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 Alongside HMD’s big bet on reviving the legendary Nokia brand and business through a licensing deal and a new wave of handsets that it is unveiling today at MWC in Barcelona, the company also announced another interesting piece of news: it has entered a new partnership with Google, where HMD/Nokia is now a leading participant in Google’s Android One — a program where Google… Read More

 Nokia’s 8110 — the distinctive ‘candy bar’ feature phone with a slider opening — was once the phone that everyone wanted but no one could afford, made popular through the Matrix film franchise. Now HMD, the company that has the license to make Nokia phones, is hoping for a hit by bringing it back. Today, at MWC in Barcelona, Nokia officially took the wraps off the… Read More

 Things have been mostly quiet on the Android Go front since Google announced the low-power mobile operating system back in May — aside, of course, from an unexpected name chance to the decidedly less catchy. Android Oreo (Go Edition). One of the things that’s made the offering unique from the start, however, is that unlike most of these sorts of lite offerings targeted at the… Read More

 ZTE’s one of those workhorse smartphone companies you don’t hear much about, aside from the occasional misguided flirtation with a bizarre form factor, a la the dual-screen Axon M. But the Chinese handset manufacturer still powers away and manages to produce some solid handsets at bargain bin prices. The company hasn’t officially announced pricing on the Blade V9 —… Read More

 Sometimes you travel all the way to Barcelona, only to meet up with a startup that’s been operating right around the block. Waverly Labs is a 20 person Brooklyn-based company that specializes in real-time translation through a pair of Bluetooth earbuds. The startup is on-hand at Mobile World Congress this week, showing off Pilot, its first piece of hardware, which launched at the end of… Read More

 I’ve been CTO of HappyFunCorp since last year, and it has been a deeply edifying experience. Everything people told me was mostly true: I write less code; I go to more meetings, and turn up in more conference calls; I think more strategically, and less tactically; my time is spent in a more fragmented and kaleidoscopic manner. Oh, yeah — and I’m a lot more involved in bizdev… Read More

 There’s a fine line between innovation and letting people see up your nose during conference calls. This week at Mobile World Congress, Huawei pushed through that line with reckless abandon on the MateBook X Pro. It’s one decided downside of this bezel-free future we’re all hurdling toward: the camera is an afterthought. For the iPhone Xs of the world, that means compromise… Read More

 Apple told Reuters that the company had to comply with Chinese authorities and move iCloud data to Chinese data centers. Not everyone’s data is moving to China. This is only going to apply to residents of mainland China who chose China as their main country when they created their Apple account (not Hong Kong, Macau or Taiwan). The Chinese government can now ask Apple to decrypt… Read More

 Bike-sharing startup GoBee Bike is giving up and shutting down in all French cities where it operates. GoBee Bike operates just like Chinese giants Ofo and Mobike. You open the app, you find a bike on the map and you unlock it by scanning a QR code. Once you’re done, you lock it again and leave it there — there’s no dock. And yet, the startup is blaming vandalism and says… Read More

 Mobile World Congress isn’t always a huge show for Samsung (last year we got a couple of tablets and some vague 5G news), but this year the company’s not messing around. Between the many teasers and seemingly endless deluge of leaks, the Galaxy S9 is all but announced at this point. Even so, once of the nice things about the company is that it always seems to have a little… Read More