The Galaxy S4 has been cleared for government use by the U.S. Department of Defense, with Samsung’s new Knox security software deemed safe for military use. It’s the first Android-powered smartphone to ever win DoD approval, and it gets it ahead of Apple’s iPhone.
Google Glass has been getting a lot of attention recently for it’s futuristic take on wearable computing. Apple’s iWatch has got people intrigued, but it turns out that Google has been working on a watch of its own, just incase Google Glass is a little bit too weird for people.
Patents filed by Google in 2011 show that the company has been working on a wearable wrist computer. The Google Watch concept describes two touchpads on a wristband that work intandem to undertand gestures like Google has on the Google Glass pad.
Just over a month after acquiring Summly for $30 million, Yahoo! has gobbled up another smartphone app. This time it’s Astrid, a pretty task management client for Android and iOS, which has a strong focus on sharing. Astrid announced the news on its blog today.
The International Data Corporation (IDC), an firm that analyzes tech trends around the globe, released its quarterly Worldwide Tablet Market Study today, showing that tablet sales show no signs of slowing down any time soon.
The study shows that tablet shipments have increased 142 percent year over year for Q1 2013. Tablet shipments totaled 49.w million units in this first quarter, surging past the entire first two quarters of 2012 combined.
All tablet makers saw huge gains in the tablet space, though Apple’s overall share of the market is decreasing. The iPad is still the world’s largest tablet being sold, with 19.5 million shipping in the last quarter, up from 11.8 in last year’s Q1, an increase of 64 percent.
The U.S government has been warming up to consumer smartphones for some time. A couple months ago, the Pentagon announced that it will permit “the use of commercial products for classified communications for the first time.” Android handsets and iPhones are starting to be used in areas that previously didn’t offer security clearance.
In a world that has been ruled by Blackberry, the latest Samsung and Apple devices are about to be let into deeper parts of the government.
