey indicated that 40 percent found the iPhone most visually appealing; for tablets, 35 percent for the iPad; and disregarding price, 47 percent said they would buy the iPhone and 48 percent preferred the iPad to other tablets.
A newly uncovered Apple patent suggests 3D gesture control may be in the works for the company’s mobile devices.
“Forget relying solely on touch to control your Apple device,” writes Wired. “On future iPads, you may be able to control your tablet from across the room using 3D gestures, such as a swirl or swipe of the hand.”
Employing a front-facing camera, it may be possible to use 3D gestures to control graphical elements such as icons, media files, text and images on an iPad or iPhone. A toolbar would teach beginners pre-set options as well as allow users to customize their own gestures.
Another Apple patent indicates the company is working on an integrated projector for iDevices that would incorporate gesture controls for manipulating projected images.
