Mobile

Tim Bradshaw

Ever looked at the iPhone App Store’s list of most popular apps and thought, how did that get so popular?

Apple has been asking the same question – and it has found that not all are quite as popular as they seem. This week it posted a stern warning to developers to stop using shady marketing firms that can artificially drive their apps to the top of the charts.

by Dan Thomas, Telecoms Correspondent

Google is taking Chrome mobile for the first time with the introduction of its web browser across the Android phone platform.

The company promises to make surfing the web a seamless experience from desktop to phone by allowing users to sync opened web pages, bookmarks and preferences across devices.

BNP Paribas has launched an iPad app in the hope that hedge fund managers will want to check out their stock holdings on the move, writes Dan McCrum.

“You can get off an airplane and in one minute see everything that’s happening in your portfolio,” says Sam Hocking, head of prime brokerage sales for the French Bank.

Tim Bradshaw

One of the more eye-catching elements of Facebook’s obligatory rundown of “risk factors” in Wednesday’s IPO filing was the section on mobile.

Facebook has huge scale on mobile. Half of Facebook’s monthly active users – 425m people – use its mobile products, as of December.

Apple has done it again. For a brief moment last week, following the announcement that it beat quarterly forecasts with record numbers, the Silicon Valley company once again became the world’s most valuable company.

This time, though, things were different, with Tim Cook, who took over as Apple’s chief executive from co-founder Steve Jobs, now at the helm.

Tim Bradshaw

After posting forecast-beating results last night, Apple has hit another high this morning.

According to figures published on Wednesday by Kantar Worldpanel, the WPP-owned market researcher, Apple’s iPhone has just overtaken Google’s Android to become the most popular smartphone platform in the US.

Tim Bradshaw

Google has admitted that employees in its Kenyan office have pillaged a local rival’s database to try to sell their competing products to its customers.

In an embarrassing lesson for any company that is growing fast internationally, Google – motto: Don’t be evil – was caught out by its victim, Mocality, in a sting operation.

Richard Waters

As widely expected, the wraps were taken off the Lumia 900 on Monday – a 4G handset for the AT&T network that is meant to lead a Nokia resurgence in the US.

But where were the other handsets and mobile operators? And where were the details of launch timing and price?

Chris Nuttall

While Cisco infamously abandoned in April its Flip unit, which popularised value-priced and easy-to-use camcorders for consumers, Sony has stuck it out with the Bloggie brand that tried to imitate the Flip’s success.

At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week, two new models are being introduced, although the Bloggie 3D, which I liked when I reviewed it last year, is being phased out.

by Daniel Thomas, Telecoms Correspondent

Just one per cent of subscribers consume half of all downloaded data with the latest devices from Apple in particular fuelling demand for bandwidth-hungry mobile content.

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Richard Waters, Chris Nuttall and April Dembosky in the FT's San Francisco bureau share their views - plus tech insights from Tim Bradshaw and Maija Palmer in London and Robin Kwong in Taipei.



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Contact the FT Tech Hub team: richard.waters@ft.com, chris.nuttall@ft.com, april.dembosky@ft.com, maija.palmer@ft.com, robin.kwong@ft.com and tim.bradshaw@ft.com.

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