Hasta La Gadget!

It’s time for the greatness of Nokia’s own City Lens technology to be released into the wild, the same powerful beast shown earlier this year at CTIA and more recently on the Lumia 820 and 920 lineup! This software brings the power of Nokia Maps to the virtual universe showing an overlay of places and attractions on your real world view through your device’s camera. City Lens will be available for several Nokia devices for real, in a v1.0 version out of Beta, starting today!

If you use the Nokia Lumia 900, 800, or 710, you’re in luck. These devices will have access to City Lens starting today. All you’ve got to do is follow the following directions to grab it quite quickly! You’ll be using your device’s camera to see a QR-code first and foremost – from there you’ll get the download and you’ll be on your way! Note that you do need an internet connection to grab this download, so make sure data or wifi are on!

1. Press the Search button on your Nokia Lumia and then tap Vision
2. Scan the barcode
3. Tap on the link when it appears on the screen
4. Install the application from the Windows Phone Marketplace

You could also, of course, just go straight to the Windows Phone Marketplace, but that’s not nearly as fun a process! Have a peek at our hands-on with City Lens through the eyes of the Nokia Lumia 920 here, and note that the final version for the 920 and the 820 will vary just a bit from the version you’re seeing for your 900, 800, or 710 today.

With Windows Phone 8 as it appears on the 920 and 820 you’ll find some features that only appear on Windows Phone 8 devices and above. With this version of City Lens, you’ll be able to pin to start any category tile. You’ll also be able to add your own favorite searches, and you’ll be able to use City Lens in both portrait and landscape modes. Check our timeline below for more City Lens action!

[via Nokia]

Nokia City Lens released from Beta for Lumia devices is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

If you’d just put down Angry Birds Space for a moment, maybe we could tell you that mobile apps are kind of a big deal. How big of a deal? How’s about 45.6 billion downloads just this year — that’s a serious amount of birds lost in space! All of those downloads weren’t just Angry Birds venturing into the final frontier, of course. Gartner, Inc’s latest mobile report doesn’t actually break down how much of that enormous number pertains to Rovio’s hit franchise, but it does note that “free apps will account for nearly 90 percent of total mobile app store downloads in 2012.” That means of the nearly 46 billion apps downloaded this year, approximately 40.6 billion were free. Additionally, an entire quarter of the apps downloaded in 2012 were via Apple’s iOS app store — but that isn’t what’s driving app growth, necessarily. “The number of apps available is driven by an increasing number of stores in the market today,” Gartner research director Brian Blau notes. “These stores will see their combined share of total downloads increase, but demand for apps overall will still be dominated by Apple, Google, and Microsoft.”

And the growth doesn’t stop there. Blau predicts that 93 percent of all apps downloads will be of the free variety by 2016 — also, we’ll be downloading over 300 billion apps worldwide by the same year. Like we said, kind of a big deal.

Filed under: Cellphones, Gaming, Tablets, Software, Mobile

Gartner: Free apps dominate market, iOS App Store accounts for 25 percent of all content originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 11 Sep 2012 13:17:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink TechCrunch  |  Gartner, Inc.  | Email this | Comments

Vodafone UK has readied 500,000 nano SIM cards suited for Apple’s iPhone 5, with the carrier briefly spilling the SIM stockpile stat in a post on its official blog. That post – since yanked (though Google’s cached version reveals all) – claimed that “the first devices have now been announced” that use the new nano SIM size, though of course that’s not actually the case; in fact, the first such phone is all but certain to be Apple’s new iPhone, and that gets its official reveal tomorrow.

“Vodafone has now got 500,000 of the new 12.3 mm x 8.8 mm nano-SIMs in stock” the carrier pre-emptively crowed. “Stripped of all excess plastic, this fourth generation SIM card is 40 percent smaller than a micro-SIM, but supports the conventional eight electrical contacts and fits backwards into current micro-SIM slots so that you can use it during any changeover period.”

The photos, meanwhile, show the nano SIM still fixed inside the credit-card sized shipping plastic, as well as in size-comparisons with today’s micro SIMs as in the current iPhone 4S and other devices. For those not in the UK, the two coins are British 20 pence and 5 pence pieces.

It’s potentially a case of premature publishing and, with no specific mention of the iPhone 5, it’s unlikely to get Vodafone into any trouble with Apple. The conspiracy theorists among us might wonder, however, whether Vodafone revealed the SIMs early on purpose, to distract from new UK LTE carrier EE’s hint at ranging the new iPhone earlier today.

[via Pocket-lint]

Vodafone iPhone 5 nano SIMs prematurely pictured (but was it on purpose?) is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Intel’s next-generation laptop chipset (Codename: Haswell) isn’t set to come out until next year, but when it does, AnandTech says the 3D-transistor-based hardware will offer twice the GPU performance as Ivy Bridge, and when idle, will consume 20x less power than Sandy Bridge. Excited yet? [AnandTech] More »

In the market for a Samsung Galaxy S III, but you despise dropping over two figures on electronics? First and foremost, we might suggest another hobby to you. We’d also suggest snapping up a half price $99 Galaxy S III from Amazon today, where it’s on sale “for a very limited time only.” Yes, you have to sign up for a new individual or family activation, but at least you can choose between Sprint, Verizon, and AT&T for that new contract. It’ll even arrive in two days, per Amazon’s free two-day shipping, and there are three different colors of the 16GB version to choose from. Hot dog!

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile

Samsung Galaxy S III drops to $99 on Amazon for a ‘very limited time only’ originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 11 Sep 2012 13:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  Amazon  | Email this | Comments