With 50 percent of the mobile browser market in its home market of China, UCWeb is now looking across the Pacific. UC’s next target is the U.S., where the company released localized Android and iOS versions this past week, and plans to open up a Silicon Valley office later this year. (It has already made inroads into India, where it has 20 percent share and is close to knocking off market leader Opera, execs said.) UCWeb's Roy Rong and Yu Yongfu visit AllThingsD. UC Browser is more than a just dumb container for Web sites; in China, the browser includes its own virtual currency accounts, identity system, social network and navigation services. In a way, it’s more like a mobile-only Facebook platform than the pure Chrome or Safari browsers. Plus, UC browser is quite fast, because the company maintains local data centers from where it compresses Web sites and sends them to phones. Opera Mini and Amazon’s Kindle Fire Silk browser use similar techniques. Bridging to the U.S. market won’t necessarily be easy, but UC’s design and experience across the spectrum of low- to high-end phones could be instructive. CEO Yu Yongfu — who’s on a grand tour of Silicon Valley this week — emphasized that while his company started doing all this in 2004, the U.S. smartphone market only launched with the iPhone in 2007. And beyond that three-year lead, China is supposed to oust the U.S. as the world’s biggest smartphone market this year. Yu said he thinks he understands how to deal with the limitations of mobile — small screen size, reduced bandwidth, limited input, short battery life, and some eight different operating systems — better than just about anyone. Still, it’s not clear that the pillars of the UC Web strategy — compressing sites to speed up Read More
Rabid sports fans are about to get even less productive at work. ESPN has reengineered its streaming radio app to offer improved sound quality, push alerts for when a favorite program is going live, and content-caching for listening to podcasts without an Internet connection. It’s also launching the app for the first time on iPad. The app is already available for iPhone, Android and BlackBerry; the updated version will hit Android in June, and a Windows phone app will be available this summer. If you vaguely recall ESPN having just updated its radio app, you would be correct: The company retooled it less than 18 months ago to include new search and personalization features, as AllThingsD’s Peter Kafka reported here. Marc Horine, ESPN’s vice president of digital and print media, says that with the newest version, the network is trying to refocus on what’s most important with a radio app — the listening experience. Files have been compressed for faster streaming and downloading, and the sound quality has been enhanced, Horine says. And the app includes DVR — which allows users to skip ads, by the way, though I doubt ESPN would encourage that — and the ability to download full podcasts for listening offline. Most of the content on the app is commentary, though there are some live play-by-play game options, and there’s a SportsCenter update available every 20 minutes (for the really, really rabid sports fans). To lure listeners to the app, ESPN has mixed up its app offerings to include original, app-only programming with stuff that’s already broadcast on terrestrial radio, like “BS Report with Bill Simmons,” “Pardon the Interruption” and “Fantasy Focus.” At $4.99, the new ESPN Radio costs two dollars more to download than the old version, and runs in-app ads as well as commercials throughout Read More
Google has launched an updated version of Google+ for iPhone, with larger profile pics, optical cues, a more prominent “+1” atop the news stream and other visual enhancements to create a more eye-friendly app. Google+ app users can also sync photos from their iPhones to a Google+ album, use mobile “Hangouts” to video chat with friends and view a “Nearby” news feed to see status updates from people around the same location. Read More
Every year, come tax season, I curse myself. I might write about all things digital, but when it comes to receipts and important documents, my record-keeping is analog amateur hour. So this year I’m getting serious about scanning. Fortunately, there are plenty of portable scanning options out there, ranging from mobile apps to wand-like scanners. This week, I set out to determine whether an app or a pocket-sized scanner with receipt-management software can really do the job of a larger scanner. I tested three options: The smartphone app JotNot Scanner Pro by MobiTech 3000, PlanOn’s tiny SlimScan SS100 scanner, and Xerox’s new wand-shaped Mobile Scanner. The JotNot Pro app uses the iPhone’s camera to capture images of documents. And after five days of testing, it became apparent that the app was great on the go, but I wouldn’t use it to scan tons of files. The SlimScan scanner’s size was attention-grabbing, but the device and its software were problematic for me. Despite its larger size and $250 price point, the Xerox scanner was my top pick, because of its fast scanning and its wireless connectivity via an Eye-Fi card. I began the scanner tests with JotNot Pro for iPhone, which was updated late last year and costs $1.99. I was at a conference last week, accumulating business cards and receipts, so it was a good opportunity to test the app. After I snapped a horizontal photo of a business card, the app immediately found the edges of the card and cropped the image. Then it processed the image, and the text in the final file was clear and easy to read. I did this with receipts as well. JotNot Pro let me enhance each file before processing it, whether it was a hard-to-read receipt or a file with lighter text; and Read More
May 3, 2012 at 12:22 pm PT Fitbit, the popular fitness device that clips on to clothing and measures the wearer’s activity levels, is adding heart rate to the list of metrics it will support, through a partnership with the Digifit heart-rate app. When users are wearing the Fitbit and using Digifit’s app, they can now pull their cardio info into Fitbit’s online dashboard, and can merge it with data from Fitbit’s new Aria scale, as well. Tagged with activity, app, Aria, cardio, data, Digifit, Fitbit, fitness, heart rate, Mobile, scale Read More
When an augmented-reality app called Wallit launched a few months ago, some users were excited by the possibilities of writing on virtual walls at established locations, such as the Eiffel Tower or an Apple store, but griped that the app was too closed-off. Only app administrators could create new Wallit walls, and users had to be in relative proximity to a place to properly use the app. Wallit has now torn down those walls to the app. Starting today, users can create a virtual wall anywhere, from their office to their living room to a party at a friend’s place. Since the whole idea of writing on virtual walls could be a bit confusing to those that haven’t seen the app, there’s a video below to help show how it works. Basically, Wallit app users have the option to leave a note on a virtual wall that’s superimposed over a real location. Depending on whether the wall is private or not, users within Wallit’s social network can use their phone’s camera to capture an image of that building or structure — such as the Golden Gate Bridge, for example — and see what people have written around it, as well as other data that might be available. Augmented-reality apps that show contextual info based on your location are hardly new, though Wallit does add an interesting social twist to AR. Mobile apps like Wikitude and Google Goggles display info about your surroundings on a smartphone screen and, of course, Google’s Project X glasses aim to remove the smartphone from the whole equation, and instead show relevant local information through a wearable device. The Wallit app is free, and right now the 700 existing walls don’t show any ads. However, Wallit creator Veysel Berk says that “value walls” may be a part Read More
Over the past week and a half, I’ve purchased seven cups of coffee, three bags of beef jerky, two cookies and a pastry. With my smartphone. It’s not a sustainable diet, but that’s what was available at the relatively few shops around San Francisco and New York City that are accepting Pay with Square and PayPal’s mobile app. In case you’ve missed it, there’s a battle brewing over the future of mobile payments — that is, the ability for consumers to ditch the leather wallet and purchase things with their mobile phones. Companies like Google, PayPal, Square, wireless providers and credit card companies are debating various forms of mobile payment technology. But in the battle over who gets to control your digital wallet, it’s important not to forget the consumer experience. Is it really that much easier to pay with a mobile phone than it is to just pull out cash or a credit card? That’s what I set out to find this week, mainly using Pay with Square. Square is a company known for creating a device for small businesses that plugs into an iPhone and can read a swiped credit card, but the company recently renamed and relaunched its app for consumers. Now called Pay with Square, the app works only at stores that are using Square’s register system for the iPad. Currently, around 75,000 merchants across the U.S. are accepting payments via the Pay with Square app. In my experience Pay with Square proved to be an easy, enjoyable app to use to purchase things using my smartphone — though it won’t be an everyday app for me until there are more businesses accepting it. The free Pay with Square app works with iPhone and Android phones. It used to have a wallet-like interface, but now it simply Read More
CloudOn, a free application that has partnered with Microsoft to bring Office applications to the iPad, is rolling out a new version of its app that adds Box, DropBox and Adobe Reader. Users can now log in to their existing cloud-storage accounts and view and update files directly from CloudOn. The app first launched in January, and says it has seen close to a million downloads. A competing app, OnLive, also offers iPad users access to Microsoft Office, but has come under fire from Microsoft for allegedly violating licensing terms. Read More
It’s possible that, one day, Tim Cook will stand up onstage and show off a “real” Apple TV set — an integrated box/screen/entertainment device – that will replace whatever’s sitting in your living room now. Another possibility: Over time, Apple simply builds an Apple TV set right in front of us, in bits and pieces — so slowly that we don’t really notice it. Take the remote, for instance. PatentlyApple has its hands on an Apple application for an “advanced TV remote” that would offer some cool features. Like the ability to automatically scan your other devices and figure out the right code to control them, instead of requiring users to use a combination of manuals and trial and error. At least as important is that, while Apple’s patent, filed back in 2010, could be a standalone device, the application makes it seem much more likely that users will use their iPhones, iPods or iPads to control their TVs. Which makes sense, because Apple is already offering a “Remote” iOS app that handles some basic functions for its existing Apple TV. That is: There’s a good chance you’re just a download away from owning a bona-fide Apple TV remote already. This kind of incremental building may be even more important on the content side, which is the real key to an Apple TV: If it’s simply a very nice screen that offers the same content choices that TV viewers already have, then it’s just a very nice screen. And for years, Apple has been making attempts to wrangle different TV choices, at different price points, without much success. But instead of one grand, sweeping video package, Apple may end up just cobbling together an array of offerings, piece by piece. To wit: The latest refresh of Apple TV didn’t offer any new Read More
Robin Sloan, a guy who thinks hard about the Internet while the rest of us go on blithely using it, made what he calls an iPhone “tap essay” that came out Wednesday. Sloan’s free “Fish” app invites readers to tap through his thoughts about how we tend to race through online content, rather than savoring our favorite stuff with repeat reading or viewing. We might click to say we “like” things all the time, but Sloan thinks that’s become a hollow gesture. Sloan, who used to work at Twitter, helpfully (and a little presumptuously!) set up links at places within the app where he thinks his readers may want to tweet out his bon mots from their own accounts. It’s a good read. But if the “tap essay” genre multiplies, Louis C.K.-style, I’m not sure how many such apps I would download and save on my phone. That’s sort of Sloan’s medium and message, all in one. Read More
