Mobile & Wireless

This week, Major League Baseball will begin rolling out thousands of iBeacons in ballparks around the country according to a source familiar with the plans who shared them with MacRumors. The league is looking to have twenty parks outfitted with roughly 100 iBeacons each by Opening Day at the end of March. Boston, Milwaukee, San Continue Reading →

A new report originating from the ongoing Snowden document trove presents the terrifying possibility that our casual gaming habits offer government surveillance agencies a look at some key personal data, including but not limited to age, location and even sexual orientation. Angry Birds is cited by name by the documents as an example of the Continue Reading →

SwiftKey, the word-predicting artificially intelligent keyboard made by a U.K. startup — whose machine-learning software was on more than 100 million devices globally last year (most of them Androids) — is finally addressing the mainstream iPhone/iPad user. Not, sad to say, as an alternative iOS keyboard that can be used natively across the phone. That Continue Reading →

The Federal Communications Commission has proposed a rule that would require all text message providers to support emergency texts to 911 by the end of the year. “While voice calling to 911 remains the preferred method, consumers also expect to be able to send a text to 911 and have it reach authorities,” the commission Continue Reading →

Paging Dr. Mario. Nintendo’s big plan for the future isn’t mobile games — it’s boosting your “quality of life.” At a briefing for investors and the media held on Thursday morning, Nintendo’s CEO Satoru Iwata outlined the company’s plan to create a third platform to sit alongside its Wii U and Nintendo 3DS game machines. Continue Reading →

Google has just let us in on another tidbit about the deal it has built with Lenovo over the sale of its Motorola Mobility assets: It keeps the high-tech Q division-type stuff being developed at Motorola’s Advanced Technology Group. That means the Ara modular smartphone concept, as well as sensors you swallow and passwords you Continue Reading →

Amazon.com plans to offer brick-and-mortar retailers a checkout system that uses Kindle tablets as soon as this summer, people briefed on the company’s plans said. In one scenario, the Seattle company would give merchants Kindle tablets and credit-card readers, the people said. Amazon also might offer retailers other services, such as website development and data Continue Reading →

As has been rumored for some time now, Facebook on Thursday announced a new iOS app called Paper that uses a newspaper metaphor as a way of aggregating content from the social network, complete with topic-based sections and content selected in part by human editors. For traditional publishers — who already see the giant social Continue Reading →

Google is selling its Motorola Mobility smartphone unit to Lenovo for about $2.91 billion, the companies announced on Wednesday. Google’s Mobility unit includes handset technology that the search giant acquired when it bought Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion in 2011. That acquisition was Google’s largest by far, and the biggest bet that Larry Page, its Continue Reading →

In early January, while the rest of the consumer technology world at CES marveled at the sheer size of Samsung’s upcoming Galaxy tablet, Google execs were dismayed by what they saw on the screen of the massive 12.1-inch slate — a fancy new user interface called Magazine UX. As Re/code’s Bonnie Cha wrote at the Continue Reading →