Mobile Phone Blog:

[The opinions expressed in the blog post are entirely those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the views of Mobileshop.com.]

Today has been a bit of a slow news day, all things considered, so I reckon I’m going to do something a bit different in today’s post. Y’see, I just read an article about Google Glass, Google’s smart glasses, and I finally realised something; specifically, I finally realised why I’m less than excited about it, even though the tech involved is rather chuffing cool, and not a little scifi-esque.

Y’see, the problem is that it doesn’t look that scifi-esque. It’s all very neat and unobtrusive, and sleek, and all that, but then, so is everything these days (from the television, to cars, to the likes of the Samsung Galaxy S4). Perhaps that’s why I like the mad colours available on the HTC 8X, too? Anyway, let me lay out what I want… (more…)

Nowadays, we all take phones for granted, and people sometimes forget that the history of the telephone can be traced back to the pioneering work of one Alexander Graham Bell, the man who came up with the first practical telephone. Oddly though, considering what he invented, no-one knew what Bell sounded like. Well, until now, that is…

Yes, that is the voice of the man who made the first ever phone call, recorded at the Volta Laboratory, in 1885. If you love your phone, whether you’re using a cheap PAYG special or a top-end Samsung Galaxy S4, you owe it to that man. So, how did they manage to capture his voice after this long? (more…)

Well blimey o’riley, I cannot believe I forgot what today is. Mind you, it’s hardly surprising. Just ask any of my friends how good I am at remembering birthdays. Honestly, I’m useless at it; I swear, on my life, I even had my mum’s birthday wrong in my phone until I lent her it for something and she spotted it.

It was a tad awkward, yes.

Anyway, the point is that I was poking about online a few minutes ago, and suddenly saw maaaaaaaaany posts reminding me that today, right, today is the 40th anniversary of the very first ever mobile phone call! So, I reckon it’s time to get all contemplative and retrospective, and all that… (more…)

[The opinions expressed in the blog post are entirely those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the views of Mobileshop.com.]

Now then, here’s an interesting thing. Y’know how Apple tends to have possibly the most loyal fans in the entire spacetime continuum, and how it’s because Apple manage to give off this vibe that their gear is just cool, and something people want to own? It’s been called the reality distortion field before and it’s served Apple well, but now, it’s starting to sound like that distortion field might be starting to fail.

According to BBC News, consultancy firm Added Value has done a survey about “inspiring” brands, and they’ve found that Apple, apparently, just ain’t as inspiring as it used to be.

So, what’s going on? (more…)

Right then, we should all know by now that the Samsung Galaxy S4 is getting unveiled tomorrow; you’d have to be living under a moderately massive rock to not be aware of it, since pretty much everyone is talking about it. However, there’s a part of me wonders what their next mid-range phone will be like, ‘cos there’s usually some new mid-ranger that comes out not long after, to capitalise on the flagship’s success (the Samsung Galaxy S3 Mini springs immediately to mind).

And then, I read a post on PocketNow, and it made such an incredible amount of sense to me, that I had to do a post about it, here. The basic crux of it is this: what if Samsung didn’t make a mid-range version of the Galaxy S4? (more…)

[The opinions expressed in the blog post are entirely those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the views of Mobileshop.com.]

Well folks, I planned to do this post on Monday, but interesting things started happening that I simply had to talk about, so here we are. Anyhow, you may remember that last week, I ended the week with a post bemoaning how the Mobile World Congress had been a bit of a let-down this year (mainly because I somehow failed to notice the rather brilliant LG Optimus G Pro). It was mostly a let-down because the big names in the industry chose to unveil phones like the HTC One or the terrifyingly awesome Sony Xperia Z at places that, well, weren’t at MWC.

On the one hand, that meant that new players had a chance to shine. On the other hand, one of those new players was Firefox OS…

Y’see, the one word I’d use to describe Mozilla’s new baby is most definitely not ‘shine’. I’ve been pretty unimpressed by how low-spec the phones running it have been, and when you combine that with an article I read on the topic, on Engadget, it left me kinda worried about the future of the platform. (more…)

[The opinions expressed in the blog post are entirely those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the views of Mobileshop.com.]

Y’know, I can remember the days of yore, when the Mobile World Congress was literally the most exciting event of the entire year for people like me. I can still remember the old days, like the first MWC I did coverage on, where Sony Ericsson first unveiled the phone that I later went on to buy, the Xperia X1. I was agape with wonder, at the massive raft of phones that got released in Barcelona, during MWC.

Cut to the present day, five years later, and it’s sadly a very different story.

I’m sad to say it, but I reckon that MWC’s days as the premier mobile industry event of the year are, basically, pretty much over. That may seem harsh, but I shall explain why I think that… (more…)

In the past, you might well have seen me wibble on at great length about tough phones. Ever since the first JCB Tough Phone was unveiled, I’ve had a bit of a soft spot (which is an ironic thing to say, when ye think about it) for this particular class of device, so it’s possibly kind of odd that the question posed in the title of this post even popped into my brain at all. Nonetheless, pop in there it did, and so I find myself asking: do we really even need tough phones to exist any more?

Y’see, the question popped into my head when I saw an article on T3 about the Caterpillar CAT B15, a rugged Android phone, running Jelly Bean, and I experienced one of those moments that made me go, “Hang on a minute…” (more…)

Ever since Google first announced Project Glass, there’s been an awful lot of talk round the net, about how those kind of things are the future. You know the kind of things, smart watches, and smart glasses; wearable computing devices, basically. Why only today, I read a report by ABI Research, saying that wearable computing will become the norm within five years, with manufacturers hitting 485 million annual device shipments by 2018. So, with me being Technical Markus, you’d expect me to be nodding in agreement with the report, right?

Well, you’d be wrong.

Despite my name, I don’t believe that’ll be the case at all, and I shall tell you why… (more…)

Is anyone reading this old enough to remember the Milk Can, that hit the UK around the late 80s kinda time? It was one of those canned drinks, like Pepsi or Tizer or whatever, only it wasn’t fizzy. Because it was milk. In a can. Hence Milk Can. Anyway, the ‘milk’ bit isn’t important here, ‘cos the important bit is the ‘can’; it wasn’t actually a can, of course, because it wasn’t made of metal. It was made of some completely indestructible, infinitely flexible plastic stuff, that I was convinced had come from Roswell, in 1947.

The important bit is that it was flexible, which allows me to shoehorn that memory into this blog post, which has nothing to do with milk, but everything to do with flexible technology… (more…)