Hasta La Gadget!

You think phones are getting huge now? Before smartphones reigned, dumbphones made people look—in retrospect—insanely dumb. It wasn’t there fault, but let’s look back in time and laugh at them. More »

AT&T has the following chart on their webpage which outlines roaming rates while outside the U.S. We’re going to concentrate on the text messages row, also known as SMS messages. More »

There’s no question that cell phones have made our lives easier, but they can also sometimes cause some pretty big headaches. Dropped calls, for instance, are always a major annoyance, and a new poll from the Pew Internet & American Life Project finds that the vast majority of cell phone users still find themselves dealing with them. 72% of respondents told Pew that they still experience dropped calls occasionally, which is a ridiculously large number of people when you consider how many of us own some kind of cell phone.

Of those people who answered in the affirmative, 32% said they suffer dropped calls multiple times per week or more frequently. Though we’ve only got 32% of polled cell phone users saying that they experience dropped calls frequently, the number that say dropped calls are still an issue is pretty staggering. Looking at the chart above, we can see that 6% of users say they deal with dropped calls on a daily basis, and another 6% say it happens multiple times per day, which we imagine is endlessly infuriating.

Elsewhere in Pew’s report, which was authored by Jan Lauren Boyles and Lee Rainie, 69% of users say that they occasionally receive unwanted marketing calls, with 25% of users claiming that it happens a few times per week. 79% of cell phone users say they text message, and 69% of those texters claim to occasionally receive spam messages. Finally, we come to mobile Internet download speeds. 55% percent of cell phone owners use their phones to access the Internet, and 77% of those mobile Internet users claim to be hit with “slow download speeds that prevent things from loading as quickly as they would like” every once in a while.

The sad news is that smartphone owners report these problems more frequently than “other cell owners.” Looking at the second chart from Pew, we see that smartphone owners report problems with dropped calls, unwanted calls and texts, and slow download speeds more often than the rest. Pew says that the poll took place during March and April 2012, and that the non-profit polled a total sample of 2,254 adults to get these rather interesting results. At least now you know that you aren’t the only one suffering when you experience a dropped call, right?

Majority of cell phone owners still experience dropped calls, Pew poll finds is written by Eric Abent & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Wondering if Samsung’s new flagship has hit its sales goal yet? Breathe out — it did. According to Yonhap, Shin Jong-kyun, head of Samsung’s information technology and mobile communication division, told reporters the firm has moved more than 10 million Samsung Galaxy S IIIs since its unveiling. Jong-kyun wasn’t able to give specific numbers, but we know from history that the handset is outpacing its predecessor, which took five months to make eight digits in sales. As for the goal, Sammy previously pegged the 10 millionth unit for early July, noting that it was fighting component shortages along the way — all in all, mid-month isn’t too far off. Thinking of helping the firm bolster its numbers further? We’ve got a whole series of reviews you may want to take a look at.

Filed under: Cellphones

Galaxy S III sales breach 10 million, satisfy Samsung executives originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 22 Jul 2012 20:41:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Huawei’s taken to the Taste of Chicago event in Chicago to introduce its fresh pair of myTouch phones to the world, but it also had another gem at its booth: the Huawei M660, also known as the Ascend Q. An upcoming smartphone that’s poised to hit the US in August, the company plans to launch the device on Cricket as a prepaid handset. It’s certainly not high-end, but we weren’t exactly expecting it to take the no-contract carrier by storm in that sense. In fact, spec junkies may be a little disappointed at what they see in the portrait QWERTY phone: a 3.2-inch HVGA touchscreen display, Android 2.3.6, an 800MHz CPU, 1,500mAh battery, microSD storage slot and a 3MP fixed-focus rear camera with no LED flash. The device will also feature Muve Music, a Cricket staple that’s starting to be included on most of its smartphone lineup.

The keyboard, while small, actually closely resembles a BlackBerry Bold — its keys are pretty close together, but each key offers a ridge that gives our fingers a little more travel and makes it easier to type than most other ‘boards its size. The one concern we had with the keyboard was its placement of some of the keys — for instance, there’s a messaging access button on the lower right corner of the device, which we accidentally hit on multiple occasions when we were attempting to hit the much smaller enter key just above it. For a Gingerbread device with an 800MHz CPU, the Ascend Q actually runs pretty smooth, with minimal lag when going in between various tasks. And in our limited time with the device, we were able to do a quick SunSpider test, which yielded a score of 4,800. In terms of the user interface, the Gingerbread UI on the Q is reminiscent to the skin we’ve encountered on previous Huawei phones such as the Honor and Mercury.

Overall, this will likely be a good device for prepaid fans interested in a smaller messaging device. Huawei wasn’t able to give us any mention of pricing yet, but we imagine it will be quite a reasonable cost on Cricket. Check out our hands-on gallery and full video below.

Continue reading Huawei Ascend Q hands-on (video)

Filed under: Cellphones

Huawei Ascend Q hands-on (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 10 Jul 2012 19:42:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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