Mobile Phones News Blog

With the new iPad now on sale, it’s time for the rumour mill to start grinding up some stories about the next iPhone, and today we have the return of an old favourite.

According to an ‘unnamed industry source’ in South Korea quoted by Reuters, Apple has already begun ordering screens for the new iPhone, but instead of the same old 3.5-inch panels, it’s stocking up on 4.6-inch screens.

Prior to the release of the iPhone 4S last year, the rumoured iPhone 5 was expected to have a larger screen, and was linked to a 4-inch Toshiba display with a 720p resolution. Of course, this didn’t pan out, but that’s no reason to think it won’t happen this year instead.

However, Apple has maintained that the 3.5-inch screen on the iPhone is the ideal size for single-handed use, so increasing its size by over an inch would be a surprise, as with it will come a considerably larger body too.

Samsung, who supplies screens to Apple, already uses a 4.65-inch screen with 720p resolution on the Galaxy Nexus, but the pixel-per-inch rating is only 316, which crucially falls below the iPhone 4S’s 326ppi. Why is this important? It’s because this is the figure Apple uses to define its Retina Display standard.

Therefore, the resolution would have to be higher than 720p on a screen this size for it to improve on the iPhone 4S’s Retina Display. While this could happen, 720p can also provide a slightly higher PPI rating when the screen is smaller than 4.6-inch though, as the 4.3-inch screen fitted to the HTC Rezound proves with 342ppi.

Using this basic information, the larger the screen size rumoured, the less credible it sounds. But we also wouldn’t put it past Apple to surprise us with a truly amazing screen on the next iPhone, as it has had plenty of practice developing the iPad 3′s impressive Retina Display.

Going back to the Korean source of this rumour for a moment, a release date somewhere between April and June is also stated, which seems highly unlikely given the iPhone 4S has only been on sale since October last year.

As with all similar rumours, all the above is completely unconfirmed by Apple, and it’s probable we’ve got another six months to go before we find out anything official about the new iPhone.

Amazon Kindle app, the ebook reading app, has received a new update that brings support for new audio and video formats. With the new Kindle Format 8, the Google Android based Kindle app will now be able to showcase interactive audio-visual content bearing children books, comics and other rich formatting loaded Kindle titles. The new Amazon Kindle app update has also been released for the Apple iOS devices.

For ebook reading, Amazon Kindle app offers a gateway to browse, purchase, download and read several titles from the large library the Amazon library. The select eBooks specifically created for the Kindle platform. New Amazon Kindle update also enables playback of audio and video media embedded with rich formatting.

After this update, the Kindle App for Android and iOS will now be able to support the interactive audio-visual content loaded eBooks. Content producers can now use the Kindle Direct Publishing platform to create multimedia rich eBooks that can be viewed on both Android and iOS platforms.

Amazon has made these advancements in order to compete with the Apple’s new iBooks Author platform which in way is limited only to textbooks. However, Apple iOS platform has been used to create interactive apps for iPad tablet.

The new Amazon Kindle App update can be downloaded for Android from Play Store and on iOS devices from Apple App Store.

A recent survey has found that although Apple is the favoured manufacturer of smartphone consumers, Android devices created by HTC are pushing strongly for second place.

Over 7,000 smartphone users were surveyed for market research firm JD Power’s  latest biannual report, in which they were asked to rate the user experience provided by their handset using criteria such as battery life, design and ease of use.

In Vol. 1 of the 2012 Wireless Smartphone Satisfaction Study which resulted (volume 2 follows later in the year), Apple scored 839 out of a possible 1000 points – establishing the company as the field leader for the seventh consecutive report.

Only HTC came close to matching that impressive tally with 798, making them the leading Android manufacturer – and the only other smartphone maker to exceed the industry’s average score of 774.

This report, taken from data recorded during the second half of last year, also found that HTC was one of only three companies – along with Apple and Nokia – to improve upon its customer satisfaction scores from the last report.

Whilst it’s not exactly racing up the charts, the improvement must come as good news to Nokia, whose troubles with faltering phone sales and job cuts look to be abating slightly.

Trailing the leading pack were Samsung (769) and Motorola (758), while the hit to BlackBerry’s reputation last summer continues to see it drop to 733 points, and tie with LG in fifth place.

According to the research, the main bugbear of smartphone users concerned the battery life of their devices with the introduction of 4G technology attributed as a key factor in the reduction of “battery life” scores on 4G devices down to 6.1 out of 10 on average. In comparison, 3G users rated their handsets an average 6.7 out of 10.

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Android users who have a smartphone packed full of free apps could be losing up to 75% of their handset’s battery life, according to a new study.

Research from the University of Purdue, Indiana, has found that the advertisements incorporated into many free applications to fund their development could drain as much as 75% of a phone’s battery life.

Analysts from Purdue built special software to analyse the power demands and efficiencies of various free applications, including popular apps such as Angry Birds, Free Chess and NYTimes. They found that on average, only 10-30% of the energy used was spent powering the app’s core function, with the rest harnessed to serve ads and other background functions.

In the case of Angry Birds, just 20% of energy is used to display and run the hit game, while 45% is spent finding and uploading the user’s location with GPS to enable the downloading of location-based ads over a 3G connection. The 3G connection stays open for around 10 seconds, and even if data transmission is complete, this “tail energy” consumes another 28% of the app’s power.

In the case of New York Times app, 75% of the energy was drained because the function that downloads stories continues to run after the news has been downloaded to the handset.

Researcher, Abhinav Pathak, a computer scientist at Purdue, blames the energy leakage on inefficiencies in the third-party code that developers use to generate profit on free apps. He will present the research at the EuroSys conference in Bern, Switzerland, next month.

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Apple’s iPhone may be the market leader in smartphones around the world, but in the Far East it’s being outsold three-to-one by Samsung – and the tech giants have only themselves to blame.

Their decision not to construct an iPhone compatible with TD-SCDMA, the 3G standard provided only by carrier China Mobile (CM), has cost them a potential 655 million customers; the amount of CM subscribers and a customer base that is two times larger than the entire population of the United States.

Apple’s refusal to build the TD-SCDMA phone – and thus to meet unprecedented demand for their product following the egg-pelting incident at Beijing’s Apple Store – has allowed competitors willing to meet that standard to put some distance between themselves and Apple in the Chinese market; competitors such as Samsung, whose smartphones currently account for almost a quarter of all those sold in China.

Following that incident at the Apple Store, iPhones were removed entirely from the shops although they remain available online. With this in mind, Samsung have widened the gap even further on Apple with an eye to staking their claim on the soon to be expected 137 million smartphones in China – a figure that sees the United States overtaken for the first time as the leading smartphone users.

Market expert Kim Young Chan of Shinhan Investment said, “It’s just one country, but it’s such a big market and its portion in the global market is huge, so Samsung is trying to act fast to capture the market.” He went on to say, “Dealing with different network standards will give them a pretty valuable competitive edge.”

It remains to be seen whether or not Samsung can retain that edge as China moves into the 4G age.