Sony's Live with Walkman is built for music, Facebook

With its 3.2-inch, 480 x 320 pixel display and 1GHz processor, Sony Ericcson’s latest Walkman-branded phone isn’t anywhere near the high end. And its not meant to be.

Built with Facebook in mind, Live with Walkman features extensive integration with the social network, allowing users to access Facebook’s features via the phone’s photo gallery, phonebook, and calendar.

Music also plays a big part with the device, which shouldn’t be surprising considering its name. Live with Walkman is bundled with a dynamic music recommendation app, which pulls music and video recommendations from Facebook friends. Sony’s Qriocity service is also present, as is its sound quality-boosting XLoud technology.

Available later this year in both black and white, the Live with Walkman is still without an official price point. But we’d wager Sony Ericcson will price the device pretty low.

Source : zdnet

Tablet shipments to near 250 million in 2017

Tablet shipments are set to explode in the coming years, a new study from research firm In-Stat has found.

According to the company's estimates, worldwide tabletshipments will approach 250 million units in 2017. The firm says iOS and Android will secure over 90 percent of the tablet space between them, while Windows will come in "a distant third."

If In-Stat's shipments numbers turn out to be accurate, it would make for significant growth in the tablet market. Earlier this year, DigiTimes cited market watchers who claimed iPad shipments will reach between 35 million and 36 million this year. Android tablet shipments, those market observers claim, will hit about 19 to 20 million this year. Next year, those figures will grow to approximately 55 million for the iPad and about 45 million for Android devices.

That report followed claims earlier this year from research firm Strategy Analytics, which said tablet sales could hit $49 billion in 2015. In 2009, the research firm noted, tablet sales were essentially zero, marking meteoric growth in that market.

However, as In-Stat pointed out in its study today, only companies that jump on the bandwagon will be successful in the coming years. The company said that firms who do not support "one of the leading OS platforms" will face demise "due to lack of application support."

That already appears to be the case. Last week, HP announced that it was discontinuing its WebOS platform and TouchPad tablet. That device, which came with a 9.7-inch display and only launched last month, was dogged by sluggish demand. In fact, AllThingsD reported last week that big-box retailer Best Buy was only able to sell a fraction of its inventory of TouchPads.

Aside from running the right operating system, In-Stat warns that vendors must also remember to offer up large displays in their future slates. The company said that by 2017, tablets with displays ranging in size from 9 inches to 11 inches will own 56 percent of the market.

Apple may introduce a radically different Mac product family by year's end

With consumers embracing a rapid shift away from traditional computers and towards a growing array of mobile devices, Apple may be preparing to introduce a distinct family next-generation Mac designs unlike anything seen to date, a vague rumor suggests.

Citing an anonymous source within the Cupetino-based company's Asian supply chain, hit-or-miss macotakara.jp claims Apple with the help of its component suppliers is gearing up to introduce Macs that are "absolutely different from current products," possibly by the "end of this year."

The brief report goes on to state that although the source could provide no further details on the matter, the designs of the news Macs mark such a departure from Apple's existing offerings that they could be brought to market under a new brand or product name altogether.

As such, the latest rumor appears to be describing an initiative separate from Apple's reported efforts (1, 2) to transition its flagship line of MacBook Pro notebooks into slimmer enclosures akin to the MacBook Air, dropping traditional hard disk drives in favor of solid state drives and jettisoning optical disc drives completely.

For its part, macotakara.jp has a mixed track record in predicting Apple's future product directions. Though it accurately reported that Apple would introduce its second-gen iPad in March and push out the release of the iPhone 5 until much later in the year, other reports about new MacBook Airs featuring high-speed 400MBps flash memory and a flat-back iPad 2 did not pan out.

The Japanese publication has also issued a flurry of other claims over the past several months that remain pending, including rumors that Apple will return to an aluminum back sideon the iPhone 5 and that the company is testing MacBook Airs powered by the same A5 chip found inside the iPad 2.
Source : appleinsider

What is a next-generation firewall?

If there is a simple way to describe the difference between a next-generation firewall and a traditional firewall, it is "more detailed controls." In firewall terms, people talk about "widening the 5-tuple."

Firewall managers like to use the term "5-tuple," borrowing "tuple" from the world of databases. The "5-tuple" means the five items (columns) that each rule (row, or tuple) in a firewall policy uses to define whether to block or allow traffic: source and destination IP, source and destination port, and protocol.

For example, to allow traffic to a Web server at 1.2.3.4 from the Internet, a typical 5-tuple would include source IP and port of "any" (or "*"), destination IP of 1.2.3.4, destination ports of 80 and 443, and destination protocol of TCP — with an action of "allow." There's variation in every firewall on the market, but at the core of every one you'll find a set of rules that look more-or-less like that: 5-tuples.

Next-generation firewalls "widen" the firewall rule base by adding elements (columns) to each 5-tuple, starting with "application" and "user identity" and perhaps going wider still, factoring in other elements such as "reputation."

Trend Micro Titanium steels itself for 2012

Trend Micro overhauled its security suites last year to great success. The company changed everything about the programs, from introducing a cloud-based detection engine on up through an interface with fast transitions and even the name, rebranding the suites as Trend Micro Titanium. Available exclusively today from CNET Download.com, this year's Titanium Maximum Security 2012 (download), Titanium Internet Security 2012 (download), and Titanium AntiVirus Plus 2012 (download) offer far fewer and far less dramatic changes, but they do include some improvements that ought to keep the suite competitive.

In addition to last year's Smart Protection Network, which forms the heart of the Trend Micro's cloud-based detection by creating a real-time, always-updated database of user security encounters, two new engines have joined the fold. One is designed to detect and remove the "fake antivirus" malware, also known as ransomware, that plagues many. The other stops botnets that might've infected your computer.

Value-added enhancements cover both the useful, like bundling one free license for Trend Micro's SmartSurfing for Mac, and the gimmicky, like a selection of new interface skins for the Windows version. Does anybody spend so much time in their security suite that they want to skin it?

There's SafeSync for storing files online and syncing them among your various devices, and Trend Micro considerately gives you a decent 10 GB to play with if you buy Titanium Maximum Security. Titanium Internet Security users get 2 GB. You also get a local encrypted vault for file protection. There's a PC optimizer that cleans your Registry and temp files, and deletes browsing history and cookies. Of course, your browser does that, too.

One excellent "extra" is mobile security. Titanium Maximum Security 2012 comes with free licenses for iOS andAndroid security apps, which offer lost phone tracking, antivirus, and SMS blockers. The Trend Micro toolbar forFirefox and Internet Explorer warns you about malicious links posted to Facebook and Twitter, as well as search, although there's no support yet for Google Chrome.

When it comes to benchmarks, Trend Micro 2012 was frustratingly uneven. Its Quick Scan was the fastest CNET Labs has tested so far this year, with the slowest of the Titanium suites coming in at more than 400 seconds faster than the second-fastest suite, and they also had the lightest touch on computer shutdown times. However, Titanium had the biggest impact on system boot times, with the Titanium suite that was fastest at boot still adding 20 seconds more than the next-slowest competitor. In the era of security suite-free Windows 7 computers that often take no more than 30 to 40 seconds to boot, and tough competition from Macs and Chromebooks that can boot in 20 to 30 seconds, doubling a computer's boot time is unacceptable.

Trend Micro Titanium 2012 looks nearly identical to the Titanium suites from 2011.

(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

Third-party labs that look at the efficacy of virus detection and removal found Trend Micro 2012 equally uneven. While scoring high on threat detection and blocking, and earning low false positive scores, the Titanium suites did not do well on infection removal.

Price-wise, Trend Micro Titanium Maximum Security retails for $79.95; Titanium Internet Security retails for $69.95; and Titanium AntiVirus Plus retails for $39.95. These prices skew towards the higher-end of security suites, and are in the same ballpark as Kaspersky and Norton. However, online deals can often be found for cheaper.

Basically, Trend Micro Titanium Maximum Security's a good, solid security option if you've got a nice, shiny new computer and you don't want anything to happen to it, see? But if you've got either an Android or an iOS device, the free mobile security is a sweet cherry on top to have.