Facebook used to organize UK riots, clean them up

Scotland Yard has vowed to track down and arrest protesters who posted “really inflammatory, inaccurate” messages on social networks like Facebook and Twitter. The platforms are being blamed in part for helping rioters in the UK organize.

On the flipside, the social networks have also been used to help organize clean ups after the disturbances. In Liverpool, 21-year-old bartender Charles Jupiter set up a “Liverpool Clean Up” Facebook page that brought about 100 volunteers onto the streets this morning to sweep up piles of broken glass and debris.

“I thought, ‘Not in my city’,” Jupiter told CBS News. “People were posting, ‘I’m embarrassed to be English, I’m embarrassed to be from London or Liverpool.’ I reposted and said, ‘I’m not. That’s why I’m going out there to help clean up.’”

The volunteers followed the same path taken by the rioters on Monday night who smashed bus stops and set fire to cars. A supermarket even supplied the groups with brushes, shovels, and binbags after hearing about their effort. If violence strikes again tonight, the volunteers said they will go back to doing the same work tomorrow morning.

Source : zdnet

Apple secures injunction against Samsung Galaxy Tab in E.U.

Apple has scored a major victory as a German court has granted a preliminary injunction against the distribution of Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1 throughout the entire European Union, with the exception of The Netherlands.

FOSS Patents‘ Florian Mueller reports that Apple already has a lawsuit open against Samsung in The Netherlands regarding the 10.1-inch tablet’s design.

Note that this is only a preliminary injunction. While it will take immediate effect in Germany, there is the possibility it could take longer in other countries.

Although Apple’s complaint hasn’t been published publicly yet, here is what has been made public, according to Mueller:

Apple asked the Landgericht (district court) of Düsseldorf, Germany, to order an injunction under which Samsung is threatened with fines of up to EUR 250,000 (US$ 350,000) for each violation or imprisonment of Samsung’s management for up to two years in the event of continued infringement. Those are standard sanctions under German tort law for contempt of a preliminary injunction.

This is a huge blow to Samsung as the international market was the best hope for stronger Galaxy Tab sales. With Europe out of the game, at least for the near future, it’s going to have a lot trouble making any kind of profit off this device — if that ever even happens.

It’s also obvious that Apple is going to take  up this lawsuit in every single country in the world if it has to in order to block the Galaxy Tab 10.1 forever.

The Cupertino, Calif.-based company recently garnered another win against Samsung in Australia, where the Android-based tablet is being temporarily blocked from promotion and sale.

However, Samsung Australia released a statement last week stating that the Galaxy Tab 10.1 “will be released in the near future” because Apple filed a complaint against a “variant that Samsung Electronics had no plans of selling in Australia.” (Meaning, the U.S. version.)


Source : zdnet

Hacking becomes latest weapon in London riots

BlackBerry Messenger has been pinpointed as one of the main mediums that rioters in London have been using to communicate and, well, organize themselves, so to speak.

Now Research in Motion, as if they haven’t had a bad enough year already, is the caught in the middle.

RIM’s Inside BlackBerry blog was hacked into after the Canadian mobile phone maker agreed to cooperate and help British police forces. As of 9:30AM PT on Tuesday, the site was still down and just looked like a blank page.

And for once, it’s not Anonymous or LulzSec behind this security breach but rather an unknown group that is now being referred to as “TeaMp0isoN.” The Next Web has the group’s statement in full, but here’s a snippet of the overt threat to RIM:

You Will _NOT_ assist the UK Police because if u do innocent members of the public who were at the wrong place at the wrong time and owned a blackberry will get charged for no reason at all, the Police are looking to arrest as many people as possible to save themselves from embarrassment…. if you do assist the police by giving them chat logs, gps locations, customer information & access to peoples BlackBerryMessengers you will regret it, we have access to your database which includes your employees information; e.g – Addresses, Names, Phone Numbers etc. – now if u assist the police, we _WILL_ make this information public and pass it onto rioters…. do you really want a bunch of angry youths on your employees doorsteps?

For some, it came as a bit of a surprise that BBM is taking on the primary social media role in this turn of events rather than Twitter, which has been seen in other riots and revolutions in the last two years across the Middle East, most notably in Iran and Egypt.

However, as ZDNet’s Zack Whittaker described on Monday, BBM has taken on the role of, and even replaced, standard text messaging for many people in the United Kingdom, so it’s not that surprising after all in this case.

And although we’ve seen a number of attacks on governmental websites from Anonymous and Lulz Security, particularly during the AntiSec campaign that commenced earlier this summer, this occasion is quite different.

The attack is politically motivated, but these hackers chose to go after RIM rather than a London police department website instead. From one perspective, this makes sense as they’re trying to cut off the source of information.

Yet, in a comparative incident, Anonymous targeted a Spanish national police force website after three of its own were arrested for allegedly being involved in the attacks on Sony’s PlayStation Network.

But also, these hackers are directly threatening RIM employees. Anonymous and LulzSec have made it a point to go after governmental organizations and global corporations, which definitely did trickle down and affect innocent people, but they never threatened any of these people with violence.

Thus, someone has taken note of the power that hack attacks, and now turned it into a weapon that we haven’t really seen before.

RIM shouldn’t back down from helping U.K. authorities try to suppress these riots. But the breach of RIM’s website is serving as a warning to both law enforcement officials and the tech companies working with them about the new face of cyber security threats that is growing in popularity — especially amongst younger generations — and it is taking on a much more dangerous tone.

Source : zdnet

Windows Phone 'Tango' to be Microsoft's lower price-point operating system?

Until today, I’ve said nothing on my blog about Tango — the Windows Phone operating system release supposedly slated to arrive after Mango but before “Apollo” (Windows Phone 8). The reason? I couldn’t find any of my trusted contacts who had heard of Tango.

But after an alleged Tango screen shot leaked late last week (which I first saw via WPCentral.com), word of the next Windows Phone OS update is slowly percolating through my network.

Digitimes first mentioned Tango in June 2011, citing an official with OEM Compal who mentioned Mango and its follow-on, Tango. Some were speculating that Mango would be Windows Phone OS 7.1 and Tango, 7.5. However, more recently, we’ve learned that while the Mango OS is version 7.1, the Mango phone handsets are what will be labeled as 7.5. So it’s somewhat murky as to whether Tango actually will be labeled as Windows Phone OS 7.5 or not.

Microsoft isn’t talking about anything post-Mango and, as usual, is none too keen on commenting on codenames. Mango only recently was released to manufacturing. But a couple of my sources are now saying that Tango is real and it is, indeed, the next version of Windows Phone OS.

One of my contacts who asked to remain anonymous said he believed there would be at least one and maybe two Tango releases hitting before the Windows Phone 8 Apollo release. He said Tango was “all about Nokia” and focused on hitting the lower-price point for Windows Phonesthat Microsoft and Nokia execs have been promising. My contact also said the Tango release may be focused largely or even exclusively on the Asian market.

Another of my contacts said that Tango and SeaRay (the codename for Nokia’s expected first Windows Phone) are often mentioned in the same breath. But Tango is an operating system update and not a handset, said the contact who asked for anonymity, said. (SeaRay is expected to be running Mango when it debuts, most likely later this year.)

The Windows Phone team’s plan seemingly is to deliver one major operating system update per year. That’s making me think Tango is likely considered a more minor release, given that Apollo/Windows Phone 8, is (last I heard) a late 2012 deliverable. By the way, Microsoft execs also have said that, at least for now, all Windows Phone OS codenames end in the letter “O” (hence NoDo, Mango, Apollo).

In other Windows Phone news, 21-year Microsoft veteran Charlie Kindel –  who most recently was Windows Phone General Manager in charge of the Developer Experience — is leaving Microsoft to found a Seattle area startup. Kindel’s replacement is Matt Bencke, who has been in that role for a number of months. Kindel said he had been working on special projects related to Windows Phone and the cloud (none of which he can talk about) over the past few months, while figuring out what he wanted to do next.

Back to Tango: Anyone out there have more details (like operating system version number, release date, target market) for Microsoft’s next Windows Phone OS update?

Source : zdnet

Visa uses carrots, sticks to boost mobile payment adoption

Visa is planning to roll out dual mode chips in it infrastructure in an effort to step up mobile payment adoption. Meanwhile, Visa is deploying a mix of carrots and sticks to get merchants on board.

Specifically, Visa is aiming to prepare payment infrastructure for NFC (near field communication) mobile payments. Google has pushed NFC payments and other mobile phone players are aiming to turn your smartphone into a wallet. Visa will support EMV and NFC. EMV, which stands for Europay, MasterCard and Visa, is a global standard for credit and debit payment cards. EMV has been popular abroad, but lags in the U.S. In a blog post, Visa said:

For several years, Visa has been talking with clients and merchants on this subject – and now more than ever before, we’re hearing confirmation that chip is the right direction for the U.S. Over the last year, for example, we’ve seen financial institutions issuing chip cards to international travelers. And some large merchants have already begun installing chip terminals.

Visa will also push dynamic authentication to overcome any security worries and encourage adoption. With dynamic authentication it would be hard to use a card at a point of sale system even if payment data is compromised. Visa will support personal identification numbers (PINs) and signatures—so called static authentication—but expects both to give way to dynamic authentication.

According to Visa the following initiatives will boost dynamic chip authentication adoption:

• Starting Oct. 1, 2012 Visa will expand its technology innovation program to the U.S. Merchants in the program can eliminate the requirement to prove that they are PCI data security compliant as long as 75 percent of Visa transactions come from chip enabled terminals. Given that PCI compliance can be a pain, Visa is betting that merchants will move to support mobile payment systems such as NFC.
• April 1, 2013 is a deadline for processors and sub-processors to support merchant chip transactions. Service providers will have to support additional data that’s needed to verify that each transaction is unique.
• Shift liability for fraud. Visa said it will shift liability starting in Oct. 1, 2015. Today, point of sale fraud is absorbed by card issuers. If a merchant hasn’t adopted contact chip terminals liability for fraud may shift to the merchant’s acquirer. Fuel vendors will have an additional two years before liability shifts.

Those three items will serve as a stick for Visa to push mobile payment and contactless system adoption.

Like 3G/4G with that Android tablet? No thanks

A tablet with no connection to the web is very limited in how useful it can be. Just ask a traveler on a flight without Wi-Fi if you don’t believe that. That is why tablets typically come in two varieties: Wi-Fi only and 3G or 4G. The former is usually less expensive and the latter can get online virtually anywhere using either mobile broadband or Wi-Fi. Getting an Android tablet with 3G or 4G sounds like the best move for a consumer, but in my experience that is not always the way to go.

Android tablets with only Wi-Fi connectivity can be purchased either online or in big-box retailers. They require no contract with a phone carrier so once you buy one there are usually no more out-of-pocket expenses involved in using the tablet. They can be used anywhere an open hotspot can be found.

A 3G/4G tablet on the other hand usually means a two-year contract with a mobile provider, and that carries a monthly fee. These tablets can easily cost over $1,000 over the life of the contract, without factoring in the purchase of the tablet. They can get online almost everywhere, but not without that hefty data fee.

The cost difference is a solid reason for going with a Wi-Fi tablet, but for me it is not the main reason to pass on the 3G/4G tablet. I own both types of tablets running Honeycomb and Gingerbread, and in the Android world the Wi-Fi models get system updates far earlier than the carrier supported devices. The involvement of the network in the Android OS update process adds time, in most cases a lot of time, and that means customers get new software versions long after owners of the same tablet with Wi-Fi only gets them. I recently got the upgrade to Gingerbread on my Sprint Galaxy Tab with 3G, long after Samsung had released the upgrade for Wi-Fi models. Owners of Tabs with other carriers are still waiting for the same upgrade, which is a significant update.

Some customers buy a tablet and don’t care if or when it gets updated. If you’re one of those then you should get one with 3G/4G connectivity if that is important to you. If it is not a big issue for you, then you’ll find that your Wi-Fi only tablet will likely get all system updates before owners in the other camp get them. That may be reason enough to go Wi-Fi.

This is only one decision that must be made by prospective tablet buyers. Remember that everyone’s needs are different when it comes to these slates. There are even some folks that should stay away from tablets like comedian Steven Wright.

Black Hat: 'OS X networks are significantly more vulnerable'

Microsoft’s Windows 7 operating system is more secure than Apple’s Mac OS X, claims security researchers at Black Hat.

According to Alex Stamos of iSec Partners, OS X has a greater number of vulnerabilities compared to Windows 7, and when it comes to network security, ’OS X networks are significantly more vulnerable to network privilege escalation,’ and that ‘almost every OSX server service offers weak or broken authentication mechanisms.’

Stamos also goes on to dispel the myth that Mac OS X isn’t attracting attention from hackers. To support this he points out that over the past three years 1,151 major vulnerabilities have affected Apple products, only slightly less than the 1,325 affecting Windows.

Things are looking up for Mac OS X though, as 10.7 ‘Lion’ adds application sandboxing to keep malware contained. Whether this will be enough to make Lion more secure than its predecessors remains to be seen.

But what about mobile devices? Independent security researcher Dino Dai Zovi claims that Apple is doing a good job with iOS because applications run in a sandbox and the operating system makes use of a dynamic application signing feature where apps are verified before running.

When it comes to Android, Zovi claims that this mobile OS is less secure than iOS and actually about as secure as a jailbroken iOS device. Blackberry has better data security than iOS but doesn’t have the sandbox feature for applications.

Source : zdnet

Samsung 2.8-pound 'Sandy Bridge' laptop hits $619

Staples has begun selling the 11.6-inch Samsung Series 3 laptop for $619 after "instant savings," one of the least expensive ultraportables based on Intel's latest Sandy Bridge processor.

The Series 3 presages sub-$800 Ultrabooks likely to appear in 2012 from PC makers. Though--with a maximum thickness of about 1 inch--it's not as thin as Ultrabooks are expected to be, the weight is about right at 2.8 pounds.

The silicon is similar to Ultrabooks too. In this case, an ultra power efficient Intel Core i3-2357M Sandy Bridge processor.

Unlike the Samsung Series 9 (which can be considered an early Ultrabook), the Series 3 does not have a solid-state drive but a standard spinning hard disk.

Other specifications include 4GB of memory, 320GB hard disk drive (5400RPM), 6-Cell battery, Intel HD graphics, Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit), and VGA, HDMI, and USB ports.

And here's another way to think of this Series 3 model: an inexpensive alternative to the 11.6-inch MacBook Air, which begins at $999.

With iPad Included, Apple Dominates the Notebook Market ?

Most calculations of market share in the portable computing arena don’t include the iPad, which they consider a tablet and not a traditional computer. But because tablets seem to be cannibalizing computer sales, it’s not a stretch to include iPads in those tabulations.

Based on the line graph above, the notebook landscape changes drastically when iPad is included.

Deutsche Bank analyst Chris Whitmore calculated global notebook computer sales up until the second quarter of 2011 in a note to clients. Not including iPad sales, Apple ranks last, saleswise, as a manufacturer. Including the iPad, Apple soars to snag the top spot.

Whitmore’s note included stats about the top six notebook vendors: Acer, Apple, ASUS, Dell, HP and Samsung. The top two overall vendors for most of the time period, HP and Acer, have had generally downward trending market shares since second quarter 2010, which is right around when the original iPad debuted.

It’s been pretty clear that the iPad has been eating into laptop sales for a while, and this graph corroborates that. But compared to Whitmore’s calculations in 2010, Apple’s market share including iPad sales has actually gone down slightly, from about 25 percent to 20 percent. Does this mean that all those copycat tablets are actually edging in on the iPad’s market domination? Lenovo’s three recently revealed tablet offerings look to be pretty good Android contenders against the iPad, while others like theSamsung Galaxy Tab have had decent sales but still don’t make the mark. And according to Digitimes, iPad sales are expected to rise 55 percent in 2012, while non-Apple tablet shipments are expected to jump 134 percent.

“Within the tablet market, the iPad remains the gold standard as competitors struggle for mind-share and traction,” Whitmore says in his note — which must help explain why the iPad is the only tablet included in the second quarter 2011 calculation, when many of the vendors now have tablet models available. He also sees Apple snagging an even larger piece of the pie as the back-to-school season sets in and the Microsoft/PC ecosystem is “relatively stagnant.”

The iPad is very clearly still Apple’s prizewinning stallion in the portable computing department. Even with innovative competitors popping up, it’s going to take a lot to unseat Apple from its dominant position

Blackberry QNX phone details leaked

But underpowered if true ...



Images and specifications for the first Blackberry running QNX have surfaced, but if these are accurate then the Blackberry Colt is underpowered, incompatible and doomed from the start.
The details come from the Boy Genius Report blog, which claims inside information and a photoshopped image of the handset. That information points to a single-cored handset running QNX, but without BES integration and reliant on Microsoft's ActiveSync for reading email, which sounds so unlikely it might just be true.

The blog does say that some details might change, but is adamant that the device being tested within RIM is a single core – while many of the competition is already using dual cores, and many will be quad-core by the time the Colt launches next year.

The report also claims that BES integration is proving harder to port to QNX than previously thought, which is why the handset will launch without it. BGR claims this is the reason the PlayBook doesn't have an email client, which is in contrast to RIM's claim that the PlayBook was only ever intended to be an adjunct to a BlackBerry handset and therefore has no need for a local client.
The PlayBook's lack of email client was much reported when the tablet launched, but surprisingly the App World isn't bulging with email clients, as most users seem to have got used to webmail or do indeed sync with their BlackBerry handsets.

But, stung by the early reviews, RIM promised a proper BES integration which hasn't yet arrived – lending credence to the idea that it is proving to be a difficult port.
RIM needs something remarkable to regain trust in its brand, and an incompatible and underpowered handset isn't going to deliver that, so hopefully the company has something more impressive which has remained under wraps

Source : Onespot

Sony Ericsson teases Minecraft: Pocket Edition on Xperia Play in short video

Those noncommittal so-and-sos over at Sony Ericsson have released a teaser video on Facebook of Minecraft: Pocket Edition for Xperia Play with some teeny, tiny hints about the upcoming title.

The nine-second-long YouTube trailer reveals the familiar first-person view of Minecraft in its ‘creative mode’, with the block palette at the bottom of the screen. 

The description below the video reads: “Not long to go now... how long until Minecraft arrives?” So, we could be forgiven for speculating that the release date will be publicised soon.

The development of Minecraft: Pocket Edition is being headed up by Mojang’s Jens Bergensten, and the game will be exclusive to the Xperia Play “for a while”, according to the developer.

It’ll cost $6.99 when it does finally rear its head on the Android Market.

Google driverless car causes five-car crash

It seems that one of Google’s self-driving cars caused a five-car crash right near the search giant’s Mountain View Googleplex headquarters. Is it going to be a roadblock for the Google driverless car program?

Let’s be clear: we now know that there was a human behind the wheel of the Google-customized Toyota Prius which allegedly instigated in the incident - at least, that’s what Google’s claiming. Originally, car blog Jalopnik, which broke the story when a tipster came forward with photos, wasn’t sure who was driving when the accident occurred.

And without access to an official accident report, we may never know for sure - and Google’s not going to be releasing that anytime soon.

But NBC San Francisco followed up and got a witness report:

Google’s Prius struck another Prius, which then struck her Honda Accord that her brother was driving. That Accord then struck another Honda Accord, and the second Accord hit a separate, non-Google-owned Prius.

Meanwhile, Business Insider got an official response from Google:

“Safety is our top priority. One of our goals is to prevent fender-benders like this one, which occurred while a person was manually driving the car.”

If a person was driving the car, then this is a non-issue. And again, without any kind of official documentation, we don’t know if Google’s being straight with us on this one. But one of the things that opened the way for Nevada to begin the process of licensing Google’s driverless carswas the fact that they had an impeccable safety record - even with 140,000 miles driven in testing.

And this incident raises other interesting questions, regardless of whether it was Google or a human at the wheel: if a driverless car gets into an accident, is it considered negligence on the part of the person in the front seat? After all, you can’t give a computer a court summons, and having the car drive itself is a pretty solid impetus for taking your eyes off the road.

AMD introduces Radeon-branded system memory for consumers, graphics memory for video card makers

While you wait for wait impatiently for the first Bulldozer chips to ship, AMD has released something to consider when you’re building your system around the new processors. The company has just introduced Radeon brand DDR3 SDRAM — that’s right, system memory — for consumers, and graphics memory for manufacturers of Radeon graphics cards.

It’s unclear why AMD has decided now is the time to enter the memory business, and while AMD.com has information on Radeon memory, there’s been no formal launch of the new products. The chip company is releasing three lines of RAM that it claims are optimized for its new Llano APUs and Bulldozer CPUs, all in 2GB DIMMs: an Entertainment series, an Ultra Pro gaming series, and an Enterprise series for servers.

The Entertainment module runs at 1333MHz with 9-9-9 timings, whereas the gaming memory runs at 1600MHz with 11-11-11 timings. These specs are still “TBD” for the Enterprise series. This memory is apparently already available in Japan, though AMD’s silence means any kind of release dates for the U.S. are also TBD.

Radeon graphics memory is likewise divided into three lines: Value, Mainstream, and Gaming Entertainment. The former two use DDR3 (running at 800Mhz and 900MHz-1000MHz, respectively), while the latter is GDDR5 memory clocked from 1000MHz to 1500MHz. AMD says the graphics memory is “specially tuned to compliment and maximize the performance” of the latest Radeon cards.

Would you have any interest in buying Radeon memory for your new AMD build? Why or why not? Let us know in the Comments section.

Source : fudzilla

Lose your laptop? Change all passwords, pronto

LAS VEGAS--If your Windows laptop is stolen, be warned: new research shows how a thief can gain access to the passwords used by your Amazon.com, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, and other Web accounts.

The passwords for accounts in the cloud are supposed to be protected by Windows' built-in encryption. But a team of security researchers demonstrated at the Black Hat security conference here how last week to bypass the operating system's security.

A thief--or someone unconcerned with the finer points of federal hacking laws--can take advantage of the vulnerability to discover the passwords stored by Web browsers and other programs like instant messaging clients. So can police using electronic forensics to analyze a computer seized during a criminal investigation or without a warrant at a national border.

"It's not just your data on the computer, but everything you have in the cloud, including your Facebook account, your Gmail account, and so on," Elie Bursztein, a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University who also analyzed Microsoft's geolocation database, told CNET. Ivan Fontarensky, Matthieu Martin, and Jean Michel Picod collaborated with him on the research.

The team has released a open-source utility to perform this decryption, which they call OWADE, for Offline Windows Analyzer and Data Extractor. It runs on Ubuntu, a Debian-derived Linux distribution, and is designed to decrypt information stored by the four major Web browsers and instant messaging clients under Windows XP.

Here's how it works: Windows offers a built-in encryption feature called DPAPI, part of the Crypto API, which allows application developers to store sensitive data in scrambled form. Microsoft describes as allowing any application to "secure data without needing any specific cryptographic code other than the necessary function calls to DPAPI." (API stands for application programming interface.)

That's a useful feature to have--assuming it's designed and implemented well.

What Bursztein and his colleagues found are security vulnerabilities in the way DPAPI was created. For instance, the list of possible passwords in many versions of Windows is unusually small, about 7 trillion possibilities, and can be pre-computed.

A Microsoft representative said the company would have a public response later today.

Another vulnerability they found is in the way passwords for Wi-Fi networks are encrypted and stored. (In Windows XP, they're in the system registry. In Windows 7 and Vista, they're in both the registry and an XML file.)

Different browsers, they found, store passwords for Web sites in different locations with varying amounts of security precautions.

"I'm very sad to say that Firefox is the worst for offline security," said Bursztein, who uses that browser himself.

Internet Explorer turns out to be the most secure. If you don't know the exact Web page, you can't recover the password.

Instant messaging clients also offer differing levels of security. They found Skype uses custom encryption for passwords and rated the difficulty of decrypting or bypassing it as "extreme." If the Skype password is sufficiently strong, they said, it can't be discovered.

Google Talk's Windows client uses DPAPI and is rated as "hard" to penetrate. Microsoft Messenger gets a verdict of only "medium," with details varying based on which version is being used.

Even worse: aMSN, an open source MSN Messenger clone; 9talk; Trillian; and Pidgin.

Bursztein's recommendation, after doing all this work? "The mechanism that's in place in Windows to protect your data can be easily bypassed. The only real alternative for you is to encrypt your disk if you don't what your account compromised."

Source : cnet

Theoretical iPhone 5 cost breakdown puts raw parts at $270

Pre-release iPhone 5 price estimate has BOM at 270

Bloomberg terminal owners on Monday afternoon were given an unusual pre-announcement cost breakdown of what the next iPhone will cost. Making assumptions that Apple will use a dual-core A5 processor, 512MB of RAM, and 16GB of storage, analysts expected it would cost $270 to make in raw parts. The difference would leave Apple with a 56.4 percent gross profit if Apple charges a net $620, although this doesn't include marketing and some other costs.

The values are likely to change and will depend heavily on Apple's goals. More RAM and more storage could increase the price.


It's not clear whether the breakdown includes assembly and other prices. Typically, IHS and iSuppli studies have priced iPhones considerably less. iPhone 4 hardware was estimated to cost about $187.51, but only in components.


Apple isn't thought to be making any radical breaks in technology with the next iPhone but may be upgrading to an eight-megapixel rear camera and a larger screen. Higher-end models may also go to 64GB of storage.

Source: onespot

Harvard test: iPhone, Windows Phone easier than Android

Harvard's lab for Human Factors in Design has posted a new usability study (below) that gave Apple and Microsoft the edge in mobile OS design. The small experiment by Professor Dennis Gallatta had newcomers to smartphones try to make a phone call, add a contact, and send a text message without help. iPhone and Windows Phone users had the easiest time and typically scored well, while Android and BlackBerry trailed well behind.

Adding a contact was often the most difficult task and proved especially bad on both Android and BlackBerry devices, both of which got one star out of five. In the cases of both the contact and messaging tests, the company had to fast forward the video footage because of how long they took relative to the iPhone and Windows Phone users.

Both Apple and Microsoft might have been helped by their experiences developing desktop operating systems. Google and RIM started off developing mobile operating systems that weren't their primary businesses. It's not clear how much of the Android complication was affected by the Sense interface used on the HTC Thunderbolt used in the test. A Nexus S phone with stock Android would have removed HTC from the equation.

The study doesn't provide a complete picture of ease of use and also doesn't touch on the power of the interface once an owner is comfortable. Harvard's study may nonetheless show how discoverable features are and how well users can adapt out of instinct instead of having to train themselves

Source : onespot

Pierre Cardin steps into the tablet game with PC-7006 tablet

The tablet market is getting more and more interesting by the day. The latest company to throw its hat - or handbag or business suit - into the ring is Pierre Cardin with its PC-7006 designer tablet.

An Android tablet through and through, the PC-7006 is a 520g, 7-inch tablet running Android 2.2. With a 1Ghz processor and 512MB RAM, it certainly not the most power Android device on the market. Nor is it the cheapest. At $449, you might be better served going for more than a few competing devices. But, then again, if you did that you wouldn’t be able to say you were using a Pierre Cardin tablet, would you?

Source : ZDnet

Google: 'We can protect the values of Android'

John Lagerling, director of Android global partnerships at Google, said the company can work with its partners to protect the values of Android and fend off patent lawsuits.

Lagerling, speaking at a Pacific Crest investment conference, addressed the patent issue on a day where the topic was front and center. Google last week blasted Apple and Microsoft for leading a consortium that won Nortel’s mobile patent portfolio. Tech insiders have been going back and forth about Google’s response ever since. Meanwhile, Google’s court sparring over Android with Oracle looks like it may be backfiring a bit.

Also see: Software patents: Lots of whining, but reform unlikely

Here’s what Lagerling said:

Without going into too much detail, I do think that we have very strong paths that we can take to protect the values of Android that we have built through the open-source Apache 2 license with our partners. Obviously, Google doesn’t build — we don’t build phones and devices, but we had a vested interest in protecting the values of the Android ecosystem.

So when our partners are being attacked by aggressors, which we see as materially unfounded, it’s something that we join up together with our partners to resolve. And we have, I think, several options that we can take that will help protect the values of Android.

So again, we want to protect innovation. Patents were supposed to be there to enable innovation and monetization of innovation. When it’s being used in a prospective which is more to, as we see it, stifle innovation, it’s not something that is good for consumers.

Android is the only operating system, modern smart-phone operating system, that exists on devices that cost $200 or less. That is what is enabling the next billion of users of the Internet on mobile in the world. There might be players that are not so excited to see the margins and the prices go down like that and the variety that Android enables, but I think we are very convinced that we will be able to continue and create and protect the value of Android.

The big question is how Google will be able to protect those Android values and what tools the company has at its disposal.

Source : ZDNet