This week was a big one in the smartphone and tablet spaces, with big news about all of the major platforms. Here's a breakdown by platform of the major news of the past week.
This week was a big one in the smartphone and tablet spaces, with big news about all of the major platforms. The line between phones and tablets is becoming a very blurry one, with phones getting bigger and tablets of all sizes hitting the scene. Here's a breakdown by platform of the major news of the past week.
BlackBerry
RIM is continuing to rock the PlayBook, and this week news appeared that a 10-inch model will be coming to light later this year. The company's existing PlayBook is of the 7-inch variety, the smaller size that Steve Jobs has told us we don't want. Consumers may beg to differ with that assessment, but RIM is looking to cover all its bases with a larger sibling to the current PlayBook.
Windows Phone
Microsoft has kept the Windows Phone in the news a lot recently, but for all the wrong reasons. While the update fiasco seems to have finally died down, this week Windows Phone owners reported not one but two major service outages affecting the platform. First the Windows Phone Marketplace went down, leaving owners unable to find or buy apps for the phones, a major business hit for the ecosystem. Then news surfaced that the Xbox Live service was down for Windows Phone users. It seems Microsoft can't catch a break with Windows Phone.
Android
The Android army got bigger this week, much bigger in fact with the announcement of the Samsung Infuse 4G that is coming to AT&T. The Infuse has a ginormous 4.5-inch Super AMOLED Plus display, making this the biggest pure phone to come along. Samsung is touting the Infuse is the thinnest 4G phone in existence, which the 8.9mm thickness certainly bears out. The phone will be available May 15 from AT&T.
iOS
Apple answered a flap concerning its own mobile platform with the release of iOS 4.3.3. The update's purpose was to address locationgate, the recent discovery that iPhones and iPads track user's locations and store the data locally on the devices. Whether this flap was deserved or not depends on who you ask, but supposedly iOS 4.3.3 puts the issue to bed. Location data is now deleted if Location Services is turned off by the user, and the data cache is no longer backed up to iTunes.
