Mobile & Wireless

BlackBerry CEO John Chen recently dismissed iPhone users as “wall huggers” due to his suggestion that they constantly have to hug walls looking for electricity sockets to stop their phones running out of battery midday. Two patents published Thursday show that Apple is not taking similar criticism lying down, as it actively investigating the possibility Continue Reading →

Apple might be taking a stab at a new way to access vehicle owners manuals. The US Patent and Trademark Office on Thursday published a patent application from Apple called “Identifying and Presenting Information Based on Unique Vehicle Identifier.” According to the patent application, the technology would would identify all parts and part numbers in Continue Reading →

They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. If that’s true, Google should be very flattered by the efforts of a regional wireless provider to bring a 1Gbps fiber network to Mississippi. C Spire is using the Google Fiber business plan that the search giant has employed in building 1 Gpbs fiber networks Continue Reading →

I hope you enjoyed your life over the past month and a half; Flappy Bird is coming back to the App Store after its removal earlier this year, according to the game’s developer Dong Nguyen. Gawker spotted the dev’s tweeted response to a question about whether or not it would ever return, which is an Continue Reading →

Burger King, the second-biggest U.S. burger chain by store count, is introducing an application that will allow customers to pay for Whoppers with their smartphones as it races rivals to woo younger diners. The program will be introduced next month and should be in all of Burger King’s more than 7,000 U.S. locations in “a Continue Reading →

Watch out, Samsung. Oppo’s latest smartphone, the Find 7, boasts enough impressive specs to put the impressive Galaxy S5 on notice. Unveiled in Beijing on Wednesday (and via Oppo on Twitter), the Find 7 is the first smartphone to feature a 2560 x 1440 “2K” display. That ultra-high resolution provides the Find 7 with one Continue Reading →

Best Buy and 7-Eleven have started shutting down near-field communications (NFC) capabilities in their stores’ point-of-sale terminals, making it even harder for Isis and Google to get their fledgling smartphone payments services off the ground. According to a report in ComputerWorld, payments technology analysts say Best Buy and 7-Eleven began disabling the NFC readers at Continue Reading →

Sonos oozes simplicity: all your music, all your services, all over your house, all from one place. But its app has always lagged behind, a cluttered blue list of services that made it needlessly hard to actually find what you were looking for. Today, Sonos aims to fix that: it’s launching version 5.0 of its Continue Reading →

The National Security Agency has built a surveillance system capable of recording “100 percent” of a foreign country’s telephone calls, enabling the agency to rewind and review conversations as long as a month after they take place, according to people with direct knowledge of the effort and documents supplied by former contractor Edward Snowden. A Continue Reading →

Lyft has launched “Happy Hour” rates — fares that are 10 percent to 50 percent cheaper than normal during slow business hours — to encourage more rides during those periods, the company announced Tuesday. Slow times are typically midday and after rush hour during the work week. “With Happy Hour, Lyft’s prices are fully dynamic, Continue Reading →