Displaying items by tag: Android

Huawei will welcome a new member of their smartphone family this month; the Ascend G600 comes with Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. So far it is not known in which countries the Ascend G600 will be available first, but according to an official announcement they will start distribution for the German market in December. The initial price for device the device is expected to be €300. Shao Yang, Chief marketing officer said that “We are very excited to introduce the new Huawei Ascend G600, which gives more functionality and power for people who expect more from their technology“.

Archos announced they will release a 7-inch Android tablet made primarily for gamers. Lately a lot of high quality Android games have come out and Archos hopes that this will be a trigger for their success. We also talked few days ago about the new console OUYA, that will be Android based, so it looks like the Android gaming market is starting to grow rapidly. Many would describe the Archos GamePad as like an XL PS Vita and we can agree that they have some similarities but let’s not mix apples and pears. The Archos GamePad will run on Ice Cream Sandwich, so we can expect it to be able to handle all of the latest games for Android. At launch it will run on Jelly Bean and will not get the upgrade until more games become compatible with it.

Rumors going around Microsoft's Windows Phone 8 are saying that we could see some of these phones as early as October 29th. According to an anonymous source that gave this information to ZDNet October will be a very important month for Microsoft. Beside the launch of their new OS, Windows 8, they will launch the Surface RT, and after that Windows Phone 8. The month gets wrapped up with October 30th and the start of Microsoft's Build 2012 conference. Even though several manufacturers will release their Windows 8 or Surface RT devices on October 26th, Microsoft decided to wait 4 more days to release Windows Phone.

Amazon has joined the club of companies that reserved September for their big events. They sent invitations to newspapers for their press conference that will take place at Santa Monica, California, however no further details were provided. As usual, this created a bunch of rumors, and most believable are those about Amazon launching a new Kindle Fire, or even several different models of it. Beside that, there could be e-book readers based on e-ink with integrated illumination.

Originally this article was to be a stand alone item to show how the mobile world is catchin up to the desktop. However, now that we have the news of domains being seized that offered pirated versions of Mobile Apps it seems there is certainly a new push to secure this highly profitable sector in play. The company that produced the report (Arxan) is not associated with this push, but timing of the publication of the report is very interesting. So let's take a look at how sad the state of the mobile app market is in terms of securing apps from hacking.

The mobile world has exploded in much the same way that the PC world exploded back in the mid to late 90s. It was a time when everyone was selling cheap computers for the masses. Unfortunately the hardware and software that was being used by everyone was also very open to attack. The thought of malware protection, hardened operating systems and edge protection (in the form of a firewall) were still very new in the consumer market. These things were also still in their infancy in much of the corporate market. Now we are seeing the same thing happening in the mobile world. The introduction of the smart phone and the mobile “app” have created a new offshoot which is still very immature and which due to its rapid growth and perceived security has become a target for malware and piracy, just like the PC did in the 90s.

A couple of days ago we covered some interesting news about EA and what appear to be steps to set themselves up for a buyout. In the original article we talked about the fact that they are buying back their own stock from investors as well as trimming down staff which puts them at a lower financial liability. At the same time they were doing all of this EA was talking up the future of mobile gaming especially in conjunction with the Windows 8 ecosystem. This happened in conjunction with OnLive selling to an unnamed company. Now we are hearing that EA owned mobile gaming company PopCap is cutting roughly 12% of the staff in North America.

The Nikon Coolpix S800c is assumed to be a new camera from the Japanese manufacturer and it is belived it will feature Android software. It is not official, but after seeing leaked photos of the device we can say it looks promising. If it comes out it will be first Android based camera, and it is expected to be announced on August 22nd. The device will have 4.5-54mm lens, 3.5“ OLED display and will run on Android 2.3 Gingerbread. 

As of today, Adobe's Flash is officially removed from Google Play. They announced last November “we are focusing our work with Flash on PC browsing and mobile apps packaged with Adobe AIR, and will be discontinuing our development of the Flash Player for mobile browsers.“ Android 4.1 wont have any certified implementations of Flash Player. Adobe will use configuration settings in the Google Play Store to limit continued access to Flash Player updates to only those devices that already have Flash Player installed.

From the beginning of the Samsung V Apple case we have likened the situation to a battle field.  We have seen ambushes, feints, counters and now landmines. Landmines are one of the worst things that you can find in a battle field. It seems that Samsung laid one down for Apple to step on and the Apple team obligingly did just that. This was in the form of their expert financial testimony about the damages that were due to Apple. Simply put the claims that Apple made were flawed in their core premise that if someone had not opted to by a Samsung phone they would automatically have bought one from Apple.

In following a trial as big as the Samsung V Apple trial there are small things that popup over the course of a case this large and this public. We have already found out that both Samsung and Apple tend to release the number of units “shipped” to investors rather than the number of units actually sold. This is not an uncommon item as when product is shipped to a company like Best Buy or Target they are still listed as a unit “sold” for many companies. But there are other items that come out as well; one of these is only visible if you look closely. This is the strength of the actual claim(s) involved. Although both sides often object just to make things annoying for the other what we have noticed is that Apple appears to want considerably more real data and evidence blocked than Samsung.