Smartphones spread out: Pew says 46 percent of US adults now own one

Our master plan is slowly working, and soon every man and woman in our great nation will own a smartphone. Pew Research Center reports that just under half of adult Americans, or 46 percent, own smartphones currently, meaning that smartphone owners now outnumber their feature phone counterparts by five percent. Pew polled multiple demographics to get its numbers, and there was growth across the board over ...
Apple Inc., Made In America

There are two sayings on the back of every Apple product: Designed By Apple in California and Assembled in China. These statements attempt to say that even though the products might be assembled in a different country, Apple is an American company — a fact Apple proclaimed loudly today with a new web page titled Creating jobs through innovation. Apple has been under fire lately regarding its overseas manufacturing partners. Apple hired the Fair Labor Association to conduct voluntary audits of the final assembly partners, including Foxconn’s ...
TechCrunch Giveaway: Samsung Galaxy S II, Case, And Gift Card #TechCrunch

We have another exciting giveaway for all of you this week. Earlier this morning, Jordan wrote about our friends over at Picksie and the launch of their new Android app. For those who don’t know, Picksie is a location-based app that helps you figure out what fun things there are to do around you. However, you won’t be able to enjoy it without a solid Android phone. With a huge thank you to Picksie, we have a brand new Samsung Galaxy S II to give away, along ...
Windows 8: The Road Ahead

If Windows Vista was Microsoft’s folly – a mish-mash of ideas not fully baked and aimed at multiple constituencies – Windows 8 is Microsoft’s rebirth. To get to ecstatic about it isn’t quite the direction I’d like to take this mini-review, but let’s just say that Microsoft is on the cusp of getting things right. As we said before, Windows 8 will ruffle a lot of feathers. The first and most obvious comparison is with the new Windows Phone interface. The “Start” menu is gone, replaced by ...
ReportGrid Launches Precog To Help You Turn Big Data Into Smarter Apps

Back in October, ReportGrid closed a $750K seed round with investors like Launch Capital, David Cohen, Walt Winshall, Doug Derwin, and Ed Roman — not long after it graduated from TechStars’ summer program in Boulder. The interest in ReportGrid was due to the fact that the company offers data analytics as a service (or DAaaS, if you prefer), providing companies with nifty scalable cloud database and visualization engine. In this way, it’s meant to be a turnkey, hosted alternative for developers to save them from having to ...
A closer look at the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 (video)

The last time we showed you the Galaxy Note 10.1, we had time for a few hands-on shots, but not quite enough to get to know the tablet, to warm up to the idea of interacting with one of our favorite 10-inchers using a stylus pen. Now that we've had a chance to park ourselves at Samsung's Mobile World Congress and get acclimated to the various S Pen apps, we wanted to hit back with one more hands-on, this time ...
Asus Rebrands Its Tablet Line To “Transformer Pads”, Launches The TF Pad Infinity & TF Pad 300

Once upon a time the Asus Eee brand held some weight. The Eee name debuted with Asus’ netbook line, which nearly instantly set the bar for low-cost, but still quality, computing devices. That’s why the Eee brand was used for Asus’ first tablets. But now, in 2012, with netbooks quickly fading into irrelevance, Asus wisely decided it was time to retire the name. From here on out Asus tablets will be known as Transformer Pads. Along with the rebranding, Asus also used the Mobile World Congress stage ...