Tim Conneally

Motorola Mobility's Atrix Android smartphone, announced separately by both AT&T and Motorola yesterday, is drawing crowds on the CES showfloor today. After talking to Motorola and getting some solid hands-on time with it, I can say it's an easy contender for the best announcement of the show.

The Atrix is not so much a smartphone as a dockable cloud computer, and without its impressive feature-enhancing docks, could have easily gone unnoticed against the dozens of tablet announcements coming from CES this year. Because without these docks, it would just be another Android smartphone; albeit one with mind-bending specs.

Continue reading →

Every year, the average megapixel count of consumer mobile devices takes an incremental hop upward. Last year, the most common mobile phone cameras hovered around 5 megapixels. The phones being debuted at CES 2011 seem to be sticking around 8 megapixel with 720p video capture capabilities.

But at the same time as their internal sensors are getting more sophisticated, they're also becoming more sophisticated remote viewscreens. Today, Samsung launched a line of "DIY" video security cameras that can broadcast to smartphone or connected TV apps located either within the camera's local network, or remotely.

Continue reading →

Motorola Mobility was very deliberate with news about its intentions to release a tablet. Back in September, CEO Sanjay Jha announced the company would have a product out in 2011, but wouldn't be rushing it, and then in December the company released something of a "diss" video, denigrating the other popular tablets.

At CES 2011's press day yesterday, the company officially announced its XOOM tablet and showed it off, but clearly didn't have a finished product on its hands. This is likely due to the unreleased nature of the OS it will be running, Android 3.0 "Honeycomb."

Continue reading →

The Federal Communications Commission's Wireline Competition Bureau has released its 2010 E-Rate Program and Broadband Usage Survey, which gathered data from E-rate funded schools and libraries to assess the current state of broadband in our education system. The "E-rate" is a discount on telecommunications services and Internet access that the Schools and Libraries Universal Service Support Program offers to eligible institutions.

The report collected the various broadband connection types and speeds across urban and rural schools, districts, libraries, and consortiums; and then polled the administrators about whether they felt their speed and coverage were adequate.

Continue reading →

At a pre-keynote briefing Wednesday, Microsoft unveiled Surface 2.0, the company's newest build of its touchscreen display that has thus far been employed mostly in signage and kiosk interfaces.

The first generation of Surface utilized cameras to sense where the user was touching the screen, and this made it a gigantic, immobile table. Now, in partnership with Samsung and AMD, Surface is only 4" thick, and it comes with the biggest piece of Corning's Gorilla Glass that has ever been bonded to an LCD screen. It's not unlike a big smartphone, and because it is so much thinner, it can now be mounted upon vertical surfaces.

Continue reading →

The freshly spun-off Motorola Mobility has made a huge impact at CES 2011 with the new Android-powered Atrix 4G, a dual-core Android smartphone with 1GB of RAM that can be docked in a multimedia desktop dock or an 11" notebook dock, making it a full-blown Android PC either way.

Atrix 4G, simply stated, is the most powerful smartphone that has ever been announced. It has a dual-core Nvidia Tegra 2 processor, 1GB of RAM, support for up to 48GB of storage, a 4" (960 x 540) screen, 5 megapixel flash camera and front-facing VGA cam, HSPA+ mobile broadband, 802.11b/g/n, and Android 2.2 with MotoBLUR.

Continue reading →

Web retailer Amazon.com is launching its own Android app store both for Android devices and for the Web. Wednesday, the company opened the beta of its developer portal, inviting Android appmakers to enroll in the program and submit their apps for approval.

There may be one "official" Android Market that is run by Google, but that doesn't mean Google necessarily owns the Android application trade. Thanks to the mobile OS's open source underpinnings, there are many third-party app stores designed by carriers, manufacturers, and software companies. Some companies that have released devices running on Android have also created app stores exclusive to their devices.

Continue reading →

On Monday, just a couple of days before the International Consumer Electronics Show for the year 2011 takes place, chipmaker Intel revealed the specs for its long-awaited second generation Core i3, i5, and i7 processors and the related chipset family code named "Sandy Bridge." Intel's 32nm process chips will be the replacement for the Nehalem architecture that has been in use since 2008.

The most noteworthy qualities of the Intel Core 2011 chips come from their new construction, which integrates the CPU, GPU, and a multi-purpose I/O controller on the same little piece of silicon. What makes this especially interesting is that early testers of the chips say the integrated graphics processor (called either HD 2000 or HD 3000) can actually outperform certain low-level discrete graphics cards. Intel today highlighted the chips' graphical capabilites with "Intel Clear Video HD" for high def, and "Intel InTru 3D" for stereoscopic Blu-Ray playback.

Continue reading →

After trading closes down today, Motorola Incorporated is expected to begin distributing shares of its newly spun-off mobile devices company known as Motorola Mobility (MMI). This split has been in preparatory stages for the last three years, and this marks the final stages of the separation. After all of the common stock for the new company has been distributed, Motorola Inc. intends to change its name to Motorola Solutions Inc (MSI.)

Motorola Mobility's CEO and Chairman will be Dr. Sanjay Jha, who has been in the position of co-CEO with Greg Brown since 2008. Prior to joining Motorola, Jha was the COO of Qualcomm Inc. Motorola Mobility's executive staff will also include Mark Rothman as Chief Financial Officer; John Bucher as Chief Strategy Officer; and Geoffrey Roman as Chief Technology Officer.

Continue reading →

Lake Superior State University, noted for being the smallest public university in the state of Michigan with a student body of only 3,000, has released a list of words and phrases it has "banished" for the year of 2010. While many of the banished phrases are terms that are abused by media and marketers, some of the terms that top the list are actually those most commonly used by the anonymous masses.

The Lake Superior State University 2011 List of Banished Words is topped by "Viral," the term once used to describe a marketing strategy that turned an ad's viewer into a "carrier" of a marketing message, it has now grown to mean anything that gains online popularity in a sudden, explosive fashion.

Continue reading →

Web retailer Amazon.com has released a few end of the year lists that show what people were buying in 2010. Among its "holiday hot sellers" list, Amazon said Smith Micro's Anime Studio Debut 7 and Manga Studio Debut 4 were two pieces of software that were given the most as gifts, along with Adobe Photoshop Elements 9.

When looking at the rising tide of app store-based software distribution, the popularity of netbooks and ultra slim PCs with no optical drives, and the hype surrounding smartphones, tablets, and Web terminals like Google's Chrome OS, boxed software like these would appear to be under serious threat of extinction. But good old fashioned boxed software serves a major purpose and has a specific group of consumers to whom it appeals.

Continue reading →

One of the major advantages Barnes and Noble's Nook e-reader offered over Amazon's Kindle was the ability to lend other users e-books that you had purchased. Today, Amazon closed that gap when it announced Kindle Book Lending.

Just like Barnes and Noble's Nook, Kindle users can now share certain books they have purchased with friends for a period of 14 days. From the "Manage Your Kindle" menu in your Amazon account, you can select "loan this book," and then enter the recipient's e-mail address and name. They do not have to own the Kindle hardware, and can read the book in any of the free Kindle applications. If one receives an e-mail alerting you that someone has loaned you a book, you have seven days to initiate the loan and start the 14 day loan period.

Continue reading →

An Android-based Trojan called "Geinimi" has been discovered in the wild, mobile security company Lookout now warns. The Trojan is capable of sending personal information to remote servers and exhibits botnet-like behavior, the security company says.

Geinimi originated in China, and is being distributed inside applications and games downloadable in third-party Android app stores. Once the application is launched on the user's smartphone, the trojan collects location data, as well as the device's IMEI and IMSI numbers, and a list of all the apps the user has installed on his device. It then attempts to contact a remote server every five minutes to send this information.

Continue reading →

Popular instant messaging, voice and video chat client Skype today released a version for iOS that supports video calling on the iPhone and iPod Touch.

With the updated iOS application, users can make video calls to desktop versions of Skype as well as to other iOS devices over Wi-Fi or 3G mobile data connections.

Continue reading →

2010 was a big year for Google's Android mobile operating system, as it moved at a lightning pace from a minority position into the position of most popular operating system in the United States. Still, when retrospectives are put together for "best apps of the year" lists, editors often make choices that seem obvious. We've put one together for 2010 that hopefully avoids the more self-explanatory choices.

Moodagent-- Even though it's frequently chided for being weak in the gaming department when compared to iOS, Android has far more ground to gain against it in the MP3 player category. With the many OEM-skinned media players, the built-in one sometimes looks unremarkable. That's why third party media management apps on Android is a category worth paying attention to. Moodagent is a playlist-creation app that takes the music stored on your Android device and categorizes each song by its "feel." The user then sets sliders labeled "Sensual," "Tender," "Happy," "Angry" and "Tempo," and playlists appropriate to the mood are built according to its settings.

Continue reading →