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June 22, 2013

Mobility Techzone Week in Review

Well, summer is now officially upon us, and with summer perhaps some of you have made plans to spend some time traveling abroad. If so, dare we ask if you have made arrangements for how you will communicate with your friends, business associates and relatives back home while you are in foreign climes? We thought not…so we've put together a little mobile travel primer for you to prepare you for your international travel.

While we are on the subject of international destinations, just yesterday Samsung held an event in London at which it unveiled nine new products. Samsung reminds us of the energizer bunny these days - it just keeps going and going, delivering a seemingly endless parade of new products. Among the nine new products were some tablets, some ATIV Windows-based products and a new "mega-screen" Windows ATIV laptop sporting a 3,200 x 1,800 pixel display. We won't get to any of these until next week - we're just making note of them here. But that said, Samsung also managed to introduce yet another Galaxy S4 variant this week - this one claimed to support true next generation LTE-Advanced capabilities. It will initially only be available in South Korea - is it a real state of the art device.

Not to be outdone, Chinese vendor Huawei, which puts out a very interesting Ascend series of smartphones, is looking to own the world's thinnest smartphone crown. Towards that end it has introduced the 4.7 inch display Ascend P6, which comes in at all of 6.18 millimeters (0.24 inches) thin, which makes the company's former flagship Ascend P2 seem positively fat at 8.4 millimeters. Huawei has managed pack a quad-core processor clocked at 1.5GHz and other relatively high end features into the svelte case.

Quad core smartphones such as the Ascend P6 are the next big thing we'll see emerge that end up trickling down into lower prices. A new report from Berg Insight shows sales of high-end smartphones equipped with quad-core application processors reached 40 million units worldwide in 2012. We can of course expect much higher numbers for 2013, and next year we'll start to see quad core devices move downstream.

The media industry of course will be thrilled to help you turn that quad core processor into a TV. Through the Dyle Mobile TV mobile device solution, you will be able to turn that smartphone or tablet of yours into a portable TV. It will do so by combining mobile devices with peripheral tuning devices that will let an attached mobile device grab television broadcasts from the airwaves and turn them into convenient entertainment without eating up wireless data. Real television - quite a throwback in a way.

Of course you can always choose to remain in the more modern camp. For example, you can turn to Vuclip, an independent mobile video and media company. This week Vuclip announced that it has reached more than 80 million monthly unique mobile users worldwide. These numbers certianly back up the notion that video and media technology is continuing to grow with users and isn’t slowing down any time soon. On another front, Tango, a messaging app that is more than 120 million users strong, has been working hard to form strategic partnerships to benefit its users. In what one Tango representative calls “just the tip of the iceberg,” the company, which, up until now, has largely focused on video, unveiled its first entertainment partnerships.

Perhaps video and TV are no longer your thing - perhaps you prefer to text your time away. If that is the case you would be in some fine company indeed if you happen to also be a WhatsApp user. This week the company reported amazing new usage numbers - over a single period of 24 hours, WhatsApp has processed 27 billion messages, a massive step up from its previous best of 18 billion. That is a whopping large number of text messages!

Here is a question for you: let's say that you happen to be a fairly avid mobile shopper. And let's further say that you happen to have a particularly bad mobile shopping experience at any particular site. Following the bad experience would you abandon the site forever, ditch it for at least 3 to 6 months, provide negative comments about it through your social networks? In other words, if you have a bad mobile shopping experience will it more likely than not impact you in a highly negative way? According to a newly released Skava survey you certainly would be. Find out how you rank compared to your peers.

Have a great weekend!





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