| Week in Tech: Facebook shows it knows the power of apps over hardware Apr 5th 2013, 11:56 
Technology is like fashion: by the time an exciting new range hits the shops, the industry's eyes are already on the next big thing. This week, the next big things are coming from the biggest names in the business. If you were expecting this week's big story to be the Facebook phone, you'd be right, sort of: while the incoming HTC First Facebook phone isn't on a par with the HTC One or the Samsung Galaxy S4, what's really interesting isn't the hardware but the software - Facebook Home. By making a Facebook-flavoured interface for Android, Mark Zuckerberg's mob isn't limited to just one phone. That means all kinds of Android phones could become Facebook phones, improving Facebook user engagement and driving Google crazy. Facebook knows its own limitations - and the power of an app. In with the BlueFacebook isn't the only tech giant showing off new software. Microsoft's been at it too: Windows Blue is getting a duller name (Windows 8.1) and a host of new features. And Apple is joining in as well. iOS 7 is running behind schedule, it seems, and engineers are being pulled off other projects to get it shipshape in time for this year's WWDC. Despite early reports of "pretty conservative" changes, reports now suggest that Jonathan Ive is already putting his stamp on the iOS interface and that the changes will make iOS 7 look much fresher. 
Apple's also involved in Webkit, the open source browser rendering engine spun off from KHTML, and this week we discovered that its Webkit partner Google doesn't want to play any more. As Matt Swider reports, "Google is kissing Webkit goodbye, announcing it will fork the widely used layout engine that renders web pages for its Chrome browser, and instead develop a new rendering engine, Blink." The move is apparently due to Google's frustration that Webkit changes weren't happening quickly enough. Guess who else is getting into browsers? That's right: Samsung. In a move that raises many more questions than it answers, Mozilla and Samsung have announced that they're collaborating on a new browser engine. As Michelle Fitzimmons reports, it's interesting because "Mozilla is working on its own mobile Firefox OS, while Samsung has been the standard-bearer - or at least most successful manufacturer - developing on Android. And of course there's Tizen, an open source operating system Sammy has its fingers in." It'll be interesting "to see how the various pairings Samsung finds itself in end up playing out". Ring of untruth?We know what you're thinking. "Surely there must be some new and frankly unlikely Apple rumours this week?" - and you're right, because the latest Apple TV speculation says that you'll control the device with a magic ring. It'll be a motion controller, and it will work just like a normal finger except something something magic ring. In a world of Kinect and Leap Motion interfaces, having to wear magic electronic jewellery to control a TV sounds like a backwards step to us. To say we're sceptical would be an understatement. 
That's not the only Apple rumour. This week we also heard that the Apple iWatch - which doesn't officially exist - might have fingerprint scanning, just like the iPhone 5S, which doesn't officially exist. The reports may well be accurate, but it's worth noting that they're based on single, anonymous sources. Some leaks are more credible, such as Gamespot's comments on the Xbox 720 - it's "compelling" and Microsoft is "doing some really cool stuff" - and the similarly named GameStop, who says that the PS4 will definitely be coming to Europe in 2013, not 2014 as previously reported. But of course, this being the tech industry everybody's already looking for what's coming after that. So what's next in high-end gaming? According to Nvidia, it's phones. They'll be the new skinny jeans, mark our words.     |  | BlackBerry Q10 hits Carphone Warehouse pre-order with £600 price tag Apr 5th 2013, 11:06 
Carphone Warehouse has opened its BlackBerry Q10 pre-orders today, and if you want the QWERTY-toting BlackBerry Q10 without a contract deal, it'll set you back an eye-watering £600. That's a whole lot of cash to drop on a BlackBerry handset - and a whole £70 more than Unlocked-Mobiles is selling it for. If the idea of handing over £600 is making you feel a bit queasy but you simply must have that QWERTY and it must come from Carphone Warehouse, you'll also be able to get the handset for free from £36 a month on a two-year contract. Q600Deals will vary depending on whether you opt for O2, Orange, T-Mobile, EE and TalkMobile, and since the Q10 is 4G-friendly, you may want to shell out more for the faster connection. You can pre-order the thing from Carphone today and the BlackBerry Q10 UK release date is set for the end of April - CW hasn't said exactly when but Unlocked-Mobiles expects stock on April 26. At that point you'll take delivery of your BlackBerry-10-toting handset with the lovely BlackBerry keyboard under a 3.1-inch Super AMOLED touchscreen with NFC, 2GB of RAM and an 8MP camera as standard.     | | Gary Marshall: Facebook Home: Android's worst nightmare? Apr 5th 2013, 09:01 
Damn, that Mark Zuckerberg is smart. Facebook could have forked Android and tried to get manufacturers on board, but that would have been an enormous job - and a risky one too, because as Windows Phone's disappointing numbers demonstrate, half-arsed support from OEMs is little better than no support at all. So rather than compete with Android, Facebook has decided to make it irrelevant instead with Facebook Home. On a typical Android phone, Facebook is just an app. Android runs the show and gathers all the data, and Facebook exists inside Google's walled garden. On a phone with Facebook Home, Google's the one in the garden and Facebook's running the show. Facebook knows what apps you're launching, and where you are, and what you're doing, 24/7. It's an OS in everything but name, then, and because it's an app Facebook can update it and push those updates to users as often as it likes. Nexuses aside, you can't do that with OS updates. Google must be furious. Android: owned?Facebook Home isn't for me, or for you: it's not designed for people who worry about privacy, or who take smartphones seriously. It's for the people who don't care too much about tech, the people for whom Facebook and the internet are the same thing. You can see the appeal of an affordable, attractive Facebook Home phone - and Home is beautifully designed and very attractive - and for people already on Android it isn't hard to imagine the existing Facebook app plugging the hell out of Home until everyone installs it. What Facebook is doing, then, is trying to cut Google out of Google's own OS - just like Amazon did with the Kindle Fire and perhaps its rumoured Kindle Phone, and just like Chinese manufacturers are doing with their cheap Android handsets. Google only benefits from Android if we use Google services, give Google data and watch Google ads. That doesn't happen on Kindle Fires, or on Chinese cheapies, and if Zuckerberg gets his way it won't happen on HTCs or Samsungs either. The data will be gathered by Facebook. The ads will be Facebook ads. That might not happen, of course, but it's a threat - and it's a huge one. What Facebook is doing, I think, is using Google's strength against it. The very openness that's helped build market share gives Facebook a great opportunity to grab that huge audience, and the lack of control over Android apps means there's no gatekeeper to stop it. Can you imagine Apple allowing this kind of takeover in iOS? I'm sure Google will be all smiles about Home today, but I'm equally sure that behind the scenes, Mountain View is Frowny Face Central. Google isn't going to be happy about Home, and that means it'll either try to copy it or kill it.     | | Why Facebook snubbed Apple and iOS with Facebook Home Apr 5th 2013, 00:43 
Facebook brought a recently rumored Android overlay to life today, the Facebook Home, along with the first handset to carry it, the appropriately named HTC First. Rather than making its own handset or forking Android to create an outright Facebook operating system, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that as a Google Play download that'll eventually be made available to most Android devices, Home can reach the maximum number of users. "Our community has more than 1 billion people in it," he said. "A really good phone would only get to one or 2 percent of that." That's nice rhetoric, but the elephant in the Facebook press conference room was, "What about Apple?" Zuck answersAgain and again, Zuckerberg highlighted what he called the openness of Android, a feature that ultimately allowed Facebook to develop the Home overlay to fit on top of the operating system. He played the PR game, but his message about why Facebook went after Android and snubbed Apple's iOS was clear: "We have a great relationship with Apple, and the way you work on all these operating systems is pretty different," Zuckerberg hemmed during a post-conference Q&A. He did, however, get to the meat of the matter: "Apple is a very controlled environment. The good news is we have this long, good relationship with Apple. We are integrated into the operating system, we have an active dialogue to do more with them, but ultimately anything that happens with Apple is through partnership with them. "Google is aware of what we're doing, we've talked with them about this, but fundamentally Android is just a more open system, so we don't have to work directly with them in order to build an experience like this or even go deeper than what we're talking about today. "They've designed Android from the ground up to support deep integration like this." In other words, Apple's closed and controlling environment wasn't where Facebook wanted to develop Home. Apple, it would seem from Zuckerberg's comments, would have had its fingerprints all over Home, slowing Facebook's overlay roll and potentially taking the project far from the vision the FB team had when it set out to build this house of apps. Perhaps there's an iHome in development already, but clearly Zuck and crew wanted to get Facebook Home out to the masses ASAP the way it wanted it to be done, and Android was the platform that allowed them to do it.     | | Blip: Most time on smartphones spent playing games Apr 5th 2013, 00:02 
If you're in the office now, look around you. The people you see looking at their smartphones are probably playing Temple Run. This according to apps analytics firm Flurry which has posted some revealing stats breaking down how we use our phones. Looking at only US data, Flurry sees smartphones users spending 2 hours and 38 minutes a day on phones, with 32 percent of that time in games. 20 percent of the remaining time is spent using web browsers, and only 2 percent of the time in productivity apps. Shocked? Your boss is. 
The only single app named in the data is Facebook, which accounts for a remarkable 18 percent of smartphone usage, or about 30 minutes a day for the average user. This dominates all other forms of social media which only account for 6 percent of the time in the research, as a collected figure of everything that isn't Facebook. Blips are TechRadar's new news nuggets that you'll find percolating through the homepage - or you can see them all by hitting the blip keyword below.     | | Updated: HTC First release date, price, specs and features Apr 4th 2013, 19:15 
Meet the HTC First, the closest thing we'll get to a Facebook Phone, as it has Facebook Home preloaded. Facebook Home is the eponymous social network's new deeply integrated Android overlay which brings all manner of Facebook shenanigans to your phone's homescreen and notifications bar. "It's a great opportunity to bring mobile and social together even more closely," Cho said, promising "the best Facebook experience" on the device. The HTC First comes with Instagram pre-loaded. HTC First release dateThe HTC First's U.S. release date is April 12, but there is no U.K. release date as of yet. It will come in red, light blue, white and black. 
HTC First dimensions and sizeHTC says its new "hardware is thin, modern and seamless, with soft edges to draw your attention to the updates from friends and family". The dimensions are 125.6 x 64.93 x 8.96mm (4.96 x 2.56x 0.35in), and it weighs in at 4.37oz - that's 124g. HTC First OS, processor and connectivity Inside, the smartphone runs Android 4.1 - Jelly Bean - with the new Facebook Home experience and incorporates a Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 processor with dual-core CPU and 3G/4G world and multimode LTE. There's also 802.11a/b/g/n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0. HTC First display and cameraThere's also a 1280 x 720 4.3-inch glass display, while there's a 5MP rear-facing camera with LED flash in addition to a 1.6MP snapper on the rear. Up to 1080p HD video capture is supported, with 720p HD playback on the device. There's a 4x digital zoom. HTC First mediaThere's also a built-in FM radio in addition to support for AAC, AAC+, eAAC+, AMR, iMelody, MIDI and MP3 music formats.  HTC First in the USThe HTC First will be available in the U.S. for $99.99 exclusively on AT&T at first for LTE. "The HTC First will offer the best Facebook Home experience on mobile, right out of the box," said Ralph de la Vega, Chief of AT&T Mobility. "Because AT&T offers the fastest 4G LTE in the nation, it's the best network for Facebook Home. And the best device for Facebook Home is the HTC First." HTC First in the UKThe HTC First is also coming to the U.K., with EE set to range the First first on its 4G network. We're anticipating a U.K. price tag of about £100, but there are sure to be contract deals in the works, too. "The HTC First will be exclusively available this summer on EE's superfast 4GEE service, with details on pricing and availability to be announced in due course." We're on the case with both the networks and HTC so we'll bring you more details on the HTC First U.S. and U.K. release date and pricing as we have them.     | | Updated: HTC First announced, coming to the UK with EE Apr 4th 2013, 19:06 
The first phone to come with Facebook Home built in is coming to the UK, with EE set to range the HTC First in the UK. It sports a 4.3-inch display, dual-core processor, runs Android Jelly Bean and will arrive in four colours; red, black, white and pale blue. That's all we really know for now, with the handset hitting the US on April 12 but no release date announced for the rest of the world. EE says said: "The HTC First will be exclusively available this summer on EE's superfast 4GEE service, with details on pricing and availability to be announced in due course." Second, third, fourth...In the US, the handset will sell for $99, so we're anticipating a UK price tag of about £100, while there are sure to be contract deals in the works too. The HTC First is as close as we're going to get to an official Facebook Phone, with CEO Peter Chou hopping up on stage at Facebook's Android Home event to reveal the handset to the world. Facebook Home is the eponymous social network's new deeply-integrated Android overlay which brings all manner of Facebook shenanigans to your phone's homescreen and notifications bar. We're on the case with EE and HTC so we'll bring you more details on the HTC First UK release date and pricing as we have them.     | | Apple's curved iPhone patent comes to life in photos, but is it real? Apr 4th 2013, 18:08 
If history repeats itself, this year Apple will probably release something along the lines of an iPhone 5S - but it's unlikely to resemble the prototype of a curved handset making the rounds online. GSM Arena reported Thursday that a pair of convincing-looking photos (shown here and here) for a potential new iPhone have surfaced online, which appears to take a radical departure from what Apple has done thus far. The images immediately raise suspicion, as they not-so-coincidentally closely resemble an Apple patent application approved last week. That design featured sloped edges, echoing a style Nokia has used to great advantage with its Windows Phone-powered Lumia line. Glimpse into future?Given the iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4S borrowed the same general designs from their predecessors, it seems unlikely the prototype featured in these images could be the "iPhone 5S" rumored for later this year. But the design could indicate a future direction for Apple's iconic smartphone, potentially losing the home button users know and love today and replacing it with a curved, edge-to-edge display. It's important to note that many Apple patent filings - including some that actually get approved - never see the light of day, so these images should be viewed a curiosity at best. One thing's for sure: We're all but guaranteed to see a new iPhone in 2013, but it may not resemble the one shown here.   | | Facebook Home's new Cover Feed replaces Android's lock and home screens Apr 4th 2013, 17:58 
The long-rumored "Facebook Phone" has taken the form of Facebook Home - not a phone at all, but "a family of apps" that will be deeply integrated with the Android OS. Facebook Home is a custom Android interface that, among other things, replaces the lock screen and the home screen of your Android phone with the Facebook "cover feed." The cover feed is what you see when you turn on or open your phone, and it shows a continuous stream of your friends' Facebook updates. From the Facebook Home cover feed, a finger swipe accesses apps, phone calls and the other functions you expect from a phone. The 'Facebook Phone' unveiledFacebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg took the stage today to introduce Facebook Home. "Today we're finally going to talk about that Facebook Phone," Zuckerberg, who previously spent months denying the existence of a Facebook Phone, said. "Or more accurately, we're going to talk about how you can turn your Android phone into a great, simple social device." That simplicity involves putting Facebook before your Android phone's other functions, so that instead of opening your phone and navigating to Facebook, the UI works the other way around. "More and more we just want to know what's going on with the people around us," Zuckerberg said. Facebook Home will be available starting April 12 on the HTC One X, Samsung Galaxy S3, the Galaxy Note 2, and other future devices, including the Galaxy S4. It will come pre-loaded on the HTC First - introduced today as the closest thing to an actual Facebook Phone that we'll ever get.     | | Nokia Catwalk to strut its stuff on May 15? Apr 4th 2013, 14:48 
An anonymous tipster who goes by the sobriquet South has revealed that Nokia is set to reveal the Nokia Catwalk on May 15. South, who could have chosen a cooler moniker, let's face it, didn't have much more to say from him/herself beyond that, other than that the launch will take place in London, UK. The news came by way of My Nokia Blog, which says it has had accurate information from South before, although it doesn't say exactly what so we'll just have to take their word for that. Fashion killaIt's not the first time we've heard tell of the Nokia Catwalk, said to be the follow-up to the Nokia Lumia 920. We're excepting a thinner, lighter body thanks to the use of aluminium instead of the 920's polycarbonate. Aside from that, the last report suggested that the specs will be pretty similar to the existing Lumia 920. It's been a while since Nokia busted out a high-end handset - MWC 2013 was all about the mid-range for the Finns - so May isn't too ridiculous a date to expect a hotter Lumia to hit. But since we can't verify the source and Nokia's keeping schtum, you'll have to file this one under 'perhaps, perhaps, perhaps'.     | |
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