Hasta La Gadget!

BlackBerry’s BBM client for iOS and Android, due for release this summer, will not support the iPad at launch, the company has revealed, focusing instead on smartphones. The cross-platform BlackBerry Messenger support was announced on Tuesday on the first day of BlackBerry Live, but software portfolio chief Vivek Bhardwaj confirmed to Trusted Reviews that tablet support is relatively low on the agenda.

“At this point it is iOS and Android, and that’s iOS phones running iOS 6 and higher” Bhardwaj said of the app. “Smartphone is our real focus and again it comes back to what BBM is. If you look BBM and the engagement and the activity, it’s because it is mobile, because people are on the go.”

Expanding BlackBerry Messenger support across rival platforms has been a long-rumored strategy for BlackBerry, though there’s controversy around whether the decision will now be too little, too late. BlackBerry OS has dropped a place in the worldwide smartphone OS market share league, it was announced today, with Windows Phone taking third place instead.

Whether that will mean BBM for iPhone and Android works as a gateway drug of sorts, or merely as a route for BlackBerry owners looking to leave the platform behind and yet still keep in touch with old friends on a new device, remains to be seen.

Even without a dedicated iPad version, that’s not to say iPad and iPad mini owners won’t be able to access the iPhone BBM app. However, they’ll be stuck using screen-doubling until BlackBerry gets around to coding up a tablet-specific interface, and there’s no telling when that will actually happen.

Still, there’s at least a hint that such support is in the pipeline, as well as other form-factors where BBM could roost, beyond mobile. “I think when you look at things like Smart TVs and desktops, those are definitely areas for exploration,” Bhardwaj teased.

IMAGE: BlackBerry Blog

BlackBerry: No BBM for iPad app at cross-platform launch is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Apple has passed the 50bn app download point, with one App Store user taking away a $10,000 iTunes card for being the person who pushed the firm across the milestone. More than 800 apps per second – or over 2bn apps per month – are being grabbed on iOS, Apple said today, with over 850,000 titles to choose from.

350,000 of those are native iPad apps, Apple highlights, perhaps a small dig at Google which has struggled to see the same developer engagement in Android tablets. Yesterday, during the opening keynote to Google I/O, Google confirmed that over 48bn Android apps had been installed.

The 50-billionth iOS download itself was Say the Same Thing by developer Space Inch, Apple confirmed, downloaded by Brandon Ashmore from Mentor, Ohio.

The App Store has been a lucrative endeavor for not only Apple but developers as well. The company has supposedly paid out more than $9bn to coders over the past five years. The 50bn figure doesn’t include re-downloads or updates, only the first app install.

In the intervening period, the number of available apps a smartphone OS has to offer has become an important metric in the potential success of the platform. Microsoft, for instance, paid developers ahead of the launch of Windows Phone, to make sure certain key titles were available. However, more recently, the focus has turned in part to app discovery, with well-stocked download stores struggling to present good titles in an efficient way. That’s something iOS 7 is expected to address later on in 2013.

Apple passes 50bn App Store downloads is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Windows Phone has taken third place in the global smartphone OS shipments chart buoyed by Nokia’s Lumia successes, new figures suggest, pushing BlackBerry into fourth place, but Microsoft’s platform still languishes well behind Android and iOS. Google’s Android is the clear smartphone OS marketshare leader, according to IDC, with a claimed 75-percent of the market in Q1 2013, while Apple’s iOS has 17.3-percent.

That’s a 79.5-percent increase year-on-year for Android, while iOS managed a 6.6-percent climb from its share in Q1 2012. Microsoft saw the biggest increase, however, up 133.3-percent over the course of 12 months, to hold 3.2-percent globally.

BlackBerry OS, however, declined 35.1-percent year-on-year, down to 2.9-percent. There’s still a comfortable buffer over other platforms dwelling at the bottom of the barrel, but it suggests that BlackBerry 10 still has plenty of work to do if it’s to leverage the company back into the mainstream.

For Windows Phone, 7m units were supposedly shipped in the opening three months of this year. That’s predominantly down to Nokia devices; the Finnish company shipped 5.6m Lumia Windows Phones in the period, making it the most popular vendor for Microsoft’s mobile OS. Nokia’s expectations are high for Q2, too, with estimates of as many as 7m sales by some analysts.

In Android, Samsung dominates the segment, with 41.1-percent market share of smartphones overall. Earlier this week, Strategy Analytics estimated Samsung devices comprised 95-percent of Android smartphone sales.

“The intra-Android competition has not stifled companies from keeping Android as the cornerstone of their respective smartphone strategies,” IDC concludes, “but has upped the ante to innovate proprietary experiences.”

For Apple, it’s the company’s most impressive volume for iPhone sales, but IDC blames iOS stagnation for lower year-over-year growth than the market as a whole. That’s likely to change, it predicts, when iOS 7 debuts later in 2013.

Windows Phone comes 3rd in smartphones but Android keeps clear lead is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Google’s new, unified Hangouts platform focuses heavily on its mobile apps, which give Android and iOS users a common platform for text and video chats. In theory, they’re the cure for the consistency problems Google’s messaging systems have faced for years. But are they the fixes we’ve all been waiting for, the all-encompassing solutions that have us dropping the likes of Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp? We gave Hangouts a test on both Android and iOS to find out — check our impressions after the break.

Filed under: Internet, Mobile, Google

Comments

The rumors were apparently true: Google’s unified chat platform (widely nicknamed Babel) is launching as the new Hangouts, with new mobile apps to match. The messaging service puts Android, Chrome, Gmail and iOS all on the same page for the first time, focusing the interface on conversations that carry over from device to device. Across the board, you’ll find consistent notifications, as well as emoji and shared photo pools that weren’t in Google Talk. Contacts are still there, but they’re pushed to the side in the mobile view. Live group video is new, too, while text chats have watermarks to clarify who’s reading and typing. Everyone gets access to the updated Hangouts today. The Android and iOS apps are available as we write this; Gmail users can hit a “try it now” button, while Chrome users can install an extension. One word of warning: the Android app currently won’t run on some tablets, including the Nexus 7.

Filed under: Cellphones, Internet, Mobile, Google

Comments

Via: Official Gmail Blog, Google+ Project

Source: Chrome Web Store, App Store, Google Play