Mobile Phones News Blog

Symbian’s life has been hanging by a thread for sometime now, after the Android-of-its-day was systematically abandoned by manufacturers – remember both Samsung and Sony Ericsson once supported it, see the Omnia i8910 HD and the Satio for example 0 and even Nokia themselves opting to go with Windows Phone over the ageing platform.

If a new report is true, we could be getting very close to the final hurrah for Symbian, as The Register says Nokia has just one last phone running the operating system to launch, and that will be that.

Although other Symbian devices were in development, they’ve now been cancelled following lower than expected sales figures, with CEO Stephen Elop hinting the demand for low-cost smartphones is making it too difficult to compete.

Symbian could be going out with a bang though, as its rumoured swansong is to be a Nokia N8 sequel. The N8 has long been the best camera-phone on the market, and is one of the few devices still to feature a xenon flash; but it’s 16 months old and ripe for a refresh.

While new hardware may not continue, Nokia has repeatedly promised to continue supporting the software for several years yet – with 2016 often provided as an end date. There’s no reason not to think they’ll stick to their word, as we’ve got Nokia Belle coming soon, plus there has been talk of other updates for the future.

Perhaps we’ll find out more during Mobile World Congress, where there’s a chance we may meet the final phone too.

New data from market intelligence firm IDC this week places Apple as the third largest manufacturer of mobile phones, in a fourth quarter of 2011 which overall showed surprisingly little growth on the same period of 2010.

Apple’s latest model, the iPhone 4S, was partly responsible for a jump of almost double the number of units shipped over the last calendar year compared to 2010, increasing from 47.5 million to 93.2 million in a jump of over 96%.

With Apple gaining so much ground in the smartphone race for market share, there had to be losers and the primary victim of the surge was LG, whose reported drop of almost 25 percentage points in smartphone sales between the end of 2010 and two months ago has badly affected shareholder confidence.

The Korean manufacturer’s overall market share is only down from 8.4% to 5.7%, though considering the huge amount of smartphones purchased in that year (nearly one and a half billion, up 11.1% on 2010), LG’s growth has certainly slowed compared to the iPhone’s success story.

The top two mobile makers remained unchanged with Samsung in second after near one-fifth growth year-on-year, whilst leaders Nokia, who also reported a loss of ground to Apple maintain top spot despite sales down from 453 million during 2010 to 417 over the last calendar year.

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New data from market intelligence firm IDC this week places Apple as the third largest manufacturer of mobile phones, in a fourth quarter of 2011 which overall showed surprisingly little growth on the same period of 2010.

Apple’s latest model, the iPhone 4S, was partly responsible for a jump of almost double the number of units shipped over the last calendar year compared to 2010, increasing from 47.5 million to 93.2 million in a jump of over 96%.

With Apple gaining so much ground in the smartphone race for market share, there had to be losers and the primary victim of the surge was LG, whose reported drop of almost 25 percentage points in smartphone sales between the end of 2010 and two months ago has badly affected shareholder confidence.

The Korean manufacturer’s overall market share is only down from 8.4% to 5.7%, though considering the huge amount of smartphones purchased in that year (nearly one and a half billion, up 11.1% on 2010), LG’s growth has certainly slowed compared to the iPhone’s success story.

The top two mobile makers remained unchanged with Samsung in second after near one-fifth growth year-on-year, whilst leaders Nokia, who also reported a loss of ground to Apple maintain top spot despite sales down from 453 million during 2010 to 417 over the last calendar year.

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Apple has been forced to remove its iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4 and 3G iPad 2 devices from the German online Apple store following a patent battle with Motorola Mobility, according to a report from Business Week.

The dispute is centred on a patent license held by Motorola concerning a GPRS module that it believes is being infringed upon by Apple in their older Infineon chipset devices. As a result of the action, a German court has taken the decision to suspend sales through retail channels in the country until the patent issue is resolved. As the iPhone 4S is powered by a Qualcomm baseband chip, it is exempt from the ban.

Apple has rejected the injunction on the grounds that Motorola refused to license the patent on a fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND) basis, and have gone on to state that the products in question will still be available in Apple stores and via authorised dealers.

The dispute is one of several court cases currently being fought by the Californian tech giant – an unrelated case involving patents concerning the iCloud service, also involving Motorola, was recently lost by Apple in the same Mannheim court.

Images from debugging software claimed to be running on an Apple iPad 3 prototype have been published by BGR. The pictures aren’t of the device itself, but of the data collected by the development tool, and purport to show certain technical features of the forthcoming tablet.

The juiciest morsel to come from the pictures is the presence of an A6 processor inside the tablet, bearing the model number S5L8945X, which is believed to be a quad-core chip.

There will be two iPad 3 models according to the leak, known as the J1 and J2 or iPad 3,1 and iPad 3,2. As before, one will be a Wi-Fi model and the other will have a cellular radio inside, but this time it will support GSM, CDMA and LTE networks.

When the iPad 2 was launched this time last year, the addition of 4G LTE wasn’t talked about much beforehand, however, the rumours really got started prior to the iPhone 4S’s release. While some expect the iPhone 5 to also have a LTE connectivity, others say it’ll first appear on the next iPad and skip another iPhone generation.

Of course, none of this matters here in the UK, as our next-generation mobile network has yet to reach the public anyway.

As to when the iPad 3 will be released, a set of iPad 3 for Dummies books have appeared on Amazon France, complete with a 29 March release date.While this could be pure speculation on the publishers part, it would be odd to sell the book without the device it refers to being available.

How does one go about bringing Space Invaders, an established genre classic, but very much a product of its time, to a new generation of gamers? After all, however familiar the attacking aliens and their ‘womp, womp, womp, womp‘ musical accompaniment may be, the incredibly primitive graphics and simple gameplay won’t satiate many Uncharted or Gears of War fans.

The answer may sound simple – update it accordingly – but a new version should also consider those gamers who love the original. It would be all too easy to alienate (sorry, no pun intended) players who pumped coins with reckless abandon into the arcade machine back in 1978, by ignoring its roots and turning Space Invaders into something crass that would appeal only to hyperactive tweens.

In essence, this was the challenge faced by Taito, who wanted to commemorate the game’s 30th anniversary with an all-new game that would appeal to all players. Released way back in 2009 for iOS, and just before Christmas 2011 on Android, Space Invaders Infinity Gene is the result, but does it manage to keep both newcomers and old-timers happy?

What Infinity Gene does is actually quite interesting, and is clearly the result of a lot of time, effort and love for the original on the part of the developers. Space Invaders is the grandfather of all shoot ‘em up games, leading to Galaxian, Defender, Scramble and many more, as the genre split and mutated to include everything from sideways scrolling games to the most recent evolution of the space shoot ‘em up, ‘Bullet Hell’ games.

Infinity Gene is an evolution of Space Invaders, but it could almost precede all the games mentioned above, as it not only references a dizzying amount of classic titles, but serves as an introduction to them.

The game starts out with an exact recreation of the Space Invaders game, before ‘evolving’ into a scrolling shoot ‘em up. At first, your ship only moves from side-to-side as the level scrolls by, but as you progress through the levels and score more points, you unlock bonuses that include complete movement around the screen. Weapons are upgradeable too, a process that means destroying UFOs and collecting the genes they leave behind. Other weapons are soon unlocked, along with other special features of the game.

Enemies vary greatly, from little aliens shooting around the screen to massive ships that require separate sections destroying before they can be defeated, and tricky beam generators that block your path. All this is accompanied by an electronic score that’s part trance, part chiptune, and perfectly in sync with the on-screen action.

To give an extra dimension to the gameplay, Infinity Gene has a trick up its sleeve: Turn your device to landscape and the game swaps from being a top-down shooter to a sideways scrolling game. It’s a stroke of genius, and truly alters how you play certain levels.

Presented almost entirely in monochrome wireframe-style graphics, with the occasional splash of background colour, Infinity Gene looks decidedly retro. The ships are angular blocks and weapon fire varies between solid straight lines, squiggly lines or solid circles. You’ll pay close attention to the bullets too, as the screen can get very busy, very quickly once you’re into the later levels.

If you’ve been keeping count, that’s about six or seven different genres covered in the above synopsis of the game. Playing Infinity Gene recalled everything from R-Type‘s huge spaceship that takes up its entire third level, Rez’s use of a trance music soundtrack, Star Wars’s filled wireframe graphics and the precision of modern ‘Bullet Hell’ games. But due to Infinity Gene’s style, it never feels derivative, in fact it feels like it has just been discovered on an old hard drive and really pre-dates all of them.

Infinity Gene is straight-forward enough to play, and is genuinely addictive, but it’s a far better game on the iPad as your finger will get in the way on the iPhone, but this isn’t a problem on the larger screened iPad. Although the levels are short, the fast-paced action keeps you coming back for more, and the excellent soundtrack keeps your excitement levels high as you play. Like all good shoot ‘em ups, it’s easy to play, but difficult to master.

For a real challenge, try out the Music bonus level, which lets you listen to a song from your iPhone/iPad’s library and play a level of the game around it. The game quickly throws everything it can at you here, and you’ll need plenty of practice just to make it to the end of a song.

The game isn’t without problems though, the biggest of which is understanding what is going to kill you and what isn’t. The screen is frequently filled with enemy fire and ships, incoming bigger ships and some landscape, however, not everything destroys you on contact and it’s never completely clear what those things are. There’s nothing you can do but rely on trial-and-error, but it does lead to some annoying moments where you’re not sure why you’ve been blown up.

Taito has succeeded in doing something that Hollywood rarely manages: They’ve remade a classic and not only brought something new to the table, but understood its roots in the genre and that there are many fans who don’t just want the same thing with more explosions. Space Invaders Infinity Gene is a brilliant retro shooter that every arcade game fan will love, no matter whether they played the original or not.

This year’s Macworld event threw up a few interesting surprises, which is an impressive feat in itself considering that Apple themselves no longer maintain an official presence at the annual event. However, a hot tip has come in this week that could shape the future of the smartphone as an even more essential everyday piece of kit.

Apple news site 9to5mac reports that a “well-connected developer” is in the advanced stages of creating an app that includes NFC communication for the purposes of financial transactions.

Though third-party apps such as Moneto currently exist for this reason, it seems that Apple is beginning to invest heavily in further developing this functionality themselves. The source stated that he’d spoken to Apple iOS employees who were “heavy into NFC” and that the developer himself was very confident of progress on their end, “enough to bet the app development on”.

If Apple is developing this technology for widespread use on its iDevices, it’s more than likely  discussions with credit card companies, banks  and the like, about partnering up to offer their products to customers are already underway. A recent hint was dropped by at Mastercard executive  Ed McLaughlin, who spoke to Fast Company magazine about his tech-based role as the head of Emerging Payments.

When quizzed if the Cupertino-based tech giant is involved in any such negotiations with Mastercard, McLaughlin replied: “When we have discussions with our partners, and they ask us not to disclose them, we don’t.”

With that comes the relatively safe assumption that Apple is looking to incorporate contactless payment technology in a future product – whether it’ll be ready for release within the upcoming iPhone 5 remains to be seen.

The machines are coming for us, but after so many movies about robot uprisings the only surprising thing is the political aspect (in that there is one). We always assumed the computerised destruction of humanity would, at the very least, mean a lack of elected leaders, or at most a sort of “I have the most guns”-based meritocracy. But it turns out that human politicians are in cahoots with the robots. We always knew they weren’t on the side of the common man, but at least assumed were at least in favour of the man part.

Some of the most recent robotic attacks have centred on American south, in states with close-run elections. Residents of these embattled regions have been bombarded with robocalls –  automated messages hassling people at all hours of the day, because the best way to get someone on your side is to keep bugging them until they give up. We’re surprised that elected officials are copying tactics from five year olds.

You might wonder why we should care about American idiocies, and the answer is equal parts true and terrifying. Because we copy them, that’s why. Ridiculous airport security measures, insane lawsuits for spilling hot drinks, ever-expanding waistlines – every awful thing happening in the UK was prototyped in the colonies, and while we did get our revenge by inflicting both Simon Cowell and Piers Morgan on them it’s not nearly enough. Because the establishment’s next plan is to target your mobile phones.

A new bill in progress, HR 3035, would allow companies to use your mobile phone number without permission as long as they promise only to use it for ‘non-marketing commercial information’, and anyone who knows what that even is works for their side. Listen, companies, we’re not dictionaries connecting to feelings – we won’t not be annoyed if you just find a different word. If any description of your service is a synonym for “interrupt what we’re doing to answer a call we didn’t ask for” then we hate your service and we hate you.

If you’re relying on American law to hold off the hordes of ‘time limited offers’ that you have been specially selected for, oh dear. Even the existing laws against unsolicited calls have exceptions for political and marketing calls. That’s like kevlar which lets bullets through but provides 100% protection against spaghetti bolognese. And it’s not just the usual legal leakage across the Atlantic we have to worry about. Multinational corporations don’t view countries as anythnig but differently-flavoured markets, and if they get their foot in the mobile-phone-targeting door (it’s the door to the ninth circle of hell, by the way) in one country their tone will shift from “we’re not allowed” to “it works there so let’s get on with it.”

Luckily, there’s a simple solution to this problem, and if we all work together we can nip this in the bud. What you do is, every time a company calls you without permission, drive to their headquarters and burn it down.