As part of an industry that owes so much to Steve Jobs, we remember him on this day, the 58th anniversary of his birth, with great sadness but also with gratitude. Of Steve's many achievements, we particularly want to celebrate the Apple App Store, the venerable purveyor of iPhone software.
If you've come anywhere near a tech site in the last year or so, you've heard it all before. "iOS is getting stale compared to Android! It needs some new ideas!" Whether that's actually true is up for (heated) debate, but those with an open mind are usually willing to acknowledge that Apple and Google could afford to swap a few ideas when it comes to their mobile OSes.
Free iPhone and iPad apps from Apple's App Store pose a greater privacy risk than free apps from Google Play. That's the finding of the latest study by Appthority, which is in the business of evaluating mobile apps for companies.
Whenever Google releases a new version of Android for its Nexus devices, it doesn’t roll out to everyone at once. It may take several days before your device receives the update, but you don’t have to wait.
Note that this only works if an OTA (over-the-air) update is actually available – for example, if you’ve got a Nexus 4 running Android 4.2.1 and you haven’t yet received a notification to update to Android 4.2.2. This won’t help if you’re using an Android device that isn’t receiving updates.
The BYOD phenomenon is old news, with support from most companies. For IT organizations, that means ensuring proper security and management over the mobile devices employees are likely to use. In the last year, Apple's iPhone and iPad have become the new corporate standards due to high user satisfaction and superior security capabilities.
If you lose possession of an Android phone, your PIN or pattern unlock might not be enough to protect the sensitive data stored on it. Not, at least, after it’s spent an hour in a hacker’s freezer.
Having failed to carve out a place for itself in the post-PC era, Hewlett-Packard is now taking drastic measures — by adopting Google’s Android operating system to run a series of upcoming mobile devices.
It’s a bit of a Hail Mary pass for HP, which has fallen years behind its rivals in the mobile space. It’s also a big win for Google, which adds another powerful partner to the Android ecosystem.
Nexus 4 users are finally beginning to receive their Android 4.2.2 update, about 48 hours after it was first spotted on Galaxy Nexus, Nexus 7, and Nexus 10 devices. Users of LG and Google's latest Nexus handset may find themselves losing a desirable feature, though—AnandTech reports that an update to the phone's baseband software included in Android 4.2.2 appears to completely disable its partial, unofficial LTE support.
If you bought Verizon's first 4G phone, start checking for updates now: the carrier has finally approved the Android 4.0 update (codenamed Ice Cream Sandwich) for the HTC Thunderbolt. The only problem? The Thunderbolt has been on the market since March of 2011, and Ice Cream Sandwich came out seven months later in October—not exactly a great turn-around time.
Apple is starting to significantly lose ground in its attempts to squash competition from Android.
The late Steve Jobs, always one for believing his own marketing, declared what he called thermonuclear war on his old business partners Google and Samsung, ironically claiming that they nicked his ideas. One of his ideas was the rounded rectangle which would be news to Euclid who thought of it a few thousand years ago.
