HP has spent the last year or so, as the new owner of the WebOS mobile operating system, alternately making arbitrary decisions about the platform's future and making sure to not release any nice hardware for it. After the company ignominiously shut down WebOS for good this summer, we thought that was it for the best smartphone platform nobody used - but HP has surprised us with an announcement that WebOS will be going open-source.
News regarding Carrier IQ, a third-party service loaded on certain smartphones that's capable of tracking users and even recording keystrokes, has been spreading rapidly in the past few days.The world is still learning more about what the service specifically does, but the latest news is that references to Carrier IQ were found in Apple's iOS, the operating system used by the iPhone and iPad. Here's what you need to know.
The lab-on-a-chip model has been praised as the future of simplified diagnostic medicine - place a sample of saliva, blood, or urine on a small chip-like device that traps disease biomarkers, and send it off to a lab for analysis and diagnosis. But a couple of researchers at the Korea Advanced Institute for Science and Technology think we could simplify that process even further by doing the lab work on the touchscreens of our smartphones.
A new tool called Euclid Analytics is the physical version of Google Analytics, recording and analysing physical traffic instead of website visitors. The startup's cofounder, Scott Crosby, helped to build the technology of its internet counterpart. But instead of reading IP addresses, Euclid observes physical visitors by listening to smartphone Wi-Fi signals.
The Lumia 800 is supposed to be kismet: Nokia makes great hardware, but terrible software. Windows Phone is great software, but the only phones that use it are yawn-worthy plastic rectangles. The Lumia, Nokia's first Windows Phone, is finally here, and if it's not as, well, new as some might have hoped, it's still a very, very fine smartphone--probably the best Windows Phone out there, which should make it high on your list if you're looking to buy a new phone this year (and you live in Europe and/or are rich).
If you've ever tried to use the Nuance dictation features that came out in the last iOS update, you'll probably have found it to be a little hit and miss. Certainly not a feature you can actually use with certainty. We thought for a moment there we Aussies might just be forgotten, but thankfully there's a whole bullet point dedicated to us in the next 5.0.1 update.
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