Verizon woos Android lovers with Xperia Play, launches three other new phones (Appolicious)

Verizon’s ramping up its smartphone roster with a new lineup of devices, all featuring entertainment perks, speed boosts and new features. The four new devices include the Xperia Play, LG Revolution, HTC Trophy and Motorola Droid X2.

The Xperia Play is the darling of the bunch, manufactured by Sony Ericsson, and donning the PlayStation mark. It’s a gaming phone, connected to the PlayStation Network, and designed to handle high-end games, making it a hefty gaming device that happens to have phone capabilities. With a 4-inch 480x854 display, 1GHz CUP and an 8GB memory card, the long-awaited Xperia Play will cost you $199 if you give Verizon two years of your life.

LG’s hoping to make a splash in the device arena with the Revolution, touting LTE capabilities as one of its selling features. This makes the Revolution a speedy phone, with faster data transfer on the go. It’s slightly bigger than the Xperia Play, with a 4.3-inch screen, a single-core 1GHz Snapdragon CPU, a 5-megapixel back camera (and 1.3-megapixel front camera), and 16GB of storage. You’ll pay a premium for the speed, however, with the Revolution’s price tag of approximately $250 with a two-year contract.

The HTC Trophy, on the other hand, is the device maker’s latest Windows phone, boasting WP7 OS. It’s the cheapest in this freshly launched group, costing about $150 with a two-year contract. It’s also on the smaller side, with a 3.8-inch display, a 1GHz Snapdragon CPU, a 5-megapixel back camera and 16GB of storage memory.

Finally, there’s the Droid X2, which is roaring with power. It’s got the dual-core 1GHz CPU, with an 8-megapixel back camera and a 4.3 inch, 960x540 display. There’s no LTE on this phone, however, slightly dropping the price down to about $199 with a two-year contract. For all its beauty and brawn, the X2 is really missing out with no support for Verizon’s 4G capabilities, leaving it to city outskirts, while making way for faster phones.

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Foursquare Is Facebook's Equal on Super-Social INQ Phones (Mashable)

The "Facebook Phone" cometh! So the media lauded in a not-so-distant past that has since been rewritten in the truth: INQ Mobile, a device maker with a social penchant, worked with Facebook to release INQ Cloud Touch, an Android smartphone with rich Facebook integration. Monday, INQ Mobile and Foursquare announced that they were collaborating on a similar home screen experience for INQ's lineup of Android devices. The mobile marriage will help users better discover and explore nearby places via Foursquare.

[More from Mashable: Native App vs. Web App: Which Is Better for Mobile Commerce?]

The pending release will offer OS-level Foursquare integration -- just as is the case with Facebook integration on the INQ "Facebook Phone" -- for a deep Foursquare connection that gives users instant access to location-sharing and recommendation features.

"Because it’s built directly into the Android system, you can check in and explore without even firing up the application," Foursquare wrote on the company blog.

[More from Mashable: Facebook Friends Help Plan Your Trip With Gtrot]

According to INQ's press materials on the to-be-scheduled release, "Users will be able to swipe back and forth between Facebook and Foursquare home screens, depending on what they are doing, what they are looking for and who they want to connect with."

What we have, then, is a lineup of super-socialized INQ handsets that will level the Facebook/Foursquare playing field. Both will compete for user attention on INQ devices' dual home screens. One company may be looking towards one billion users and the other ten million; but in the eyes of the handset maker, the social networks, which battle in the location arena, are equals. Equal except that INQ has chosen Foursquare, not Facebook, to power its phones' location services.

Lest we read too much into INQ's decision, we should recall that the phone maker's devices have limited carrier support and are not yet available in the United States. As such, INQ will do little to bolster Foursquare's rung in the social networking hierarchy for the time being.

This story originally published on Mashable here.

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MasterCard says 62 percent of people would make payments using mobile phones (Appolicious)

Google (GOOG) and a number of other companies think that paying for things using smartphones might be the future of brick-and-mortar commerce.

It’s called Near-Field Communication, and it’s a technology found in Google’s Nexus S phone and other smartphones that have recently hit the market. It allows the devices to broadcast a short-range signal that can interact with certain receivers. Users could wave the phone at a payment terminal when they go to check out at the grocery store, and their credit card information would be used instantly to complete the transaction. It could also be used to gather information from movie posters, for example, that would offer advertising information or show times.

But payments are the real power of NFC technology, it seems. According to a report from Fierce Mobile Content, MasterCard (MA) has been surveying customers to see if they’d be willing to use their mobile devices as payment tools for transactions, with 62 percent of those asked responding in the affirmative.

The survey found that 63 percent of respondents between ages 18 and 34 would be willing to make mobile NFC purchases, but that number dropped down to 37 percent for respondents who were 37 or older. MasterCard also found a disparity between men and women in mobile payments, finding that 51 percent of males said they were comfortable with NFC transactions, compared to 40 percent of females.

Respondents in the survey were also asked how they feel about having cell phones on them – 65 percent of 18- to 34-year-olds said they felt more ‘naked’ without their phones than their wallets, compared to 34 percent of respondents older than 35. Between men and women, 50 percent of women said they felt more exposed without a mobile device than a wallet, with only 36 percent of men responding in the affirmative.

MasterCard has worked with Google in the past to help embed NFC payment technology in smartphones, which is supported by Google’s Android 2.3 Gingerbread operating system.  Other companies, like Amazon (AMZN), are considering getting in on near-field technology, considering it the cutting edge of mobile capabilities. Verifone (PAY), a maker of payment terminals for retailers (you’ve probably seen them – they’re often used for scanning credit and debit cards and inputting PINs), is adding NFC capabilities to all its newly manufactured terminals, as well.

But MasterCard’s survey suggests that while 62 percent of respondents are willing to go along with mobile NFC payments, that means almost half of respondents still feel the technology is a bit dubious. There’s a lot of investment going into NFC from many sources, but it’s going to take an investment in convincing people that near-field communication is a trustworthy and safe way of passing financial information before it really takes off.

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Apple and Android phones face strict laws in Europe: report (Reuters)

LONDON (Reuters) – Apple and Google smartphones may come under tighter regulation in Europe after a data protection panel ruled that data on the location of their users should be classed as private, the Financial Times said Thursday.

The proposals by the panel, which advises the European Commission, are a first step to formulating a law on mobile phone location data, and could be written into Europe's revised Data Protection Directive this year, the FT said.

The panel said companies should get permission from smartphone users before collecting user-location data and should specify what purpose the data are being used for.

"Since smartphones and tablet computers are inextricably linked to their owner, the movement patterns of the devices provide a very intimate insight into the private life of the owners," the FT quoted the panel as saying.

"One of the great risks is that the owners are unaware they transmit their location, and to whom."

(Reporting by Karolina Tagaris)

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