Looking to purchase a new smartphone, but don’t want to wait around until the fall (at the earliest) for Apple to release a new iPhone? No worries, as there are countless state-of-the-art handheld devices available, Appolicious reports. In fact, there are so many smartphone options right now that the biggest challenge is choosing the best device for you amidst all of the clutter. Here are the five best smartphones to buy right now (that aren’t the iPhone).
Motorola Droid RAZR MAXX (Verizon): Before Apple forever changed how consumers view smartphones, Motorola’s thin and stylish RAZR was the hottest handheld device on the market. The 2007 debut of the iPhone exposed many of the RAZRs shortcomings, including average audio quality and poor battery life. This dulled sales and forced Motorola to discontinue the series for four years. In 2011, Motorola debuted the new Droid RAZR, a slim and sexy Android-running smartphone that still suffered from poor battery life…
Podcast Series: Innovations in Education
Explore the full series of eCampus News podcasts hosted by Kevin Hogan—created to keep you on the cutting edge of innovations in education.
Putting the APP in Apple: Does Apple own ‘app store’?
Apple (AAPL) iPhone may “own” the smartphone market by virtue of being the market leader in sales. And it may “own” the app market because hundreds of thousands of apps are available for the iPhone. But does Apple own the words “app store”? asks appolicious. Apple thinks so. But long-time rival Microsoft (MSFT) doesn’t. Todd Bishop at Seattle blog TechFlash said his homeboys are “fighting for the right to use those words for its own mobile application store.”
…Read More‘Big App’ is watching you, with iPhone worse offender than Android
Your smartphone may be secretly transmitting to “outsiders,” such as ad networks, your name, your location, your age, your gender, your phone number, your unique device number and other personal data without your knowledge or consent, appolicious reports. As part of a series of articles on privacy, Scott Thurm and Yukari Iwatani Kane reported in the Wall Street Journal that smartphones “don’t keep secrets. They are sharing this personal data widely and regularly.”
The reporters, reviving the spyware controversy in the new era of apps, examined 101 apps and found that 56 of them transmitted the smartphone’s unique device ID and 47 apps transmitted the phone’s location. Daniel Eran Dilger said in Apple Insider: “The findings might be news to some smartphone users, who are rarely presented with simple, straightforward information about individual apps’ privacy policy.” The limited survey–where Apple (AAPL) offers hundreds of thousands of apps for the iPhone–found: “iPhone apps transmitted more data than the apps on phones using Google (GOOG) Inc.’s Android operating system.”
For example, the reporters said the worst offender in the survey was textPlus 4 for texting on iPhone, which sent unique ID numbers to eight ad companies, along with age and gender to two. The popular music app Pandora transmitted age, gender, location and phone ID to ad networks……Read More
Fresh iPhone apps for Nov. 15: UberTwitter, Target for iPad, Demotivational Creator
Heading up today’s Fresh Apps is a cool new Twitter client that makes checking out links from your Twitter feed a little easier, reports appolicious. Read about that, and a couple of other cool apps, in the list below.
UbberTwitter (iPhone) Free: Here’s a free Twitter client that supports all the usual features of Twitter, like direct messages, lists and searches, neatly arranged in tabs at the bottom of the app. It’s a nice, clean interface that makes it easy to navigate. The app also includes a very cool feature called “UberView,” which allows you to check out links in a separate pane right in the app. It’s a nice alternative to other Twitter clients — which send you to the browser every time you tap a link — and lets you avoid having to load another app to see what your friends and followers find interesting…