Mobile Phone

F ollowing its Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple released updated App Store guidelines that included a new rule allowing it to ban apps created by a “commercialized template or app generation service.” The understanding at the time was this was part of Apple’s larger App Store cleanup, and the focus was …

Last November, Facebook launched Instant Games, a new platform for gaming with friends inside the Messenger chat app. Today, the company is announcing a couple of notable new features for this gaming platform, including support for live streaming via Facebook Live and video chatting with fellow gamers. The idea with …

Qualcomm just launched new Always Connected PCs with Snapdragon 835 processors, but the company isn’t resting on its laurels. It’s also announced the upcoming Snapdragon 845, and a bevy of improvements to go along with it. The company hasn’t said much about the CPU core itself, which is almost certainly …

2017 has already been a banner year for AMD, with a suite of products more competitive than anything the company could offer since ~2010. Most of the company’s launches, however, have focused on desktop computing. While the desktop market is important to AMD, it doesn’t account for anything like 50 …

Consumer spending on all mobile app stores will surpass $110 billion in 2018, according to a new report from App Annie, out today, which forecasts the state of the app ecosystem for next year. The $110 billion figure represents a 30 percent increase from the year prior, the firm also …

Apple today is introducing a new way for app developers to acquire users for their apps: it’s launching a pay-per-install advertising product called Search Ads Basic. The “basic” branding signals that this product is being aimed at smaller developers compared with the existing Search Ads product, which is now being …

Virtually every person with a cell phone has sent a text message by now, but 25 years ago just one person had done so. That’s when engineer Neil Papworth sent the first SMS, on December 3rd, 1992. What started as a curious implementation of existing cellular standards eventually grew into …

Facebook and Instagram have begun testing a feature that allows you to more easily bring your Instagram contacts into Messenger. The experience, which is entirely opt-in for the app’s users, is the latest in a series of integrations between Instagram and Facebook’s properties, which has earlier included the cross-posting of …

As promised earlier, Target today launched its own mobile payments system with the introduction of “Wallet” in the Target app. Wallet, as the name implies, allows Target shoppers in-store to both check out using their smartphone as well as take advantage of their Cartwheel digital coupons and discounts with only …

Mobile devices have long been hamstrung by lithium-ion batteries, which have been advancing much more slowly than other pieces of the hardware puzzle. Every few months we hear about a new battery design that might be able to replace the li-ion cells in our phones, but none of them have …