Enterprises are beginning to leverage mobility to transform their business processes rather than simply providing always-on access to email and calendaring. Healthcare, financial services and retail are at the forefront of using mobile to transform their businesses, and Windows 8 may accelerate the process.
Barclays Bank puts a personal spin on mobile payments with a person-to-person mobile app that lets customers send and receive payments via text messages between iPhone, Android and Blackberry mobile phones.
Research In Motion continues to struggle as it works to finish the BlackBerry 10 operating system, but the audience at the London edition of the BlackBerry 10 Jam World Tour developer event still thinks the company can play an important role in the enterprise.
Perhaps it was an omen of what was to come when the city of San Francisco on New Year's Eve 2010 couldn't get a backup system running in its Emergency Operations Center because no one knew the password.
Since the advent of the first modern smartphone--arguably the original Apple iPhone in 2007--the power of these mobile computing devices that also happen to make phone calls has advanced by leaps and bounds.
Samsung took a step toward finding a kind of "pax tabletica" with arch-foe Apple in an Australian court last week, offering to remove features from its Galaxy Tab to avoid a court ban on sales of the device in that country. But what's really interesting about the case isn't the technical litigation, but the underlying attempt to define how much of a product's design is actually protected under existing, fragmented international laws.
A few years ago businesspeople carried a laptop on the road, used a desktop PC in the office, and worked on another PC at home. Maybe they had a BlackBerry, too--but only if they were real big shots.
History may look at Android as the tech industry's Helen of Troy: The OS that launched a thousand suits.
Video chat is all the rage these days, thanks to new services such as Google+ Hangouts and Skype/Facebook integrated video chat. Video chatting is a great way to stay in touch with family and friends--seeing loved ones' faces on a computer screen is almost like actually being there.
In June 2007, Apple released the iPhone, and the device quickly took off to become a major brand in the smartphone market. Yet when the iPhone shipped, security on the mobile operating system was nearly nonexistent. Missing from the initial iOS (then called iPhone OS) were many of the security features that modern-day desktop software has as a matter of course, such as data-execution protection (DEP) and address-space layout randomization (ASLR). Apple's cachet lured security researchers to test the platform, and in less than a month, a trio had released details on the first vulnerability: an exploitable flaw in the mobile Safari browser.
With Apple preparing to talk about the future of iOS at its Worldwide Developers Conference in June, and the rumor mill churning, it's time for an old tradition: the iPhone feature wish list.
Even by the new standards of cell phone advertising, the run-up to the HTC ThunderBolt -- Verizon's first 4G LTE smartphone -- was elaborate and expensive. Gatefold ads in mass-market magazines and high-profile TV spots on the Oscars, NASCAR and college basketball all proclaimed that there was a new 4G phone coming from Verizon, but not much else. Inquiries made of HTC and Verizon were met with official shrugs. The company spent many millions of dollars advertising a phone and didn't tell anyone when it would be on the shelves.
Roll out the welcome wagon, Android fans: It looks like you'll soon have a new place to shop.
Odds are, if you ask anyone waiting in line for an iPad 2, they'll list plenty of reasons why they're lusting after Apple's latest camera(s)-equipped tablet.
To buy or not to buy? That's the question right now as the Motorola Xoom, Google's first Android Honeycomb tablet, gets ready to make its grand debut.