Samsung showed off the Galaxy Tab 8.9 back in March at CTIA and yesterday they made the U.S. announcement official with a release date of 2 October. You will be able to find this new Android tablet for $469 for the 16GB model and $569 for the 32GB model this weekend. Samsung also revealed the Galaxy Player 4.0 and 5.0, essentially Android smartphones without the cellular phone capability.
As expected, Google has unveiled its mobile payments system, dubbed Wallet. With Google Wallet, smartphone users will be able to pay at stores that accept the system with their phones, but also redeem coupons, get special offers and so on. Eventually, they'll be able to store other data in their Wallet, IDs, loyalty cards, pretty much everything you can store in a real wallet.
Microsoft revealed on Wednesday that it has delayed its Windows Phone 7 release of Angry Birds.
The software giant had previously promised that Angry Birds would be made available on May 25. Joe Belfiore, who oversees Windows Phone Program Management, proudly announced at MIX11 last month:"Angry birds, i'm excited to tell you and everyone else who's following on the Internet, will be available on our Marketplace on May 25." Unfortunately Redmond has delayed the release to June 29. Microsoft says the delay is down to a better experience. "The shift in timing of "Angry Birds" as the final title in the Must Have Games lineup was a decision made to ensure we provide the best possible gaming experience on Windows Phone," said a Microsoft spokesperson.
Google News for mobile lets you keep up with the latest news, wherever you are. Today we're excited to announce a new feature in the U.S. English edition called "News near you" that surfaces news relevant to the city you're in and surrounding areas.
Location-based news first became available in Google News in 2008, and today there's a local section for just about any city, state or country in the world with coverage from thousands of sources. We do local news a bit differently, analyzing every word in every story to understand what location the news is about and where the source is located.
Now you can find local news on your smartphone. In the picture you can see an example of a "News near you" mobile section automatically created for someone in Topeka, Kansas...
The most audacious start-up pitches are those that propose changing people's communications habits. No matter how clever a company's technology or gorgeous an app's interface, getting users to adopt new modalities of communication is perhaps the hardest job in tech.
It's a social challenge as much as a technological one, which means that if you get it right, your technology spreads from person to person--virally, as the overused term calls it. Lately, social start-ups have been adopting strange, mutated viral models: Path is a social app that launched with a bizarrely limited way to join networks. Color opens you up to pop-up social networks based on physical proximity. Both clever but far outside most users' comfort zones.
When we launched Google Earth in 2005, most of us were still using flip phones. At the time, the thought of being able to cart around 197 million square miles of Earth in your pocket was still a distant dream. Last year, that dream came to fruition for Android users when we released Google Earth for Android. With the recent release of tablets based on Android 3.0, we wanted to take full advantage of the large screens and powerful processors that this exciting new breed of tablets had to offer.
Are you fond of treasure hunts? Did you know that there could be several treasure troves lying hidden somewhere near your home, school or office, ready to be discovered? Yes, we're talking about geocaching. If you're an Android or iOS user and are fascinated by the concept of the worldwide sport, then you'd be happy to know that Garmin has released the official client for its geocaching web service/community, OpenCaching.
Research In Motion kicked off its annual BlackBerry World conference with the unveiling of the BlackBerry 7 operating system, which will ship on the company's new RIM BlackBerry Bold 9900 and BlackBerry Bold 9930.
Apple has finally broken its silence on the iPhone tracking controversy.
The company explains in an FAQ, posted on its Web site this morning, that it is not stalking its iPhone customers, but is instead trying to get more accurate location information. It also admits that there is a bug in the software that is making the iPhone store too much information.