Tag Archives: cell phones

What’s your favorite phone app? Shazam? Grindr?

Grindr has won the TechCrunch award for Best Location App. Geeks clearly don’t mind what it’s used for. Yay, nerds! (Via JMG reader Osman)

A new phone app sends a form to the person who dumped you. Didn’t he just tell you to stop calling?

The Sydney Morning Herald reports: A popular “meat-market” smartphone app that spawned a sexual revolution in Australia’s gay community has been compromised by a Sydney hacker, potentially exposing intimate personal chats, explicit photos and private information of users. The location-aware Grindr app enables gay men to meet other gay men who may be just metres away, making use of their …

New York Philharmonic conductor Alan Gilbert brought Mahler’s Ninth to a screeching halt when an audience member allowed his iPhone to continue ringing. The iPhone marimba ring kept going — and going — until concertgoers pointed out the area where the guilty party sat, a witness said. Finally, a man reached into his pocket and turned off the phone. Gilbert …

If you think you’ve heard it all, hang on to your thinker. Verizon is about to launch a $2 charge for customers who pay their bills online or over the phone. Beginning on Jan. 15, Verizon will charge all customers a $2 “convenience fee” for paying their cellphone bill online or over the phone, according to documents obtained by Droid-Life. …

Thefts and robberies are soaring in NYC and the crooks are focusing on handheld electronics. An eCrime wave is sweeping the city with iPads, smartphones and other pricey devices now more popular with Big Apple thieves than even cold hard cash, cops say. Half of the nearly 16,000 robberies in New York over the first 10 months of this year …

Pakistan’s blogosphere is having a field day over a new government directive ordering phone companies to block more than 1700 words from text messages. Among the banned words are gay, lesbian, and homosexual. Also: Jesus Christ. Operators have been directed to start blocking text messages containing these words from November 21. The move has been greeted with ridicule and derision, …

Product description: Alert your lawyer, loved ones, etc … that you are being arrested with a click. I’m Getting Arrested enables anyone, with one click, to broadcast a custom message to SMS numbers in the event they are arrested. Inspired by a real Occupy Wall Street incident. Free to the other 99%. Android only, so far. The guy behind it.

Observers carefully note that last week’s Blackberry outage “coincided” with a reduction in traffic accidents. The National reports that traffic accidents in Dubai dropped 20 percent compared to historical averages during the blackout. In Abu Dhabi, accidents dropped by 40 percent, and there were zero fatalities. If you’re thinking that this isn’t a significant enough sample to show that smart …

Product description: Instant alerts when homophobic lawmakers get caught in gay sex scandals! iScandal tracks hypocrisy among anti-gay lawmakers. Functioning like the “It’s been XX days since our last accident” signs you see in factories, whenever a new scandal breaks, iScandal sends a push notification and the option to spread the word. Though lighthearted and fun, iScandal serves a meaningful …

Beginning on Tuesday, even some of Manhattan’s subway platforms will not be out of reach for the clattering, jabbering, Angry Birding masses. Some straphangers will be able to make calls and go online on their smart phones at six subway stations starting Tuesday, MTA officials confirmed to amNewYork. The pilot program for AT&T and T-Mobile customers will begin along the …

Android Authority has the deets: Specs of Galaxy Skin include 1 GB RAM; 1.2 GHz processor; 8 MP rear camera and VGA front camera with auto focus, self-portrait, stop motion, action shot, and Panorama shots; and 1500 mAh battery. Connectivity-wise, it has Bluetooth 3.0, USB 2.0, and Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n features. It will reportedly run on Android Jellybean (the next …

Approximately 25% of this week’s JMG readers arrived via mobile devices. Amazing. That is three times the percentage of one year ago. iPhone users lead by far with 14%, Android-based phones are at 5%, iPad users are at 3%, various other systems (Palm, Blackberry, etc) comprise about 3%. And as always, Mac-owning JMG readers are highly over-represented compared to Apple’s …

Gizmodo’s Sam Biddle takes a dim view of a new smartphone app that offers the use of your home bathroom to people that you have friended on Facebook. The crew behind CLOO, who apparently think putting a sassy salsa soundtrack to their demo video somehow makes the notion of a stranger coming in off the street and taking a shit …

The Department of Justice today filed suit to block the merger of AT&T and T-Mobile, saying that if the companies were to join, millions of consumers would suffer with higher prices and fewer choices. “AT&T’s acquisition of T-Mobile would eliminate a company that has been a disruptive force through low pricing and innovation by competing aggressively in the mobile wireless …

A public service message from NYC artist Jay Shells’ “Metropolitan Etiquette Authority.” More signs at the link.

Say goodbye to the Palm Pre and the HP Touchpad. In discontinuing its tablet and webOS phone hardware lines, Hewlett-Packard is killing off several pieces of hardware that it had just released. HP’s newest devices weren’t exactly tearing up the marketplace. According to one report, Best Buy had ordered 270,000 HP Touchpad tablets and only sold 25,000 of them; a …

Google has acquired Motorola for $12.5B. This acquisition will not change our commitment to run Android as an open platform. Motorola will remain a licensee of Android and Android will remain open. We will run Motorola as a separate business. Many hardware partners have contributed to Android’s success and we look forward to continuing to work with all of them …