Mobile

Samsung’s settled into a nice little twice-yearly schedule for releasing flagships. That’s allowed the company double the opportunity to introduce some nice upgrades to their high-end Android handsets. Nearly six months after the release of the S10, the company just dropped the new Note line. Here’s a whole bunch of words I wrote about the

Omer Kaplan Contributor More posts by this contributor Mobile gaming is a $68.5 billion global business, and investors are buying in By the end of 2019, the global gaming market is estimated to be worth $152 billion, with 45% of that, $68.5 billion, coming directly from mobile games. With this tremendous growth (10.2% YoY to be

The latest study from Pew Research Center takes a look at the impact mobile technology, including the use of smartphones and social media, is having on the diversity of people’s social network in emerging markets. For the purpose of the study, Pew surveyed mobile users in eleven key markets: Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, South Africa, Kenya,

DoorDash announced last month that it would be changing its controversial tipping model. Today it’s revealing the basics of how the new system will work. Under the past model, Dashers (DoorDash drivers and other delivery people) were guaranteed a minimum payment per delivery, with DoorDash paying a $1 base, then providing an additional payment boost

We’ve long known that 5G rollout wouldn’t happen overnight. But now that carriers have gotten things started, they’ve been confronted with pushback against the next-gen wireless technology’s limitations. Among the bigger issues is spotty coverage indoors — you know that place where most of us spend most of our time? Verizon’s looking to address the

Multiple reports this week claimed Google had quietly rolled out a more in-depth app review process to all developers — changes designed to keep the Play Store safer from spam, malware, and copycat apps. Those reports are inaccurate, Google tells TechCrunch. Instead, the company is giving itself more time to review apps from new, unestablished

T-Mobile customers across the U.S. say they can’t make calls or send text messages following an apparent outage — although mobile data appears to be unaffected. We tested with a T-Mobile phone in the office. Both calls to and from the T-Mobile phone failed. When we tried to send a text message, it said the

Tala, a Santa Monica, California-headquartered startup that creates a credit profile to provide uncollateralized loans to millions of people in emerging markets, has raised $110 million in a new financing round to enter India’s burgeoning fintech space. The Series D financing for the five year-old startup was led by RPS Ventures, with GGV Capital and

The process of using the Stoic journaling app is simple: You open the app in the morning and the evening, when you’ll prompted to answer a couple questions and perform a few simple exercises. For example, this evening the app asked me to rate my current level of fulfillment and to identify what made me

The chat fiction stories offered in Mammoth Media‘s mobile app Yarn are about to get more interactive. The branching narrative mechanic should be familiar to anyone who read Choose Your Own Adventure books when they were kids — you read a story, and at certain key moments, you choose from different options that determine where

Superlatives abound at Cerebras, the until-today stealthy next-generation silicon chip company looking to make training a deep learning model as quick as buying toothpaste from Amazon. Launching after almost three years of quiet development, Cerebras introduced its new chip today — and it is a doozy. The “Wafer Scale Engine” is 1.2 trillion transistors (the

In an email distributed to YouTube Premium subscribers, the company confirmed that access to YouTube’s original programming will no longer be exclusive to Premium customers after September 24th, 2019. Instead, many of YouTube’s Original series, movies, and live events will be offered to all YouTube viewers for free, supported by ads. Premium members, however, can

Ajit Pai has long signaled that he would approve a T-Mobile/ class=”crunchbase-link” href=”https://crunchbase.com/organization/sprint-nextel” target=”_blank” data-type=”organization” data-entity=”sprint-nextel”>Sprint merger, but today the FCC Chairman made it official. In spite of widespread opposition suggesting that the combining of the country’s third and fourth largest carriers would reduce competition in the marketplace, Pai takes the stance that such a

Good on Motorola for keeping it interesting. At the end of the day, I’m not sure how large a market there is for a budget “action camera” phone, but in a world of samey electronics, at least the Lenovo-owned brand continues to shade in interesting corners. Honestly, I’m surprised more phones didn’t attempt to position

It’s true, you’ve got the Galaxy Note to thank for your big phone. When the device hit the scene at IFA 2011, large screens were still a punchline. That same year, Steve Jobs famously joked about phones with screens larger than four inches, telling a crowd of reporters, “nobody’s going to buy that.” In 2019,

Each month millions of Indians are coming online for the first time, making India the last great growth market for internet companies worldwide. But winning them presents its own challenges. These users, most of whom live in small cities and villages in India, can’t speak English. Their interests and needs are different from those of

Two major U.S. carriers, AT&T and T-Mobile, announced this morning a plan to team up to protect their respective customer bases from the scourge of scam robocalls. The two companies will today begin to roll out new cross-network call authentication technology based on the SHAKEN/STIR standards — a sort of universal caller ID system designed

Domestic abuse comes in digital forms as well as physical and emotional, but a lack of tools to address this kind of behavior leaves many victims unprotected and desperate for help. This Cornell project aims to define and detect digital abuse in a systematic way. Digital abuse may be many things: hacking the victim’s computer,

After 18 years at the helm, Mitchell Reichgut is stepping down as CEO of Jun Group, with COO and President Corey Weiner taking over as chief executive. The news comes just about a year after Jun Group was acquired by Advantage Solutions, but Reichgut said the acquisition was a “non-factor” in his decision. “I think

If you were desperately ripping days off of your calendar until you could get your hands on Huawei’s $2,600 5G foldable, the Mate X — which was originally slated to launch next month — it sounds like you’re going to have to wait a bit longer, per TechRadar which attended a press event at Huawei’s

A new report from The Wall Street Journal could be another damning piece of evidence for a company already under a good deal of international scrutiny. The paper is reporting that technicians working for Huawei helped members of government in Uganda and Zambia spy on political opponents. The report cites unnamed senior surveillance officers. The

Kurbo Health, a mobile weight loss solution designed to tackle childhood obesity which was acquired for $3 million by WW (the rebranded Weight Watchers), has now relaunched as Kurbo by WW — and not without some controversy. Pre-acquisition, the startup was focused on democratizing access to research, behavior modification techniques, and other tools that were

Ahead of the upcoming school year, Apple this morning announced it’s bringing contactless student IDs in Apple Wallet to several more U.S. universities. The expansion will allow over 100,000 college students to carry their student ID on their iPhone or Apple Watch, where it can be used for a variety of tasks including paying for

Oregon this week became the 15th state (plus the District of Columbia) to sign onto a lawsuit seeking to stop a T-Mobile/Sprint merger. The suit, co-signed by 16 attorneys general, argues that a merger between the country’s third and fourth largest carriers would greatly reduce competition in the wireless industry. “It’s important that Oregon join

Xiaomi has now been the top smartphone maker in India for eight straight quarters, becoming a constant headache for Samsung in the key overseas market that continues to show strong appetite for handsets as their shipment slows, or drops pretty much everywhere else in the world. The Chinese electronics giant shipped 10.4 million handsets in

As we noted last month, DJI’s camera stabilizer line began life as an offshoot of the company’s drone offerings. Since then, however, it’s grown into a pretty massive portfolio in its own right, spanning from SLR to standalone pocket offerings. For obvious reasons, the Osmo Mobile has been one of the more popular models. Designed

Attentive, a startup helping retailers personalize their mobile messages, is announcing that it has raised $40 million in Series B funding. The startup was founded by Brian Long and Andrew Jones, who sold their previous startup TapCommerce to Twitter. When they announced Attentive’s $13 million Series A last year, Long told me the startup is

If making an Android alternative was easy, we’d have a lot more of them. Huawei’s HarmonyOS won’t be replacing the mobile operating system for the company any time soon, and Huawei has made it pretty clear that it would much rather go back to working with Google than go at it alone. Of course, that

India’s Reliance Jio, which has disrupted the telecom and features phone businesses in India in less than three years of existence, is now ready to aggressively foray into many more businesses with the help of global giants including Microsoft. The subsidiary of India’s largest industrial house Reliance Industries today announced that it will commercially launch

The first Note was a spectacle. It wasn’t just the reintroduction of the stylus. In 2011, the idea of a 5.3 inch phone was laughable. Around the same time, Steve Jobs famously mocked a push toward 4-inch-plus phones, telling a press conference, “no one’s going to buy that.” With the average phone size hovering about