Author: Rebecca

Next smartwatch from Samsung now for sale in the US

| October 8, 2015

The Gear S2 wearable technology devices have now been released onto American store shelves.

After the Samsung Gear S2 smartwatch received a fantastic response from consumers within its own home marketplace in South Korea, the device has now traveled to the other side of the world where it has been released to shoppers in the United States.

There are two different models of the Gear S2 wearables that are being released for U.S. consumers.

The two models of the smartwatch that have been rolled out in the U.S. are the Gear S2 and the Gear S2 Classic. Both of those devices run on the Tizen operating system, which belongs to Samsung. The device, itself, features a 1.2 inch round Super AMOLED screen. It has a rotating bezel, a 360 x 360 pixel resolution. The predictions are that it will be the Samsung Gear S2 3G model. That gadget can be paired with all Galaxy devices, as well as any smartphones that aren’t made by Samsung but that are running on Android 4.4 or later and that have a minimum of 1.5 GB of RAM.

There are about 18 pre-installed apps currently added to the Gear S2 smartwatch, among which 12 are permanent.

Smartwatch on sale in USAmong the apps that cannot be uninstalled from the new Samsung wearable technology are the Calls, Messages, Email, S-Health, and Gallery applications. Other applications in the Samsung Gear S2 include the “buddy”, which makes it possible to automatically favorite your contacts, as well as the “looking for my device,” which makes it possible to find out where connected devices are located, in addition to the “Syrup Wallet”, which is a mobile payments application through membership-based services.

When the Gear S2 was first launched for preorder in South Korea, it managed to sell out in a matter of two hours. Now the wearables are available to consumers in the United States and some are predicting that this will seriously cut into the market that had previously been led by Apple. In fact, there have been predictions that this could go so far as to take down the power of the Apple Watch.

The smartwatches are available starting at $299.99 and for as much as $349.99.

Mobile technology frustrations grow in India with regularly dropped calls

| October 5, 2015

The explosive growth of telecom and weak infrastructure are posing a threat to Modi’s plan to connect rural and urban India.

Mobile technology has been taking off in India with a vengeance, but the dream that Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been aiming to realize – to bring steady connections to urban and rural regions of the country – could be threatened due to a number of common struggles.

Almost one billion people in India have connected to the country’s cell phone services over the last ten years.

This has been a part of the mobile technology revolution that has been occurring in the country. It has brought India to the point that they are the second largest market in the world for wireless phones. However, a recent combination of rapid growth and the poor wireless infrastructure has also meant that the hopes the country has had to expand its mobile network reach has become exceptionally difficult and frustrating to device users.

The current mobile technology situation in the country has earned it the nickname of the “call-drop nation”.

Mobile Technology FrustrationThe regularly dropped calls is currently affecting people in all social statuses and income levels. The help line run by the government in order to allow for consumers across the country to register complaints has now reported that dropped calls are among the leading grievances that have been registered over the summer. It has become national headline news and has even led to the creation of a popular social media hashtag campaign called #NoCallDrops.

Though this problem has been growing steadily worse as mobile connections have been getting worse, the issue has been catapulted into the spotlight over the last few weeks after dozens of cell towers in the country’s capital were deemed invalid by the municipal corporation. This brought the three largest mobile device makers in India before a parliamentary committee in the hopes of discovering a solution to this widespread issue. Modi has called to his officials to repair this problem.

According to mobile technology consultant Prasanto K Roy, “India’s mobile network is under tremendous stress,” adding that “if we fail to address mobile connectivity problems, it will directly hit the government’s Digital India initiative.”