Amazon attempts to set “Fire” to the smartphone market

Amazon Fire Phone

June 18^th marked the introduction of the Amazon Fire phone, Amazon’s first entrance into the smartphone market. The Fire phone features a 13 MP (front facing) camera with an f/2.0 lens and optical image stabilization. The base model features 32GB of storage and comes with free unlimited Cloud storage through Amazon’s Cloud Drive. The handset itself has a 4.7-inch display featuring Gorilla Glass, aluminum buttons, and a rubberized grip area. Performance wise the handset features a Quad-core Snapdragon 2.2 GHz processor, 2GB of RAM, and dual stereo speakers with Dolby Digital Plus for a virtual surround sound experience.

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I Want to Print My Mobile Photos – A Windows Phone User’s Tale of Woe

Recently, I have been thinking about printing photos from my smartphone. I have a high-resolution camera phone with some advanced photo features and had taken some pictures that I thought came out particularly well and a few I applied some artsy filters to as well. I wanted to see if they looked as good off screen. As if somehow Snapfish read my mind, the service introduced a promotion to get people printing photos from its smartphone app. The mobile-only promotion offers 100 free prints a month (4 x 6-inch), for one year, for mail delivery only.

Being a Windows Phone user, I went to see if there was a Snapfish app in the Windows Phone store. A search for “Snapfish” resulted in “We couldn’t find a match.” Then I searched for Shutterfly, which found a “Shutterfly” app, which was not from the official Shutterfly but from an unknown developer instead. I even dug far back in my photo print memory and looked up “York Photo” – no match. I expanded the search to “print photos” and a long list of apps came up but only a handful of recognizable brand names — Walgreens and Kodak Pic Flick being two of them.

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September News Heats Up Mobile Market

Image credit: ZDNet

iOS (iPhone) in the News

Apple once again held true to its history of a September iPhone introduction. There was much speculation around the impending announcement and Apple delivered by introducing two models on September 11^th — the iPhone 5c and the 5s. Although the overall excitement for some seems to be waning that never stops the true Fan Boys; the very day the phones were announced, there was a guy in Tokyo that lined up in front of his local Apple Store and lines continue to form wherever the phones will be available even though they will be available  on September 20^th.

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The Nokia Lumia 1020 – who says a camera phone ISN’T a “real” camera?

Nokia Lumia 1020

So you think your camera phone takes “good” pictures? Last week Nokia introduced a new smartphone that plans to change our definition of “good” mobile photos. The handset manufacturer from Finland introduced the Lumia 1020 on July 11^th in New York City, a Windows smartphone that features a 41 megapixel camera with advanced photo features.

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Is that a smartphone in your pocket?…

There is no doubt that American’s love their mobile phones — and our latest love affair is with the smartphone. According to the 2013 InfoTrends U.S. Mobile Imaging Study, 94% of consumers report using a mobile phone of some kind, and nearly 59% are using a smartphone. It’s hard to miss the slew of TV commercials that promote the latest and greatest smartphones. Some commercials, like the recent iPhone campaign say that more photos are taken and more music is listened to on an iPhone than any other device. Windows Phone has a funny commercial that makes fun of Android & iPhone users as they brawl with each other about which is better while the Windows users calmly stand by and shoot photos/video of the brawling group. All joking aside, which operating system is really winning over the hearts of U.S. consumers?

The Survey Says….

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