Smartphones

For many smartphone manufacturers and carriers, the Apple iPhone is the great, white elephant in the room. Though they might not want to acknowledge it, the iPhone has certainly changed the game and for better or worse, it's become the gold standard to which a lot of people compare other touch-screen phones.

While most of the competition might be content to let their products speak for themselves, Verizon has made a bold move by single-handedly calling out the iPhone and AT&T in its iDon't and "There's a map for that" TV commercials. The … Read more

Want great software for your mobile phone? Keep up the complaints. That was the message at a Tuesday session of the BlackBerry Developer Conference here in San Francisco aimed at developers. But it's a dictum that applies to all smartphone owners.

In the symbiotic relationship between the application developer and the user, a well-placed critique is key to a good programmer improving their mobile application. The motto of the squeakiest wheel getting the most grease may seem obvious, but the importance of user feedback becomes even clearer when articulated in dollar signs and numbers.

A single-star rating for an application on a review site or storefront can severely limit its chances of getting downloaded, and therefore of making money.

"This is the curse of the one-star," said session speaker Stephen King (not that Stephen King), CEO of app testing company Mob4Hire.

His company's research suggests that the bulk of users feel comfortable downloading new mobile software that gets four stars or above. With 69 percent of people discovering apps based on rankings, reviews, and friend recommendations, and the mobile app industry growing 26 percent year over year, according to Juniper Research, there's real money to be made or lost. Addressing peoples' complaints isn't just a best business practice; it may directly affect the bottom line.… Read more

In an interesting move, Samsung announced on Tuesday that it will launch its own mobile operating system called Bada in December, giving developers an open platform to create new apps for Samsung's upcoming phones.

The name Bada, which means ocean in Korean, was chosen to represent the "limitless variety" of potential apps that could be created on the platform and its goal is to bring the smartphone experience to everyone. Samsung said Bada will offer a developer-friendly environment particularly in the area of Web services and promises a rich user interface. In addition, Bada will give mobile … Read more

A few months ago, e-mail search app Xobni told us they were creating a version for BlackBerry. At the BlackBerry Developer Conference in San Francisco on Monday, we got a look at it.

Xobni on the Windows PC is an Outlook add-on that quickly finds e-mail messages and attachments. On BlackBerry, Xobni will integrate with your e-mail account, where it will extract addresses, phone numbers, and social networking details to automatically create a secondary address book for your phone. You'll be able to use Xobni for BlackBerry to quickly find contacts--including those you have not physically added to the … Read more

"OpenGL ES" and "Eclipse" may not mean much to you if you're not an application developer, but ordinary BlackBerry owners will soon be able to benefit from the string of announcements uncovered on Monday at RIM's second, annual BlackBerry Developer Conference.

BlackBerry-maker RIM announced on Monday enhancements to its BlackBerry application development platform--including four APIs for developers to more easily integrate ads, payment services, geolocation, and push notifications for third-party developers.

What does that mean for you? The new tools and features for developers should make it easier for them to create richer apps and do so faster. For instance, new support for OpenGL ES, a graphics API, makes it possible for developers to create 3D games for BlackBerry. Electronic Arts (EA) hopped on stage to demo the car-racing game Need for Speed-Shift on the Storm. The game includes new touch controls, like swiping to activate a speed boost or touching the screen to apply the brakes.

Very soon you'll start seeing visual themes and widgets available for purchase and download in BlackBerry's App World. RIM's new BlackBerry Theme Studio 5.0 will let developers include ringtones in themes. As a result, a theme you download through App World might replace your default ringtone with one that matches the visual theme, like the "Batman" theme song to mirror your "Batman" wallpaper. The ringtones sound very cool, but are limited to BlackBerry phones running the 5.0 operating system or higher.

In addition to finding themes and widgets in the App World for the first time, you'll soon be able to buy premium content not only through PayPal, the current purchasing model, but in 2010, through your monthly phone bill.… Read more

J'adore France and the French people. But I'm pretty disappointed with Musee du Louvre, a free but painfully brief virtual tour of the famous museum.

The app consists of four main sections. In Louvre: The Visit, you get a video tour of seven well-known areas of the museum, including The Venus de Milo and Mona Lisa.

However, each "tour" lasts less than 20 seconds, and the default language is French. If you tap the screen to bring up the controls and then tap the language icon, you can select English (or German or Japanese), but there'… Read more

"Come on, Flixster. We know you can do better than that."

Those are the words I wrote on Friday to sum up a review of Flixster's movie app for BlackBerry phones. The trouble is, I goofed. I was apparently a day early, reviewing the previous Flixster for BlackBerry, which did deserve the critiques I dished out, and not the Flixster update that was set to release on Saturday (we still don't see it in the BlackBerry App World as of Sunday, but keep checking the store and this post for an update). A re-review--or rather, a … Read more

It's not like us to get too excited about an iPhone case, but this one shines--literally--because it's the very device I was wishing for last month while traveling in Europe.

Beamer, as the name connotes, is an iPhone case with a built-in LED light you can turn on to use as both a flashlight and a camera flash. Just the thing I needed when I wanted to shoot the Leaning Tower of Pisa at night with my iPhone, having left my real camera back at our hotel.

And it sure would have helped in Paris when we returned … Read more

Updated 11/8/09 at 9:15 pm PT: This post evaluated Flixster's Movies 1.0 app for BlackBerry phones. It turns out, we got a little bit ahead of ourselves on this review--but here's the hands-on review for the update to the app described below, Flixster's Movies 1.1.6 for BlackBerry.

We were excited to hear that Flixster's popular iPhone movie app was making the jump to BlackBerry. Unfortunately, not all apps dive as elegantly into other mobile platforms. Flixster's Movies app is one of them.

The free Movies by Flixster app for BlackBerry … Read more