Mobile Technology News

By Joe Wilcox, Betanews

The InterWeb is buzzing about Android’s sudden second quarter smartphone OS market share surge against Apple’s iOS and Research in Motion’s BlackBerry OS. Windows Mobile was a goner last quarter. But behind the numbers is a bigger question: Which mobile platform will be more successful? Smartphones are but one small measure of success.

By Ed Oswald, Betanews

Skype, Kazaa, and Joost creators Janus Friis with Niklas Zennström launched Rdio on Tuesday, aiming to offer an inexpensive way to provide unlimited streaming music from mobile phones. In addition, the service would allow users to save music to their device for offline listening.

The service costs .95 per month for desktop-only access, and .95 monthly for both desktop and mobile use. The company has about seven million songs in its database, and unlimited streaming. Users can select songs to be synced to their devices for online listening, or download copies of the song to keep at a cost of 99 cents per track.

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

Today, OnStar and General Motors announced a plan to bring mobile phone-based controls to 2011 Chevrolet, Cadillac, Buick and GMC automobiles.

The service will be included in OnStar’s subscription package at no extra charge, and users will be able to download an OnStar app onto their mobile device that grants remote access to their vehicle.

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

Market research firm comScore released its U.S. search rankings for June 2010, and though the search business is still soundly dominated by Google, both Microsoft and Yahoo increased their market share where Google actually lost some ground.

According to comScore, Google’s market share for June was 62.6 percent, down from May’s 63.7 percent. Microsoft and Yahoo each increased their search shares from 12.1 to 12.7 percent and 18.3 to 18.9 percent.

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

Mobile Web consumption is growing at an explosive rate according to reports from both the PEW Internet and American Life Project and Morgan Stanley, and in as few as five years, our mobile devices could be our primary connection to the Web.

To address this explosion in mobile Web consumption, YouTube last night unveiled a new mobile site with all the features of the traditional YouTube.

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

Keeping the Kindle momentum high, Amazon has announced the next generation of Kindle DX is available for pre-order today, and will be shipping on July 7th.

The new Kindle DX has the same 9.7″ screen size, and the same free 3G wireless, but features a new graphite chassis and a higher contrast e-ink screen with a purported 50% improvement in contrast. Furthermore, all of this is available at a price about 25% less than the first generation DX.

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

T-Mobile has begun the beta of a new function called “Device Tune-up” for Android devices running version 2.1 and below.

According to the wireless carrier, “Device Tune-up is built to run in the background at all times and ‘tune-up’ the device by closing unused services that are running. [It] is different from most task killers because it does not require you to do anything. Device Tune-up will default to ‘on’.  While on, Device Tune-up proactively closes services to help the device and battery perform at their best. Most pre-loaded applications will not be affected by Device Tune-up. ”

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

Motorola seriously changed the mobile phone industry in the 2000′s with the RAZR. The low-profile flip phone sold more than 110 million units, spawned several successful follow-up models and imitations from competitors, and generally altered how we perceive “sexiness” in mobile phones.

It has had an excellent run, and continues to sell to this day. According to Neilsen Media, the RAZR was the third most popular mobile phone on the market last year with 2.3 percent of mobile subscribers owning one.

By Joe Wilcox, Betanews

About five years ago, when blogging as an analyst, I asserted that computing and informational relevance had started shifting from the Windows desktop to cloud services delivered anytime, anywhere and on anything. The day of Windows’ reckoning is come: 2010 will mark dramatic shifts away from Microsoft’s monopoly to something else. Change is inevitable, and like IBM in the 1980s, Microsoft can’t hold back its destiny during this decade. The Windows era is over.

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

The Android Team today published a snapshot of the platform which shows the versions of Android most commonly in use. Though the platform is frequently criticized for being highly fragmented, there are three versions used far more than the rest.

Out of the six supported versions of Android, it is a close three-way split between 1.5 (37.2%), 1.6 (29.4%), and 2.1 (32.4%). Version 1.1, 2.0, and 2.0.1 combined only make up 1% of Android users.