Prison authorities in Colombia say they are holding a girl who was caught trying to smuggle 74 mobile phones into a jail in the city of Medellin.
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Eleven-year-old smuggles mobiles into Colombian jail
The pressure group Liberty says new head teachers’ powers in England to search for mobile phones are more suited to terror investigations.
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Pupil phone searches ‘excessive’
Microsoft shows a full version of Windows running on chips usually found in mobile phones, a move it says will benefit portable gadgets.
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Microsoft uses mobile phone chips
Collapsible speakers pack hi-fi sound in an ultra-portable body Many portable speakers do little more in the way of design modifications than shrink a full-size speaker to a smaller, tinny version. The ultra-portable X-Mini Capsule Speaker , while still tiny, adds an expandable woofer that boasts immense sound for its size. Twisting the speaker opens an accordion-like patented bass enhancement to create even bigger resonance. A Red Dot award-winner, the speakers plug into laptops, mobile phones, gaming devices, and even link to each other for an on-the-go surround sound solution. We’ve been using an X-Mini at CH headquarters and at presentations, and it’s impressed us all with its booming sound. For an all-in-one device, the newest addition to the range, Happy , features a built-in SD/SDHC card slot so that you can play music on it. Rechargable through a USB cable, the super-useful range of five X-Mini speakers sell online for $20-80, depending on type.
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X-Mini Capsule Speakers
The 7/7 bombers evaded detection by buying unregistered pay-as-you-go mobile phones which they used for a few weeks before dumping them, inquests are told.
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7/7 bombers had ‘secret’ phones
Parliament is to debate allegations that MPs had their mobile phones hacked into by News of the World journalists.
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MPs to debate phone hacking claim
When Rupert Murdoch announced last week that Apple’s iPad was a “game changer” and would lead to hundreds of millions of so-called tablet computers being sold globally, it was not just the media world that nodded sagely in agreement. The technology industry is also gearing up for a world in which the desktop PC, laptop computer and smartphone are joined by a fourth member of the home computing family.
With the same market foresight and cutting edge design that enabled it to revolutionise the smartphone market with the iPhone, Apple has given itself a commanding lead in this new market. But the iPad is about to have several new competitors, some of which will be made by companies that have scores to settle with Apple boss Steve Jobs, having seen him usurp their place in the mobile phone market.
It is the very success that Apple had in the smartphone market and the reaction it has produced – especially from Google – that means Jobs will not enjoy the sort of lengthy market lead with the iPad that he has enjoyed with the iPhone.
It is three years since the iPhone first appeared and only in recent months have serious competitors arrived. But with one of the first real alternatives to the iPad expected to be unveiled tomorrow in New York by Samsung, there will soon be devices able to compete with and perhaps even better Apple’s product.
Speaking to Wall Street analysts as his News Corp empire announced its financial results on Wednesday, Murdoch said: “I think we’re going to see, around the world, hundreds and hundreds of millions of these [tablet] devices” and they are going to change the way that people consume the content created by his media businesses.”
Murdoch himself reckons Apple will sell about 15m iPads this year and more than 40m by 2012, with more being made by other manufacturers. But estimates for the potential size of the market vary wildly. One thing is certain, these estimates will be wrong.
A couple of months before the iPad launched, ABI Research estimated that 4m could be shipped this year, rising to 57m a year by 2015. But on the run-rate reached since the device launched in the US in April, Apple should exceed 4m this month. At the start of the year, research house Gartner reckoned 4m tablets would be sold this year – including the iPad. After the iPad’s success that estimate is now 14m.
To put this into perspective, the tablet market is still small compared with the PC and the mobile phone markets. Sticking with Gartner’s figures, the 14m tablets in 2010 compares with an estimate of 1.4bn mobile phones and 366m personal computers.
In financial terms, Generator Research reckons by 2014 Apple’s iPad business will be worth more than bn (£11bn), while the worldwide smartphone market will be worth bn and the laptop market 5bn.
But while the figures for tablet computers may be comparatively small, the technology industry reckons tablets will fundamentally shape the way that consumers interact with digital content in the future. Getting in on the ground floor, so to speak, is crucial.
As with so many technology fads, the industry has been here before. A decade ago, Bill Gates unveiled the Tablet PC and the following year told the Microsoft faithful that the new device would become the most popular form of PC within five years. Five years later, Microsoft was still trying. It teamed up with Intel and Samsung for Project Origami to work on smaller handheld digital media and gaming devices. They also failed to capture the public’s imagination.
Apple, however, has got its timing right. Whether by luck or judgment, the iPad has emerged during a confluence of events. The ubiquity of broadband internet access in the developed world has created a generation of web users who want instant access and interactivity with media, from music and film to books and newspapers. The media industry, meanwhile, is desperate to move away from the mere “digitisation” of its traditional product so it fits on a PC screen and is ready to experiment with new formats. As the media industry explores new ways of creating content in order to generate new revenues, a tablet represents a perfect half-way house between the sit-forward world of the keyboard-based PC – where online advertising has so patently failed to deliver revenues – and the passive sit-back world of traditional circulation and display advertising-based print media.
The iPhone and its host of imitators, meanwhile, have got consumers accustomed to the idea of using touch as their main point of interaction with content, rather than a keyboard and a mouse. Finally, the arrival of operating systems designed specifically for touch-based smartphones means manufacturers have something ready to use, rather than having to shoehorn into their tablet computers pared-down but still bulky “mobile” versions of PC operating systems.
After the arrival of Apple’s iOS, when the first iPhone appeared, Google realised the mobile phone industry could not be relied on to create a viable competing software platform on its own. So it created its own operating system, Android.
This year, sales of Android devices have already overtaken sales of iPhones in the US and sales in the UK are already up more than 300% as the result of just one new device, the HTC Desire. Worldwide, Android is expected to overtake iOS in terms of global smartphone shipments during 2012, according to forecasts from iSuppli. The company reckons Android will be used in 75m smartphones at this point, up from 5m last year, while iOS usage will be 62m units, up from 25m.
Now Android is headed for the tablet market. The two biggest names in communications and software are both still lagging behind. Microsoft is unclear whether tablets should use its Windows 7 software – which does support touch – or base devices on its Windows Phone software, while Nokia has turned to Intel for help in creating new tablet software under the MeeGo brand.
BlackBerry, meanwhile, has upgraded its software for touch and looks ready to explore tablets, while Hewlett-Packard recently bought Palm, which will provide it with a solid software base for the next generation of smartphones and tablets.
“How long did it take for competitors to compete with the iPhone?” asks Carolina Milanesi, from Gartner’s mobile devices team. “You are talking three years. But with the tablet I really do not think that is going to be the case. A lot of the things that took time in the smartphone market are already there in tablets. We continue to see Apple dominating the segment for the next three years or so but you will see devices that are very close to the iPad very quickly.”
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Two new attacks on Android mobile phones and other devices have been uncovered by security firms.
One, a piece of malware posing as a movie player, sends text messages to premium-rate numbers, collecting charges applied to the user. Kaspersky Labs, which found the program, claims it is the first SMS-based malware attack on mobiles running Google’s Android operating system. It is thought to be most prevalent among Russian users; the threat to worldwide users is said to be low.
Prior to installation, as required by Android’s application permissions, the “Media Player” asks users to confirm permission for the application to run “services that cost you money (send SMS messages)”.
A statement released by Google said:
“Our applications permissions model protects against this type of threat. When installing an application, users see a screen that explains clearly what information and system resources the application has permission to access, such as a user’s phone number or sending an SMS.
“Users must explicitly approve this access in order to continue with the installation, and they may uninstall applications at any time. We consistently advise users to only install apps they trust. In particular, users should exercise caution when installing applications outside of Android Market.”
This application is not thought to have been available in the Android Market, so affected users would have had to change a default setting on their handsets to allow installation of it from an external website.
Meanwhile, the British security firm MWR InfoSecurity has found a flaw in the internet browser of Android versions 1.6 to 2.1, allowing an attacker to remotely access a user’s internet history – including sites visited, cookies, usernames and passwords – by code injected in a compromised website, or through an unsecured Wi-Fi network.
The vulnerability was reported to Google’s Android team in May this year, according to the security firm. A fix present in the latest version of Android, 2.2 Froyo, eradicates the problem, while Android is said to be working on a patch for previous iterations.
Alex Fidgen, the MWR commercial director, advised users simply to avoid using unsecured Wi-Fi networks. He said: “This is one of the most serious implications in mobile technologies to date and calls into question fundamental assumptions about mobile phone security.
“The best way an attacker could affect this is to mimic an unsecured network or spoof an access point – this has been around years. [Attackers are] all using techniques that have been around years now.
“This is a really serious problem, there’s no two ways about it. Mobile companies are not incorporating security enough while smartphone adoption is increasingly widespread.
“The flaws could have been ‘fixed’ when the mobile phone companies issued new operating software recently but they did nothing.”
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010
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iPad may be a ‘game changer’, but competitors are up to this game
Saturday, August 14th, 2010
This article titled “iPad may be a ‘game changer’, but competitors are up to this game” was written by Richard Wray, for The Guardian on Wednesday 11th August 2010 06.09 UTC