Phone wars: Galaxy S3 joins the fray

RIM's Thorsten Heins
RIM's Thorsten Heins admitted the company needs to re-focus its efforts

Smartphones are at the cutting edge of tech, which perhaps explains why non-news such as a photo of what might be the SIM card tray from an iPhone 5 gets loads of coverage.

After extensive analysis, we've got some news about what it all means: as a shocked Kate Solomon says, it means that "the iPhone 5 is going to need a SIM card".

Thankfully the rest of this week's tech news is much more exciting and interesting. There's the return of rioters' favourite, the BlackBerry, for starters: creator RIM is going to become a "lean, mean, nimble hunting machine", says boss Thorsten Heins, although to be honest we think it'd be better off making phones rather than going hunting. It's just a thought.

We kid, of course, because the BlackBerry is back! Back! BACK! The new BlackBerry 10 OS is "a revolutionary mobile computing engine" which will pay app developers big piles of cash.

The NFC-enabled phones will have software, not hardware, keyboards, which RIM says offers "the best typing experience in the world", and there's even a nifty camera that enables you to "rewind" photographs.

Sadly there's no time travel trickery involved: the camera app simply starts shooting the moment it's loaded, rather than waiting for you to press the shutter button. If the person you're shooting blinks or gurns, you can simply rewind to the moment before they ruined everything.

It all sounds very exciting, but there's sad news too: BlackBerry 10 won't be available for existing BlackBerry 7 handsets. If you want the new OS, you'll need to buy a new BlackBerry.

Samsung: bigger than big

Among the people hoping you won't do that is Nokia, which has just announced plans to sue pretty much everybody in the tech industry over patents, and Samsung, whose share of the mobile market is bigger than something really big. According to IDC, Samsung is now the biggest smartphone seller, although Apple is still the firm making all of the profits.

Samsung's unlikely to be deposed any time soon: the Galaxy S3, which launched last night, is designed to be even better than the five-star Galaxy S2 and makes HTC's recently released One X look like a piece of cardboard with a phone drawn on it in crayons. Er, probably.

Galaxy S3

The Galaxy S3 is finally here

The Galaxy S3 runs Ice Cream Sandwich, the latest and greatest version of Android, but it's still in the minority: Ice Cream Sandwich adoption is best described as "woeful", with its market share only just reaching 5% some six months after it was released. The culprits? Phone firms, who'd rather you bought a new phone, and network operators, who'd rather you bought a new phone.

An Amazon phone?

The smartphone market's never been more competitive, so you'd have to be pretty mad to try and barge into it — but it seems that Amazon's running around with a pig down its trousers, barking at hatstands and making its own phone. Flushed with the success of its Kindle Fire tablet, which is now the most popular Android tablet on the planet, Amazon apparently reckons it can pull off the same trick with a smartphone.

The Kindle phone might end up fighting with the rumoured Facebook phone, which suggests that smartphones are the new apps. You heard it here first.

Carrie Marshall
Contributor

Writer, broadcaster, musician and kitchen gadget obsessive Carrie Marshall (Twitter) has been writing about tech since 1998, contributing sage advice and odd opinions to all kinds of magazines and websites as well as writing more than a dozen books. Her memoir, Carrie Kills A Man, is on sale now. She is the singer in Glaswegian rock band HAVR.