The future of the mobile industry is pretty clear- it’s all about data. Data revenues have allowed U.S. carriers to keep subscriber ARPU’s relatively stable in the face of 30% declines in voice revenues over the past five years. Look no further than Verizon Wireless’ recent announcement to allow unlimited Skype-to-Skype voice calls over its 3G network to see the future revenue prospects of voice, now a commodity service. Data revenues, in contrast, are expected to continue their explosive growth, more than doubling by 2013 according to a recent Telecommunications Industry Association report. It’s no coincidence that over the same period smartphone sales are projected to account for more than 40% of all wireless devices sold domesti

The Nielsen Company, the same company behind TV show ratings, has released data on the top 10 cell phones for 2009, and it may not look exactly the way one would expect. No big surprise to see the iPhone at the top of the list, but the fact that BlackBerry handsets are taking up three of the slots is rather impressive, as is LG in total taking up four slots.  It's a bit surprising the RAZR is still in the top 10, but oh well. The BlackBerrys taking up so much of the list shouldn't be that surprising honestly when you consider Research In Motion (RIM) announced last week that it had shipped 10.1 handsets in the previous quarter.  It just once again brings up the subject of why these phones get ignored so much when it comes to

Details of the NexusOne keep leaking out all over the place Have you heard about the NexusOne?  If you answered "no", you are either Amish or dead.  If you're the latter, please don't eat my brains as reading this means you have come back to life as a zombie and yet you are still interested in news on this phone. The phone completely dominated the past few days of coverage in the tech blogosphere, which is quite possibly good news for anyone pondering developing apps for the Android OS. Sorting through the plethora of news that has come out is the tough issue, but the most important points to focus on can be summed up pretty simply.  First up, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) filing for the phone came out Monday morni

Research In Motion (RIM) shipped a record 10.1 million BlackBerry phones last quarter ... why aren't there more apps for them? So you love the iPhone, the Android phones get you all excited, but it appears there are still a ton of people who love the BlackBerry phones.  According to Electronista, RIM has sold a total of 75 million BlackBerries in its history, and a whopping 10.1 million of them were in the quarter that ran from Sept. to Nov. of this year, yet people seem to think the BlackBerry is dying for some odd reason. Lets face it, it's true that the BlackBerry App World leaves a lot to be desired, but the phone overall is still a solid piece of technology.  Am I biased?  Yep, my BlackBerry Tour is sitting next to me

New site keeps track of those many talked about iPhone App Store rejections It seems like every week we hear some sort of wacky story about another app being denied approval for admittance to the hallowed halls of the iPhone App store.  The question has been what causes these rejections, what great crimes have these potential applications committed that makes Apple lock them out of the store?  Well, there's an app for that ... er, there's a web site for that. The aptly named AppRejections.com is a new site trying to document all of the various apps that have been rejected from the store, and the reasons that the developers have been given by Apple.  It's an intriguing look inside the process from those that have suffered t

Update from event: The points below are NOT quotes. They are paraphrased and/or my own personal liberal interpretations. I cannot emphasize this point enough; nobody from RIM actually said these words. 1. We are the carrier's friend. Bandwidth is extremely constrained, and upgrading networks costs tens or hundreds of billions of dollars. All-you-can-eat data plans are unrealistic and unfair. Users and applications need to be policed. Applications need to be made more efficient, consuming less bandwidth, enabling batteries to last longer. 2. We are the enterprise's friend. Employees need to be monitored, policed and restricted. Employees need to be prevented from distractions that reduce their concentration on work. Users need to be

I've received a number of questions regarding my earlier post on my experience with RIM's BlackBerry Desktop Manager for the Mac... - Yes, I tried different USB cables of varying lengths--short and long, retractable and non. - Yes, I made sure I was signed out of Spanning Sync on all my machines before going down this path. - Yes, I ensured that my "Import:Address Book Archive" executions were all into an address book totally devoid of entries, with iSync reset when I did so. - Yes, in addition to meeting the system requirements of OS 10.5.5 or above (as noted, I'm running 10.5.8) and BB OS 4.2 or above (as noted, I'm running 4.5.0.81), I'm running a version of iTunes (9.0.1) newer than the required 7.7.1. What that

Friday October 2nd will be remembered for two epic failures – Chicago's elimination in the first round of voting for the 2016 Olympics, and for the release of RIM's horribly incomplete Desktop Manager for the Mac. I had high hopes for both; both ended up poorly. The good news is that RIM has a chance to fix this in short order, whereas Chicago just goes back to being a great city that isn't going to get a second chance to host the big games in seven years. I'm not sure if I should give RIM a D, an F, or an incomplete. Maybe by the time I'm done writing this review, I'll have made that determination. In fact, I've held off writing this recap; I've hoped that each of the last 10 days, I'd wake up to some magic button that allowed synchron

Microsoft’s recent debacle with its Sidekick device is the ugliest user experience we may have ever seen in wireless. The Sidekick device was the first one to backup and synchronize over the air (the “cloud”) to a central server starting already several years ago. The company behind the device was acquired by Microsoft 18 months ago, and after that point the Sidekick platform fell behind the competition – Blackberry and iPhone to begin with, and more recently also Palm/WebOS and Google/Android. Yet, the remaining Sidekick users appear to have lost all of their data as a result of Microsoft’s server failure. What this saddest of technology sagas illustrates is that while cloud sync may be convenient, it is no replacement for ma

Android OS to be number 2 by 2012 according to Gartner Look out Apple and RIM, Google is huffing and puffing at your doors. Currently the Google Android mobile operating system currently has about 2% of the market, but Gartner Inc. is predicting that number could surge as high as 14.5% by 2012. This would place the OS ahead of Apple's iPhone, Microsoft's Windows Mobile and RIM's BlackBerry. This would place it second only to the Symbian OS which currently powers 50% of all phones, but could fall to 39% by 2012. To no great surprise, Gartner is saying that a lot of this success will be due to the number of handsets that Android runs on. By 2012 it is forecast that the Google OS will be appearing on 40 handsets, as opposed to Apple's iPhon