android
Microsoft To Support Higher Priced Apps For WP7
“I’d rather developers sell fewer than a million downloads and get to a million dollars,” Brandon Watson, director of an apps developer program for Microsoft, said in a press briefing in Helsinki. “If we can support a higher price point that’s good for developers.” Microsoft seems to be supporting that way of thinking as they believe that by allowing higher priced apps into the store it would encourage developers to create higher quality applications.
The question is considering that this is just a mobile device, how much would you be willing to pay for a high quality app? The difference between the Android Market and Apple’s App Store is that the Android Market is open sourced meaning they will allow just about anyone to upload an app which could turn out to be an incredible app or just malware. Apple has faced quite a bit of criticisms from developers on how long and how difficult it is to get their apps approved to be placed in the App Store.
I brought those comparisons up because while Apple’s App Store has good quality apps that only cost $0.99 or $1.99 or even free, that are great and of excellent quality. Games like Doodle Jump, Fruit Ninja and let’s not forget Angry Birds only cost a dollar or so but look at how well crafted they are, and how they gone on and sold millions of copies. Considering that WP7 has a pretty tiny piece of the smartphone pie shouldn’t they be trying to lure more users in rather than talking about raising app prices?
The Fairphone 2 was first unveiled in June earlier this year, where this particular handset carried a modular design while featuring majority of its components that have been sourced from conflict-free mines. It seems that this particular handset that you can purchase with a clear conscience has begun to ship to those who happen to live across Europe.
Fairphone announced in a blog post, “It’s been almost two years in the making, and some of the earliest buyers have been patiently waiting since July to receive their new phones. As community manager, I want to personally welcome the new batch of Fairphone owners to our community.” The initial 1,000 units are tipped to ship this month, before the other pre-orders follow in January 2016.
In terms of hardware specifications, the Fairphone 2 will run on a Snapdragon 801 chipset, has a 5″ 1080p screen with Gorilla Glass 3 protection, 2GB of RAM, an 8MP camera, with Android 5.1 Lollipop in tow. It will be a dual SIM capable handset with a microSD memory card slot and plays nice with 4G LTE networks, retailing for approximately €525 a pop.
It looks like the upcoming flagship model from Xiaomi will feature NFC support, at least based on a document that was released by China UnionPay. Just in case you are scratching your head and wondering who China UnionPay is, they happen to be the only domestic payment gateway supplier and card organization, and hence, to see them offer detailed support concerning the newly released NFC-based payment system points to the very real possibility of the upcoming Xiaomi Mi 5 featuring NFC capability.
After all, the Xiaomi Mi 3 was also mentioned on the list, which so happens to feature NFC, and there is no mention of the Xiaomi Mi 4 which does not come with NFC. Still, such a new payment system would be the ideal tool to see the reintroduction of NFC to the flagship model.
OnePlus did make an announcement in the previous month that the Ceramic variant of the OnePlus X will be released on November 24. True to their word, they did exactly that – although only a pitiful number of units were made available, and not only that, this was through a charity auction. Thankfully for the rest of the masses who are on the lookout for this device, it has gone on sale officially already.
Needless to say, this particular variant is available only by an invitation, although do bear in mind that standard OnePlus X invites are not good here – you will still need to snag yourself a specific Ceramic variant invite before you make a purchase. OnePlus is also on the lookout to offer additional methods of picking up this smartphone, although no further details were revealed.
The OnePlus X Ceramic will be available only in select markets, where among them include Europe, India, and Hong Kong. To date, we do know that OnePlus had made only 10,000 units of the handset available. A case of the early bird getting the proverbial worm here?