Going BlackBerry? What You Will Lose

BlackBerry 10: Right For You? - Mobility - Smartphones -: " . . . If you're coming from Android, you're going to lose device choice. True, the Z10 and Q10 offer a small selection, but Android wins hands-down when it comes to the variety of form factors. Android devices are big and small, cheap and expensive, rugged and high class. You're going to lose access to apps. You're also going to lose access to Google's services. Yes, BB10 supports Gmail and Google Contacts and Calendar, but that's it. No Google+, no Google Maps, no Google Drive, no Google Docs, no Google Voice, no Google Search / Google Now. Some Google services, such as Talk and YouTube, have been ported thanks to BlackBerry, but the vast majority aren't there. If your business has "gone Google," switching to BB10 simply doesn't make sense. If you're coming from iOS, you're losing access to 800,000 apps. BlackBerry World has about 70,000, many of which are ported Android apps. The selection just isn't there, yet. You're also losing access to many of the same Google services that are available to Android. You're losing access to an incredible array of accessories. Devices such as the iPhone have more accessories available than any other device on the market. Being so new, BB10 does not yet have such accessories, and there's no telling if, or when, it will catch up. . . . "

Android and iOS “duopoly” monopolizes 92% of global smartphones in Q4 - SlashGear: "In Q4 specifically, Apple had 22-percent of the smartphone OS marketshare, though that was down 2-percent from the same period a year ago. Still, iOS was up 29-percent annually, having shipped nearly 50m smartphones worldwide. Android, in contrast, rose from 51-percent marketshare in Q4 2011, to 70-percent in Q4 2012."

What Softbank Buying Sprint Means To You | News & Opinion | PCMag.com: "The merger has to clear the U.S. government, but regulators won't care. As this doesn't eliminate any U.S. companies, there's no competitive effect, and U.S. politicians aren't paranoid about Japanese control the way they are about Chinese firms. (That's a real change - anyone remember the 1980s?) Softbank may be a UMTS carrier, but Sprint will not switch to GSM/UMTS. That makes no sense from a cost perspective. Rather, Sprint will do what everyone else is doing - try to roll out LTE as quickly as possible with the aim of becoming an all-LTE carrier by 2017 or so."

The Internet Is A 21st Century Utility And We Deserve Better - Forbes: "According to the latest State of the Internet report from Akamai Technologies, the U.S. ranks 9th in the world for connection speed with an average of 7.2 Mbps. That means the U.S. just needs to double its average speed to get close to South Korea at 14.7 Mbps. You might think that the 7.2 Mbps sounds pretty good, but remember that this is an average, not a baseline."

Watch Out Nokia And Blackberry, Here Comes Huawei - Forbes: "Not only will Nokia, Research in Motion and others have to contend Google/Motorola and HTC as well as Sony (SNE), Apple and Samsung vying for market share but two new players gaining traction according to IDC could pressure margins even further. Those two players are Huawei and ZTE, which took the #3 and #5 spot for 4Q 2012 smartphone shipments. While those two companies had respective market shares of 4.9% and 4.3% in the quarter, they were ahead of HTC, LG, Nokia, Research in Motion and a host of others. While Nokia, HTC and RIM shipped the third, fourth and fifth most smartphones during all of 2012, those three companies were absent from the top five for 4Q 2012. "

Report: Amazon dominates Android tablets, US-based Kindle Fires alone are 33% of global devices - The Next Web: "Research from mobile app analytics service Localytics which goes live tomorrow shows that the Kindle Fire is by far and away the most owned Android tablet on the planet. The company estimates that the number of Amazon Fire devices in the US alone represents 33 percent of all Android tablets worldwide — while the US itself is the world’s biggest tablet market with a 59 percent market share."

Guy Eymin Petot Tourtollet's Wi-Fi-Blocking Wallpaper
Businessweek
Now Guy Eymin Petot Tourtollet, 46, scientific director of the French pulp and paper research institute Centre Technique du Papier, has invented a snowflake-patterned wallpaper that blocks Wi-Fisignals, while still allowing FM radio and emergency ...

Bring Your Own Hassles -- How to manage the explosion of employee-owned devices | MoFo Tech - JDSupra: "Make it easy: “Don’t make it too difficult for employees to comply with the rules, or they’ll actively try to circumvent them,” advises Christine Lyon, a Palo Alto, California-based Morrison & Foerster partner who focuses on privacy and employment law. Train, train, train: “You need to create a culture in which everyone understands it’s in both the individual’s and the institution’s best interest not to have a data breach,” says Daniel Westman, managing partner of Morrison & Foerster’s Northern Virginia Office. "

TeleGeography's gorgeous map of the global Internet.: "At first glance, the lines appear to mirror long-proven global trade routes, with major hubs in global capitals like New York, Amsterdam, and Mumbai. But Mauldin notes that there have been no new cables across the Atlantic since 2003. The growth today is in historically under-served regions like Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. Nor are all the hubs located in the big cities you’d expect. That phalanx of cables converging on Brazil, for instance, lands not in Sao Paolo or Rio de Janeiro but Fortaleza, simply because it’s an easier hop from the Northern Hemisphere. Another surprisingly popular destination is Djibouti, whose appeal becomes more clear when you consider the relative business-friendliness of its neighbors at the mouth of the Red Sea: Somalia, Eritrea, Yemen."
Submarine Cable Map 2013

Unlocking Smartphones Rendered Illegal by Librarian's Baffling Decision: "So why has the Librarian of Congress made this rather inconsistent ruling on unlocked phones? The way the LoC reads the DMCA, unlocking the phone circumvents the technological protection of the software in the device. How this came to be interpreted this way is a mystery, since the only purpose for unlocking a phone is to change carriers, not to steal the software. What’s even more of a mystery, given the reasoning of the LoC is that jail breaking is OK, even though that effectively unlocks the phone. But perhaps the most mysterious of all is how the DMCA came to be applied to phone unlocking. Or at least it’s a mystery until you realize that the major carriers have been lobbying the Librarian of Congress for years. The bottom line for all of this is that basically very little has changed for individual owners of mobile phones. . . . "

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