Citing “Short-Term Difficulties”, HTC Forecasts Weak Q1, Significant Revenue Drop

Submitted by TechCrunch on

htc

Smartphones and tablets maker HTC this morning said it foresees a huge drop in revenue (PDF) in the first quarter, citing “short-term difficulties” as it gears up to – reportedly – launch four new phone models at the Mobile World Congress later this month.

The Taiwanese company sees revenue dropping as much as 36 percent in Q1, to between NT$65 billion and NT$70 billion (roughly $2.2 and $2.4 billion) due to this “product transition”.

In PR speak, that sound something like this:

Despite short-term difficulties, momentum will resume in the upcoming product cycle driven by HTC’s brand strength, innovation, and design/engineering capabilities

OK Go ‘Play’ 1,000 Instruments With a Car in Stunning New Video

Submitted by Mashable on

The band OK Go is known for their imaginative and original videos, and their latest, for Needing/Getting, is no exception.

This time the folks from OK Go decided to play the instruments used in the song – with a car.

They outfitted a Chevy Sonic with retractable pneumatic arms, and then drove it around with the arms hitting more than 1,000 actual instruments posted on the side of the road in a desert near Los Angeles.

What makes the entire project really amazing (and a bit crazy) is the fact that the entire stunt was not only about the visual side of things: the instruments were actually producing sounds.

For example, “each piano had the lowest octaves tuned to the same note so that they’d play the right note no matter where they were struck,” says the band in the video description on YouTube.

Super Bowl 2012 Commercials: Watch Them All Here

Submitted by Mashable on


Phone Innovators: Official 2012 Best Buy Game Day Commercial


Watch as phone innovation meets phone-buying innovation, at Best Buy. Choose Phone Freedom and get any phone, any carrier, and all of their plans, with lots of unbiased advice.
Reserve a $50 gift card at http://www.bestbuy.com/phonefreedom now for your next upgrade.

Click here to view this gallery.

Pedestrian Map App, Lumatic, Raises $800K From Joi Ito And 500 Startups

Submitted by TechCrunch on

Lumatic screen

All the major map apps like Google Maps, Bing Maps, and Mapquest have walking directions as a standard feature, but the folks at Lumatic don’t think they are good enough. It is creating mobile maps designed for pedestrians, cyclists, and people who use public transit. Originally a TechStars company called Omniar, serial entrepreneur Scott Rafer (MyBlogLog, Lookery, Mashery) joined as CEO a year ago.

He recently raised a seed round of $800,000 from Joi Ito’s Neoteny Labs, 500 Startups, Chamath Palihapitiya, Allen Morgan, Ted Rheingold, and other angels.

10 Best iPhone Armbands

Submitted by Mashable on


1. Sporteer Armband





"Designed by athletes for athletes," the Sporteer gets an integrated pocket for cash, cards and keys.

Cost: $24.99

Click here to view this gallery.

If you use your phone as an MP3 player during workouts, or don’t want to go running without it, an armband case is the ideal solution to give you a practical, handsfree way of keeping your handset close.

We have found 10 armband cases for the iPhone that offer great solutions for joggers and gymers. Whether you’re looking for an armband case with a hidden pocket, glow in the dark safety features or built-in cable management, you’ll find a case to suit you in our selection.

Tablets: price and quality

Submitted by Lost in Mobile on

Tablets are one of the few computing products in which price cannot always be classed as an accurate indicator of quality. There are tablets on the market retailing for under £250 that offer an truly excellent experience and other that retail for more than £400 that fail in the most important of areas.

The iPad is seen as the benchmark for tablet quality and while that is true, in the Android arena things get muddled because there are so many available. Examples include the HTC Flyer which can now be purchased for under £250 and which offers an exceptional experience in almost every area. Some other tablets at the same price point offer lesser performance in terms of battery, speed and basic hardware requirements like a screen that can be viewed in all weather conditions so this makes it difficult to decide which one to buy.

Samsung’s “Thing Called Love” Ad: The Anti-Apple?

Submitted by Mashable on

Samsung has made one thing clear in its “Next Big Thing” Super Bowl spot — it wants to be the anti-Apple.

The South Korean electronics maker is marketing it’s 5.3-inch smartphone with stylus as the latest player in the world of connected devices.

The ad — as we already new from its teaser released last week — pokes fun at Apple fanboys and fangirls who notoriously camp out in anticipation for iDevice launches.

The towns of San Francisco, Calif, Boston, Ma. and Denver, Co., erupt in non-choreographed flash mobs, when they meet “The Thing Called Love,” the Samsung Galaxy Note.

The phone, which some Mashable editors got their hands on at CES, feels too big to be a phone, measuring over half the length of the iPad.

Do iOS Apps Crash More Than Android Apps?

Submitted by Lost in Mobile on

A new study by Crittercism has concluded that iOS apps crash more than Android apps.

From Forbes- "The largest proportion of app crashes from both iOS and Android platforms were on iOS 5.01 with 28.64% of overall crashes (in a normalized data set). That makes sense since iOS 5 was still relatively new at that time and many apps still need to work out the kinks with the new OS. But there are also older iOS versions that have a significant proportion of app crashes. For example, iOS 4.2.10 had 12.64% of app crashes, iOS 4.3.3 had 10.66% and iOS 4.1 had 8.24%. One other point that this made clear to me is that many people apparently take their time updating their iPhone software or never update it at all."

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