I wrote a bit last week about how it was going to be a weird MWC. By “weird,” I mean beyond the usual way that everything is weird all the time now. In addition to being the second time the show has been held during a global pandemic, the smartphone industry has undergone some big […]
Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy. The app industry continues to grow, with a record number of downloads and consumer spending across both the iOS and Google Play stores combined in 2021, according to the […]
I fully confess I was a skeptic when Samsung unveiled the first Note. And I certainly wasn’t alone among the crowd at the Messe Berlin that IFA. The 5.3-inch display was unimaginably large in a year when the average screen measured a hair over 3.5 inches. The stylus graced the phone like a vestigial organ […]
To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PST, subscribe here. Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for Monday, February 14, 2022! Oh, what we have for you today. If you wanted mega-rounds, Apple’s latest hijinks, and even some political-hacker drama, TechCrunch has […]
The Note is dead. After more than a decade, Samsung has officially closed the book on the transformative phablet. The brand will still exist, but only in a kind of liminal marketing capacity. “We’re thinking more and more of the Note as the experience,” a rep told me on a recent briefing call. As the […]
It’s been a little under a year since Google and Samsung announced a joint wearables effort aimed at taking on Apple’s utter dominance of the category. It’s been clear from the beginning that such an effort wouldn’t happen overnight. Back in August, we got the first glimpse at “the new Wear OS Powered by Samsung,” […]
Google is introducing its own take on Apple’s SharePlay feature for FaceTime with today’s launch of a new “live sharing” feature for users of its Google Duo video calling service. In Google’s case, however, the interactive, co-viewing experience is not nearly as robust or as broadly available as Apple’s. It only works with a handful […]
South Korean electronics giant Samsung has been banging its sustainability drum loudly over the past couple of years, with impacts that echo around its ecosystem. With slogans like “corporate citizenship” and a big push for environmentally friendly supply chains, materials and manufacturing, the company has been pushing for a greener world than before. As part […]
Global smartphone shipments had already begun to shrink ahead of 2020, though two years of a pandemic and the resulting supply chain and chip constraints certainly didn’t help the overall figures. According to a pair of reports from Counterpoint Research and IDC, however, the market finally experienced growth last year for first time since 2017. […]
Supply chain issues continue to have a major impact on smartphone manufacturers per newly released figures from analyst firm Canalys — global shipments grew only 1% year over year in the final quarter of 2021. The numbers come on the tail of Q3 reports, which saw an overall drop of 6%, citing similar issues over […]