This marks the conclusion of Talk Mobile 2013. After fifty episodes, more than a hundred breakout videos, and two hundred essays, it's time to wind down the insanity and take a step back an look back at what all transpired. While Talk Mobile brought new tools to the mix, both technical and editorial, the crowning accomplishment was the conversation - not between the writers, but the...
Mobile You. The last of ten weeks of Talk Mobile 2013, and it was all-too-appropriately all about you. From how to find the right smartphone for you to how to customize that phone to how to manage your family of mobile devices and mobile device users, week ten was about the mobile you. The modern smartphone is a beast that has changed the way that we live and communicate. It's...
For all the time we've spent in Talk Mobile talking about specs, services, carriers, and usage, we haven't spent much time on what these devices look like. Sure, they're mostly glass slabs with white or black framing (with a few exceptions), but beyond that glass, what else is there? With unit sales moving well past the millions monthly, with people willing to line up overnight to be...
More than anything in the past, the internet offers the opportunity to rocket your notoriety into the stratosphere overnight. News used to run in a daily cycle, with the morning newspaper, maybe an afternoon edition, and the evening news. Today the news runs in an unending unstopping cycle, augmented, supplemented, and in large part supplanted by social networking and media. What you...
We humans are social characters by nature. We gather with friends, we pair off with mates, we love and care about our families to the point of being irrational. Modern technology enables those bonds to transcend space and time, but they add a whole new layer of complication to our lives. The same decision making processes that we have to apply to making our own smartphone purchasing...
For the longest time your options with mobile devices were limited. If you wanted a smartphone, chances are you'd be getting one with a physical keyboard, either the Treo/BlackBerry-style "candybar" smartphone or a horizontal slider. If you wanted a tablet, you were looking at a thick stylus-driven experience mated to laptop-style internals. And if you wanted a laptop, well, you could...
Back in late 2009, CrackBerry's Kevin Michaluk composed what he termed "the smartphone hierarchy of needs". Based on Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, which stretched from the physiological (food, water, shelter, air, etc) to self-actualization (creativity, morality, purpose, meaning, etc), Kevin's hierarchy sought to classify what he looked for in a smartphone, and in what order. The...
Having a smartphone isn't enough anymore. Our mobile devices exist in a whole ecosystem of accessories, from connected speakers to fitness monitors to thermostats, refrigerators, and cars. We've gone from standalone devices that queried the internet to cloud-connected mobile hubs that coordinate all of the devices in our lives. The smartphone has domain over everything, and now it's...
There's one thing we can be almost certain of in the years to come: we're going to wear and carry more tech with us every day. Our smartphones will be more powerful, our watches smarter, and our glasses more connected. We'll carry sensors and radios everywhere, and they'll collect more data than ever before. But what are we going to do with that, where are we going to access it all, and...
When it comes to expensive purchases, cars rank right up there. Not only are they designed to go fast, they're designed to do so in relative comfort and safety, while costing as little to do so as possible. Even with all of that design they're still complicated machines to operate. Yet, they can simultaneously be boring. What's engaging about coasting down an open stretch of highway?...
Over the years our homes have gradually improved, with better insulation, more efficient heating and cooling, modern layouts, and exceedingly solid building codes. But the infusion of technology into our homes has been slow, incremental, and typically severely isolated. Sure, there have been computerized home automation systems for decades, but they've generally been unwieldy,...
Early on a smartphone accessory used to be something like a case or a holster, or maybe a Bluetooth headset if you were a real power user. But with increasingly powerful, efficient, and miniaturized sensors, memory, and processors, it's become possible for these accessories to become much more than that. Our smartphones are no longer the only piece of connected technology we can carry...
If there's one industry that didn't expect to be upended by mobile devices, it's the entertainment industry. The music, television, and radio empires are domains of the status quo. They've established dominance and usage behaviors for the public, and they're perfectly happy with how things have been. Mobile devices and their ever-increasing connectivity options and speeds have upended...
Mobile devices have enabled a whole new category of creativity, allowing us to do things we've never been able to do before. They've put a camera in our pocket wherever we go, they've permitted anybody to engage in business anywhere, and they've changed the way we listen to music. Is it good, is that bad? It's time for you, the reader, to sound off.
All this week we've talked about mobile creativity and productivity, be it what we can do with cameras or speakers or business apps. Today we're going to talk about those same things, but not so much what we can do today, but what we'll be able to do tomorrow. It's time to tackle the future of creativity and mobile business. There's no doubt that the sensors, processors, radios,...
It used to be that the Dells, ThinkPads, and BlackBerries ruled the business world, and your average road warrior carried a business-issued tablet and smartphone to get things done. Today, things are looking different. Not only have Windows Phone, Android, and iOS smartphones found their place in the boardroom, on the factory floor, in the cubicles, and out in the field, they're more...
While many of us owned standalone cameras, be they point-and-shoots or DSLRs (or even going back to ye olde days of film SLRs), far fewer ever owned a standalone video camera. The camcorder was always a far more bulky and balky beast, requiring massive batteries and recording onto magnetic film cassettes and then smaller cassettes and then removable hard drives and large flash disks...
Your typical smartphone has two speakers. One is an earpiece for the phone part (it does make calls, right?), the other a loud speaker for speakerphone (there's that phone again…), music, games, and the like. A few handsets, like the HTC One, along with a handful of tablets, sport stereo loudspeakers, but by and large we're still only looking at two speakers. These speakers carry the...
The camera. If there's any part of the smartphone that's seen its usage rate skyrocket over the past few years, that'd be it. Smartphone cameras have gone from little VGA shooters barely worthy of being called a camera to 12, 20, and even 41 megapixel beasts with image quality unfathomable just a few short years ago. We now walk almost everywhere with a small camera in our pockets or...
Talk Mobile Carriers Week was one of our most contentious weeks of Talk Mobile yet, as carrier tend to be such a subject. We dove right in, tackling what carriers are doing right, what they're doing wrong, and how we can fix it all. Really it all boiled down to "give me the phones I want, don't make me pay too much for them, and give me my data free of encumbrances." Is that really too...