BII MOBILE INSIGHTS: Google Glass Will Connect With Android And iOS

Source: https://intelligence.businessinsider.com/welcome

Mobile Insights is a daily newsletter from BI Intelligence that collects and delivers the top mobile industry news. It is delivered first thing every morning exclusively to BI Intelligence subscribers.

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Google Glass Will Tether With Android And iPhone (Forbes)
It’s nice to see that Google is not escalating the platform wars by locking iOS out of the Glass ecosystem. Google opened up a sort of pre-order contest for non-developers for its new augmented reality headgear. "Glass will be able to connect via Bluetooth to both Android phones and the iPhone. Glass can pull down data from Wi-Fi or use the 3G or 4G feed from a connected phone, but it won’t have its own cellular radio." The bigger question with Glass is how users will manage— and to what extent they will be allowed to manage— the huge potential torrent of data that this device will collect. Read >>

In Mobile Advertising, How Fast Is Fast Enough? (Bloomberg)
After Millennial Media reported this week a 71 percent surge in 2012 sales, the company’s CEO started calling top investors to address their concerns. As much as the mobile advertising company is growing, it’s not enough to meet its own targets or the expectations of analysts. While putting ads on phones and tablets may be the industry’s future, predicting the industry’s growth is turning out to be difficult as companies compete to find successful models. Millennial is something of a barometer for an industry that’s still in its early days, with high expectations. There are few easy comparisons Millennial investors can make, for better or for worse. That makes for a volatile stock. Read >>

Three Key Points About Mobile Advertising (Smart AdServer)
With Mobile World Congress 2013 underway, here is a review of mobile advertising related facts:

Click here for the full infographic. Read >>

By 2017, Mobile Connections Will Outnumber People (Cisco via e27)
According to Cisco, worldwide mobile data traffic is expected to increase 13-fold in the next five years, reaching 11.2 exabytes per month by 2017. The number of mobile Internet connections on both personal devices and machine-to-machine applications will then eventually exceed the world’s population, which is estimated to be 7.6 billion by the United Nations. Read >>

What Is Slowing Down Mobile Video Adoption? (TechCrunch)
Mobile video continues to be a huge pain for viewers and broadcasters alike. For many, the mobile video landscape is too fragmented and frustrating.

So why, then, is mobile video still an unsolved problem? The short answer is Android. The longer answer is that a number of power players refuse to work together and adopt universal standards for mobile video and instead battle for digital turf, confusing the rest of us in the process. Read >>

Sprint Is Driving Samsung Traffic (Chitika)
A recent rep! ort from Chitika Insights illustrates the success of Samsung’s smartphone in North American markets, where the Galaxy S III stands neck-and-neck with the iPhone 5 in terms of Web usage.

Sprint users generate the largest amount of Samsung Galaxy S III Web traffic at 28 percent. Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T capture 2nd, 3rd, and 4th place with 22 percent, 20 percent, and 18 percent of Samsung Galaxy S III Web usage, respectively.  Read >>

Mobile Is About Doing One Thing Great (TechCrunch)
What exactly is it about the mobile market that changes the rules of the game and why might this be the best thing for startups? The screen size, the pattern of time availability and “location” in the real world lead to a more single-task orientation on mobile than on the desktop Web. What has changed with mobile is that no (large) company has been able to pull off a “fast follow” to unseat an incumbent startup who achieves mind share with a differentiated single-task oriented product. Before, every startup when raising capital was invariably asked the dreaded questions, "What if Microsoft, Facebook or Google copied this?” Now in mobile, if that is the question your startup is asked, you are in luck because it implies that you are first to market with a differentiated and focused product.  Read >>

Which Mobile Approach Is Right For You? (Mutual Mobile)
These days everyone’s saying they need an app. But before you rush to say “me too,” take a moment to think about what makes the most sense for your enterprise. Read >>

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Sony Xperia Tablet Z Hands On: Thin, Light, and Very Promising

Source: http://gizmodo.com/5984718/sony-xperia-tablet-z-hands-on-thin-light-and-very-promising

We've known about Sony's Xperia Tablet Z for the last month or so. It promised incredible lightness, thinness, speed, and beauty. Guess what? It deliveres.

The Xperia Tablet Z is a 10.1-inch tablet that will launch with Android 4.2 (the most recent Jelly Bean update). It boasts a redesigned 1,920x1,200 screen, Qualcomm's beastly quad-core Snapdragon S4 Pro processor, 2GB RAM, NFC, an IR blaster, a microSD expansion slot, and it's listed as waterproof to one meter for up to half an hour. All that and it's just 6.9 millimeters (0.27 inches) thick and it weighs only 495 grams (1.09 pounds). To put that in perspective, that's the lightest 10-inch tablet in the world, and it's the thinnest tablet period (just eking by the iPad mini's 7.2mm frame).

Not surprisingly, it's a joy to hold. It feels impossibly light; you wonder how there's room for a computer inside. It's also extremely well-balanced. And the waterproofing's not just hype; we turned on the screen and dunked it in a fishbowl, and the touchscreen worked just fine after we pulled it back out, even while wet. We've said it a million times before: all gadgets should be waterproof.

The display uses Sony's new Mobile Bravia Engine 2, which the company claims gives it twenty percent better color reproduction than the latest iPad. While we couldn't do a side-by-side comparison, we can tell you that the screen is gorgeous. It was bright, sharp, and colors were incredibly vivid. Low reflectivity, too, an area where the iPad mini left a lot to be desired.

Another positive sign: Sony is finally stepping back a bit and letting Android shine. The Xperia Tablet Z does have a third-party skin, but it's light and mostly only noticeable on the desktop. It has the same Battery Stamina Mode as the Xperia Z and ZL phones, which is a clever power management solution. Sony says it will boost standby time up to 400 percent, which would be impressive. The Tablet Z also comes with TVSideView, a very slick app that acts as both a TV guide and a means for controlling your home entertainment setup via the built-in IR blaster.

Unfortunately, the software was still a couple months away from being final when we got to play with it. The overall experience was frequently laggy and slow, and there were some crashes. Hopefully that will be addressed before the Tablet Z goes on sale in May.

There will be some good-looking accessories for it, including a very sturdy stand and some nice, thin covers. Sony is building NFC into a lot of its upcoming audio products. This means that you'll be able to tap it to the Xperia Tablet Z and it will instantly pair the audio. We tried it on a few speakers and headphones and it worked seamlessly.

The Xperia Tablet Z will come in 16GB and 32GB flavors for $500 and $600, respectively. That ain't cheap! But if the software can live up to the promise of its high-end hardware, it might just be worth it.

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LG's 5.5-Inch Optimus Pro Has a 1080p IPS Screen (Hands On)

Source: http://gizmodo.com/5986617/lgs-55+inch-optimus-pro-has-a-1080p-ips-screen-hands-on

PPI might not matter much, but LG's new Optimus Pro, which we've seen in Korean form, has a 1080p screen, and it's pretty damn gorgeous.

It has a 1.7GHz processor, 3,140mAh replaceable battery, and a 13MP rear camera. As for the display, it's wonderful, but isn't quite as bright as you'd like. I popped into settings to turn up the brightness, and was a little surprised when it was already at full blast. But it's really, really impressive. Sticking your nose right up against the glass (very sanitary with a phone a bunch of tech bloggers have been grubbing), you'd have trouble making out a single pixel. Text looks great, and video is beautiful.

Body-wise, it's what you expect from a Note-like megaphone. It's thin, but not incredibly thin. Holding it in one hand feels absurd, but only if you go in thinking of it as a phone. As a mini tablet, the jump to 5.5 inches of real estate actually makes the pixel perfect display a lot more impressive, considering we've sort of gotten used to compromising on displays for tweener-sized gadgets, like the Note and iPad Mini.

The Optimus G Pro is on Android 4.1.2—as are all the phones LG announced today—and it runs quite smoothly. LG's skin isn't the most intrusive of the major OEM carriers, and it doesn't seem to slow things down, but it does move some common settings around a bit in ways that can be confusing if you're not used to it. The camera on the G Pro is 13MP, but didn't seem overly quick after a few quick test shots. Very quick and unscientific test, but also sort of the way you'd use the camera in real life.

The Optimus G is getting some upgrades, like an update to Android 4.1.2, and a few new LG UX additions, but mainly it's being released worldwide.

LG also announced phones in a few new lines. There's the F series, which is intended to make LTE more accessible in mid-tier phones, and the L Series II, which is focused on style.

The F5 and F7 are 4.3- and 4.7-inch phones with mid-tier guts (dual core processors), but are actually really comfortable to hold. They have slightly harder lines than Samsung's Galaxy series, but retain most of the charm. They're good looking phones, and Jelly Bean runs pretty smoothly on them.

The L7 (above) is a 4.3-inch phone, and actually pretty divergent in its "style" push. It's not glossy, like most Korean phones, instead going for a textured back piece. It's got underpowered guts—a 1GHz dual core processor!—but does run decently loading up apps and games.

Prices and availability weren't made immediately available by LG, but we'll let you know when it is.

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LG Has Acquired webOS From HP to Power Smart TVs

Source: http://gizmodo.com/5986632/lg-has-acquired-webos-from-hp-to-power-smart-tvs

LG has just announced that it has acquired the much-troubled webOS from HP. But instead of using it to power smartphones or tablets, it's planning to roll out smart TVs which will make use of the OS.

The deal will see LG take control of the source code for webOS, along with "related documentation, engineering talent, and related webOS websites." It also gets licenses from HP for use with its WebOS products, along with a slew of patents HP obtained from Palm. There's no word on how much the deal was worth.

The news lends weight to rumors which surfaced late last year, claiming that LG was working on a range of TVs which used webOS. Clearly, LG has had its eye on the software for some time.

It's the end of a rather sad period in the life of webOS, which has been terribly mis-managed by HP. In fact, insiders reported last year that webOS was doomed from the outset at HP because "there were neither the right leaders nor the right engineers to do the job." Hopefully LG can do a little better. [CNET]

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LG Shows Off Wireless 4K Streaming, From Phone to TV

Source: http://gizmodo.com/5986642/lg-shows-off-wireless-4k-streaming-from-phone-to-tv

LG has been showing off the first example of wireless Ultra HD steaming at MWC: it can take video from a phone, playing at 1080p, upscale it on the fly, and show it off at 4K on a TV.

The technology uses Wi-Fi and Miracast to mange that, essentially mirroring phone content on a big screen, be it video, games, or whatever. According to the Verge in the video below, the streaming is pretty smooth, with only extreme panning causing frame rates to drop. Still, it's early days for this kind of streaming—and this already looks pretty damn promising. [Verge]

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