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About a year ago, Miller was convinced that the Internet was making him unproductive, and even corrupting his soul. So at 11:59 p.m. on April 30, 2012, Miller unplugged his Ethernet cable, turned off his Wi-Fi, and replaced his smartphone with a "dumb phone."

The research team of Antti Oulasvirta at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics has created a new keyboard called KALQ that enables faster thumb-typing on touchscreen devices. They used computational optimization techniques in conjunction with a model of thumb movement to search among millions of potential layouts before identifying one that yields superior performance. A user study confirmed that, after a short amount of practice, users could type 34% faster than they could with a QWERTY layout. Typing on today's mobile phones and tablets is needlessly slow. One limitation is that the QWERTY layout is ill-suited for tablets and other...

The PC is in trouble. Big trouble, if you believe research firm IDC's new data, which shows that shipments of PCs plunged 14 percent in the first quarter of this year. That's the sharpest decline in sales of personal computers since the firm started tracking the industry in 1994. Since the numbers have been released, technology experts and pundits have hypothesized about the causes of the ailing personal computer market. IDC, specifically, cited Windows 8, Microsoft's new computer and tablet operating system, as one of the main reasons people turned away from buying computers. That's certainly a possibility, but one...

Many smart people here and when it comes to 21st c tech, I am a pinhead. Situation in a nutshell, I got a smartphone as a gift a few months ago, and after many weeks, still hadn't activated it, but the gift giver wouldn't take it back and even followed up with a hefty wad of funds to activate and operate the device. I do not know enough about wireless networks, security issues, firewalls, etc., to fill a thimble. I don't even know enough to know how much smarter the gift giver is (all I know is, he wears gadgets...

That's a whole lot of pie! An undisclosed customer bought a million BlackBerrys from the smartphone maker formerly known as Research In Motion -- marking the largest ever single purchase in the company's history. These aren't the business basic gadgets of years past, of course: The Canadian company unveiled the new BlackBerry Z10 and BlackBerry Q10 in January to rave reviews from tech watchers worldwide. The company hopes the redesigned BlackBerry will fuel a comeback -- and orders of this magnitude suggest it may be working. The pioneering brand lost its cachet not long after Apple's 2007 release of the...

A startup creates a physical keyboard for touch-screen devices, like smartphones or tablets, that appears when you need to type and disappears when you're done. A few weeks ago, right before the new BlackBerry 10 phones were announced, I dragged a cameraman to San Francisco's Financial District during lunch hour and asked random strangers to name BlackBerry's best feature. Care to guess what the results of my highly unscientific poll were? Even iPhone and Android users agreed -- the famed keyboard is BlackBerry's top trait. Increasingly, we "mobile device addicts" are favoring our smartphones and tablets over our traditional computers...

Supply of Nokia's Lumia 920 was getting scarce in the past few weeks due mainly to solid demands and apparently the Finnish mobile phone maker was caught off guard by the overwhelming reception generated by its new flagship smartphone. In a research note published Monday by market research firm Canaccord Genuity, it appeared that the Lumia 920 started on a rock-solid footing in the U.S. market, its sales numbers decent enough to come behind the bestselling smartphones in America as of November this year - Apple's iPhone 5 and Samsung's Galaxy S3. "Our checks indicated the Lumia 920 was the...

You've heard that Google is working on computerized glasses. They're called Google Glass, and developers can already buy them. It turns out Microsoft is working on something similar. It filed some patents on the project and Unwired View dug them up. There's a big difference between what Microsoft is working on and Google Glass, though. The most recent word out of Google is that Google Glass isn't going to use "augmented reality" – where data and illustrations overlay the actual world around you. Google Glass is actually just a tiny screen you have to look up and to the left...

(Photo : Reuters) The Lumia 920 may give Nokia the push it needs when Black Friday comes around. Nokia's Lumia 920 may not be as disappointing as some critics said it would be. Actually, the Windows 8 smartphone is flying off shelves as we speak, which is a good sign for Nokia's Black Friday sales.The Lumia 920 has already made it on the Amazon Best Sellers list. It is already in high demand in Germany.Like Us on FacebookAccording to AllThingsD, a number of Nokia Deutschland's German retail partners experienced "stock-outs" since the device first became available earlier November."Because of the high demand, we are aware of the reports the Lumia 920 is sold out in...

Interesting tweet from analyst Horace Dediu, "Apple's share of operating profits from global mobile phones dropped to 60% in Q3. Samsung now at 39%. HTC 1%. No other companies profitable." A couple of thoughts on this: How is this sustainable for all the other phone makers? What happens to Motorola, RIM, Nokia, LG, et al.? Do they go away? If they go under what happens to Android? If you're wondering why Google is trying to save Motorola, this could be a clue. It doesn't want to be held hostage by Samsung, the only smartphone maker that's profitable. What happens to...

The early returns/opinions are in on the Nokia Lumia 920—expected to reach retailers in November—and they declare the new flagship smartphone for Microsoft's Windows Phone 8 operating system a winner. From its high-quality construction to its dazzling display, the Nokia 920, introduced Wednesday, garners kudos across the Net. "It's incredibly handsome," gushed David Pierce at The Verge. "The new Nokia Lumia 920 mobile phone is the best the company has ever made," added Matt Warman, consumer technology editor at The Telegraph, based in the United Kingdom. The 920's construction earned some praise from Andrew Wooden at T3. "Nokia’s R&D department...

“I, Smartphone” video is based on the essay “I, Pencil” penned by Leonard Read, in 1958, and has had a lasting impact on how we think about the market process. Why would the Institute for Faith, Work and Economics care about how a smartphone is made and why would we want you to care? Because God has given us the market process as the most powerful tool we have in a fallen world to serve each other by using our gifts. Yes, that’s right. Smartphones allow thousands of dispersed people from across the globe to bring their gifts to serve...

If anyone reading this owns a ZTE Score M Android smartphone, your device has been found to include a backdoor allowing root access without user authentication.The discovery of the backdoor comes via a post on the text storage website Pastebin. It has since been confirmed via Reddit by Justin Case of Cunning Logic and TeamAndIRC. He has confirmed with someone at ZTE that the backdoor does indeed exist and that a fix is in the works.The question that needs to be asked is, why is it there at all?Apparently the handset includes a hard-coded password that allows access to a...

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Nokia is seeing some good initial success from its transition to exclusively supporting Windows Phone for its high-end handsets. Initial sales of the Lumia 800 and Lumia 710, Nokia’s first two Windows Phones, are likely hovering around 1.3 million units, according to Bloomberg. This is, of course, unverified data, but for two handsets that only launched in November, that’s not bad. Add in the fact that Windows Phone is not a well known or sought-after OS yet and the fact that Nokia only just launched its first device in the US a week or two ago, and the numbers are...

If you’re a first-time smartphone shopper or a current smartphone shopper approaching an upgrade, you may be curious about the mobile platforms that are available. Everyone knows about the iPhone and iPad, and everyone knows about “Droids” (Android is the platform, Droid is one specific brand on Verizon). Often overlooked is the newcomer, Windows Phone. How do the three mobile operating systems stack up?We broke down the three platforms into some of the most distinct categories so you can better understand the differences between them. Let’s take a look…Total Devices Before delving into the specifics of each operating system, one...

Good question. However, if you want an honest opinion, it's usually best to go straight to the source. A former GM who used to work on Windows Phone 7 for Microsoft, Charlie Kindel, took to his personal blog today with some thoughts on why Microsoft's mobile efforts seem so stagnant. It boils down to carriers, manufacturers, and the companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft who make the operating system are all locked in this big three-way pissing contest to see who gets the most say in marketing a device. According to Kindel, Android is crushing iOS and Windows Phone 7...

Nokia's Lumia 800 phone - the first fruit of its much-hyped alliance with Microsoft, seems to be unlikely to be the saviour the firm hoped for. When CEO Michael Elop took over, he described the firm's situation in smartphones as standing on a burning oil platform, with no choice but to hurl itself into the sea. The alliance with Microsoft came after Elop's gloomy prognosis. But from sales data released by Mobiles Please, it looks like Nokia has so far failed to make a splash. A sample of 5,000 sales by the price comparison site found that the Lumia 800...

Android and iOS continued to gain market share at the expense of struggling platforms like BlackBerry and Windows Phone 7 (WP7), according to a new report from NPD Group. Android’s share of smartphone sales grew to 53 percent of the U.S. smartphone market (53 percent) from January through October 2011, while Apple’s iOS share grew to 29 percent of the market. Research In Motion’s OS share declined to 11 percent. RIM and other companies that were formerly on top of NPD’s smartphone rankings, however, have made critical business decisions this past year in a quest to shore up their U.S....

WILMINGTON, Del. (CBS) – Local attorneys have filed a federal class-action lawsuit against smartphone makers and a company accused of snooping on tens of millions of consumers. The software under scrutiny is called Carrier IQ, More at link