Nokia Lumia 900 Hard To Find On Launch Day, Still Selling Well [VIDEO]

Nokia Lumia 900 Hard To Find On Launch Day, Still Selling Well [VIDEO]
by Emily Price on Mashable

Nokia held a huge launch party for the Lumia 900 in NYC’s Times Square on Friday night. But when it came time for the phone’s release on Sunday it was hard to find the handset anywhere near where the celebration was.

According to New York Times writer Brian Chen, nearly all 39 AT&T stores located near Times Square were either closed for Easter Sunday, or did not answer phone calls when he called to inquire about the handset’s availability. The stores that were closed also played an automated message that advertised the availability of the iPhone 4S — but didn’t mention the Nokia Lumia 900′s existence.

The Lumia 900 handset runs on AT&T’s super-fast LTE network. The HTC Titan II is currently the only other Windows Phone smartphone that is capable of doing the same.

The Nokia smartphone sports a unique high-quality design, and has been a hit with reviewers, many who have called the handset the world’s best Windows Phone 7 handset.

The $99 Lumia 900 is Nokia and Microsoft’s best horse in the smartphone race, and both companies have a lot riding on its success. iPhone and Android have a stronghold in the smartphone market in the United States, and both companies need a winner to put both Nokia and Windows Phone on the map stateside.

Prior to its launch, AT&T said that the Lumia 900 would be “one of its biggest launches ever”. Advertising for the handset has likened it to the iPhone, and Nokia even launched a nationwide ad campaign called “smartphonbetatest” — implying that the all other smartphones prior to the launch of the 900 were just beta versions.

The smartphonebetatest site counted down to zero when the phone was supposed to be revealed. But the ultimate effect of it was somewhat dampened. The clock hit zero at least three times Friday evening, then added an arbitrary amount of time.

Launch day woes don’t seem to have affected Nokia’s sales of the Lumia 900, however. The phone was available for pre-order before Sunday, and made its way into the hands of customers over the weekend. The handset is also currently the top selling phone on Amazon (taking both the #1 and #2 slots), a coveted title definitely worth getting excited about.

What do you think about the Lumia 900 launch? Do you think Nokia, Microsoft, or AT&T should have made a bigger deal about it on Sunday, or was offering pre-orders for the phone enough? Tell us your thoughts in the comments.

Source: Mashable

AT&T Will Unlock Your Out-of-Contract iPhone Starting Sunday

AT&T Will Unlock Your Out-of-Contract iPhone Starting Sunday
by Mashable Video on Mashable

Wondering why AT&T’s new iPhone unlocking policy, in effect starting Sunday, is important? If you have an iPhone that’s out of contract, this is big news, especially if you’re an international traveler.

Source: Mashable

HTC One X review

HTC One X review
The HTC One X is a welcome return to form for HTC, says Matt Warman

HTC’s flagship new phone is big and beautiful – but at £35 a month or more on a two-year contract, it’s aiming to compete with top of the range handsets from Samsung and Apple and it needs to impress.
Even before you’ve turned the device on, it does. A scratch-resistant ‘Gorilla Glass’ 4.7” screen runs seemingly over the edges of a matt plastic back, and the 130g device is just 8.9mm thick. Switched on, the screen is the best currently available on an Android device and arguably even better than the iPhone. Colours are warm and images are sharp.
Key to using the phone, however, is the software rather than the hardware: so the fact that the One X has a processor that’s also faster than any other currently on the market is somewhat academic. Indeed, fast as the device is the main noticeable impact of that technology is its detrimental effect on battery life – heavy smartphone users will need to charge this during the day, perhaps even more so than the X’s rivals.
Of the features that stand out, however, first is the device’s excellent camera, which takes some of the sharpest images I’ve yet seen on any mobile phone and also offers easy editing features. Second is the integration with online storage system Dropbox – 25gb come free for two years, so you can store all your music, documents and photos without fear of ever losing them again. This may not be innovative but it’s certainly impressive and useful.
In a way, however, it’s the smaller features that make the One X so impressive – it runs the latest version of Google’s operating system, called Ice Cream Sandwich, but it’s been enhanced by HTC’s newly streamlined Sense interface. So Google offers users the chance to reject an incoming phone call and simultaneously send a text message saying ‘I’ll call you right back’. HTC adds an automatic reminder to actually do so. Users who also purchase the driving kit will find that the phone is the best satnav they’re likely to have used, thanks to big on screen buttons and live traffic information. Again, not innovative but beautifully done.
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Clever additional touches include building in a host of widgets, to add contacts, social media feeds or just simple access to document editing. There are even apps to turn your phone into a mirror or a torch, as well as excellent audio from Beats.
Is the One X as instantly intuitive as an iPhone? No. But does it offer more power and more possibilities? Yes. It’s the first phone of its generation and as such it’s the phone I’d buy right now because it's (arguably) the best phone on the market. It remains to be seen how long that will be the case, but it’s more than likely to hold its own against the coming competition.

HTC One X Specifications

Dimensions (mm)134.36 x 69.9 x 9.29

Weight (g)130

TouchScreen1280 x 720 HD resolution

Processor1.5 GHz quad core

Screensize (inches)4.7

RAM1GB

Internal memoryUp to 28GB

Operating systemAndroid 4.0 with HTC Sense 4.0

Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/htc/9187899/HTC-One-X-review.html

5 Charged After Chinese Teen Sells Kidney for iPhone, iPad

5 Charged After Chinese Teen Sells Kidney for iPhone, iPad
by Geekosystem on Mashable
Geekosystem is a Mashable publishing partner that aims to unite all the tribes of geekdom under one common banner. This article is reprinted with the publisher's permission.

When people say something costs “an arm and a leg,” they usually aren’t serious. After all, doesn’t it make more sense to do business in internal organs? You might say no, but others say yes, like the five people who are in trouble with the law after they assisted  a Chinese teenager who sold one of his kidneys to raise the money for a new iPhone and an iPad 2.

The recently charged include the doctor, staff, and other accomplices who  paid the boy $3,500 for the organ, and  kept the other $35,000 profit from its sale for themselves.

The teenager in question, a 17-year-old named Wang, is now one kidney short and a bit worse for the wear. He sold the kidney in April of 2011, and now he’s suffering from progressively worsening kidney failure. He did get his iDevices though, so the ploy worked. He even managed to keep it a secret from his mother until she asked how he’d paid. Apparently he’s not a very good liar.

Criminal charges are being brought against the surgical staff considering that the sale of human organs is illegal in China and has been since 2007. Yes, 2007. In 2006, this whole thing might have been shifty, in poor taste, and more than a little unfair, but also legal.

Meanwhile, Wang must really be hurting between the progressive kidney failure, the the release of the new iPad and iPhone 4S.

[via Wired]

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, TommL

This article originally published at Geekosystem here.

Sorry, Larry Page. Steve Jobs Really Wanted to Destroy Android

Sorry, Larry Page. Steve Jobs Really Wanted to Destroy Android
by Chris Taylor on Mashable

Steve Jobs passed into legend a little more than six months ago. Now it seems the arguments over his intentions for Apple are just getting started.

In the Jobs-approved biography by Walter Isaacson, the Apple founder is seen railing against Android toward the end of his life. Insisting that Google stole its look and feel from the iPhone’s iOS, Jobs vowed to declare “thermonuclear war” on Android. That’s quite an image.

Recently, Google CEO Larry Page has tried to play down that comment. In an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek, released Wednesday, Page said he thought Jobs’s attacks were “for show,” adding that “it’s useful for them to feel like they have an obvious competitor and to rally around that.”

Isaacson has fired back. In a Q&A session following his lecture at the historic Royal Institute in London, the biographer and former TIME editor insists that Jobs’s genuine passion on this topic was not to be underestimated.

“Our lawsuit is saying, ‘Google, you f___ing ripped off the iPhone, wholesale ripped us off.’ Grand theft,” Jobs told Isaacson in the book. “Make no mistake. They want to kill the iPhone. We won’t let them.”

He would not be swayed, not even by settlements. “It wasn’t a matter of money,” Isaacson explained. “He said: ‘You can’t pay me off, I’m here to destroy you.’”

What Page was actually trying to focus on in the Bloomberg interview was the fact that Jobs spent so much time with him toward the end, mentoring the young founder and CEO.

How, therefore, could their companies be anything but the best of friends?

Enter the Gates
But Page clearly hasn’t read the parts of the biography pertaining to another Jobs rival: Bill Gates.

The Microsoft founder could also be smiling and shaking Jobs’s hand one minute, and be the target of his fury over Windows “theft” the next.

That was part of Jobs’ genius, and also his weakness. He could be best friends with his worst enemies. (See also: Sculley, John.)

I’m not saying that Jobs railed at Page about Android in person the way he fumed about Windows. He was older, and wiser, and was clearly fond of the younger man, a prodigal genius with a killer product.

But Jobs’s fondness for Gates stayed as solid as his lifelong hatred of Windows. Clearly, he was capable of mentoring Page and plotting corporate strategy to destroy Android at the same time.

What’s the Beef?
Did Jobs have anything like a point?

Yes, from his perspective. Not at all, from Page’s.

Jobs was firm in his belief that Eric Schmidt — then Google CEO — had sat through Apple’s board presentations on the development of the iPhone, and been inspired to create a competitor. More than inspired, Jobs said.

Android was launched a year after the first iPhone. Schmidt left the Apple board a year after that, citing conflicts of interest between the companies. Jobs never stopped being furious with him.

To Googlers, the anger seems odd. After all, the search giant acquired Android Inc. in 2005, two years before the iPhone launch. At the time, it was known that both Google and Apple had strong interests in the mobile space.

But Jobs won that race with the iPhone, by a year. He basked in glory as the world went wild for it.

And then he saw suspiciously similar handsets with suspiciously similar operating systems, all of which were driven by a company run by a guy sitting on his board. Who knew a lot about the design of the product early in its life.

Even the most placid of CEOs might go thermonuclear in those circumstances. And Jobs — well, once he started a vendetta, the biography makes clear, it took a lot to make him stop.

He buried the hatchet with Windows, at least in a business sense, a mere 12 years after that feud started. But that was 1997, he had just returned to Apple, and the company was on life support.

Going by that reckoning, the earliest Page could have expected Jobs to quit his “thermonuclear war” on Android would be sometime in 2020.

What would that war have meant, in practice? A bunch more lawsuits, possibly. Ever more aggressive acquisitions and patents, very likely. Jobs focusing his genius design mind on making sure each iPhone iteration blew every Android handset out of the water, most definitely.

It would never have been for show. Never just to rally the troops. Given his obsession, Jobs’s strong distaste for the design of Android would have been the supercharged energy cell inside him. Had he lived, it never would have died.

Perhaps — depending on how Tim Cook steers the good ship Apple — it hasn’t.

Mobile Jobseeking is Going Mainstream [INFOGRAPHIC]

Mobile Jobseeking is Going Mainstream [INFOGRAPHIC]
March 31, 2012 by Lauren Hockenson on Mashable

Have you checked your company’s mobile job offerings recently?

While there are many people already using mobile to find their dream jobs, don’t be misunderstood — using a smartphone to check out job boards isn’t just for early adopters or technophiles. In fact, it’s quickly becoming a mainstream method of finding a lasting career.

According to this infographic by mobile job search and recruiting company JIBE — based on research done by marketing research company Kelton Research — more than 4 out of 5 of surveyed smartphone users would use an iPhone, Android, Blackberry or Windows phone to search for jobs. Of those, nearly half would actually apply to a job right from a smartphone. Given the number of American who own smartphones has surpassed 100 million mark, the level of jobseekers looking to potentially score a job right on their phones can be staggering.

So what does it all mean? Plain and simple: if your company doesn’t have a mobile-friendly job board, it’s time to begin building one as soon as possible. More and more jobseekers are turning to the convenience, simplicity and speed of mobile to access jobs on the fly. If your mobile application isn’t optimized to suit the needs of potential employees, there’s an opportunity to miss out on quality talent.

Take a look at the infographic below to learn more about how mobile is changing the way people are looking for jobs. Would you use mobile to find your new job, or integrate mobile into your company’s recruiting strategy? Let us know in the comments.

Infographic provided by JIBE.



article source: Mashable