photo credit: iPad 2 Event

The much touted iPad 2 is rumored to be revealed today in San Francisco at 1:00 pm. Special invitations for the event were sent out with a sneaky-looking iPad peeking out from behind the date. Rumors are flying about just what the new features will be. According to Catharine Smith, The Huffington Post, MacLife offers a sobering prediction: “While many may be disappointed if Apple doesn’t ’shock and awe’ with the next iPad, the reality is that the company’s tablet is leading the market by such a wide margin at this point, Cupertino can still afford to coast a little bit — at least until September, when the rumor mill claims we’ll likely see a more spectacular iPad 2 with the bells and whistles that make us all swoon.”

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photo credit: Xoom Wins Performance

The Motorola Xoom, Google’s golden child Android 3.0 tablet, is great on performance testing. However, according to Aditya Bansod, Senior Director of Product Management with Sencha, a vendor that created the Sencha Touch HTML5 application framework for mobile Web apps, “The Xoom browser is not ready for prime-time — even for ‘HTML4′.” This is a major disappointment for Motorola, who touted the Xoom as the first “real Android tablet.” The Android 3.0 OS was built specifically for the tablet platform. According to Bansod, the results of a series of tests to see how the Xoom browser conforms to and performs with emerging Web standards such as HTML5 and Cascading Style Sheets 3 (CSS 3) for both developers and consumers are not encouraging.

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photo credit: It’s a Mobile World

There were 81 million Smartphones sold world-wide in the third quarter of 2010 alone. According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, “Smartphones accounted for nearly one in five mobile phones sold that quarter. The chiefs of Verizon Communications Inc. and AT&T Inc. think Smartphones could account for nearly three of every four phones sold by the middle of the decade. Between the emergence of the iPad, apps, Android Smartphones and the introduction of 4G networks, 2010 was the year the computer truly went mobile.” Welcome to 2011 and the mobile world. Read the rest of this entry »

photo credit: Universal Cell Phone Charger

Mobile phone users in the European Union will soon have universal chargers for many of their devices. According to an article by Don Reisinger, CNET.com, “DigitalEurope, the continent’s largest digital tech organization, has delivered a sample of a universal mobile phone charger to European Commission vice president Antonio Tajani. The EU said that the sample now paves the way for consumers to get their hands on devices that support the universal charger in the very near future.”

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photo credit: Pay-by-Smartphone

Rumor has it that Apple is planning to introduce pay-by-phone on the next generation of iPhones and iPads. The new technology would allow you to use your iPhone or iPad to pay for products or services just like using your credit card. This could effectively reduce the number of plastic credit cards you need to carry in your wallet. Read the rest of this entry »

photo credit: Google Body Map

Google is hosting the Google Android Event in Mountain View, California today. The announcement and demonstration of the Honeycomb Android 3.0 OS is one of the biggest highlights for the event. Andy Rubin started off the event with this to say, “We’re really excited to show off Android Honeycomb. We’ll have a demo of the Motorola Xoom running Honeycomb. Briefly, let me talk a bit about how excited I am. We consider ourselves to be the shepherd of it. With open source you don’t know what people are doing to do with it. The innovation is all around us. There’s a lot of excitement. When you see Hugo’s demo, you’ll witness how Google’s cloud services tie together all these different devices. The cloud makes all these things work. The cloud helps all these services share this information. I truly believe the Android team — the guys in Building 44 — I truly believe they’re the hardest working team in mobile.” Read the rest of this entry »

photo credit: Verizon iPhone

Verizon is rumored to make the big iPhone announcement tomorrow. According to ZDNet and countless blogs, Verizon has scheduled an announcement tomorrow which includes Steve Jobs (Apple) as a speaker. The much anticipated Verizon iPhone is expected to be announced tomorrow, with availability as soon as the end of the month. This announcement is scheduled for 11:00 am EST on 1/11/11. Hmm… Read the rest of this entry »

photo credit: iPad 2 Rumors

iPad 2 rumors are flooding the Internet. Every day you hear more rumors, everything from a new model, a new launch date or including a USB port. How do you sort out the truth from the fiction? Ben Parr, Mashable, attempted to discern the truth about the top 10 rumors. According to Ben Parr, some rumors he would bet money on, and others he predicts will only happen when pigs fly. Read the rest of this entry »

photo credit: MetroPCS Android Cell Phone

Partnering with Boingo, the nation’s leading source of public Wi-Fi, MetroPCS phones running Android can now tap into hotspots for free. The LG Optimus M and Huawei Ascend, two of MetroPCS’s Android phones, will now come pre-loaded with special software from a company called Devicescape. The app recognizes 500,000 hotspots that are controlled by Boingo, which would cost other users a monthly or weekly connection fee. For the other 200,000 hotspots that actually cost money, the user would have to pay $7.95 a month fee. Read the rest of this entry »

photo credit: Windows 7 Tablet

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer will show off “a slew of new slates” at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in January. This is according to a report in the New York Times. Microsoft did the same thing last January, and sales were flat for the Windows 7 tablets. HP then postponed their launch of the Windows 7 tablet supposedly because they bought Palm because the WebOS was more suitable for tablets. When HP did launch the Slate 500 in October, no one was impressed. Read the rest of this entry »