android

BBC-Weather

The BBC has today unveiled a new weather app for smartphones running Android and iOS. Available to those in the U.K. and Ireland, it’s powered by Met Office data and provides all kinds of information that’ll help you plan for the day ahead, including hourly forecasts, and data on UV, pollen count, humidity, and more.

sony

Apple’s WWDC event is happening tomorrow. Because new announcements in the Apple space happen so rarely, and because that company is historically better than average at keeping secrets, everybody’s going to be watching WWDC to see what Apple announces. Above all, people care about Apple announcements because the company is easily the most influential brand in consumer electronics.

That wasn’t always so. Sony used to be the Apple of the consumer electronics market. In fact, Sony was probably Steve Jobs’ biggest inspiration, responsible for not only Jobs’ famous clothing (his turtlenecks were made by the maker of Sony company uniforms) but also the name Apple (Sony used to be called Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation and Jobs was inspired by Sony’s switch to a friendly, happy sounding corporate name).

Shockingly, Sony nowadays loses money on consumer electronics and makes most of its money from selling insurance. The reason Sony loses money is some combination of corporate inefficiency, lack of vision and, most of all, the fact that its products generally aren’t worth the money they charge for them.

In the past couple of decades, Sony has followed a familiar, frustrating pattern: They always enter consumer electronics market late with overpriced but very good hardware hobbled by their own software interfaces and applications nobody wants. They did it with laptops. They did it with netbooks. They did it with smartphones and tablets, too.

So nobody takes Sony seriously anymore. They’re a two-bit, washed-up has-been.

Or are they?

parrot-asteroid-smart-2

image courtesy of Parrot

In keeping with their promise to make more apps available for their Android-based line of Asteroid car audio head units, Parrot has added four new apps to the Asteroid’s library: Three navigation apps — including a TomTom app — and a Facebook app.

iOS_Games_on_GamePop

This winter, a new console called the GamePop will allow you to play your favorite Android games on your high-definition television. But that’s not all you’ll be able to play. Creator Bluestacks has today announced that the GamePop will also run iOS games, and a number of big iOS developers have already signed up to support it.

Samsung-Galaxy-S4-white-front

Samsung’s Galaxy S4 was always going to be a big seller — probably the best-selling Android smartphone of 2013 — but the Korean company has lost $12 billion in market value due to concerns that the two Galaxy S4 variants that were recently announced will have a detrimental affect on its profit margins.

Brokers are also concerned that the growth prospects for Samsung smartphone business have “dimmed” following rumors of a new iPhone trade-in program from Apple.

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