A tipster tells us that Palm, the troubled smartphone maker, is laying off 10 percent of its staff. I called a spokeswoman at the company, who confirmed the layoffs but not the number of employees affected; Palm, at last count, had about 1,050 employees. She also said the company would make "program cuts" —…
The Jesusphone is no longer just for privileged white folks. "The strongest growth in users is coming from those earning less than the median household income, particularly since the launch of the iPhone 3G." So says a report from ComScore, which concludes that "lower-income mobile subscribers are increasingly turning…
"When my wife switches, then you'll know," says Motorola co-CEO Sanjay Jha, whose spouse carries an LG Voyager and refuses to trade it for a Moto. Mrs. Steve Jobs? She carries an iPhone. The company is cutting back from six operating systems to three: Windows Mobile, Moto's own P2K, and Google's open-source Android.…
Joel Johnson of Boing Boing Gadgets is shocked, shocked that the team working on Google Earth, Google's 3D interactive world map, launched a mobile app for the iPhone before writing one for Google's Android operating system, which now runs on all of one clunky phone sold by T-Mobile, the also-ran of the U.S. wireless…
Medialets, a company which tracks which iPhone apps users of Apple's smartphone download from the company's iTunes store, reports that Google's Android Market, a similar service, buy mostly the same kind of apps for their Googlephones. Games, shopping, music, and weather predominate. Google launched Android Market…
Google's Android phone has something in common with Apple's iPhone: Both gadgets have a "kill switch" to uninstall unwanted applications. Buried in Google's Android legalese is a clause that says Google might "discover a product that violates the developer distribution agreement... in such an instance, Google retains…
Research In Motion's iPhone substitute, the touchscreen-equipped BlackBerry Storm, has debuted. Perhaps a bit hastily. In the U.K., it's sold by Vodafone, which has displayed a page of specifications. The screenshots show the Storm displaying the iPhone's characteristic icons and Apple's Safari Web browser. Has Apple…
Apple had planned to build 18 million iPhones in 2008. Pacific Crest Securities, an analyst which closely watches Apple's supply chain, says Apple has cut that number to between 14 million and 15 million. BlackBerry maker RIM announced lower-than-expected quarterly sales last week, so perhaps Apple is seeing a similar…
The technoblogomemesphere erupted in derision when T-Mobile's plans for a one-gigabyte monthly cap on bandwidth for the new HTC phone running Google's Android OS emerged. Customers who exceeded the limit would have seen their speeds reduced by a factor of 20. Anyone who wanted to listen to Internet radio or browse…
My heart goes out to MySpace employee Ulf Waschbusch, who used to be a product marketing manager for Google Mobile and therefore saw the company's Android phone in its early stages. "The reason many people see the G1 as ugly and old-fashioned is simply … because it IS!" he blogged yesterday. "It’s a design unchanged…
The coming iPhone-vs.-Android fight will be drawn along clear lines: Keyboard versus touchscreen. And for phone applications, open bazaar versus walled garden. While Google talks up the openness of its platform, Apple keeps plugging leaks through which iPhone app developers can thwart Apple's ruthless management of…
T-Mobile and Google executives will gather in New York on September 23 to to launch the HTC Dream, the first phone loaded with Google's mobile operating system Android to hit the market. Skeptics, such as ZDNet's Dana Blankenhorn, say the Dream won't be a "real" Android phone. Why the quibble?"It is still just a…
That traffic jam around the Moscone Center in dowtown San Francisco is the CTIA Wireless IT & Entertainment trade show. T-Mobile used the event to announce a sort-of-Apple-like app store that will split revenues at least 50/50 with application makers. But T-Mob's new developer community won't support app makers…
Don't call it an app store — it's an open content distribution system. Android Market will be Google's version of the iPhone App Store. A PR-speak description of the site emphasizes that posting apps for sale will be a lot like uploading videos to YouTube. But with iPhone app developers already posing as punk-rock…
"A single tap on its surface instantly zooms in on images; a flicking gesture moves one photo off the screen and pulls another one on. Menus appear with clever animation, and actions like downloading and emailing photos and videos are intuitively incorporated." No, not the iPhone. It's the Kinoma player for Windows…
Sign of the times: Iowa-based publisher Thaddeus Computing is killing its 11-year-old Smartphone & Pocket PC magazine. In its place, the company will publish a new title, iPhone Life. Why the change? It's not about which phone is more popular. It's about advertisers.Publisher Hal Goldstein says that despite 20…
Forget HTC's Android-running Dream, expected out this October. General Electric has brought the Googlephone to life. GE's Digital Enhanced Cordless Telecommunications, or DECT, version 6.0, has a handy built-in Goog-411 button, to spare users the burden of dialing 1-800-GOOG-411. It's already on store shelves for…
Jake Orion, the Sprint engineer in charge of Android development who mixed honest criticism with cautious optimism for Google's Android device in an interview he gave AndroidGuys.com earlier this week, has, under pressure, backed down from his comments and demanded that AndroidGuys take down his interview.
"BlackBerry is the only way to go ... the rest are for kids," says one of the 400 comments to Web Worker Daily's thorough comparison of iPhone 3G's pros and cons versus a BlackBerry for use on the job. iPhone crazies are everywhere, so in response I've summarized Web Worker's pro-BlackBerry argument for those of us…
Jake Orion, the guy in charge of Android development at Sprint, says that while "Google’s confidence, vision and self assurance are refreshing and innovative," Google needs to " to appreciate and address industry fundamentals more pragmatically." Specifically, Orion told AndroidGuys.com Google needs "a more…
