Today’s fashion is tomorrow’s rage; it is true in the sense of technology sector. This is evident from market share reports from the US mobile industry, which showed that almost half of all mobiles sold were Android based at the end of May 2011. Of course Apple lovers say this is just a blip, and the world will return to sanity in a year or so. But will it be? So indefinite question it is. In India, lot of people among us would like to have an iPhone or iPad (including me), but in true sense we also love to open an option of hardware or software upgrade, with Android we get a hundred times more choice across a whole range of price category. Finally, it’s the apps which make the true mobile market in today’s era, and there is a word which runs the most of the mobile market in India – Free!
Now move on to the fuddling and interesting news updates in the technology area. In the past month of July 2011 we saw some major changes in technology and its subdivisions. Here we try to cover all the areas of technology to give you the best possible news updates related to technology. Here we go –
Fake Microsoft Updates – beware Firefox Users
Social engineering tricks are in fashion around cyber world, a malicious script is masquerading as a Microsoft Update. Firefox users can be redirected via a popup warning to a page that is the spitting image of the Microsoft Update Center, the original can be recognized as it displays requirement of Internet Explorer. Users can proceed to download some nasty stuff, if they decide to install the so called urgent update. To protect yourself from this condition try to check security certificate of the redirected site before installing any stuff. Have a happy browsing.
Google Refines Search
Google came up with another change in its traditional search system. Now it is called Google Instant Page – predicts the link users want to use and begins fetching its data even before user clicks on any link, isn’t it cool, by experts view, it save 2-5 seconds of searching query time.
iOS 5 Due Soon
iOS 5 is scheduled to release in American Fall and shell be compatible with iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, iPad 1 and iPad 2, as well as the iPod touch 3G and 4G. In iOS 5, a new notification centre with lock-screen notifications; the newsstand, for magazine and newspaper feed subscriptions; improved Twitter integration and reader list bookmarking for Safari are some noticeable features. Lastly on handheld front, Apple also announced that MobileMe is on its final legs, and no new enrollment is open, service would be shut down completely on June 30, 2012.
Samsung Galaxy S2
This is extremely lightweight and sleek, against of its powerful features and configurations. The 4.3 inch display is accompanied by two touch based keys, for menu and return, there is a hardware button for Home, but what’s missing is the traditional search button, common on most Android Phones. Rear panel has the 8MP camera, with LED Flash, while the plasticity feel is a bit of a disappointment, the performance will simply blow you away. This phone will be a reference point for future dual core Android Phones, at last for a little while.
Solid State Drive: Future of Storage
The SSD elegantly replaces the conventional hard drive’s magnetic, optical and electrical components. Further, it does away with the moving pars of the hard drive and instead offers a combination of a flash memory device and controller. The SSD offers considerably faster access times in comparison with the hard drive.
Halo 4: Ending the Rumors
A high definition remake of the original Halo has been long rumored and Microsoft made it official at their E3 press conference. Rather than completely redeveloping the game, it will basically be a new graphical engine running atop the original game’s code. That means it will play exactly the same as the older game did. For long time game lovers, this would be a relief.
Acer Iconia Tab A500
Acer’s Iconia Tab has reached in India’s market even before Motorola Mobility got Xoom here. Google built the honeycomb user interface from the ground up and it looks nothing like its smartphone cousins. The display is divided into five home screens. It houses the NVIDIA Tegra 2 system on chip with a snappy 1 GHz Dual Core Processor. The settings menu is quite exhaustive with an additional option called Dolby Mobile. You’ll notice apps places in a drawer section on the homepage, which houses related applications. The Acer Iconia Tab has good underlying software coupled with decent hardware.
22nm Tri-Gate Transistors
Intel’s President & CEO Paul Otellini says, Intel’s scientists and engineers have once again reinvented the transistors, this time utilizing the third dimension. Amazing, Intel claims these tri-gate transistors in their upcoming 22nm Ivy Bridge processors can switch between on and off 18 to 37 percent faster than sandy Bridge processors. Intel’s 3D tri-gate transistors enable chips to operate at lower voltage with lower leakage, providing an unprecedented combination of improved performance and energy efficiency compared to previous.
HTC Sensation
The sensation is a large phone, but feels smaller than the Galaxy S2 owing to smaller top and bottom bezels. It’s heavier and therefore bulkier, but feels sleeker than the HTC Desire HD. The display is too glossy for our pleasure. This phone doesn’t suffer from the death grip that is prevalent in some HTC phones. Antenna quality is not so good and can be rated to 15 percent worse than the Galaxy S2, which wasn’t perfect either.
Now take a look on some small but really important update regarding technology.
- Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux has declared that the next version of the Linux Kernel will be 3.0 – ending the 15 years long ver. 2.0 cycles.
- Motorola Xoom gets Android 3.1 update, which will allow MicroSD card support outside US.
- Go to http://encipher.it to apply AES encryption to your text in 1 click.
- AMD discontinued the endorsement of SysMark 2012 Benchmark since it claims their results are biased.
- The two leading consumer desktop operating system makers have revealed the future of their software. PC Mag how they stack up. The article looks at everything from UI to Gesture and processor support. A must read.
- The popular video streaming site Hulu is gearing up for a sale with Yahoo! being a rumored buyer.
- Facebook bars the India pages of Cadbury and FCUK citing violations of their laws by posting contests on their walls.
- Windows 8 will allow developers to create applications using web standard technologies such as HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript.
- The first version of Firefox add-on SDK, which allows developers to create Firefox add-ons using web technologies, has been released.
- After many years of work, CSS 2.1 has been standardized, along with the CSS3 color module.
- Volkswagen has proposed a new autopilot technology for its cars using a range of technologies from lasers to ultrasonic sensors.
- Microsoft has released Kinect SDK for Windows developers. It’s still in beta, free to download and requires Windows 7.
- After attacking WordPress.com, hackers have broken into wordpress.org’s code and plugins section, compromising security of the free CMS.
- Nokia demonstrate its first WP7 device code named Sea Ray. It comes with Mango update, an8MP camera with Carl Zeiss optics and Gorilla Glass.
- Intel factories produce over 5 billion transistors every second. That’s 150,000,000,000,000,000 transistors per year, the equivalent of over 20 million transistors for every man, woman and child on earth.
- According to ComScore, iPad and iPad 2 together account for over 89 percent of tablet internet use globally and 97 percent in USA.
- Rumors are all around that the next iPhone will feature an A5 processor and an 8MP camera, releases in September 2011.
- The N9 will be the last smartphone from Nokia which runs the Linux based MeeGo OS.
- ICANN approves new top-level domains; this could allow branded domains like .nvidia or generic ones like .automobile.
- Google became the first website ever to hit a billion unique views in any month. What’s surprising is that most of us thought that was normal for them.
- Every now and then someone will come up with a something is dying or something is killing someone story. Most are just to grab the attention. But this one could actually make some sense. Head over to the link and decide for yourself.
- Adobe AIR, an SDK for creating cross platform apps using Flash has just lost a platform – it won’t be available on Linux anymore.
- LinkedIn has reportedly hit the 10-million member milestone in India.
- Apple under scanner for violating competition law in India for restricting sale of iPhone to only two operators.
- Following objections from the commissioner of Police – Bangalore, Google indefinitely froze its street view project in India.
- The Dutch Parliament passed a law that requires a website to take permission from the visitor before storing a cookie on their device.
- Airtel digital TV is first DTH player to offer rural interactive service with the launch of iKisaan.
- Chronic Dev Team is delivering iPad 2 – jailbreak for iOS 4.3.3 while others are expected to deliver iOS 5.
- Google and British Library collaborate to release thousands of historic books online for free.
- A 22nm transistor can on/off a light switch over a 100 billion times per sec. You would need 2000 years to flick a light switch on and off that many times.
- Codemasters has shut down online gameplay of its GRID franchise, as a third party didn’t renew its contract to host the server.
- Siemens introduced the first serial hybrid electric aircraft at the Paris Air Show.
- Future Ubuntu versions will be released as hybrid ISO files that work as both CD and pen-drive images.
- A lost patent tussle requires the fruity giant – Apple to pay Nokia millions of royalties.
- SanDisk has introduced a mammoth 800 GB SSD aimed at the enterprise sector.
- Office 365 is an answer from Microsoft to the challenges from Google Apps and Google Docs.
- Apple releases updated drivers of Epson and Lexmark printers.
- Reed Hastings – Chairman and CEO of Netflix has joined Facebook’s Board of Directors. Are we expecting a future Facebook with movies on demand?
