And then there were four

When Hewlett-Packard announced in April of 2010 that it planned to acquire Palm for $1.2 billion, I sent the following email to a friend on the software team at Palm: “Congrats on the stay of execution, buddy. I give it 18 months.” Of course I was jabbing him and later went on to offer more sincere congratulations in subsequent emails, but as they say, many a word of truth is spoken in jest. Here we are less than 16 short months after HP’s announcement, and webOS is no more. Well, to be fair, HP hasn’t yet said exactly what it will do with webOS: “HP reported that it plans to announce that it will discontinue operations for webOS devices, specifically the TouchPad and webOS phones. HP will continue to explore options to optimize the value of webOS software going forward.” Read on for my thoughts.

Editorial: Google, Microsoft and the incredible shifting mobile landscape

In two years, we’ll mark the thirtieth anniversary of the first commercially available cellphone — built by Motorola, incidentally. Given this week’s big news from Google, and other big events that we can only presume are yet to come, those two years may also prove to be some of the most interesting yet for the mobile industry.

One of the more telling things about Google’s acquisition announcement on Monday was the response from Motorola’s competitors (and Google’s partners). Immediately following the news, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, HTC and LG all came out to praise Google’s commitment to “defending Android,” which presumably also means that they remain committed to using Android. What’s more, as Google itself has made explicitly clear recently, it’s not just defending Android as any company would defend its own product, but defending it against what it’s described as “hostile” and “organized” threat from Apple and Microsoft (and, to a lesser extent, Oracle).

Does This Mutual Fund Manager Know Something Analysts Don’t?

With all the doom and gloom coming from some financial analysts Gokulesh pointed out an interesting change in the last quarter. The Street is reporting that “The Yacktman Fund’s Donald Yacktman, The the mutual-fund manager with the best record in the past 10 years” has taken out a large stake in RIM during the second quarter. The Yachtman Fund has purchased 1.5 million shares of RIMM stock worth $43.3 million during the second quarter… They have also purchased quite a few shares of other companies that are being hammered on the stock market including Cisco, HP, Microsoft and News Corp.

It seems like not everybody is buying the “RIM is in a downward spiral” analyst predictions and betting big on RIM’s continued growth!

via:bbreview

Nielsen: Apple top U.S. smartphone vendor, Android top OS in Q2

Android continued on its warpath this past quarter, once again showing gains as it retained its position as top smartphone platform in the United States. Nielsen on Thursday issued its second-quarter smartphone market share data for the U.S., and Android finds itself atop the list again with 39% of the market. IOS remains in the No. 2 spot with 28% and RIM slid to 20% in the second quarter. Windows Mobile and Windows Phone combined to take 9% of the market, while webOS and Palm OS combined to account for just 2% of the market. Nokia’s Symbian OS also held a 2% share in the June quarter. On the list of top vendors last quarter, Apple held its lead by a wide margin with 28% of the total U.S. market. HTC devices accounted for 14% of Android market and 6% of the Windows Phone/Windows Mobile market, making it the nation’s top vendor in both categories and No. 2 overall. Samsung owned 8% of the Android market and 2% of the Windows Phone/Windows Mobile market in the U.S. last quarter, while Motorola topped Samsung’s Android share with 11% to slide into the No. 2 spot among Android device manufacturers.

Read

BGR

Android’s U.S. smartphone OS market share plateaus in latest Nielsen report

According to new data released by Nielsen on Tuesday, Android’s market share has hit a plateau in the United States. Android remains the most popular operating system — ahead of iOS and BlackBerry OS, and Windows Mobile — with a 36% share of the market. However, that figure is on a par with the 37% share it had in Nielsen’s last report, released in April, when the operating system made a 22% leap over the study released in June 2010. Nielsen also found that 26% of U.S. mobile users own an iPhone, 23% carry a BlackBerry, 9% use Windows Mobile, 2% carry HP webOS devices, 2% have a Symbian-powered phone, and just 1% have a Windows Phone 7 device. Android users devour the most data, too, downloading an average of 582MB of data each month, compared to the 492MB of data that iOS users download and the 448MB of data HP webOS users consume. Hit the jump for a two more charts reflecting data from Nielsen’s report.

Research In Motion Under Investigation for Potential Federal Securities Law Violations

RIM has announced today that law firm Holzer Holzer & Fistel, LLC has launched an investigation for possible federal securities law violations. The firm claims that RIM had made false and misleading statements regarding some aspects of their business. The main focus of the investigation is if RIM knew but failed to disclose that they were having issues that were negatively impacting their margins and overall business. The statements were said to be made between December 16, 2010 and April 28, 2011. There are no other details for now but we’ll see how this all pans out in the coming days. Only fair to note however, Holzer Holzer & Fistel, LLC pulled the same actions against Palm before HP acquired them.

Source: Reuters

Humorous FedEx Office Print & Go commercial features two BlackBerry Torches

[ youtube video link for mobile viewing ]

I ran across this commercial for FedEx Office Print & Go today, and while it’s not new exactly, I thought it was humorous as well as informative. Who can’t use a laugh on a Monday, right? This ad features a couple of business men at FedEx Office, trying to print a document from their boss, using their BlackBerry Torches. It’s a clever ad, and reminded me that I want to try this app out sometime. After watching the tutorial video for HP ePrint and seeing how easy it looks to print documents from your device right to the copier at FedEx Office, without ever having to wait for an employee to do it for you or rent the computers there to get to your document, I can really see how this would be a valuable application for anyone on-the-go that needs to print something quick. You can check out more information at the links below.

More information/download the HP ePrint App from BlackBerry App World
Read about HP’s ePrint Mobile Printing
Read about FedEx Office Print & Go

via:cb

Glide Cloud Apps and Services Available for QNX, Android Honeycomb and WebOS

Glide is a interesting cloud storage service that has recently announced support for QNX, iOS, Android Honeycomb and webOS, allowing for sharing and collaboration between the iPad2, HP Touchpad, Motorola XOOM, Samsung Galaxy, BlackBerry Playbook and other tablets. With Glide, you can securely share videos, music, documents and photos, as well as access, edit and share files that are synced or uploaded from your PC, Mac and other devices. Glide offers 30GBs of free storage which makes it a pretty enticing solution for anyone looking for a cloud storage service. This is definitely something we’re going to try out when the PlayBook hits. Speaking of which, the iPad 2 is going on sale shortly for East coast.

Check out Glide over at glidelife.com.

 

via: BBCool

SXSW: HP ePrint – Fully Integrated to BlackBerry First

To survive South by Southwest (SXSW) 2011, I needed mobile apps. Whether I was sampling a new group chat option, sharing contacts through Twitter or just checking an online map for directions I relied heavily on mobile apps. And so did just about everyone else, as evidenced by all of the chins stuck to chests with lighted faces. But for those of us with BlackBerry smartphones, the new and promoted apps at this event were mostly out of our reach. I lost track of how many new mobile app companies who said, “it’s available on [x], but BlackBerry is on the roadmap…”.

Not so with HP. Hewlett-Packard had a major presence at SXSW, with an enormous mobile home encampment next to the convention center and a big booth in the tradeshow, and best of all they shared with me their “it’s integrated to BlackBerry FIRST” ePrint solution. I interviewed Andy Lisoskie, Marketing Strategist at HP.

The HP ePrint solution let’s a user print by using email. The wireless printer has an email address associated with it, and when you send to that address then the email, or Office file, PDF or photo attachment is printed. ePrint has been around for a little bit now, but HP has ramped it up considerably. For starters, they now have multiple lines of printers that support ePrint. That means multiple form factors and price points to choose from on the wireless printing side.

Even though any device that can send an email works with ePrint, the really cool thing for BlackBerry users is that the HP ePrint app, available for free on App World, is designed to work right inside the context sensitive menu on your smartphone. When you’re in an email and click the Menu button, one of the options (after installing ePrint) is “Print”. If you choose that option, you can then search for public printers nearby that support ePrint. There are thousands of locations, like FedEx stores, Hilton hotels and more.

According to Mr. Lisoskie, HP ePrint sends the documents to “the cloud” and renders them automatically so that they print appropriately. However, it does not fix your poor photography or misspellings. He also denies my allegations that HP is working on 4G compatible wireless ink. Anyone know who is?

For businesses who want to enable ePrint within the company, rest assured that HP has carefully planned for in-network (behind the firewall) installations, security management, sharing and more through Enterprise ePrint.

For business owners who want to offer for-cost kiosk printing to customers, you can reach out to HP directly to find out how to get started.

And for end users, just go get the app and get started. If you’re setting up a home computer to print with an HP ePrint printer, there are options during the Wizard setup to enable the service, generate your printer’s email address and so on. Sorry grandma, the printer is a poor penpal…it only writes back to acknowledge when you send in a print.

To find out nothing about wireless ink, but tons more information on HP ePrint visit HP here. There is also a great demo on using ePrint from your BlackBerry smartphone here. (Flash player required)

Andy Rosic is Player 01 (CEO) of Thumb Arcade. Thumb Arcade creates mobile and social games and apps that no two thumbs can resist. Andy blogs on the dark side of marketing and advertising. He leads and follows on Twitter @arosic.

 

via: bbcool

How RIM Can Win the Next Great Tablet Race – PlayBook in Cars From Factory

[ youtube video link for mobile viewing ]

It was still launch day when the folks at SoundMan Car Audio custom mounted an Apple iPad 2 into the dashboard of a Ford F-150 (see video above). The end result is definitely impressive and it makes for an interesting argument, as our friends at TiPb pointed out…

The iPad 2 is the perfect car audio and entertainment system, the way these guys have installed it, complete with charging, video out to rear screens and the perfect fit and finish has really got us thinking. Car manufacturers really need to stop doing customised LCD panel audio and sat-nav systems and just adopt the iPad 2. This should be an extra in any good car manufacturer’s price list! It makes so much sense and offers so much more.

It’s almost time for me to replace my old clunker, so I’ve been doing some browsing in my spare time and have to agree that I’m not really sold on the car manufacturer dashboard LCD audio/sat-nav systems that are shipping on most automobiles today (at least the ones I’m looking at). That’s a somewhat dumb thing to say of course, as a lot of these systems are powered by QNX which is now owned by Research In Motion and forms the foundation of the BlackBerry Tablet OS, but there in lies the opportunity!

The more I learn about QNX, the more I’m convinced it’s the Chuck Norris of operating systems (on twitter I hear it can win a game of Connect Four in three moves and play a two hour movie in two minutes!). In the automotive environment, it’s not really the current underlying OS in these dashboard LCD systems that is the problem, but rather that there are too many cooks in the kitchen wanting to cook with cheap ingredients. Each manufacturer wants their own UI, their own unique features, and wants to do it as low cost as possible. While tossing iPads into cars from factory and passing off the cost to the consumer as an added feature is one possibilty as noted by TiPb, beyond media and entertainment I think integrating the iPad into the entire car’s computer systems would likely be a bit of a challenge. On the other hand, QNX already has the ability to connect with literally everything in a car (see QNX Car Application Platform). As consumers, what we need to see happen next is for the RIM/BlackBerry influence to enter the automobile and tie it all together with native in-dashboard support for a tablet device such as the BlackBerry PlayBook (I’m guessing we’d have to wait for the next generation).

Here’s my dream… in step by step form: