Articles tagged "Counterclockwise"

James Bond is known for being a suave spy, but he loves his gadgets. Provided by Q, these often include an Aston Martin and a Sony Ericsson phone. It started with the Ericsson JB988, a fictional phone featured in Tomorrow Never Dies (it's the phone...

Seoul, South Korea is home to two tech rivals - LG and Samsung. While the latter is the larger company, LG has also brought plenty of innovation in tech even if it often goes underappreciated. So, let us tell you its story and see if you gain more...

Last year HTC celebrated its 20th birthday. The company was founded in Taiwan on May 15 1997 as the High Tech Computer Corporation and it initially intended to build laptops. Pretty soon it started building pocketable devices - Pocket PCs as they...

I still remember the first time I saw a Siemens ME45 - a black phone with amber lighting and it was water, shock and dust resistant. It was like a stealthy bat-phone. The ME45 internals are identical to the Siemens S45, the company's first...

Motorola is famous for making the first commercial cell phone - the DynaTAC. It also created the first ever flip phone, the Motorola StarTAC. The company has scored many more firsts in its 90 years of existence, enjoyed a golden age when it shaped...

BlackBerry phones (PDAs first) got their name because of their distinctive keyboards - the keys were arranged in a way that resembled the fruit. But let's not look at a straight up QWERTY keyboards or even how the keyboard slides or rotates out of...

The Apple App Store just turned 10, a year after the iPhone got into the double digits. That’s because the App Store was introduced with iOS v2.0 (actually, it was iPhone OS back then). So, this is a good moment to talk about how app stores came to...

A couple of weeks ago we look at weird ways to mount a phone's camera. That inspired us to dive into weird form factors this week. Phone form factors generally fall into four categories - static, slider, flip and swivel. Static is the simplest,...

SIM – the Subscriber Identity Module – is an ever-shrinking card that acts as your access pass to the carrier’s cell network. Once it was used to store your phone book and text messages, now it’s under threat of extinction. Embedded SIM solutions...

The word “selfie” was the Oxford Dictionary word of the year in 2013, but the practice is much older than that. Much older – many consider the first selfie to be this photo of Robert Cornelius from 1839. Years later, cameras came to phones and...

During the 70s and 80s there was an explosion of processor architectures, many of which found their way to smartphone chipsets. ARM, which traces its roots back to the 1981 BBC Micro, clearly won the game but it faced competition in the past. Intel...

Mobile OSes went through a Cambrian explosion and then there was an inevitable mass extinction. The two survivors – Android and iOS – date back to 2007 and they completely dominate the field. Android is on 9 in 10 phones while iOS lives in...

Other than Sony (which owns a movie studio), smartphones and movies don’t have much of an overlap. That was the case until a major push from studios tried to make 3D movies popular. Which led phone makers to attempt to bring 3D to your pocket. In...

OnePlus will be five years old at the end of the year and it already has eight phones under its belt. Its strategy has (almost) always been “do one thing and do it well”. That’s what Apple did in its early years and it worked out great for them....

Two ears, two speakers is a pretty simple equation. However, in recent times it has become pretty common to see a single speaker – on most phones and even portable Bluetooth speakers often have just one. Looking through our data, we found the...

We’ve looked at the growth of storage and the growth of CPU core count, now let us look at RAM – the intermediary between the processor and the permanent storage. Sometimes we feel that makers are trying to pull the wool over our eyes. With...

Phone makers have converged on one design for premium models – a metal frame sandwiched between two panes of glass. It’s a practical choice, the metal gives rigidity to the thin, long phones while glass lets radio waves and wireless charging...

Last week we reminisced about favorite old brands, but that was just part of the story - while many brands are still around, some of their product lines have been discontinued and we wouldn't mind seeing them come back to life. The Nokia PureView...

Before Andy Rubin started working on Android, he co-founded Danger Inc. - the maker of T-Mobile Sidekick smartphones. Matias Duarte, he who made Material Design, worked with Rubin at Danger and later worked on webOS before joining Google. We were...

The Timex Datalink was co-developed with Microsoft and first launched in 1994. Since then, many astronauts and cosmonauts have used a Datalink. That’s so cool, but it seems that for a long time, smartwatches were more popular in space than they were...