The Kindle Fire is reportedly getting a software update within the next couple of weeks, according to the New York Times. It will be an over-the-air update intended to improve scrolling, poor browser performance, parental controls and security issues. According to the report, Amazon has had a plethora of user complaints on the reviews of the device and the press has been less than friendly to the Fire. The question becomes: can a software upgrade really heal what is failing in the Fire?
This was bound to happen for Amazon. The Fire is a device made on second-tier hardware trying to fork Android Gingerbread into a seven-inch form factor with a toned-down approach based off media consumption. The Fire is an ambitious project trying to work off a scaled-down approach.
Owners of iPads, iPhones and iPods running the latest version of iOS have not yet had the option to jailbreak their devices in a way that's at all worth the trouble. For those who are dying to break free of Apple's restrictions, an untethered jailbreak appears to be on the way.
On Friday, France-based iOS hacker @pod2g uploaded a video showing that he was successful in jailbreaking iOS 5.0.1 running on his iPhone 3G. This came about a month after he announced on Twitter that he had discovered a bug in iOS 5 that would make a jailbreak possible.
This week, serendipity engine StumbleUpon launched an entirely redesigned site, complete with a new logo and a focus on topic features. A few days later, Twitter announced big updates to its user interface, completely changing the experience to focus more on a supposedly simpler user interface that tries to change hashtags from a symbol for trending topics to a space for discovery. The race for top discovery engine is on. What's more notable is that this entire experience is focused on grabbing the mobile user's attention.
This was more or less an inevitable outcome: the Samsung Galaxy Nexus on Verizon is not going to launch with the Google Wallet. Verizon has said that it is not blocking the application but rather that the company is working with Google to make sure that Google Wallet is up Verizon's technical and security standards. Does that mean we will see the Google Wallet on the Galaxy Nexus eventually? Perhaps, but the whole scenario is a series of convoluted partnerships and expectations.
This is exactly what we thought would happen to the Google Wallet. As we noted earlier this year, the first partners are losing their exclusivity by the end of the year. It looks more likely now that the exclusivity lasted until the Galaxy Nexus was launched. Either way, there are too many players in the ecosystem and all want a piece of the action.
Hewlett-Packard has finally had enough with trying to figure out what to do with its failed acquisition of mobile platform webOS. So, it is doing the easiest thing possible to get out from under the burden of supporting the platform: turning it loose to the open source community.
In its press release announcing the open sourcing of webOS, HP said all the right things. It will continue to invest and be an active participant. It will provide inclusive governance to avoid fragmentation. It will be purely open source. Those almost seems to be conflicting statements. HP may think that it is trying to create a new Android ecosystem, but HP and Google's approaches to mobile are going in opposite directions.
Picture this: You're in a new city and forgot to research its art scene before arriving. Does your iPhone have a solution to this first world problem? Thanks to the new app, ArtSpotter, it just might.
ArtSpotter was created by UK-based Raphaëlle Heaf, who has worked in the contemporary art world for more than 10 years. This ambitious new app marries her love of mapping, architecture, tech and art. Thus far, ArtSpotter has picked up funding from Ignite100, the largest accelerator program in Europe, one angel investor and two founding galleries.
ArtSpotter just launched in the Apple App Store on December 1, so it's still new and growing. For now, the top ArtSpotter cities are London, Berlin, Paris, Munich and New York because these are cities that Heaf herself knows best. ArtSpotter is also working with events in the UK (the London Art Fair is one of them), and also speaking with others in Europe and the U.S. If ArtSpotter can aggregate data and content from the right places, this app has a chance at reaching its goal.
LevelUp, the mobile payments wing of location-based gaming startup SCVNGR, is launching a mobile Web app today to compliment its Android and iOS apps. LevelUp has been available in San Francisco, Boston, New York and Philadelphia and the Web app should help make it one of the most ubiquitous options for mobile payments available.
This is a smart move for LevelUp because it will free it from the confines of the native platforms. The company uses QR codes instead of NFC or other mobile payments methods to combine merchants and users meaning that any screen that can display black and white and connect to the Internet.
Personal cloud provider Box is updating its iPad and iPhone applications today with new capabilities that should help propel the company as one of the premier storage solutions for mobile devices. The iOS apps have an all-new code base that Box promises will make the apps faster, more stable and easier to navigate.
The New York Times released a new iPhone app this afternoon and it looks great - if you're a Times subscriber at $15 per month. Will a large number of people pay that much to access high quality content about the public interest in a mobile app? I'm not so sure they will. Maybe that doesn't matter though.
The app is nicely designed and integrates a wide variety of features, some of which are available for free. It's both cool and very frustrating. Why aren't more apps like this? Why is the paper of record paywalling its best content about a subject of such great public importance?
Today Facebook announced that it is launching an update to its Android app that it is "two times faster than previous Android apps." This update looks a lot like the Facebook iPad app, all the way down to the Nearby option, which was previously called Places and, previous to that, Check-In. Messages and notifications start at the top of the screen, which should make navigation around the app much simpler. The menu is now located on the left-hand side of the app. Users don't have to switch back-and-forth from the Home screen just to see events, news feed and messages and other features. Now everything is located in one space.
Slowly but surely, the world's biggest social network is beginning to converge its platform UIs. The big question is, will users like the new UI?
