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Traveling across some of the more rural parts of America has given me a healthy dose of reality when it comes to national coverage of U.S. mobile carriers. While the movement towards national mobile coverage has been around since Craig McCaw in the early 80s, I still found pockets of emptiness on my travels.
Kentucky and some of its neighboring states have far greater challenges facing them than a lack of broadband. But can broadband play a small role in helping to revitalize the state?
I went shopping for prepaid phones and found the market can be quite confusing at times. The era of The Wire's burner phone is long gone.
MWC2019 is over, and before we start thinking about the next show that will pull us all away from our offices, it’s time to do a quick recap of what we saw. The inevitable big theme of the show was, of course, 5G with a smattering of VR to prove out possible use cases. But it was also a show that saw OEMs starting to develop more interesting smartphones, and not just foldables.
MWC19 is upon us and it’s poised to be an exciting show thanks to the hype around 5G and revolutionary hardware innovations, such as foldable displays. While 5G will be the buzz word of MWC19, we are unlikely to see many consumer-oriented 5G device/service unveilings because of the premature state of the technology in terms of network deployments and device hardware developments. Nevertheless, there will still be a lot to get excited about at the show.
Google has announced that it is buying wearable tech intellectual property rights - along with an un-named number of engineers – from the Fossil Group for $40 million. This move could indicate that the tech giant is finally getting serious about the development of its Wear OS platform after seeing its share of the smartwatch market fall below 25 percent, according to NPD’s latest Consumers and Wearables survey. The purchase of Fossil IP could also lay the groundwork for the eventual launch of a long rumored Google branded Pixel smartwatch.
Apple caused a stir this week with the warning that it was going to miss smartphone sales expectations for the past quarter. While much of the focus was placed on the Chinese market, there’s far more to digest here. Fundamentally, consumers are not upgrading their iPhones as frequently as Apple had expected, but this should hardly be a surprise. And there are greater concerns looking forward.
Carriers need to take a fresh look at the under 13 year old market in order to grow their subscriber base. European carriers may have the right idea ...
The smart city future faces a lot of challenges...
The smartphone market has become rather boring over the past few years. But that may be about to change as we enter the era of foldable screens, potentially giving consumers a reason to lust after the next smartphone innovation.