Cell Phones Zone

Nuance Apps for Dictation, TV

Nuance Communications today announced a new version of its PaperPort Notes app for the Apple iPad. Nuance says for the first time, it lets people create notes simply by speaking.

PaperPort Notes is powered by Nuance’s Dragon voice recognition via the cloud-based Dragon Mobile software developers kit (SDK), which is behind a growing number of voice-enabled mobile and consumer apps.

The app supports accessing and saving documents from cloud services including Google Docs, Box.net, DropBox and PaperPort Anywhere. Users can also annotate and highlight documents, combine pages of documents from the cloud and the web, and capture documents using the built-in camera on the Apple iPad. You can see spoken words quickly returned as text directly within PaperPort Notes. It saves documents as industry standard PDF, making it easy to share notes with others.

Nuance PaperPort Notes is a free download in the Apple App Store.

The Nuance Dragon Go! app is now available for Android on the Android Market. It gives consumers direct access to over 200 destinations for mobile content simply by using their voice – including AccuWeather, Ask.com, Bing, Dictionary.com, ESPN, Facebook, Fandango, Last.fm, LiveNation, Milo.com, OpenTable, Pandora ® internet radio, Rotten Tomatoes, Spotify, Twitter, Wikipedia, Wolfram|Alpha, Yelp, YouTube, Yahoo! and many others.

The Nuance Dragon TV app lets you tell your television what you want to watch, and deliver it. The software lets users find content by speaking channel numbers, station names, show and movie names. Designed to be completely intuitive, you can say things like “Find movies with Leonardo diCaprio,” or “What’s on Bravo at 9 p.m. tonight?” and the software accomplishes the task for you. At the moment, it’s only out for device OEMs, operators and developers, at www.nuancemobilelife.com.

It may be reason enough to get a phone or tablet with HDMI output.

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Verizon Now Offering BlackBerry Curve 9370

Verizon is showering themselves with a bunch of devices today. Aside from LG Spectrum, Verizon is also offering the BlackBerry Curve 9370. It is available for $99.99 with 2-Year contract and after $50 online discount or $409.99 without it.

As for the specs, the device packed with a 5MP camera, WiFi, and video capture. If also offered optical trackpad and Social Feed functions. The Curve 9370 runs on BlackBerry 7 OS.

[via PhoneDog]

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Motorola Mobility Announces Availability of Motorola ATRIX™ in Turkey

Innovative Android-powered smartphone puts the power and capabilities of a PC in your pocket

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News on Android Apps

If you are a fan of classic platform games such as that speedy blue hedgehog Sonic, and own an Android device you can download Sonic 4 Episode 1 from the Android Market, which has now been updated to include Android devices that run the new Android Ice Cream Sandwich operating system such as the Samsung…

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Audio Books: Future Unlimited?

Audiobooks.com has announced unlimited access to its library of 11,000 audio books through its website and an HTML5 mobile app for $24.95 a month. Unlimited content downloads have been popular for movie and music sellers, now AudioBooks is trying unlimited, monthly audiobook access, says Mashable.

Amazon-owned competitor Audible also has a monthly membership. But with Audible, you are limited to a set number of books: one title for $15 a month, or two titles for $23 a month. Audiobooks is apparently the first commercial service with unlimited streaming books.

While Audiobooks has about 11,000 titles, Audible has 100,000. Three of the top five New York Times bestselling non-fiction books and two of the five bestselling fiction books are available on Audiobooks, while all ten books are available on Audible.

In the unlimited streaming model, you pay for access to the books. If you lose your account, you’ll lose the access. Audible sells books that you download and keep.

Apple’s new iBooks Author — and the upcoming ePub-3 authoring tools – will also enable embedded audio and video clips, among other features.

How rich media ebooks will impact the billion dollar audio book business remains to be seen.

The Audio Publishers Association estimates that the total size of the audiobook industry, based on the dollars spent by consumers and libraries, is close to $1 billion. Amazon announced that it would give publishers the right to limit text-to-speech on their Kindle books, due to a lawsuit by the Authors Guild, says Guild president, Roy Blount Jr.

According to the National Endowment for the Arts’ recent study, audio book listening is one of very few “types” of reading that is increasing general literacy.

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LG Spectrum 4G LTE Available Via Verizon For $199

Verizon is now offering LG Spectrum packed with 4G LTE connection. The Spectrum can be claimed as the successor of LG Revolution with an exceptionally great specs. It compliment the device with a 1280 x 720p 4.5″ display.

The Spectrum now available online and in stores at Verizon. It features a HD 1280 x 720p 4.50-inch IPS display, a powerful 1.5 GHz dual-core processor, Android 2.3 Gingerbread, an 8 megapixel camera and Verizon 4G LTE. The device priced at $199 with contract.

[via AndroidCommunity]

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Motorola Mobility Launches Motorola XOOM™ 2 in Italy

Motorola XOOM™ 2 is powerful, portable and ready to take on the world

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News on Verizon Galaxy Nexus

Samsung’s Galaxy Nexus on Verizon that officially released just before Christmas is still proving a big hit amongst new and existing customers. Bringing with it Android’s new Ice Cream Sandwich 4.0 OS and some impressive features that we’ll remind you of in one moment, we have some good news today regarding its price. In the…

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Apple: Boom Time

Apple had its best quarter yet, with profit of $13.6 billion and revenues of $46 billion – more than double its year-ago quarter, making it the second largest U.S. company by market cap. It now also has $97.6 billion in its cash reserve.

LightReading has some of key points of the company’s first-quarter earnings call, Tuesday:

• Apple sold 37 million iPhones, which represents 128 percent growth against a market rate of 40 percent. He attributed the growth to the “breathtaking” reception of iOS 5, the phone’s camera and its voice-activated virtual assistant Siri.
• The iPhone 4S is available in more than 90 countries, making it Apple’s fastest rollout ever. Cook said Apple ended the quarter with a significant backlog in some key geographies, despite its “bold bet” on strong 4S demand.
• Apple sold 15.4 million iPads and saw unprecedented growth for the tablets in enterprises and educational institutions. Cook says the iPad will cannibalize the personal computer market, including Macs, but that doesn’t worry him, nor does the rising tide of low-cost competition.
• There have been 315 million iOS devices sold to date, 62 million of them sold in the December quarter.
• Apple iCloud now has 85 million customers signed up. “It’s not just a product; it’s a strategy for the next decade,” Cook said.
• Apple’s App Store now has 550,000 apps available, 170,000 of which are designed specifically for the iPad. Cook said developers have earned more than $4 billion from the App Store, more than $700 million of which came in the past quarter.

Verizon Communications posted the highest year-over-year quarterly revenue growth in the company’s 11-year history — with Q4 revenue of $28.4 billion, an increase of 7.7 percent compared with fourth-quarter 2010. For full-year 2011, revenues totaled $110.9 billion, a 4.0 percent increase.
Highlights:

• Total wireless revenues was $18.3 billion in fourth-quarter 2011, up 13.0 percent year over year.
• Verizon Wireless had a 23.7 percent operating income margin; 42.2 percent EBITDA margin on service revenues.
• Data revenues were $6.3 billion, up more than $1.0 billion or 19.2 percent year over year, and represented 41.6 percent of all service revenues.
• Service revenues were $15.1 billion, up 6.4 percent year over year. For full-year 2011, total revenues were $70.2 billion, up 10.6 percent over full-year 2010, and service revenues were $59.2 billion in 2011, up 6.3 percent year over year.
• Retail service ARPU grew 2.6 percent over fourth-quarter 2010, to $53.14. Retail postpaid ARPU grew 2.5 percent, to $54.80. Retail postpaid data ARPU increased to $22.76, up 14.3 percent year over year.
• Verizon Wireless added 1.0 million total net connections in fourth-quarter 2011. The company added 1.5 million retail customers, including 1.2 million retail postpaid customers. While the wholesale channel grew during the fourth quarter, a loss of telematics customers resulted in a net decrease of 490,000 wholesale and other connections in the quarter.
• In Q4, Wireless capital spending was $1.8 billion, bringing the full year to $9 billion, an increase of 6.3%.The incremental spending in 2011 was a combination of 3G capacity requirements, driven by the Apple iPhone, and the continued rapid expansion of our 4G LTE network.

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HTC Edge To Be Known As HTC Endeavor

We heard some info on the HTC Edge back in November. Apparently, they’ll be some changes HTC is planning to make on the device. First of all, the HTC Edge codename will be swap with the HTC Endeavor.

However, the device will be known as the “Supreme” on store shelves. According to rumors, the device will be launch packed with a 4.7-inch 720p display and quad-core Tegra 3 processor. We’ll probably get to see the device on Mobile World Congress show.

[via Phonedog]

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