When you decide to get yourself one of those free apps for your smartphone, you usually recognize that you’re paying the price by having to deal with in-app advertising, but did you know that you’re also paying in the form of increased power consumption?

A study was recently conducted by Purdue University and Microsoft, revealing that as much as 70% of the power consumed from playing the free games on your smartphone is actually attributed to downloading the advertisements and tracking your usage. This isn’t always the case and I’m sure that the physics engine in Angry Birds sucks up some juice too, but that’s still a lot of precious battery life being sucked away to encourage you to sign up for some dating site.

Naturally, if the free app of your choosing also requires a GPS connection, as well as either 3G or WiFi, these likely drain your battery too. The thing is that the information gathered through those means could also be used to process and funnel the right ads your way. To be fair, the tests were run on some older hardware–the Android-powered HTC Magic and Passion, as well as the WinMo-fueled HTC Tytn II–but it should mostly hold true for newer devices too.

They tested a total of 21 apps, including newspaper apps, photo uploaders, and games. In the case of Angry Birds, a full 45% of power consumption was for user tracking, including using GPS to presumably geotarget your ads. Of course, GPS isn’t actually useful for the game itself. You can read the full report in PDF form if you want more details.  To be honest, this information just sounds like a ploy to divert companies from offering their ads for free and monetizing them through other means.

[Source]

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It appears like Microsoft is slowly losing their love for their Windows Mobile OS as the company is fully concentrating on the Windows Phone platform. What you see above is the full email that is being circulated to WinMo users which details about the company’s decision to officially shut down Windows Marketplace for Mobile 6.x.

According to the email, Microsoft will bring the curtains down on the Windows Mobile 6.x Marketplace on May 9, 2012. From that day onwards, customers using handsets running on the older platform as well as the developers will not be able to access the store. (In case anyone is having a doubt, the Windows Phone Marketplace will still be there.)

All the apps that are already downloaded will continue to work, although updates will not be available. Therefore Microsoft recommends WinMo users to install available updates before the service goes dark. But new applications might still be available directly from developers.

As you might know, the talks about shutting down the Windows Mobile Marketplace began last year. And the company started giving out hints regarding the matter earlier than the arrival of the email. They have stopped accepting new submissions of applications. The news about the shutdown is certainly not a surprise and most probably won’t hurt anyone, but it is a fact that Windows Mobile played a big role in the evolution of the mobile OS.

Microsoft might be hoping for the best by focussing their whole effort on making Windows Phone a success on the market currently ruled by Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS. So far, the company’s OS has failed to become popular despite good hardware from Nokia and other partners. Let’s wait and see what the future holds for them.

The post Microsoft Windows Mobile Marketplace To Be Shutdown On May 9 appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

The Windows Phone has already made a few significant alterations to Internet Explorer 9 Mobile which will have the Mango browser. They located the address bar to the bottom part of the screen, and this bold move had caused some commotions among early adopters.

Mango: What has changed?

Mango, which is also known as the Windows Phone 7.5, has also changed. It is now sharing its engine with the IE 9, the advanced PC browser of the Microsoft Company. With this, the user can now experience a faster and smoother web-based video and animation because Mango has the ability to tap the phone’s built-in graphics processor. A speedier JavaScript engine is also featured in Mango to make sure that the user will have a great time surfing the net.

The Quest for Minimal Browser

Team behind the development of the Mango’s updated version is planning to create a faster and minimal browser that would get rid of any extraneous visuals on the smartphone’s interface. This is because they believe that too much of something can be bad, and too many things on the screen will just distract the user.

A simple and clean interface will be created and promoted by the team in order to give users faster access to the websites that they usually visit. Of course, this is not really an easy task when we’re talking about smartphones. Unlike a desktop computer which has a lot of screen real estate, a mouse and a keyboard which lets you make precise clicks and do some shortcuts, a smartphone has a smaller screen and it does not have a mouse. The challenge lies in making the surfing experience easier and more accessible given the concrete situation of phones.

The Browser that people use

The team also wanted to find out which buttons they need to get rid of on smartphones, and so they reviewed the anonymous usage data from Windows Phone owners which were voluntarily submitted to them. The address bar was the browser that is most frequently used on the phone because it also serves as a search box.

The Results

Oftentimes, developers suffer from the dilemma of choosing between design and functionality. Tradeoffs are often involved in the process, and so the makers of the IE 9 decided to move the address bar at the screen bottom and make the tabs and favorite buttons into a menu option. The Refresh/Stop button was also made bigger to make it easier to tap. Finally, the phone status info like signal strength, battery life indicator and many more were hidden to give the user a freer browsing experience.

[via Windows Blog]

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The Windows Phone OS is getting some major updates. Known as “Mango” the new Windows Phone OS release will add multi-tasking,  turn-by-turn navigation, Bing music identifier, SMS dictation and “more.”

There will be a preview for media on May 24, when Microsoft will give a rundown of the new features. Microsoft rushed to release the Windows Phone 7 Series last year, and one of the results was a lack of compatibility with Windows Mobile applications. The phone’s features were behind Apple and Google, and with “Mango” Microsoft hopes to catch up.

Some of the Mango features include Bing Audio, which allows you to search for music that you hear, and provides you with links to download it in the Windows Marketplace for Mobile. Bing Vision will have a barcode and QR code scanner that can pick up Microsoft Tags and detect CDs, DVDs, books and texts using optical character recognition. Turn-by-turn navigation with Bing maps will let you use your Windows Phone as full navigation device. Another new feature will be SMS Dictation, where your Windows Phone will read your messages to you. We’ll keep you updated on the unveiling of the Mango.

The post Microsoft To Unveil Windows Phone Mango on May 24 appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

HTC

Cheng Hui-ming is the chief financial officer of HTC and he recently had an interview with Bloomberg wherein he revealed that the company is developing its own smartphone platform. As if Android and Windows Mobile weren’t enough, they want to add yet another OS to the mix.

This seems to echo what’s going on in Korea with Samsung’s bada OS, making for an increasingly crowded and complex smartphone arena. Let’s not forget about iPhone, BlackBerry, webOS, Symbian, and others as well.

The HTC CFO wasn’t exactly forthcoming with further details, but it is very well possible that this new proprietary OS has something to do with buying Palm. The yet unnamed HTC OS could be based, at least in part, on the Palm Pre’s webOS.

The post Get ready for yet another smartphone OS from HTC appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

T-Mobile HTC HD2 coming March 24th

T-Mobile’s hosting a special event in New York City on March 16th to lay to rest all the rumors swirling around the HTC HD2 launch date.  We are expecting a March 24th release date according to a leaked roadmap, but a twitter post says it could be as early as March 23rd. The HTC HD2 is quite the monster, it’s got a 1Ghz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, a 4.3 inch high-resolution capacitive touchscreen, WiFi, 3G, Bluetooth, GPS, a microSD slot bundled with a 16GB card, and a 5-megapixel autofocus camera with dual LED flash.

Although it is said to be running Windows Mobile 6.5, and unfortunately, it may not be upgradable to the Windows Phone 7 Series, but with themes you could skin the HD2 to fool your friends and make it look like WinPho7.

Pre-loaded apps coming with the HD2 on T-Mobile are: Blockbuster On Demand integration with the full film Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. Barnes & Noble eReader, giving you access to more than a million eBooks, newspapers, magazines and your Barnes & Noble digital library. The MobiTV mobile app, giving live and on-demand TV from . Gogo Inflight Internet service for six months of free in-flight Wi-Fi access.

This is definitely a great new smartphone coming our way, expect it to go for $199 on a two year contract.

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Opera Mini 5 Beta 2 web browser for Windows Mobile devices without Java. Photo: Opera Software

What the Safari browser is to the iPhone, the Opera browser shall be to Windows Mobile devices.  Today Opera Software announced a native version of Opera Mini 5 beta 2 for Windows Mobile 5 and 6-based smartphones.  Opera on your Windows Mobile will give you a dramatic increase in browsing speed, tabs, and no more java.

How the browser works is by compressing up to 90 percent of the data traffic coming from websites before they get to your handset, thus delivering you a really fast browsing experience, and ultimately lowering your data fees.

The new version as removed Java, meaning it will work on any Windows Mobile phone, that’s a great thing for emerging markets where support for java may not always be offered on the majority of handsets. Features include tabbed browsing, password manager, bookmarks and Speed Dial.

“Windows Mobile deserves a mobile browser that looks better, handles better and delivers better than the default browser,” said Dag Olav Norem, Vice President of Products, Opera Software. “Even though Opera has 50 million satisfied Opera Mini users, we always seek ways to improve our browser for each and every mobile phone user out there. Now, we are pleased to offer the world’s most popular mobile Web browser as a native Windows Mobile application.”

You can also download Opera Mini directly from your phone for free from m.opera.com/next/.

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A study done by the  Virginia Tech Transportation Institute back in July 2009 showed that people who send text messages while driving are 23 times more likely to be in a crash.  Those are high numbers and were concluded after the examination of 6 million miles of road driven.

“Every young driver has a whole world of new things to concentrate on. Their phones are limited to emergency and parentally approved calls while driving, but unlimited when they are not. This reduces a primary cause of distractions and accidents for teens,” explained Brad White, CEO of Cell Cease.

The app is quite ingenious, it’s called Cell Cease and it works by prohibiting texting and calling when the internal GPS receiver of the cell phone detects a speed greater than 5mph.  There are allow lists, that of course allow calls from certain numbers at any given speed, calls filtered will go straight to voicemail. 911 calls are always on, a PIN allows the one in control to modify lists for calls.   The problem is, what if the teen just disables the internal GPS on their mobile, what will Cell Cease do then?

Currently only available for Windows Mobile smartphones with a built-in GPS.  The company is aiming their product at families (parents in particular) and businesses that would like to put “a ‘Governer’ on cell phone usage for your fleet drivers.”

The post Cell Cease to stop texting driving teens in their tracks appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

A variety of Windows-powered smartphones.

When Apple came forward with the App Store for the iPhone, everyone got pretty excited. At the same time apps had already existed on other platforms; just not in a unified storefront. The other trouble was that other smartphones did not have the same kind of internal storage capacity as the iPhone.

As a result, it has been more difficult to install quite as large a number of applications on other smartphones because of internal memory limitations. That’s about to change, at least for the Microsoft fans in the audience. Rather than restrict you to internal memory, you can now install some apps on a storage card.

Microsoft just made an announcement on the ability to install new applications from the Windows Marketplace for Mobile has been added to both Windows Mobile 6.5 and the upcoming Windows Phone 7 Series.

Since you can get these microSD memory cards in fairly sizable capacities, you could say that this brings Windows Mobile smartphones on par with the iPhone, at least in terms of installing a large number of apps.

For the record, Google Android phones are still lacking in this ability and rely solely on internal memory for app installations. I have a feeling that’s going to change pretty soon based on today’s news.

The post Microsoft to let you install mobile apps on memory cards, sticks one to iPhone appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

Developers, or hackers, at the XDA Developers forum have released a beta ROM of Android 2.1 that will run on the HTC Kaiser (aka AT&T tilt), Vogue, Niki, and Polaris.  Apparently the setup is nearly complete, everything is operational except a couple insignificant things (yikes) like the camera and Bluetooth.  WiFi, GPS, Phone, Sleep and Battery indicator a bit sluggish, but all working.

The team is doing their best to get the camera and Bluetooth working, they also have a bug tracker for users to help them troubleshoot anything that may arise during your conversion to Android.  A tool called HaRET will allow you to run the hacked ROM on your phone alongside Windows Mobile, if your just interested in taking a peak without the plunge.

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