AllThingsD » phone

Mobile Game Biz to Nintendo and Sony: Seasons? What Are Those?

Eric Johnson — Thu, 16 May 2013 12:00:36 +0000

As if you needed any further reminding that phone and tablet games are where it’s at, take a look at the new portable gaming report that IDC and App Annie are releasing today.

The report, obtained in advance by AllThingsD, shows just how different the new generation of mobile games is from the gaming-only devices that previously reigned supreme. For context, back in Q4 2012, total consumer spending on games for iOS and Android devices surpassed spending on “gaming-optimized handhelds” (that is, Sony’s PSP and Vita, and Nintendo’s DS, DSi and 3DS).

But the real bombshell is in the new report, which covers Q1 2013: In that quarter, consumer spending on Sony’s and Nintendo’s handhelds declined significantly, while iOS and Google Play spending both increased, also significantly. Combined, the phone and tablet crowd spent nearly three times as much on games as handheld device owners.

(And bear in mind, of course, that a new 3DS or PS Vita game costs about $40, while even brand-new mobile games are typically free or 99 cents to download, with many offering optional in-game purchases.)

But wait, you say. This is the first quarter of the year, being compared to the lucrative holiday-driven fourth quarter. How is that fair to Sony and Nintendo?

Exactly. It’s not. With slower game production schedules and much lower device turnover, the holiday quarter matters a great deal to Nintendo and Sony. But for consumers with a steady stream of new games and newer, better devices on which to play those games, seasonality is mostly irrelevant.

IDC and App Annie’s numbers, then, amount to a double whammy: At both the best of times and the worst of times, new-school mobile games beat out their older counterparts.

A few other points of interest from the new report:

The global install base for those “gaming-optimized handhelds” was about 200 million in Q1 2013. To put that in perspective, Gartner estimates that more than 2 billion phones and tablets are being/will be shipped this year alone. In other words, it’s through volume that mobile devices have closed and blown past the revenue-per-user gap.
Although the total amount consumers spent on mobile games was far greater on iOS than on Android, gaming amounted to about 80 percent of all consumer spending on Android, vs. about 70 percent on iOS.
The report splits consumers into four geographic zones: North America, Western Europe, Asia-Pacific and the rest of the world. For both Android and gaming-optimized handhelds, the Asia-Pacific share of total spending increased by more than 10 points (see the chart embedded below).

This report is the second such collaboration between IDC, which tracks videogame and entertainment hardware, and App Annie, which tracks mobile software and in-app revenue.

Look Out Google Fiber, $35-A-Month Gigabit Internet Comes to Vermont

Shalini Ramachandran — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 18:00:31 +0000

Heads up Google Fiber: A rural Vermont telephone company might just have your $70 gigabit Internet offer beat.

VTel’s Chief Executive Michel Guite says he’s made it a personal mission to upgrade the company’s legacy phone network, which dates back to 1890, with fiber for the broadband age. The company was able to afford the upgrades largely by winning federal stimulus awards set aside for broadband. Using $94 million in stimulus money, VTel has invested in stringing 1,200 miles of fiber across a number of rural Vermont counties over the past year. Mr. Guite says the gigabit service should be available across VTel’s footprint in coming months.

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Galaxy S 4 Is a Good, but Not a Great, Step Up

Walter S. Mossberg — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 04:03:48 +0000

[ See post to watch video ]

Samsung has been on a roll. The success of its many models of smartphones, aided by massive marketing campaigns, has made it by far the leading maker of devices running on Google’s Android operating system and the chief rival to Apple in smartphones. In fact, Samsung is almost as synonymous with Android as Google.

The Samsung Galaxy S 4

Now, the Korean electronics giant is about to launch its latest flagship phone in the U.S., a market where it hasn’t been able to dislodge Apple’s iPhone as the leader. The new model, called the Galaxy S 4, will roll out over the next week at AT&T, T-Mobile and Sprint, and likely sometime in May at Verizon Wireless.

I’ve been testing the Galaxy S 4 intensively for four days and while I admire some of its features, overall, it isn’t a game-changer. It’s an evolution of the prior model and despite some improvements, it still is especially weak in the software Samsung adds to basic Android. I found Samsung’s software often gimmicky, duplicative of standard Android apps, or, in some cases, only intermittently functional.

I urge readers looking for a new Android smartphone to carefully consider the more polished-looking, and quite capable, HTC One, rather than defaulting to the latest Samsung.

The new Galaxy boasts a giant 5-inch screen, a bit bigger than the 4.8-inch display on its predecessor, but its mostly plastic body is thinner and lighter. It may stretch some small pockets and purses, and look funny when held to your ear, but it doesn’t feel like a brick.

Apple iPhone 5

Still, compared with the iPhone 5, with its 4-inch screen, the S 4 is 30 percent larger and 17 percent heavier. The new Galaxy has a 13-megapixel camera, compared with 8 megapixels for the iPhone 5.

Nearly all Android phones already come with two email apps — one reserved for Google’s Gmail. But on the Galaxy S 4, there are also two online video and music stores, two music and video players, two calendars and two browsers.

Yet out of the box, there’s no camera icon on the lock screen so you can immediately take a picture. (You can add this feature, via the settings menu, in — you guessed it — two different ways.)

Some of Samsung’s new software features worked well. A feature called Air View lets you see expanded information about things like email previews and calendar items by hovering over them with your finger. A multi-window feature splits the screen so you can view two apps at once. But both features only work with certain apps.

I also liked an improved version of Easy Mode, which substitutes the sometimes confusing normal screens and settings panels for simpler ones with larger, cleaner icons and simplified settings.

Another good move: Samsung rewrote the standard Android email app so it’s better, with a unified inbox and other nice improvements.

HTC One

Speaking of settings, Samsung is proud of an expanded panel of one-touch settings icons you can get to by pulling down the Android notification window from the top edge of the screen. I liked the idea, but this panel is likely to confuse users with items labeled “Air Gesture,” “Smart stay,” “S Beam” and other special Samsung features.

There’s an array of new camera effects, such as one where you can superimpose for fun a small square image of your own face onto a picture you’re taking, and another where you can create a “Drama” shot in which a single moving person appears multiple times in sequence. These are easy to select, but I doubt they’ll be used frequently.

I had almost zero success with a suite of features that claim to take certain actions by detecting whether you’re watching the screen. For instance, Smart scroll will scroll the screen based on the angle of your head and Smart pause will stop playing a video when you look away. I only got these to work about 10 percent of the time. Samsung blamed lighting conditions, even though I used it in many settings.

On many key hardware specs, the Galaxy S 4 shines. Its screen and camera resolution beat the iPhone 5’s and I found its pictures to be slightly better than those from the Apple phone, which is nearly a year old. Its removable battery gave me a full day of use.

But the plastic body felt a bit insubstantial to me and the mono speaker on the rear was only fair. Oddly, I found the sound via headphones to be too soft in some cases, though voice calls were clear.

Prices will vary because T-Mobile has stopped subsidizing smartphones and Sprint has a temporary new-customer discount. But AT&T will sell the base 16-gigabyte model for $200 with a two-year contract. T-Mobile’s price, paid over two years, will be $630, $50 more than the iPhone 5. Verizon hasn’t provided details, according to Samsung.

My test model was running on the T-Mobile network and even indicated that it was using super-fast LTE, which T-Mobile is still building out, in some areas. But data download speeds in the D.C. suburbs averaged just 6.96 megabits per second, versus 20.81 mbps for an iPhone 5 running Verizon LTE. The Galaxy S 4 would likely be faster on Verizon in the same location.

While many will compare the Galaxy S 4 with the iPhone 5, I also compared it with the $200 HTC One, which came out April 19. The HTC has a handsome, sturdier, aluminum body, dual stereo speakers, an excellent camera, better screen resolution than the new Samsung and twice the base memory for the same price.

If you’re a nut for lists of new features, love Samsung or crave an even bigger display, the Galaxy S 4 may be for you. It’s a good phone, just not a great one.

Email Walt at mossberg@wsj.com.

The BlackBerry of BlackBerry Users' Dreams

Katherine Boehret — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 03:02:59 +0000

[ See post to watch video ]

Spotting a BlackBerry among the sea of iPhones and Android phones out there is now a rare occurrence. Those who remain faithful to these once-iconic gadgets do so for good reason: A love of physical keyboards. But the BlackBerry’s lagging browser, antiquated operating system and lack of apps made users envy other devices.

Next month, people will finally get the BlackBerry they wish they had: A device that combines the features of a modern smartphone with a physical keyboard. I’ve been testing the BlackBerry Q10 for the past seven days, comparing it to its predecessor, the BlackBerry Bold 9900.

This device is expected to cost $249 with a two-year contract, which is more than many smartphones. It will be available from Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile and Sprint by the end of May. It had a couple of app quirks, though updates before release are expected to fix these. BlackBerry still lags behind competitors with just over 100,000 apps available last month. I especially missed some of my favorites like Flipboard, Pinterest and the NPR app. And the Q10’s 3.1-inch screen is limiting compared with the 4.7-inch and 5-inch screens on the HTC One and Samsung Galaxy S4, respectively. But this new BlackBerry’s browser races along and its camera features will impress.

Physically, the Q10 bests the Bold with a slightly bigger touchscreen that measures 3.1 inches, diagonally. To make room for this screen, the Q10 sacrifices two features. First, its keyboard runs straight across rather than in the more comfortable, broad U-shaped curve like on the Bold. Second, the Q10 lacks a track pad, the below-the-screen square that functioned as a precise cursor. In about three days, though, I got used to working without these features.

The Q10 comes in white and black.

The Q10’s keyboard is smartly used for more than just typing emails. From the home screen, typing the first few letters for commands like “text message Katie” or “Facebook” pulls up related functions. This feature is called Instant Action. And some 200 keyboard shortcuts let users navigate around the Q10 more quickly. Onscreen menus subtly display what keys to press for shortcuts.

As you type, common misspellings will be auto-corrected. You can even turn on keyboard predictions, saving you a few keystrokes by showing words on the screen that you might be typing next. A tap on a word adds the word to your sentence. I found I could type faster without using onscreen keyboard predictions, though in some cases I could select predictions for nearly an entire sentence.

The Q10 runs on the latest iteration of the BlackBerry 10 operating system, which made its debut last month on the full touchscreen Z10. This latest version of the BlackBerry 10 OS is souped up with features even the Z10 doesn’t yet have, like new notification options for contacts and fine cursor control and navigation.

The BlackBerry 10 operating system is responsive and fun to use. A list called the Hub organizes all notifications related to emails, social networks and apps in one place. The Hub can be quickly checked with a left-to-right swipe from the home screen, or by swiping up and right from within an app. Contacts are integrated with social networks, adding images of your friends to the system.

Just type the first few letters of a command and Instant Action, above, pulls up the function, such as BlackBerry Messenger.

Apps can be minimized into smaller squares by swiping up from the bottom of the Q10 screen. I grew so comfortable with this gesture that I accidentally tried to use it on my Android smartphone.

In several instances, Facebook’s in-app notifications were delayed and only appeared when I opened the Facebook app. BlackBerry said an update to the Facebook app due out this week would enhance this app. I also had trouble with the Skype app: In two tests, I could see video from the caller but he couldn’t see me though my video was on.

Battery life on the Q10 was impressive. I used it repeatedly for entire days without running out of juice. This included a weekend in a remote area of North Carolina when my cell signal was roaming and several car rides when I used BlackBerry Maps for navigation.

I wasn’t able to formally test the speeds of the device I used, which ran on AT&T’s network, because AT&T is still testing the Q10 on its network. But voice calls that I made around Washington, D.C., and Kirkland, Wash., sounded clear, and Web browsing worked without a problem.

The Q10’s 8-megapixel rear-facing camera is loaded with high-end features, including Time Shift, which captures multiple shots of people and lets you piece together a photo where everyone looks good. Other features include burst mode, enhancements that edit photos and filters that can be added after capture.

BlackBerry World, the marketplace from which apps can be downloaded, looks slicker and runs faster than previous iterations. I downloaded and used a bunch of apps for the Q10, including Skype, The Wall Street Journal, YouTube, the Guardian, the New York Times, the Weather Channel, Kayak and Angry Birds Star Wars.

Along with the Facebook and Skype issues, I found that a health-tracking app and a Sudoku app didn’t work well. BlackBerry attributed this to pre-release app issues.

The browser on the Q10 was super fast, and I found myself selecting links in emails, tweets and Facebook updates that I would have avoided selecting on a Bold — and even on newer smartphones’ browsers — because of slow load times. The Q10 browser has features like an adjustable default font size and a Reader view. Websites that run Adobe Flash can be viewed by clicking a button that enables Flash.

For plenty of users who gave up on BlackBerry years ago, the Q10 probably won’t change their minds. But for those of us who love physical keyboards and want a keyboard paired with the full functionality of a serious smartphone, the Q10 delivers.

Write to Katie at katie.boehret@wsj.com.

Intel Says It's Getting the Hang of Mobile (Video)

Peter Kafka — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 20:57:03 +0000

Intel has been playing catch-up in the mobile market for a long time. Mike Bell came on board three years ago to help speed up the process. At D: Dive into Mobile, he gave Arik Hesseldahl a status report.

[ See post to watch video ]

Facebook's New Phone Commercial Is Even Weirder Than the Last

Mike Isaac — Sat, 13 Apr 2013 16:26:38 +0000

You gotta give Facebook credit for being willing to get weird.

Latest example: The social giant’s new commercial for Facebook Home, the brand new software that turns your plain ol’ Android phone into a Facebook phone.

It features a daydreaming employee messing around on the new device, and of course has CEO Mark Zuckerberg center-stage. But the real star of the strange commercial is a screaming goat, who yells in the face of an excited Zuckerberg talking to the troops on Facebook Home’s launch day.

Like I said. Weird.

The company first delved into strange territory last year with “Chairs,” the commercial it released when it hit the billion-user mark. It was a bit of a head-scratcher.

This one for Facebook Home is pretty cute, though, however strange it may be.

Enjoy.

Facebook Gets a Hold on Phones

Walter S. Mossberg — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 01:03:44 +0000

[ See post to watch video ]

Facebook wants to take over your phone. It aims to immediately immerse you in its social network with just a glance at the phone’s opening screen, without making you run its app or even unlock the device. Right from the lock screen of your phone, you’ll be able to see your Facebook news feed — including text posts and eye-catching, full-screen photos posted by friends — and to comment on, or Like items.

Facebook Home uses the lock screen to show new posts and other things.

Also, with one swipe, you can go right to Facebook Messenger, the social network’s chat feature, to communicate directly with people and even send and receive text messages.

All of this is possible before you even see the usual start or home screen of your phone filled with app icons, by using a new suite of software Facebook is introducing for Android phones on Friday called Facebook Home.

The idea is that during spare moments — say, while waiting in a line — you’ll get immediately hooked by Facebook.

Facebook Home, which replaces several key aspects of a phone in addition to the lock screen, will be an optional, free download for U.S. users at launch on four leading Android phones, including the very popular Samsung Galaxy S III. It also will be available that day, preloaded, on a midrange, $99 model, the HTC First, from AT&T. At least two other major Android phones also will be compatible when they hit the market.

I’ve been testing Facebook Home for five days on the HTC First, but this isn’t a review of the phone hardware, which is unremarkable. I focused my testing on Facebook Home, the boldest attempt by any non-hardware company to alter a phone’s native user interface.

Swipe your round photo to one of three icons: Facebook Messenger, app-launcher screen and Last App used.

In effect, Facebook has created its own phone without having to build or sell hardware. The HTC First, so far the sole phone on which it’s preloaded, even boots up with the Facebook logo.

I found Facebook Home to be easy to use, elegantly designed and addictive. Although I’m a regular Facebook user, I found that, with Home, I paid more attention than ever to my news feed, Liked items more often and used Facebook’s Messenger service more often. So, if you are a big Facebook fan, Facebook Home can be a big win.

But I found some downsides. Facebook Home blocks the one-step camera icon some Android phone makers place on their lock screen to allow you to take pictures without first unlocking the phone. It also overlays other lock-screen features some Android phone makers include, such as weather information or favorite app icons. And if you do go to the icon-filled home screen, you’ll find that Facebook Home has taken that over as well, topping the screen with a bar that makes posting to Facebook easier and eliminating the bottom bar of heavily used apps.

By default, the first of these Facebook Home app screens contains Facebook’s apps, including the popular Facebook-owned service, Instagram, plus apps from other companies, like Google Maps and Google Search, and the camera app. You can remove these and add others.

With Home, Facebook is essentially staging a land grab of Android, the hugely successful mobile operating system made by one of its key rivals, Google. Facebook Home leaves all the standard Google apps in place and doesn’t alter the underlying Android operating system. But because it’s so dominant, it makes it less likely that a user with limited time will launch Google products that compete with Facebook, such as Google’s own social network, Google+, or rival services from other companies, such as Twitter.

A Home app screen with Facebook’s apps, such as Instagram, and standard Android apps from Google.

This is all made possible because Android allows third-party companies to alter the lock screen and other core features, such as the app launcher, which displays app icons and widgets.

By contrast, Facebook Home can’t run on Apple’s iPhones, because Apple doesn’t allow others to take control of these core functions. Apple has integrated Facebook (and Twitter) to some degree into the iPhone, mainly by making it possible to sign into the services as part of its basic settings and to share almost any content to them easily. But that’s as far as it goes.

When you first turn on the screen on a Home-equipped phone, you see the time and a small circle at the bottom displaying your Facebook profile picture. If you don’t touch the screen, your news feed, called the Cover Feed, starts to display, automatically scrolling from one post to the next. You also can manually swipe through the feed. Each post takes up the whole screen. If it’s a photo, it’s displayed in all its glory. If it’s a text post, the author’s larger wall photo appears faintly in the background. The effect is mesmerizing.

If you want to Like a post, you can double-tap it or tap on a Like button. To comment, or read comments, you can tap on a comment icon.

To get beyond the feed, you touch your little round picture and swipe it over to one of three icons that appear. Swipe up to see a home screen, or app launcher of your favorite app icons. Swipe left to go to Facebook Messenger. Swipe right to go to the last app used, whether it’s a Facebook app or not.

Facebook Home has another major feature: Chat Heads. These are the profile pictures of people who send you Facebook messages or text messages via Messenger. Unlike message notifications that appear only briefly on most phones, these remain visible, atop any app you’re using, tempting you to keep chatting via Facebook. You can move them around if they’re blocking something, but you can only get rid of them by dragging them off the screen to the bottom. Whether they annoy or delight you will depend on how much you use Facebook Messenger.

Chat Heads shows profile pictures of people who send you Facebook or text messages via Messenger.

Facebook stresses that Home is purely optional. Nobody needs to install it, or buy the sole phone on which it’s preloaded. You can still use Facebook the way you always have — through the app. In fact, Home doesn’t fully replace the app, which has many more features.

And you can turn all of it, or parts of it, off. I was able to turn it off even on the HTC First and also to require the phone to be unlocked before I could see my feed.

Facebook says it hopes eventually to include feeds from other services, such as Twitter, in the automatic stream of updates on the lock screen. Even now, alerts — but not full posts or photos — from other products, such as Gmail or Twitter, appear on top of the news feed. However, this only works on the HTC First. Other phones only display Facebook alerts in Home. There aren’t any ads in Cover Feed currently but Facebook says there may be in the future.

You cannot view customized news feeds, like ones containing only certain people, in Cover Feed. You also can’t compose new posts from the lock screen, though Facebook says it hopes to add that feature.

I didn’t notice that my test phone suffered any significant battery loss while running Home constantly, but Facebook does provide settings for data use and image quality that can lower the battery load of Home. The default setting is “medium.”

Facebook Home is a very clever and very well-done product that will delight Facebook fans. If you aren’t in that category, or prefer the standard Android user interface, it won’t be right for you.

Email Walt at mossberg@wsj.com.

Content, Content Everywhere in Facebook's Ideal Mobile World

Mike Isaac — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 18:44:17 +0000

Apps are so last year. The future, according to Facebook, is people, photos, messages and sweet, sweet content.

The company pulled back the cover on its Android initiative at an event at its Menlo Park campus on Thursday, showing off “Home,” Facebook’s vision for how the hundreds of millions of Facebook users will interact with their mobile devices.

Yes, it’s essentially Facebook-izing your phone, a different interface to access your apps and personal connections.

“What would it look like if our phones were designed around people, not apps?” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said at the event.

But it’s way more than that. Facebook wants to blur the lines between individual applications and the way you interact with your device, interweaving different Facebook services — and, ultimately, Facebook content — throughout all parts of the Android phone. The two most significant ways of doing that are with “Chat Heads” and “Cover Feed,” two entirely new conceits that come with the installation of Facebook Home.

The real gem here, however, is Cover Feed — basically a non-stop flow of photos, status updates and Facebook content flowing through your phone, whether you’re using it or not. The lock screen and home screen no longer exist as static repositories for applications. Power on your phone, and you’ll be subject to a never-ending cascade of everything flowing through your News Feed.

Think of the possibilities here. Instead of having to access your Facebook app directly on your mobile device to view the News Feed, Facebook will always have its content stuck front and center, right in your face. It’s the answer to our massive shift to accessing the Web via our mobile devices over the desktop.

That, my friends, is where the money comes in. As Zuckerberg said (very quickly) at the event, “there are no ads in [Cover Feed] yet.” But — and this is a big but! — “I’m sure at some point there will be,” he followed up.

Think about that for a second. How valuable would it be for you, as an advertiser, to have your ad cycled in front of tens of thousands of faces staring at their phone’s home screen? What about small-time app developers who want Facebook’s mobile app install ad suggestions in front of potential customers? This is huge.

And I imagine at some point, when ads do show up on the device, Facebook could subsidize the phones to make them cheap, if not entirely free. (Not today, though. Still costs a hundred bucks to get an out-of-the-box Facebook phone.)

Messaging, too, carries with it a great deal of potential. Chat Heads essentially makes mobile messaging on the phone a persistent service; instead of a notification that goes away at the top of your screen, a small bauble icon featuring your friend’s head will pop up to the right-hand side, overlaid on top of the screen regardless of whether you’re in an app or the home screen.

Now look at how other major messaging competitors like WhatsApp, Line and KakaoTalk are using their messaging services. You’re able to insert photos, videos and in some cases small mobile games into the messaging application. Zynga, too, is rumored to be in talks with some companies to promote its games inside of some of these messaging apps.

So think of this future. A Facebook phone in every hand, with content circulating throughout its messaging capabilities, its lock screen, its home screen. It is non-stop Facebook — in your face — all the time. It is Facebook escaping being relegated to a mere app, invading every facet of your mobile experience. It is a potential boon for ad dollars, for partnerships, for additional outside content.

Now, all Facebook needs is for you — and all of your Android-loving friends — to install Home on your phones, and to get Home capable of running on more and more Android devices.

Time to get to work.

RELATED POSTS:

Ten Minutes With Adam Mosseri, the Guy in Charge of Facebook Home

If Facebook Made a Real Facebook Home (Comic)

The Buffy Story: Facebook’s Long Road Home to an Android Phone

Facebook’s Phone Also Coming to France Telecom-Orange, but First to AT&T

Content, Content Everywhere In Facebook’s Ideal Mobile World

Can Facebook Build an Android-Style Home on the iPhone? Probably Not.

How to Turn Your Handset Into a Facebook Phone

HTC First: The Hardware Side to Facebook Home

Buffy Has Landed: Facebook Launches Home, Its Android Phone Project

How to Turn Your Handset Into a Facebook Phone

Mike Isaac — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 17:44:11 +0000

Facebook unveiled “Home” this morning, the company’s modified version of the Android software able to be installed on Android devices.

How to get it? On April 12, head on over to Google’s Play store and search for “Facebook Home.” Download the software — it’s apparently a quick install, and should load on your phone immediately. You’ll also have to download Facebook’s other apps — Messenger and the like — and also register for the “Facebook Intent,” an under-the-hood mechanism that makes Android work.

From there, you’ll be able to access all of the key features that come with Facebook’s new Android skin, including Cover Feed and Chat Heads, the persistent messaging application that flows throughout apps across the entire phone.

Sadly, only a handful of devices will be supported at launch. The HTC One, HTC One X, Samsung Galaxy S3, Samsung Galaxy S4 (in the future) and the Galaxy Note 2. Facebook plans to have more devices supported, but for now only these few are capable of being upgraded.

Home is designed to run on Ice Cream Sandwich and Jelly Bean versions of Android, Facebook said.

A separate program will allow device makers to incorporate Facebook Home right out of the box.

The first two partners are HTC (as we reported last year), as well as carrier AT&T. Their collaboration — a phone called the HTC First — comes in four colors (ooh, aah). It’ll be released on April 12 for $100.

The company plans to update “Home” on a monthly release cycle, adding new features to install regularly.

So, it’s not ready for all Android lovers, but in Facebook’s version of the mobile future, it will be.

RELATED POSTS:

Ten Minutes With Adam Mosseri, the Guy in Charge of Facebook Home

If Facebook Made a Real Facebook Home (Comic)

The Buffy Story: Facebook’s Long Road Home to an Android Phone

Facebook’s Phone Also Coming to France Telecom-Orange, but First to AT&T

Content, Content Everywhere In Facebook’s Ideal Mobile World

Can Facebook Build an Android-Style Home on the iPhone? Probably Not.

How to Turn Your Handset Into a Facebook Phone

HTC First: The Hardware Side to Facebook Home

Buffy Has Landed: Facebook Launches Home, Its Android Phone Project

A Look Inside One of Samsung's New Stores at Best Buy

Ina Fried — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 04:01:45 +0000

From a distance, the Best Buy in Lewisville, Texas, looks like the big-box retailer’s typical outlets that dot the suburban U.S. landscape.

The blue-and-yellow logo shines atop a large building in a sprawling strip mall, next to a Guitar Center and not far from a Costco, a Chipotle and a Steak ’n Shake.

Inside, though, it is home to one of the first Samsung shops to be located inside a Best Buy. Samsung’s 450-square-foot shop occupies less than 1 percent of the Best Buy’s overall area, but its central spot means that anyone looking to buy an iPad or Mac has to walk by the giant display of Samsung laptops, phones and tablets.

That makes life pretty good for Brian Hagglund, the consultant Samsung hired to oversee operations at the store. Hagglund, who has worked as a representative for other electronics companies in the past, said he is often able to sell would-be iPad buyers on the benefits of Samsung’s pen-equipped Galaxy Note tablet.

“That’s one of our biggest opportunities,” he said, noting he has a pretty easy sell if he gets just five minutes to show off the Samsung tablet.

The Lewisville location is one of six stores where Best Buy has been testing the store-within-a-store concept ahead of Thursday’s formal announcement.

So far, Saturdays are the busiest times, for potential buyers as well as those coming in to fix a problem or ask a question. (How to take a screenshot is the most common query, Hagglund said.)

Hagglund and his part-time helpers can do basic support tasks such as updating a phone’s software or diagnosing hardware issues. They also have a phone they can use to call if they need further help.

That phone has only been needed three times, Hagglund said, oddly enough all on one day filled with particularly challenging issues.

With the Samsung Experience Shops inside Best Buy, the Korean electronics giant is hoping to give its customers a place to see multiple Samsung products in action, get help and build some of the same brand loyalty that Apple, Microsoft and Sony get through their stores without having to make the same investment in real estate.

Samsung has made smaller retail ventures in the past, including a New York City showroom that it closed about a year ago after running it for several years. Retail head Ketrina Dunagan said the Columbus Circle location was popular internally, but did little for customers.

More recently, Samsung had 14 kiosks during the past holiday season where it pitched its Galaxy range of products.

Best Buy officials said the retailer found it had to do surprisingly little shifting to clear the space for Samsung, noting that what appears to be prime real estate was previously home to CDs and DVDs, not exactly the hottest segment of its business.

But it is making a big investment in Samsung, hoping that the fast-growing brand will help bring in more customers at a time when physical retail store sales are struggling.

Best Buy will continue to display Samsung phones, tablets, cameras and PCs in their respective categories, in addition to handing over the space needed for the Samsung shops.

Does Anyone Actually Want a "Facebook Phone"?

Mike Isaac — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 18:46:37 +0000

Something Facebook mobile this way comes.

And depending on what you read, it’s a little different here and there. A proper Facebook phone. Or not a Facebook phone, but a very Facebook-y version of a phone. Whatever it is, we’re in agreement that it involves Facebook and a phone.

But let’s rewind for a second: Who among us would actually want to buy a Facebook phone, much less use it as a primary device?

Yes, more than half a billion people use Facebook on their phones daily. And yes! Facebook is the most downloaded app across modern-day smartphones! But Facebook has slowly made its endgame here very clear: The company wants you to use all its services — namely texting, voice calling and emailing — as your primary mode of communication over your existing SMS, email and voice services.

There’s probably a hardcore set of Facebook lovers who do indeed use, or would desire to use, all of Facebook’s mobile services to contact others. But that group has to be incredibly small. And some of Facebook’s more interesting mobile features, like voice calling, have only been out for a handful of months, and only in certain countries.

I’d argue that the majority of the world’s mobile-loving population isn’t built the way Facebook wants it to be.

I may use SMS texts to contact, say, my friend who hates using Facebook and doesn’t want an account. And then perhaps I’ll switch to good old-fashioned telephone calls to check in with my folks, who aren’t as tech savvy as some (Dad doesn’t own a smartphone). Then I’ll switch to WhatsApp to send a message to a techie friend, or perhaps use that app to contact another friend outside the U.S. (where it’s massively popular). Finally, I’ll jump on Snapchat to snap a creepshot of a friend and send it to someone else.

The point is this: In the tech world, context is king. On some level, we as people don’t want to funnel all of our communication through one central service. We like different apps for different things — even if it makes more sense to use one central service. It’s why Poke, Facebook’s Snapchat clone, failed miserably. It’s why Google’s plan to unify all of its services using Google Plus isn’t working at all. And it’s why, despite Facebook’s massive marketing muscle and install base, these apps continue to flourish.

Now, I totally get why Facebook wants to make a phone happen. More usage of Facebook on mobile means more potential ad products viewed and used, which means more revenue. As we’ve reported in the past, the company has experimented with multiple ways of making this happen, from a physical device to derivations of the Android operating system.

And I get why a company like HTC is willing to experiment with a Facebook-centric device. The company is in dire straits, plunging in market value over the past year. It needs a pitch to consumers that yes, it too can produce awesome phones.

What I don’t get is why regular folks — who can already use Facebook on their phone — would ever want to buy it.

Breaking: Etiquette Breakdown! (Comic)

Nitrozac and Snaggy — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 21:43:09 +0000

Here is the latest comic from our Joy of Tech friends at Geek Culture, Nitrozac and Snaggy. Joy of Tech appears three times a week in the Voices section of this site.

Why You Can Watch "NCIS" on Your iPad, but Not "Big Bang Theory"

Peter Kafka — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 19:58:09 +0000

CBS has a new iPad and iPhone app that will let you watch many of its shows for free. That’s not interesting at all.

What is interesting are the decisions the network has made about what you can watch on the apps, and when you can watch them. Because they say a lot about the state of the TV business, and the way it is and isn’t adapting to digital reality.

Stuff to pay attention to:

CBS, which for a long time kept most of its shows off the Web, now offers almost all of them on the Web, and you can see most of those on the apps. The omissions in the mobile lineup are the shows that CBS doesn’t own. “Big Bang Theory,” for instance, comes from Time Warner’s Warner Bros. studio, so it’s not on the app.
You can see most of CBS’ daytime and nighttime programming (soaps, “David Letterman”) on the apps the day after they air. But its primetime stuff — (“NCIS,” “The Good Wife,” etc.) won’t show up until eight days after it airs on the network.

The state of mobile, or at least the state of TV’s thinking about mobile, has a lot to do with both of those decisions.

For starters, while regular human beings recognize that stuff they look at on a tablet or a phone is the same as the stuff they see on TV or a Web browser, that’s not how biz dev and legal people think. So CBS, for instance, doesn’t have the rights to show “Big Bang Theory” on your iPad, even though it can let you watch it on its website.

And even when CBS does have mobile rights, it can’t convince advertisers to give it full credit for the eyeballs that watch its shows on phones and tablets, for technical/measurement reasons. So it’s not going to put stuff on mobile until it has wrung out the full value of its TV ad dollars.

When it comes to “Letterman” and “The Young and the Restless,” that’s the next day. But CBS and other networks are trying to convince advertisers that they should get credit for shows and ads that people watch in the seven days after an episode first airs. That’s not happening right now — currently, they get credit for shows watched live or on DVRs in the first three days after air — but CBS is hoping/assuming they’ll get what they want in the next couple years.

CBS isn’t the only network paying attention to the so-called “C7” window; you can see evidence of that in Fox’s decision to keep its shows off the Web except for “authenticated” viewers who are also paying for cable TV. (News Corp., which owns Fox, also owns this website.)

But that thinking isn’t universal, either: Right now you can watch the episode of “The Neighbors” that aired last night on ABC, on the network’s site or its iPad app, or on Hulu, for free, without any kind of sign-in/registration.

Actually, you can watch it here, too (unless you’re reading this on a tablet or mobile, because, see above). Enjoy.

BlackBerry Reinvents Itself to Compete With All-Touch Smartphones

Walter S. Mossberg — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 15:54:12 +0000

[ See post to watch video ]

There is a new smartphone coming to market, running on a new operating system. It’s an all-touch device — with no physical navigation controls and no physical keyboard — and serves as a platform for third-party apps. It’s meant to compete in a world defined by Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android phones. It’s a BlackBerry, reinvented from the ground up.

This model, called the Z10, and its operating system, called BB10, are bet-the-company moves by BlackBerry maker Research In Motion. RIM has seen its once-dominant position in the market shrivel away, especially in the U.S., since the iPhone appeared in 2007. It has tried a couple of times to drop its famous physical keyboards for touchscreens, but those projects failed, partly because the old BlackBerry operating system was primarily designed to handle corporate email and was a poor platform for app developers.

The BlackBerry Z10 comes in black and white and looks very different from past BlackBerrys.

Now, RIM is hoping that BB10 can change all that, so much so it’s changing its name to BlackBerry. The new OS, which is the most important part of the product, isn’t an evolution of the old BlackBerry platform. It is a clean break. Its user interface is so different that it will seem foreign to longtime BlackBerry users. And the first phone to use it, the Z10, looks much more like its rivals than like traditional BlackBerrys.

I’ve been testing the Z10 for about a week and decided to approach it as a new entry from a new company, because it is so different from past BlackBerrys. Overall, it worked fine in my tests, but I found it a work in progress. I liked some things a lot, including the way BlackBerry has designed its new virtual keyboard and camera, and the way it gathers all your messages into a single Hub. But it will launch with just a fraction of the apps available from its competitors, and is missing some very popular titles. It also lacks its own cloud-based ecosystem for storing and sharing files, like Apple’s iCloud or Google Drive. And there are other missing or lagging features.

Fervent BlackBerry fans might shun the Z10 for its lack of a physical keyboard, while fervent iPhone and Android fans might shun it for its small selection of apps and lack of native cloud services.

BlackBerry is formally announcing the Z10 and BB10 this week and it will go on sale in some countries almost immediately. In the U.S., all four major carriers are expected to sell the phone, for $199, according to BlackBerry, but the company estimates it won’t be available until March.

A second BB10 phone, the Q10, due in April, may be an easier transition for BlackBerry addicts, since it will have a physical keyboard. But BlackBerry sees typing on glass as its future and will be emphasizing the touch model.

Hardware

The Z10 is basically a chunky plastic slab, midway in size and weight between the tall, slim iPhone 5 and the bigger, wider crop of new Android models. I found it felt good in the hand. Its high-resolution 4.2-inch screen is a bit bigger than the iPhone’s 4-inch display, though much smaller than many newer Android screens, which are creeping toward 5 inches. The rear camera is the same eight megapixels as on the iPhone and Android models like Google’s flagship Nexus 4. It comes in black and white, and has only one memory configuration — 16 gigabytes (the base on the iPhone) — but the memory can be expanded by up to 32 more gigabytes using a removable card. Unlike many phones today, it has a removable battery.

User Interface

The Z10’s virtual keyboard is fast and easy to use, partly because of its predictive typing.

You unlock the phone by swiping up from the bottom border. The phone displays the last screen you were on. A similar swipe from any screen will take you to the home position, which displays minimized versions of up to eight apps currently running, with each displayed as a large rectangle showing some information from the app, such as weather or appointments. These are called Active Frames. From there, swiping to the left takes you through screens of app icons, similar to those on Apple and Android phones. Swiping from the bottom minimizes any open app into an Active Frame. I found these gestures easy to use and remember.

BlackBerry Hub

Although it isn’t technically the home screen, BlackBerry expects most users to spend most of their time in the device’s unified inbox, called BlackBerry Hub. To reach the Hub, you swipe right from the display of running apps, or, if you’re on any other screen, you swipe up and to the right in a curved gesture from the bottom border — that one takes a little practice.

The Hub contains emails from all the accounts you’ve set up on the phone, as well as text messages, messages from the company’s BlackBerry Messenger service, and even updates from Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Unlike on older BlackBerrys, there aren’t separate icons for various email accounts; they are visible only via the Hub. But you can swipe right from the Hub to see each account and view only its contents. If you swipe down while in the Hub, you see upcoming calendar events.

Keyboard

The Z10 keyboard is the best and fastest out-of-the-box virtual keyboard I’ve used. Master BlackBerry thumb typists might not find it as fast as the traditional physical keyboard, but, for a one-finger typist like me, it was faster and more accurate than either the native keyboards on the iPhone or Android. This is partly because it features predictive typing. It displays words that are likely to come next right above the rows of letters, and lets you flick these words upward into the text you’re composing. It learns what mistakes you typically make in hitting letters, and adjusts. And it learns words and abbreviations you frequently use, even proper names.

Apps

BlackBerry claims it will have 70,000 apps at launch. Others are promised shortly afterward. That sounds like a lot, but Apple is approaching 800,000 and Android has over 700,000. BlackBerry’s app store, called BlackBerry World, includes—or will soon include — some common and standard apps, such as Facebook, Twitter, Angry Birds, The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and Major League Baseball. But at launch, it will be missing Instagram, Pandora, Spotify, NPR, Google Maps and Netflix, among many others.

Work and Personal

If you use a corporate network controlled by an IT department, and want to keep your work and personal apps separate, BB10 has a simple way to do it. You just swipe down and press a button called “Personal” or “Work” and the apps, and even the background, change. However, email and calendar entries are still intermingled.

Camera, Voice and Battery Life

The camera has a cool feature called TimeShift that allows you to adjust individual faces in a group shot to get different views of them — say, smiling instead of frowning — by capturing additional images just before or after the snapshot. Voice calls were excellent. I didn’t do a formal battery test, but in my moderate to heavy use of the phone, I found it didn’t last as long on a charge as the iPhone 5, and began to get pretty low by late afternoon. It would last some people an entire day, but not everyone.

Browser

I found the browser adequate, but noticeably slower than the standard Apple and Android browser, even on a fast Wi-Fi network. However, unlike on many phones today, the browser supports Adobe Flash on some pages, if you manually enable it.

Data Speeds

The Z10 is capable of using LTE networks, the most consistently speedy available. But on my test unit, which was running on AT&T, I could never achieve download speeds of more than a paltry two megabits per second, even though the phone said it was on LTE, which typically sports download speeds of 15, 20 or even more Mbps. BlackBerry had no explanation for this anomaly.

Video Chats

In BB10, BlackBerry has added a video-chat feature similar to Apple’s FaceTime. In my tests, this worked well.

Cloud

Unlike Android or Apple devices, BB10 has no built-in cloud system for syncing or storing photos or other data. BlackBerry says that the third-party cloud app Box, which is mainly used by corporate customers, can do some automatic syncing, but it says it plans to work on its own system over time.

Other Downsides

There is no native ability to print from the Z10. And in some cases, I found that common controls required too many steps. For instance, to quickly get to the top or bottom of a long list of messages in the Hub — something the old BlackBerry did with ease — you have to go to the menu. BlackBerry says it is working on making that quicker.

Bottom Line

The Z10 and BB10 represent a radical reinvention of the BlackBerry. The hardware is decent and the user interface is logical and generally easy to use. I believe it has a chance of getting BlackBerry back into the game, if the company can attract a lot more apps.

A comparison table of the BlackBerry Z10 with its competition in the smartphone marketplace.

Email Walt at mossberg@wsj.com.

RELATED POSTS:

BlackBerry CEO: PlayBook Update Coming, Vague on Future Tablet Plans

Most — But Maybe Not All — U.S. Carriers Will Have BlackBerry 10 Device by March

BlackBerry 10 Boasts Some Key Apps, but Many Big Names Missing

BlackBerry to Launch in U.S. in Mid-March

RIM Changes Name to BlackBerry

RIM Aims for Reinvention With BlackBerry 10 Launch

Walt Mossberg: BlackBerry Reinvents Itself to Compete With All-Touch Smartphones

Square COO Keith Rabois Departs Company

Kara Swisher — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 06:11:22 +0000

In a major exec departure, Square COO Keith Rabois will be leaving the San Francisco payments company.

Square gave no other information about the sudden management change, but sources said disagreements between Rabois and CEO and founder Jack Dorsey were part of the reason for his exit.

It’s not clear if there were more serious issues between them, or whether the parting was related to a specific business problem. But the departure of the No. 2 exec is significant, so definitely more to come on what happened.

In a statement about the move, Rabois only said:

It is amazing what Square has accomplished since August of 2010. When I joined, there were 17 engineers all reporting flatly to Jack. The local coffee shop served as our interview room. Leading our amazing crew has been the most rewarding professional journey of my life. I am forever grateful to Jack, for his confidence in me and to each and every member of the team for allowing me to learn from them.

But every day matters. And it is better at this point for me to be doing something different every day.

As a result, I’ve decided to resign from Square. I am very excited about what lies ahead for the company. Square could not be better poised for greatness.

I will have more to share about my next opportunity soon.

Said Square’s Dorsey:

Today I accepted Keith’s resignation from Square. When he joined, we had fewer than 30 employees and under 1000 active merchants. Today, over 3 million individuals and businesses are able to accept credit cards with Square, processing over $10 billion annually. We couldn’t have done it without him and we wish him well in his next opportunity.

Square CFO Sarah Friar will become acting COO, Square said. It’s an unusual move to put an exec without a lot of deep operational experience in the second-most-important slot at Square, though the former Goldman Sachs analyst and Salesforce.com finance exec is clearly familiar with the heart of the company’s business.

The change in top management comes at a time of fast growth for the three-year-old Square, which completed a $200 million funding round in the fall that valued the company at $3.2 billion. At the time, the company said it had more than 400 employees and would grow by 100 more by year’s end.

Square is best known for allowing a range of small businesses, such as taxicab drivers, to accept credit and debit cards using their mobile phones. But it has also branched out into other mobile payments areas.

Besides his stint at Square, Rabois is a well-known angel investor in Silicon Valley, and serves on several boards, including Yelp’s. He has worked at many startups, too, including PayPal (acquired by eBay) and Slide (acquired by Google).

'Twas the Night Before Christmas and Santa's Online

Eric Johnson — Tue, 25 Dec 2012 00:18:52 +0000

’Twas the night before Christmas,
And Santa’s online.
He’s emailing and calling,
And all just in time.
With holiday cheer,
And a techie assist,
He’s using the Web
To re-check his list.

It won’t fit under the Christmas tree, but there might be one last-minute gift to make the geekiest of little ones happy: A personalized email, video message or phone call from jolly old St. Nicholas.

Previously, parents had to take their children to the mall to meet Kris Kringle, but he’s updated his act with the times and across a long list of Web sites.

Here are just a couple:

My favorite of the bunch is Google’s “Santa Tracker,” which starts off by walking you through a surprisingly detailed faux-instant-message chat with Santa. After you say you’ve read and agreed to Santa’s Terms and Privacy Policy (no, really, but they are a lot better than Instagram’s), he interviews you about a friend, co-worker or loved one you want him to contact. Then he offers to give them a phone call (but only between 8 am and 9 pm), an email or a Google+ message. (I wonder if Santa puts the naughty and nice kids in different Circles on Google+.)
Portable North Pole (pictured at top) takes it one step further, letting you send a video message from Santa. And in PNP’s questionnaire, you can tell Santa to cater his message specifically to an adult, or to someone (adult or child) who shouldn’t be on the “nice” list. Since it’s a video call, Santa optionally asks for a photo of the recipient or of you that he can use, or you can just have him use a picture of a gift.
It’s just one of many, many similar smaller services, but Christmas Dialer layers a business on top of the Christmas-y concept. It gives you one free call from Santa, then charges at least 57 cents for each additional call to your eBay PayPal account. Unlike the other two listed above, though, it asks less information upfront and, as a result, offers far fewer choices of what sort of message the recipient will get.

Marissa Mayer's First Live Interview (Which ATD Had to Virtually Sneak Into): God. Family. Yahoo.

Kara Swisher — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 04:06:24 +0000

Tonight, new Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer gave her first public interview since becoming the leader of the troubled Silicon Valley Internet giant.

Not to cranky me, of course, but to the much more amenable Fortune magazine writer and editor Pattie Sellers, who hosted the former Google exec at a dinner in Palo Alto, Calif., as part of the magazine’s Most Powerful Women franchise.

Fortune recently put a glamour shot of Mayer on the cover, and Sellers also did a profile. Now, Mayer was ready to sit down to talk about Yahoo and more.

(I wish I could have reported from the event, and almost did. I had initially been invited to the dinner at the Garden Court Hotel for about 100 guests, mostly women. But I was then waitlisted, and then told by Sellers directly that I could not attend, as the editors had decided to close out outside media and only have Fortune staffers covering it.)

Whatever! I have my ways to liveblog it and do it faster than any magazine writer can — and none involve disguising myself as a cater-waiter or solely using the Twitter feed from Fortune. As if!

Here goes:

7:50 pm: After some lovely cocktails, the audience sits down at about 10 tables of nine people and starts in on the salad course.

Soon enough, the night starts off with a speech by a McKinsey partner (and presumable sponsor of the dinner), delivering some stats as part of a study of some sort about how businesses are using — or should be using — social tools.

More than 60 percent of knowledge workers spend time exchanging information … Social can deliver an estimated $1 trillion in value.

Big news! Not! Even! Slightly! Oh dear, please get to the opening act!

Finally, Sellers gives her intro of Mayer.

8:04 pm: Sellers notes that her conference had hosted Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz in 2010 (she was ousted in 2011), and in 2011 had Mayer when she was an exec at Google (she became Yahoo CEO this year).

Now, in 2012, Mayer is top dog at Yahoo, and the youngest CEO in the Fortune 500.

“Why don’t we just call this ‘the most powerful Yahoo dinner,’” jokes Sellers.

Why not!

Mayer — for those who care, and forgive me, since I am fashion-stupid — is wearing a black frock and some heeled Mary Janes. She gets big applause when Sellers notes that Yahoo stock is up 18 percent since Mayer became CEO.

Note: It did go down when she made a shareholder misstep early in her tenure, but has gone up since she repeated mobilemobilemobile with confidence on a recent earnings call that got investors excited about her tenure.

8:08 pm: By the way, Mayer put in a call for people to vote for her as Time magazine’s Person of the Year (she is on the list of nominees — more kudos from a Time Inc. property).

Mayer starts off with basic PR messaging that she trotted out previously on the recent earnings call, around how she wants Yahoo to be focused on “delighting and engaging users” and how it is a brand that touches people every day.

Therefore, its products need to be inspiring and delightful.

Daily delight! This is the buzzword.

Also, she notes, Yahoo should be the bestest place to work.

As apparent proof of that, Mayer says that all Research In Motion BlackBerry smartphones have been banished, and that Yahoos will be using Apple’s iPhones, Google’s Android phones and Microsoft’s Windows phones.

This has been endlessly reported, even though most other Internet companies do this, but it’s a good line, anyway.

8:12 pm: By the way, iPhones are the most popular with Yahoo employees.

News at 11! (I will add that iPhones are the most popular with the Swisher boys, too, and — irony alert — one of their moms works at Google.)

Sellers then asks about what makes a good product, which is precisely why the product-savvy Mayer was brought in to fix Yahoo.

Says Mayer: “Acute user need.”

I acutely need doughnuts. Does this count?

Also, says Mayer, products have to be created in a way that is “frictionless and beautiful,” and that the offering cannot get in the consumer’s way.

Sellers asks her to name a great product. Mayer notes that she was not talking acquisitions, but quickly namechecks the iPhone and Google.

Since those companies’ market caps are a billionty times bigger than Yahoo’s, she def cannot acquire anything there.

8:17 pm: Mayer also apparently likes some kind of luxury paper made in Germany that looks like velvet. It’s Gmund, by the way.

The topic moves on to Flickr, the once hip photo-sharing service that Yahoo bought and proceeded to ignore. Meanwhile, Instagram.

Mayer says that Yahoo needs to focus on the “global suite” services that are excellent, and on executing them well.

She points out Yahoo’s fantasy football service, mentioning its recent breakdown on game day that sent fans into a tizzy.

It’s a they-love-us-so-much-they-hate-us point.

Yahoo will not do things like online maps, though, Mayer says, noting that where Yahoo cannot compete, it should partner.

Sellers asked about acquisitions.

Mayer: Mobilemobilemobile! (It worked before!)

8:22 pm: Mayer then mentions the importance of small teams that work together, such as its recent Stamped purchase.

She notes that the bigger and more strategic opportunities are around advertising technology. Calling the Rubicon Project!

Mayer veers away from a question about layoffs, a sad Yahoo tradition. I have reported previously that she will make cuts via performance reviews.

At Yahoo, she says, it’s now about performance, not potential: “No offense to potential, but what we really care about now is performance.”

No offense taken!

Also, everyone’s goals will be posted on the Yahoo Web site for everyone to see.

Oh, wait, there will surely be offense taken by those lazy potential people at Yahoo.

Mayer does add that Yahoo should be a “growth company,” and not one defined by cuts.

8:28 pm: “The consumer Internet is growing, and we need to invest,” she says.

To achieve this will be a hard job, and will take multiple years, she adds.

Sellers asks about the Disney turnaround, which Mayer is apparently fascinated with. Mayer does indeed love Disney.

Who doesn’t? (Well, me, but I am an outlier.)

Speaking of Disney, one of its directors, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, sent regrets, but has emailed a question from its board meeting in New York.

Sandberg once worked at Google with Mayer, though the pair is still not working on a search engine together.

Sandberg asks what was most surprising to Mayer about taking over at Yahoo.

Mayer says she thought the job would be hard, and her new baby would be fun. Mayer had her first child at the end of September.

“The job is fun, and the baby is easy,” says Mayer.

Sellers wants to know how Mayer gets it all done. The answer: “Ruthlessly prioritize.”

She notes that that’s why she has not talked to the media at all, and why she will not be talking after this event.

(Well, I guess I will go back to not waiting by the phone for Yahoo PR to call back. Hi Anne! — also looking forward to not getting the holiday media party invite, which is no prob as the Googlers are throwing one the same night and they usually have organic arugula picked by elves they employ that’s acutely delicious.)

Then, as a Wisconsin Green Bay Packers fan, Mayer does her version of the famous Vince Lombardi quote: “God. Family. Yahoo.”

Cheesehead moment! And Mayer and I have so much in common! Mine is: Dog. Family. Yahoo.

8:33 pm: Sellers throws in one more question from famed investor Warren Buffett, who apparently wants to know what, if Mayer was not CEO of Yahoo, would she want to run?

Not Berkshire Hathaway! Mayer says she would build something herself.

It seems as if that is what she is doing at Yahoo, so we await the result.

Until then, Mayer’s mum. So to speak.

Latest Lumia Smartphone: High Quality, but It’s Heavy

Walter S. Mossberg — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 02:03:38 +0000

Both Nokia and Microsoft were once titans in the smartphone world, but the pair have struggled to find favor with consumers, carriers and developers in the iPhone-Android era. Now, the two companies, which have become close partners, hope they’ve finally found the formula for success. The product on which their hopes rest is Nokia’s new flagship smartphone, the Lumia 920, running Microsoft’s revamped operating system, Windows Phone 8.

[ See post to watch video ]

I’ve been testing the Lumia 920 and consider it a handsome, high-quality phone with attractive features that worked well for me. Not only that, but it costs half of what most other top-of-the-line smartphones set you back, and yet gives you twice the typical memory. It is greatly improved from the first flagship Lumia, last spring’s Lumia 900.

While this isn’t a review of the new Windows Phone 8 software, I can say that it also has improved in the past year. Its underlying architecture has been rebuilt, it is faster and more reliable, it now has smaller icons so you needn’t scroll as much to find what you want, and it still offers a fresh, engaging interface that sets it apart.

The brightly colored Lumia 920 is 65 percent heavier than Apple’s iPhone 5.

But the Lumia 920 has two big drawbacks: It is heavy and thick, and, like all Windows Phones, it has a much smaller app selection than the iPhone or Android phones.

This new Lumia, which costs $100 with a two-year contract from AT&T, has a sharp, vibrant 4.5-inch screen, a very good 8.7-megapixel rear camera, and is fast and fluid. It supports LTE, the most consistently speedy U.S. cellular-data technology, and has 32 gigabytes of memory for storage. It is made of plastic, but it is a solid-feeling plastic in bright colors — including red, yellow and blue — that are injected into the material.

The phone also has some unusual features. Its screen responds to fingernails and even fingers clad in regular thin gloves (though winter-weight gloves didn’t work for me). And it can be charged without plugging in a cable, by merely placing it on a charging plate that plugs into the wall. (The charging plate, normally a $49 option, is being included with the phone for an unspecified period.)

While I didn’t do a formal battery test, this Nokia lasted me through a day of mixed use. Voice calls were reliable and clear, and the phone’s speakers sounded great. Photos and videos looked very good.

In my tests, the LTE speeds were very good, averaging 17 megabits per second downstream. But AT&T’s LTE network is only in about 100 cities.

However, the Lumia 920 has a few characteristics that may turn off potential buyers. The biggest downside is its sheer size. This may be the heaviest modern smartphone I’ve tested, and it’s one of the thickest.

To give you an idea, it’s 65 percent heavier than Apple’s iPhone 5, and 40 percent thicker. We’re in an era of smartphones with larger and larger screens, but most phone makers take care to keep these bigger-screen phones relatively light and thin, something Nokia didn’t do here. For instance, compared with the latest high-end Android phone, Google’s Nexus 4, which has an even larger 4.7-inch screen, the Lumia 920 is 33 percent heavier and 17 percent thicker.

It can be charged by placing it on a charging plate that plugs into the wall.

The second major downside is app selection on the Windows Phone platform. The number, quality and variety of apps has improved considerably in the past year. But developers still either ignore Windows Phone or write for the platform well after they’ve launched on Android or Apple’s iOS mobile operating system. The Lumia 920 has about 120,000 apps, versus some 700,000 for the iPhone and the latest Android phones.

Sheer numbers of apps may seem irrelevant after a certain point. In fact, important apps like Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, Kindle, Yelp, the New York Times and Words With Friends are available on the Lumia 920 and worked in my tests. Plus, only Windows Phones have smartphone versions of Microsoft Office programs.

But my searches of the app store on the new Lumia failed to turn up plenty of popular apps available on the Apple and Google platforms, such as Instagram, Dropbox, Google Drive, YouTube, HBO GO, Spotify, Pandora radio, United Airlines, MLB, Scrabble and Starbucks.

Some other annoyances turned up in my tests. An update to one of the built-in settings features has remained stuck in the app store for days (Nokia can’t explain why). The camera, which claims superior image stability and low-light performance, generally did very well for me. But it sometimes had a tendency to take over-bright shots. For instance, an orange wine label came out as yellow.

Voice recognition is a weak point on the Lumia 920. Its ability to answer spoken questions and commands lagged far behind Apple’s and Google’s in my tests. And its dictation capability for things like email and texts was atrocious, never coming close to accurate.

The wireless charging plate worked every time for me. But it has a gigantic wall adapter and takes about an hour longer to charge the phone fully than the included standard charger cable.

All in all, though, the Nokia Lumia 920 is worth considering, if you can live with a heavy device — especially given its combination of low price and strong features.

Email Walt at mossberg@wsj.com.

Corrections & Amplifications
The app store on the new Lumia includes an app for Delta Air Lines. A previous version of this article incorrectly said the app was not available.

Japan's Masayoshi Son Picks a Fight With U.S. Phone Giants

Daisuke Wakabayashi and Anton Troianovski — Sat, 24 Nov 2012 21:00:58 +0000

In Japan, Masayoshi Son is known as the eccentric Internet billionaire who upended the country’s telecom industry. In the U.S., he is about to become the cash-strapped underdog who picked a fight with two corporate giants — AT&T Inc. and Verizon Wireless.

“It’s like the poor kids fighting against the rich kids,” Mr. Son said recently about the coming showdown. “Sometimes, the poor kids have more guts to fight the uphill battle.”

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Nexus 4 Is a Great Value With Small Improvements

Walter S. Mossberg — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 02:03:01 +0000

Google’s Android operating system is used on hundreds of smartphones and tablets. But the flagship Android devices, the ones the company calls “the best of Google,” are labeled Nexus. They are meant to show the world all that an Android device can be, and are designed and sold directly online by Google. Next week, the company will begin offering the latest phone in this line, the Nexus 4.

[ See post to watch video ]

This new phone is part of a Google-designed portfolio that now includes two other devices: The Nexus 7 and Nexus 10 tablets. The phone, which features a new version of Android, hits the market at a time when Apple has had early success with its iPhone 5, and as Nokia and HTC are bringing out devices with a fresh version of Microsoft’s phone software, Windows Phone 8.

I found the Nexus 4 more evolutionary than revolutionary. It has some nice features and carries on Google’s recent tablet tradition of low pricing. But there’s no knock-your-socks-off stuff in the new phone. Even the new version of Android is just a further iteration of the current variant, called Jelly Bean, rather than an all-new edition, such as Google introduced last year at this time with the prior Nexus phone.

The Nexus 4’s Photo Sphere feature shows a 360-degree image, in which you can pan around to see up and down as well as side to side. Blue dots guide the photo taker.

And the Nexus 4 is missing two important features: The ability to use LTE, the most consistently speedy 4G network in the U.S.; and a memory capacity greater than 16 gigabytes, the amount most smartphones start with. The new phone also lacks a memory-expansion slot. The phone’s most touted new capability, the ability to capture 360-degree pictures, worked poorly in my tests.

Otherwise, I found the latest Nexus to be a solid, reliable, phone and a good value. On Nov. 13, Google will begin selling it starting at $299 for an unlocked version — one that has no carrier plan or contract — with a puny 8GB of internal storage. A 16 gigabyte unlocked version will cost $349. You’ll have to add the cost of a contract or prepaid plan from T-Mobile, AT&T or carriers that use the same network technology to those prices (the phone won’t work on Verizon or Sprint). T-Mobile will be offering the 16GB version for $199 with a two-year contract. To grasp how inexpensive the Nexus 4 is, consider that Samsung’s popular Galaxy SIII is about $550 unlocked, $199 with a two-year contract.

The Nexus 4, built for Google by LG of Korea, has a large 4.7-inch screen with high resolution, higher than Apple’s 4-inch Retina display on the iPhone 5, though with slightly fewer pixels per inch because it’s spread over a larger display. The new Nexus is 20 percent thicker than the iPhone 5 and 24 percent heavier. But its curved rear edges made it feel comfortable in my hand.

It’s made of plastic, but is clad in relatively sturdy Gorilla Glass 2 on both front and back. There’s a 1.3-megapixel camera on the front and an 8-megapixel camera on the back. These cameras took sharp, vivid pictures and videos and you can apply filters to snapshots.

While I didn’t do a formal battery test, the Nexus 4 lasted a full workday in mixed use, including Web surfing, lots of app use, email, texting, viewing of short videos, occasional music playback and voice calling.

A new feature in the Nexus 4 allows you to charge the battery, which is sealed inside, without plugging in an adapter, by merely placing it on a charging pad plugged into the wall. These pads, which Google doesn’t sell, must comply with an industry standard called Qi. I had mixed results trying this. I tested it on two Qi pads and only one worked with the Nexus 4.

Instead of LTE, the Nexus 4 relies on a 4G standard called HSPA+, which is more common outside the U.S. This network standard can be as fast or faster than LTE in places, but in my tests comparing the Nexus 4 on HSPA+ with an iPhone 5 using LTE, the differences were often stark. In one location, the two were about the same, at just under 15 megabits per second for downloads. But in two others, in two cities, the Nexus 4 on HSPA+ managed average download speeds of just 2.8 mbps and 3.8 mbps, while the iPhone 5 on LTE averaged nearly 30 mbps. Some other phones offer both LTE and HSPA+.

I found voice calls to be clear and reliable, but the external speaker sounded weak and it’s worse when you aren’t holding the phone because it’s located on the rear.

The phone’s fast processor, coupled with improvements in the new version of Jelly Bean, called Android 4.2, made the Nexus 4’s touchscreen fast and fluid. One new feature of the latest operating system is called Gesture Typing, which allows you to compose text by swiping from key to key, rather than tapping them. This worked fine, but is similar to a system called Swype, which has long been available on other Android phones. Another nice feature in Android 4.2 is improved auto-correction. It now tries to anticipate the next word likely to be typed. So, if you type “Monday,” it suggests “night” and “morning.”

However, I found the most touted new feature on the Nexus 4, an enhanced panorama photo feature called Photo Sphere, disappointing. A Photo Sphere is a 360-degree image of a scene, in which you can pan around to see up and down as well as side to side. Google has made it easy to take such a picture, guiding you with blue dots as you move from around a starting point, automatically adding more of a scene in all directions until you decide to stop.

However, in all four of my Photo Sphere tests the results were poor. Objects like chairs, roofs and even people came out distorted and uneven. Google officials said they couldn’t explain my results.

Also, you can only fully share these Photo Spheres with others, for now, via the company’s Google+ social network. If you email them, they arrive as static scenes.

The new version of Android introduced on the Nexus 4 also has an enhanced version of Google search, which yields more answers, rather than just links, and speaks some of the answers back to you when you search by voice rather than typing. But the same new features were just released in a new version of Google search for the iPhone. In my tests, the iPhone version sometimes gave richer answers, such as hourly temperatures on weather searches, missing from the Android version.

Overall, the Nexus 4 is a good phone, with especially good prices for unlocked versions. But I’d advise Android buyers to consider other models with LTE, better speakers, and the ability to add more memory and work on all carriers.

Email Walt at mossberg@wsj.com.

Gadget-Case Maker Targus Acquires Sena Cases

Lauren Goode — Tue, 30 Oct 2012 12:00:30 +0000

Laptop-case maker Targus just got a bit fancier.

Targus, the Anaheim, Calif.-based company known for its laptop and tablet cases, has acquired Sena Cases, another Southern California company that makes premium phone cases.

One of Sena’s leather iPhone 4/4S cases.

The 30-year-old company announced today that it had bought Sena for an undisclosed amount.

A spokesman for Targus said that Sena would continue to operate under its own brand name, and that Sena’s co-CEOs, brothers Ramsey and Fevzi Oten, will continue to lead the company.

For Targus, buying Sena (pronounced “Senna”) helps the company expand into the the phone accessory market, specifically high-quality cases. Until now, Targus has mainly focused on laptop and, more recently, tablet bags. Thirteen-year-old Sena Cases, on the other hand, makes fine leather and luxury smartphone cases (like the one I mention in this wallet-case roundup).

Last month, Targus made its own foray into phone accessories, with three different styles of cases for iPhone 5.

Dear Samsung Galaxy Note II: It's Not You, It's Me

Lauren Goode — Mon, 29 Oct 2012 13:00:27 +0000

When Samsung first introduced a sandwich-sized smartphone called the Galaxy Note in February, it was received with skepticism from people who prefer thinner, smaller phones.

Now, with 10 million Galaxy Notes sold worldwide, Samsung has taken the next step with the Samsung Galaxy Note II. This 4G LTE-compatible smartphone has an even larger screen than the first Note, but also has a slimmer, narrower body and a brand-new Android operating system.

It’s still too big for a smartphone.

[ See post to watch video ]

I say this while acknowledging that it’s a well-made device, and that other consumers may be more comfortable with a large phone. I admittedly was sucked in by the brilliant, 5.5-inch display for shopping online, checking emails and reading articles.

I enjoyed using Samsung’s redesigned “S Pen” stylus for writing what Samsung calls “S Notes” and clipping Web images. The Note II also has a new feature called Air View, which shows an enlarged view of an email, photo or video when you hover the tip of the stylus just over the content you’re trying to see.

And the battery, which offers 24 percent more juice than the first Note, lasted me a full day and into the next morning, which is more than I can say for my iPhone.

But, after testing it over the past week and a half, the awkwardness that came with carrying such a large, “notice me” phone outweighed the benefits of it, for me.

The Note II officially launched in the U.S. last week, and is available through all four major U.S. carriers — AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon Wireless — plus U.S. Cellular. Almost all of the carriers are charging $300 for the device with a two-year contract. T-Mobile is doing something a little different: It’s selling the Note II for $250 with 20 consecutive months of $20 payments, or for $370 after a $50 mail-in rebate, also with a two-year agreement.

The Note II runs on a speedy quad-core processor. It has two gigabytes of internal RAM, and comes with 16GB of built-in storage, plus a microSD card slot for up to 64GB of additional storage.

The phone builds upon the features that were already in the first Note, and borrows some features from Samsung’s Galaxy S III smartphone. The cameras, for example, are the same eight-megapixel rear camera and 1.9-megapixel front camera as the Galaxy S III, but on the Note II, there are some advanced photo settings and more ways to view and organize your photos.

The Note II, which comes in white and titanium gray, measures about six inches by three inches, and is .37-inch thick. It weighs just over six ounces. Its rounded edges add to its overall sleek look.

Samsung has opted to use a combination of physical and touch-friendly buttons on the bottom of the Note II, which I liked, for the most part, though it’s hard not to accidentally hit the “back” button when dislodging the stylus.

The large HD display shows pictures, videos and Web sites with amazing color, detail and clarity. At times I got so caught up looking at Facebook photos, or scrolling Twitter or ordering items through the Amazon app, that I stopped paying attention to what was going on around me, even when I was out in public.

The phone runs on the latest version of Google’s Android operating system, 4.1 Jelly Bean. This includes Google Now, a Siri-like personal-assistant function, and more colorful, comprehensive calendar notifications, which were so big on the Note II’s display that it would be impossible to miss a meeting reminder.

There are two home-screen modes users can choose from. Basic mode shows the conventional Android layout, littered with apps and widgets, which I think can be confusing for non-Android users. Easy mode shows a simplified home screen, with favorite apps and settings.

The browser includes a welcome “pop-up” option. This allows you to click on a Web link, whether from an email or another app, and view the new Web page in a small, separate window that appears beside the app you’re in.

The Note II is technically a 4G LTE-compatible device, but whether you can access that 4G or LTE depends on the wireless carrier. I tested the Note II on T-Mobile’s and Sprint’s wireless networks. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get my hands on Note II phones that run on Verizon’s or AT&T’s LTE networks.

In the dozens of speed tests I conducted in midtown and downtown Manhattan, I got an average download speed of .8 megabits per second and an upload speed of .67 megabits per second on Sprint’s 3G network. T-Mobile’s high-speed HSPA+ network performed much better, with an average download speed of 5.6 megabits per second and an average upload speed of 1.2 megabits per second. (For a little context: The average Internet speed of U.S. households is 6.7 megabits per second, according to Akamai.)

Call quality on the phone was very good, even when I was wearing headphones. Speakerphone worked especially well. The biggest drawback with calling on this phone isn’t the sound; it’s the size.

The Note II felt uncomfortably large pressed against my ear and face, with my hand stretched just to grip it. And here’s the thing: It’s not just during calls that the phone feels like it’s meant for people the size of LeBron James, who is 6’8″ (and part of Samsung’s marketing for the phone).

With the Note, Samsung has been trying to offer a hybrid device, a “phablet” if you will, that lets you carry just one gadget instead of a phone and a tablet. But for me it just didn’t split the difference well.

When I was heading out for a night and slipping it into my jacket pocket or purse I wished it was smaller. When I was sitting in bed watching videos on it, I wanted a tablet or laptop after awhile.

When I listened to music on it at the gym — something I do regularly with my iPhone — the Note II started to feel like a responsibility instead of a running accessory.

Using the excellent Google Maps app on such a large screen was great. But one afternoon, while stopped at a street corner as I navigated downtown Manhattan, two people pointed at the phone. My friends gawked at it when I pulled the phone out of my bag after dinner one night.

Those who like the idea of a larger phone won’t be displeased with the Samsung Galaxy Note II, a fine specimen of a smartphone. For me, it felt like I was trying to jam fine art into a tiny apartment. It’s beautiful, but it just didn’t fit.

Facebook Gift Event Also Gets Blown Out of NYC by Hurricane Sandy

Kara Swisher — Sun, 28 Oct 2012 17:42:39 +0000

And the hits — and not happy ones — keep on coming with the imminent approach of Hurricane Sandy to New York City.

Along with cancellation of tomorrow’s Google Android product event and postponement of our latest All Things Digital conference, D: Dive Into Mobile, which was set to take place tomorrow and on Tuesday, Facebook is also now putting the kibosh on two events it was planning in Manhattan this week.

The first is a Tuesday engineering open house that was planned for the social networking site’s New York HQ in mid-town. And, more importantly, its larger Gifts event at FAO Schwartz is now off too.

A Facebook spokeswoman confirmed the cancellations.

Facebook was set to unveil retail partnerships at the media gathering to “come see what’s new with Facebook Gifts,” after announcing the ability to buy physical gifts for other users last month.

It is the company’s major initiative into the world of social gift giving and e-commerce.

As Mike Isaac wrote when it was announced in late September:

It’s exactly what it sounds like. Users can choose, mail and pay for real-world, physical gifts — not the lame virtual ones Facebook offered a few years ago — to send to one another, all completely inside of Facebook. They’re tied to the significant event reminders that pop up on occasion — say, a friend’s anniversary, or a birthday. Or even better for Facebook, users can also just buy gifts for others for the heck of it.

It’s a major undertaking for Facebook, tackling an entire new segment of online commerce and adding a brand new revenue stream to its business. And to a degree, we’ve known it was coming for some time — after all, on the same day Facebook went public, it acquired Karma, the social gifting application upon which all of Gifts is based and built.

Perhaps more significant, however, is that users aren’t limited to just the desktop to send and receive gifts; the entire Gifts program is accessible on mobile phones.

Microsoft Hits the Restart Button With Xbox Music

Tricia Duryee — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 04:27:37 +0000

Microsoft is officially unveiling all the details today about its new music subscription service that will work across a variety of devices.

Xbox Music will start rolling out tomorrow on the game console, replacing the Zune marketplace, and on Oct. 26 it will be baked into more devices as part of the Windows 8 launch.

Xbox Music will be familiar to consumers who use other streaming music services, like Spotify and Rdio. From the start, it will have access to more than 30 million songs globally and 18 million in the U.S. It’s launching in 15 countries.

A free ad-supported version will allow users to manage their entire music catalog from their PC and supplement it with an online catalog that is streamed over the Internet. Users will be able to skip from track to track, create playlists or listen to an album without restrictions (at least for the first six months). A premium version will cost $10 a month and will work across PCs, the game console and Windows 8 phones.

Both services will allow the user to purchase songs a la carte for about 99 cents each, or use the Smart DJ feature, which will let consumers discover new music based on their interests.

Xbox Music was first announced last June and, since then, a lot of the details have been spilled, but nonetheless, this represents an important launch for Microsoft. It is the first significant investment it has made in music since the launch of Zune five years ago, and this time it hopes it has come up with a winning formula, given the company’s intense interest in owning the home entertainment space. Digital music is something that Apple has so clearly dominated that others, like Amazon, can be fairly successful and still only make a small dent in its market share.

Next year, Microsoft will also launch apps for iOS and Android devices, which will require the premium version, but obviously will extend the potential consumer base beyond those who are only willing to own Windows devices.

In an interview, Scott Porter, Xbox Music’s principal program manager, said over time, “music became work, and we wanted to make it an enjoyable experience again.”

From a Windows 8 tablet, Porter showed me how you can easily play music after searching for an artist, or how you can create playlists without a lot of dragging and dropping. The free version, he estimated, would play advertisements every two to five hours, which is the standard created by other music servies. With the paid version, though, Porter said users will be able to stream or download songs, and back up their entire music collection to the cloud, which can then be accessed on the phone or other devices.

Ten Ways to Make Your Android Smarter

Katherine Boehret — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 22:10:13 +0000

[ See post to watch video ]

Are you getting the most out of Android? You may not know it, but some of the Google operating system’s most useful features may not be in plain view.

This week, I gathered 10 tricks that could make using an Android device easier and more enjoyable. Since only a handful of devices currently run the latest Android operating system, known as Jelly Bean, I focused on features that work on the more prevalent version of Android known as Ice Cream Sandwich. Many of these tips work on devices that run Jelly Bean and some work on earlier versions of Android. Since there are so many Android phone models, names and wording may differ in some of these steps.

1. Easier Keyboarding

To avoid switching from Android’s letter keyboard to its number and symbol keyboard, hold down the period key to see commonly used punctuation marks and symbols. Slide your finger to the menu that appears, lifting it to select the right key.

If you can’t stand tapping on glass to type on a virtual keyboard, try not lifting your fingers as much. Many Android devices come preloaded with Swype, which lets you type by dragging your finger from one letter to the next; lift your finger up when the word ends. It’s remarkably accurate. To see if Swype is running on your device, spell out a word without lifting your finger. If connecting lines don’t appear between each letter, tap and hold the space bar to see the Select Input Method screen and choose Swype. You can still type the old way, tapping one key at a time.

2. Unlock With Your Face

Instead of tracing a pattern on a screen or typing in a PIN, hold your Android device up and stare into its front-facing camera for a second to unlock it. This isn’t as secure as other methods and doesn’t always work, but it can be fun to use. To set this up go to Settings, Security, Screen Lock and choose Face Unlock. Set a backup PIN or pattern to trace for those moments when face detection doesn’t work.

3. Screen Shots Made Simple

Capture a still image of any screen you’re looking at by simultaneously pressing the power button and the volume down button. Find your screen shot in your Gallery under Screenshots or in the Notifications shade, which pulls down from the top of the screen. This feature only works in Android devices running Ice Cream Sandwich or later.

4. Manage Screens

In Android, app icons and widgets are organized on several Home screens. There are two ways to rearrange or remove these screens. One way on certain phones is to swipe from right to left to get to the last screen on your phone, tap at the bottom of that last screen (an option may say Manage Pages) and then touch and hold a screen to rearrange its order or remove it. For a shortcut, tap and hold the phone’s Home button for a second to jump directly to this.

5. Shortcut to Contacts

There’s an easier way to get in touch with your favorite people: Pin their faces to a Home screen. Go to All Apps, Widgets, select the Contact widget, which will prompt you to choose a person’s name from your contacts list. That person’s photo and contact information will be pinned to Home, for faster texting, calling and social networking. A Favorite Contacts widget pins four together on the Home screen.

6. Save the Battery With a Widget

Stop digging through menus to quickly turn off features that suck up your battery. One tool will do the trick: the Power Control widget. Find this by opening the All Apps page and tapping Widgets at the top. You may have to flip through a few screens to find the Power Control widget, but when you do, tap and hold it to anchor it on any of your pages. Once this bar is on a page, it will let you tap once to turn five features on or off: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, automatic account syncing (for Google, Facebook, LinkedIn and others) and screen brightness (low, medium, high or auto).

7. Auto-Update Apps

Avoid the nagging update notices that appear in your drop-down Notifications shade and set your apps to automatically update as updates become available. If you’re worried about conserving data, set this to update only over Wi-Fi. Open the Google Play store, Settings, Auto-Update Apps by Default and check the Wi-Fi option.

All photos and videos that you capture on your device can be automatically saved to a private folder in Google+ called Instant Upload.

8. Sync Photos and Videos on the Go

If you’ve signed up for Google’s social network, Google+, you can automatically save any photos or videos you capture on your device to a private (by default) folder in Google+ called Instant Upload. See these back at your desktop by accessing Google+ and looking at Photos, Instant Upload. (Videos are there, too.) Conserve data usage by adjusting when these photos and videos get uploaded, like only in Wi-Fi or only when the device is plugged in and charging. Adjust these settings from your mobile device in Google+, Settings, Instant Upload.

9. Smarter Web Browsing

Google’s Chrome browser comes preloaded on Android devices and works on PC or Mac computers, iPads, iPhones and other devices. If you own a few devices and use Chrome on each, instantly access the tabs you left open on one from another device by tapping Menu, Other Devices and tapping on an opened website in another device’s list of opened tabs. Browse in Chrome without leaving any history by using Incognito Mode on your Android mobile device. Turn this on in Menu, New Incognito Tab.

10. Back Up and Restore Settings, Apps

If you’re upgrading from one Android device to another, you can start using your new device with your old settings and apps if you follow these steps.

First, on the old device, go to Settings, Privacy Settings (for devices running Android version 2) or Settings, Backup and Reset (for devices running Android version 4 or 5). Place a check mark beside the Back Up My Data option. Give it a few minutes to back up and then when you start the new Android device, a setup option will let you restore settings and apps from backup.

Write to Katherine Boehret at katie.boehret@wsj.com