Mobility

AT&T announced its intent to purchase Time Warner this weekend in a move that is sure to raise a few eyebrows at the FCC and DOJ. In theory, it’s a “vertical” acquisition, meaning that there is (almost) no overlap between the AT&T and Time Warner assets, and, typically, vertical deals meet with regulatory approval. But there is vertical, and then there’s the layering of content on top of mobile and fixed networks to form a competitive advantage. And that is where the fear sets in.

LeEco unveiled most of its U.S strategy yesterday, announcing four TVs, two smartphones, a VR headset, a connected bike and the concept car that it previewed at CES earlier this year. The overall hardware strategy is to focus on high-end products with mid-tier pricing - in addition to the $2 billion Vizio acquisition the company announced this summer. But don’t mistake LeEco for a hardware company, as it is much more...

Living in an always-moving ever-connected city, it’s easy to expect that connectivity is as accessible as a picking up a pack of smokes at the gas station. But the reality is there remain numerous places across America where the dream of a connected world is merely a vision of the future...

Pokémon Go has swept the nation and beyond to become one of the most downloaded apps within the first week of its launch. Based on the concepts developed for Niantic’s Ingress game, which has a strong cult following, Pokémon Go has brought location-based augmented reality to the mainstream consumer market with a vengeance. In the name of research (ahem), and perhaps because it sounded fun, I was an early adopter. With friends and family signing-up quickly, I knew there was no way I could resist the urge to go Pokémon hunting.

The smartphone has fundamentally changed our lives, and how we interact with each other. It allows us to stay in contact while out-and-about through more than just voice calls; and it enables us to ignore the people right in front of us when we choose. Sure, it’s a mixed bag of good and bad behaviors, but with 70 percent of U.S. consumers carrying a smartphone (and some carting more than one) we take for granted many conveniences that caused major headaches before the smartphone.

I remember getting my first cell phone like it was yesterday. It was my 15th birthday and the phone I was thrilled to receive was dumb, heavy and oh so cool all at the same time. Thirteen years later, I’ve had my share of ever-evolving phones from the Motorola Razr, to the very first iPhone, and so on. I have games galore, messaging apps and yes, I can still make the occasional phone call. And yet, has the phone lost its cool factor?

It’s no secret that we all keep our smartphones close, and they are the most personal of personal devices that are available to us. Indeed, on average we interact with our phones 150 times in a given day, which means that if we assume that we all get a decent night’s sleep, we reach for our phones every six-to-seven minutes during the waking hours. So what do we reach out and do first?

“Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you,” said Graham Alexander Bell, as he made the first ever phone call 140 years ago yesterday. And, of course, I’m sure Mr. Watson came running from the other room, probably wondering why they couldn’t have invented video conferencing instead. How times change; when the landline phone rings at my house, the kids barely look up from their smartphones and no one makes a move to answer the thing. And so it rings and rings until voicemail finally kicks in…and no one bothers to check that either. If you want to talk to one of us, call us, not the house. And yes, we all have video conferencing, but on our own personal little screens.

Mobile World Congress has traditionally been the playground of the mobile OEMs, highlighting the latest and greatest devices, and creating the loudest buzz possible along the way. To some extent, this fact remained true at MWC 2016, but the real buzz was saved for VR headsets and the 360-degree cameras needed to help build some of this content.

The sensory overload of CES 2016 is over and most of us have made it home to appreciate the relative peace and quiet of anywhere except Vegas. As I think back on the sights, sounds and devices that I saw in the past week, few stand out as surprises. This year seemed to be one of incremental advances, rather than giant leaps forward.