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Motorola Xoom shipments, RIM warns investors, Samsung Galaxy players updated: US Update
Samsung Galaxy players score 3D navigation support, Google Navigation dethroned?
Motorola Xoom headed to Sprint, 4G support nowhere to be found
RIM smartphone shipments fall short of expectations, PlayBook estimates still on target
Everything Everything first quarter results are in: churn drops to 1.3 percent
Motorola shipped more than 250,000 Xoom tablets in Q1 2011
Get your fake Mario iPhone game before Apple pulls it [video]
HTC Wildfire S review: A mini Desire S missing the crucial bits
Android animation: How we stop framed Google’s OS
Tech Business: Biz tips from Google, money saving know how from IBM and roaming charges revealed

Motorola Xoom shipments, RIM warns investors, Samsung Galaxy players updated: US Update

Posted: 28 Apr 2011 07:10 PM PDT

Going down smoother than a bottle of aged whiskey, it's your morning US Update. Kicking things off this fine morning is official shipments numbers of the Motorola Xoom, a warning issued by RIM that smartphone shipments will not meet forecasts and a 3D navigation update to Samsung's Galaxy players. This and more on your US Update.

More than 250,000 Xooms have been shipped by the manufacturer during the first quarter of 2011, a respectable number, but shipments and actual device sales are quite different from a retail perspective. Combined with 9.3 million mobile device, 4.1-million representing smartphones, and it's easy to see why Motorola's net revenues were up 30 percent compared with the year-ago quarter.

RIM's BlackBerry smartphone shipments for fiscal Q1 2012 were forecast in the range of 13.5 to 14.5 million units. RIM now expects the actual number to be closer to the lower end of that range, roughly 13.5 million. Of those 13.5 million devices, the company expects a lower average selling price. As a result, revenue is expected to be slightly below the original forecast of $5.2-5.6 billion.

Short of an updated Motorola Xoom fact sheet, Sprint's Xoom will be the same WiFi-only version currently on sale across many parts of the world. One could argue the logic behind the madness is that customers hoping to tap into Sprint's 4G data speeds may do so with their current smartphones and enable the mobile hotspot feature to share the high-speed love.

Samsung is treating all three of its Galaxy Players (YP-GB1, YP-GB70, SHW-M180) to a well-deserved upgrade. By way of a press release this afternoon, Samsung announced its Galaxy players would be updated to Thinkware's new 'Navi 3D' Android UI, navigation and optimization.

That wraps up the latest and greatest in the world of tech news. As always I'm Nick Marshall and I'll see you again tomorrow.

Samsung Galaxy players score 3D navigation support, Google Navigation dethroned?

Posted: 28 Apr 2011 07:01 PM PDT

As a die-hard Google Navigation user on both Android smartphones and most recently, the Motorola Xoom, it pains me to say Thinkware's new 'Navi 3D' might be the UI to beat. Judging by the screen shots (seen below), the 3D navigation coming to the Galaxy players looks to be top notch. The catch, of course, is that you'll need a WiFi network or some sort of mobile hotspot connection to tap into the power of your PMP.

Here's a look at the new dual-view mode in the Navi 3D app. I think this might just be the blockbuster feature, what do you think?

via Samsung

Motorola Xoom headed to Sprint, 4G support nowhere to be found

Posted: 28 Apr 2011 06:46 PM PDT

Ready for the tablet curveball of the week? How about a Motorola Xoom WiFi-only tablet headed to first 4G carrier in the US. This is exactly the way the cards have been dealt by Sprint/Nextel, announcing via press release this afternoon they'd be adding Motorola's first tablet to their portfolio sans 4G connectivity.

Unfortunately for those interested in using the Xoom to replace an in-car GPS unit, the paring of an Android handset to the tablet is not the complete experience. On the other hand, not having to add a second data plan is always nice. The real question at this point is how Sprint actually plans on selling the Xoom — will there be a 2-year commitment for a discounted price or is this simply Sprint selling the WiFi-only version in their retail stores?

via Sprint

RIM smartphone shipments fall short of expectations, PlayBook estimates still on target

Posted: 28 Apr 2011 06:30 PM PDT

RIM has cautioned investors this afternoon that smartphone shipments for its first quarter of fiscal 2012 will fall short of previous forecasts. The PlayBook on the other hand, looks to be enjoying a warm reception, despite the lack of native email and Android application support. After the Canadian giant recorded record smartphone shipments last quarter but say stocks plummet 12 percent, how would Wall Street react to today's news?

Facts are king so let's begin with some number crunching. RIM's BlackBerry smartphone shipments for fiscal Q1 2012 were forecast in the range of 13.5 to 14.5 million units. RIM now expects the actual number to be closer to the lower end of that range, roughly 13.5 million. Of those 13.5 million devices, the company expects a lower average selling price. As a result, revenue is expected to be slightly below the original forecast of $5.2-5.6 billion.

Now for some good news: BlackBerry PlayBook shipments continue to be in line with previous expectations and the devastating events in Japan played will not result in any significant supply disruptions. The full year fully diluted earners per share of $7.50 is also still on track. The combination of new BlackBerry smartphones and "prudent cost management" should propel stronger revenue in the third and fourth quarters of the fiscal year.

So how did Wall Street react? According to Bloomberg, "RIM fell $6.17, or 11 percent, to $50.43 in late trading, after closing at $56.59 on the Nasdaq Stock Market. It has lost 2.7 percent this year as of today's close."

via RIM

Everything Everything first quarter results are in: churn drops to 1.3 percent

Posted: 28 Apr 2011 06:04 PM PDT

The merger of Orange and T-mobile UK, better known as Everything Everywhere, has managed to post respectable figures for the first quarter of 2011. The combined forces managed to keep mobile service revenue on track, keeping in line with the 1.6 percent year-over-year growth by adding 160,000 new customers and reducing churn from 1.5 to 1.3 percent.

Changes were brewing between Orange and T-mobile during the first quarter as 2G national roaming was extended to 15.1 million customers, resulting in 350 million calls completed using the alternate network over the quarter. Thanks to 160,000 customer additions, the combined networks are now home to 27.7 million. The big shift this quarter was an 8.1 percent growing in contracts and a 6.0 percent decrease in prepay. This is the type of shift a carrier loves to see when it has its sights set on lowering churn.

The outlook looks bright for Everything Everywhere. The combination of a the successful launch of the iPad 2 on both Orange and T-mobile in March, contract-less mobile payments, and a refresh to the Orange pre-pay offer with top-ups from as little as 10p will continue throughout the second quarter.

via Orange

Motorola shipped more than 250,000 Xoom tablets in Q1 2011

Posted: 28 Apr 2011 05:47 PM PDT

It's time to put the speculation to rest, Motorola has come clean with sales data for its inaugural tablet, the Motorola Xoom. More than 250,000 Xooms have been shipped by the manufacturer during the first quarter of 2011, a respectable number, but shipments and actual device sales are quite different from a retail perspective. Combined with 9.3 million mobile device, 4.1-million representing smartphones, and it's easy to see why Motorola's net revenues were up 30 percent compared with the year-ago quarter.

Let's jump right into the highlights and skip the fluff. Net revenues for Q1 2011 were $3.0 billion, up 22 percent from the first quarter 2010. Net loss was .27 per share compared to .72 loss in the first quarter 2010. Mobile device revenues hit $2.1 billion, up 30 percent from the first quarter 2010. The GAAP operating loss was $89 million, non-GAAP was $61 million. In business, cash is king — Motorola recorded a positive operating cash flow of $107 million for the quarter.

Overall, things are looking good for Motorola Mobility. We'd like to see more Xoom tablet shipments, but let's be honest — Honeycomb is a work in progress.

via Motorola

Get your fake Mario iPhone game before Apple pulls it [video]

Posted: 28 Apr 2011 09:16 AM PDT

UPDATE: Annnnd it’s gone. We’d like to say it was fun, but well, it was actually copyright infringing garbage. For once we’re happy to see Apple wielding its ban hammer.

Monino is one of those iPhone apps. The sort that have clearly some how slipped through Apple’s rigorous (and sometimes arbitrary) approval process. It’s an IP infringing Super Mario spoof, complete with Nintendo’s own artwork and music. Unlike some of those iPhone apps, it’s also so bad it needs to be played to be believed. Read on to see the video.

Monino, by developer FeiYingInfo, was just added to the iPhone App Store yesterday, though we do wonder how it ever made it at all. It’s a mish mash of Nintendo artwork and names (Monino must face the evil Bowler), and copyrighted MIDI music that completely fails to capture the imagination in the way Nintendo manages. The goombas appear to have been drawn in paint, and the fireballs are just red circles.

We’re giving this one hours before the plug is pulled, so get it on your iPhone now – it’s worth the 59p to show your mates just how bad it is.

Out Now | £0.59p | iTunes

HTC Wildfire S review: A mini Desire S missing the crucial bits

Posted: 28 Apr 2011 08:34 AM PDT

The HTC Wildfire S has landed, hitting shop shelves to sate those after an affordable Android phone now, rather than an insanely specced one in a few weeks’ time. But will it? Take a closer look in our HTC Wildfire S review and you’ll see the audience for it isn’t quite the one you’d expect.

Most people we know who ended up with an original 2010 HTC Wildfire did so because they were after a very cheap smartphone – and though it was originally priced much too close to the HTC Legend to make it worthwhile, it soon ended up on very low price deals, making it a worthy option. This time around though, with cheap rivals already on sale, think twice if that’s your plan.

HTC Wildfire S: Everything you need to know

Build

Just as the original Wildfire looked and felt like a HTC Desire Mini, so the Wildfire S design echoes that of the new HTC Desire S. It’s not unibody, but it is mostly metal, and feels just as sturdy. Like its bigger brother, it’s also done away with the optical trackpad, leaving you with a perfectly responsive row of capacitive buttons below the screen, and just your usual volume keys on the left hand side, and 3.5mm audio and power on the top. It’s a streamlined handset, and all the more covetable for it.

It is however, bloody small. It’s five millimetres shorter than the original, but feels even tinier. We actually had to go and check with a ruler that the display really was still 3.2-inches across. This isn’t a dealbreaker, but it is the thing you need to be sure about before slapping down for it: can you cope when a keyboard is shoved on a touchscreen this small? Does having a titchy little pebble of a phone in your palm feel awesome or absurd?

Android Augmented: How the HTC Wildfire S makes Android more human

Have a play in a shop if you can: it’s too small for our own hands, but we know there’s always a market for dinky phones too. Check out the colours too: our lilac review model is surprisingly subtle, but there are black, red and white options as well.

Screen

Long time Electricpig readers will know that the screen was our big sticking point with the original Wildfire. Its 320×240 resolution not only looked as grainy as cereal stretched scores 3.2-inches, it also meant not every Android app ran on it.

HTC Wildfire S: Clark Kent’s personality in a superman suit

HTC has upped the resolution for 2011, to a more bearable 480×320: as a result, the screen is as sharp as that on the HTC Hero or HTC Legend – admittedly both yesteryear phones now. It’s enough for reading emails and web pages, but if you’ve ever tasted sharper, you won’t want to go back. Viewing angles are decent (in fact, glare from the glass overcoat proves to be more of an issue than the LCD itself) and the colour’s…not bad. But colour isn’t as rich and vibrant as on the AMOLED display in the HTC Legend – in fact, if you can find one anywhere, the Legend is a superior option still.

The best Android apps of all time: Top 100

That’s also in part because we’ve been having the odd issue with touch response on the HTC Wildfire S. We’ll go to drag down the notification bar, press the space button or enter the PIN lock code only for the odd prod not to register – something that we’re not used to in a world where touchscreens are now so advanced. It’s not the end of said world, but it is a reason to consider other, even older, phones in place of it.

Android 2.3

On paper, Android 2.3 “Gingerbread”, the latest version of Google’s mobile operating system for smartphones, should be a huge selling point for the HTC Wildfire S. Who doesn’t like living on the bleeding edge? And yet in practice, HTC has actually removed many of the features that make Gingerbread a worthy upgrade.

For one, there’s the keyboard. You don’t get the incredible QWERTY keyboard Google crafted with this release, just HTC’s one which it’s been using for years now – it’s alright, but nothing on the vanilla Ginegrbread pad and its predictive shortcuts.

Then there’s HTC Sense. It’s the same software overlay as that found on the latest bunch of Android smartphones from the company, such as the HTC Incredible S and Desire S. You can integrate your Facebook and Twitter contacts as ever, remotely track your phone should you lose it, and toggle all the power settings and see recent apps in the notification tray, a lovely little HTC flourish.

But some extra features, like the DLNA streaming app are gone. As a result, the only real software benefit the Wildfire S boasts over the original is the ability to download new themes from HTC’s hub. Woooo.

Of course, Android itself is fantastic (if surprisingly crashy on the Wildfire S – the launcher and messaging apps have both died a few times in use) – wonderfully flexible, with a Market bursting with apps and games. But on its low end offerings, HTC’s Sense overlay has changed so little that we’re starting to become quite tired of it now. Same keyboard, same weather widget, same lack of multimedia file format support, same Stocks apps which we can’t see any Wildfire owner ever using.

Check out our best Android phone: budget Top 5 here

This isn’t us being jaded, and we’re not alone. Many people are already coming to the end of a contract with an HTC Android phone already – time flies, but they’ll find this just more of the same.

Battery and performance

The Wildfire S is one of many Android phones powered by a 600MHz CPU on sale right now (See also LG Optimus One, INQ Cloud Touch), and performance is predictably equal. The browser loads web pages quickly enough, and all your social networking apps will run just fine. Games on the other hand are another matter: you’ll get the odd stutter in Angry Birds, but you can outright forget about more graphically advanced games like Gun Bros.

On the plus side, the HTC Wildfire S is an absolute champ when it comes to conserving battery power. After a day and a half of solid testing with Wi-Fi and email syncing left on overnight, it’s still going strong at forty percent. Unusually for an Android phone, you can easily clear two days with all connections left on.

Check out the best HTC Wildfire S deals now

Call quality also impressed us: for a phone of such small proportions, the Wildfire S belts out top quality audio in calls, and not too scratchy, not too belchy audio through the speaker as well.

Camera

What did you expect? HTC’s never enjoyed a good reputation for camera phones, and nothing much has changed here. Video is jerky, stills lack any clarity despite auto focus, and the less said about the flash, the better.

Of course, you shouldn’t expect much more of a low end model – shutterbugs that are still intrigued are likely to be more put off by the lack of a physical shutter button on the HTC Wildfire S than the image quality.

Verdict

It may very well be HTC’s low price Android offering, but that doesn’t mean the HTC Wildfire S is the best affordable Android option. Far from it: we still can’t recommend the Orange San Francisco highly enough, which for £90 on Pay As You Go will give you a vastly superior screen and most of the same software features.

The HTC Wildfire S is however, the new micro Android option. If your fingers are the size of a grain of rice, and you’re looking for a more up to date Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini, you’ll love this tiny little smartphone. Us though, we’re all about the big screens.

Android animation: How we stop framed Google’s OS

Posted: 28 Apr 2011 07:18 AM PDT

You’ve met our Android Avengers, right? You can’t have missed them, plastered all over Electricpig. If you haven’t seen our eye-popping animated video, make sure you check it out. We’ve had a few people asking how it was made, so we’ve whipped up this behind the scenes video.

It might surprise you to know we cut and pasted every single thing on-screen, and spent a whole week snapping 3,000 individual animation frames before stitching them together. We really love Android. Watch our video, and you’ll see the lengths we went to in paying homage to Google’s OS!

If you haven’t already met the Android Avengers, check out the gang in full, and take our personality test to see which superhero identity most matches yours. Oh, and watch the video too, it’s a cracker.

Tech Business: Biz tips from Google, money saving know how from IBM and roaming charges revealed

Posted: 28 Apr 2011 06:42 AM PDT

If you're heading abroad with your new tablet this week, you might want to read what our sister site BizGene.com has discovered about the charges involved. This week, BizGene has also spoken to IBM about how you can save money through reducing the amount of computers your business uses. They've also chatted with Robert Whiteside, a Head of Enterprise at Google to get his top 10 business collaboration tips. Finally, BizGene have also commented on the Apple tracking furore that Apple simply call 'a bug'. Whether you're a sole trader, freelancer or small business, this is essential reading.

10 business collaboration tips by Google
It's not all about the tech but the people too. Learn how to work better and make everyone happier and more productive at the same time.

Which? highlights tablet roaming charges
Avoid £3000 bills for checking emails and using Google Maps while away on business.

IBM research shows how cloud computing saves you money
IBM have commissioned research which you need to read if your business has more than one computer.

Top tips to avoid late payment
Cash flow problems can scupper the smallest of businesses and the largest as well as freelancers. Find out how to keep things organised and get paid on time.

Is Apple following you?
Are they and if so, what does it mean to you and for rivals that Apple have been quick to point the finger at?