Displaying items by tag: Smartphones

As expected HTC presented their Windows Phone 8 devices yesterday. Windows Phone 8X and 8S will both be branded as Microsoft Signature Windows Phones. The 8X model will feature a 4.3-inch Super LCD II display with 720p resolution, a 1.5 GHz dual core Snapdragon processor and 1GB of RAM. As with most smartphones these days the 8x will have an 8 Mpix rear camera with BSI sensor and LED flash, while the front will be 2.1 Mpix with the ability to record 1080p HD video. A nice thing to know is that unlike Nokia's new phones the 8X can record video with stereo sound. The 8x will also have Gorilla Glass and optical lamination touchscreen. Storage capacity is 16GB which cannot be expanded with microSD cards. NFC, WiFi a/b/g/n and LTE (NA only) or HSPA+/DC-HSDPA (EMEA) are also supported. To take care of sound they brought in Beats Audio that gives the phone decent multimedia boost.

It took only 100 days for the Galaxy SIII to reach 20 million units sold; they marked 10 million at the end of July.  Now the company has announced that they have doubled the numbers. Samsung said that the Galaxy S III achieved this level three times faster than Galaxy S and six times faster than Galaxy S II. Since 2012, the Galaxy S and S II have marked over 50 million units sold. With the S III Samsung has made their biggest sales in Europe at around 6 million devices, followed by Asia at 4.5 million and North America with 4 million. The final 2.5 million units were sold in Samsung’s homeland, Korea.

In the second half of 2012 most panel makers stationed in Taiwan expect their biggest orders to come from the rising tablet and notebook markets. Customers want more and more from mobile devices and as we know there are a lot of new tablets coming out just before the holiday season. AU Optronics said that they expect their shipments of small and medium size segments to grow even more in the last 2 quarters of 2012. Panels in near future will continue to have higher and higher resolution as well as reduced power consumption. As far as size is concerned most shipments will be of 7 to 10-inch panels as they are the most popular.

ARM has released three new multi-core GPUs that are extremely flexible which ARM hopes will find their way into a wide range of mobile devices next year. New GPUs are the Mali T624, T628 and T678, built on the ARM Midgard graphic architecture. The new Mali GPUs are supposed to be the successors to the Mali 450-MP found in Samsung Galaxy S III, and if we can trust ARM they surpass that generation quite a bit. ARM claims they will offer a performance increase of aproximately 50% over the earlier Midgard generation T604 and T658. The new Mali GPU bring support for a graphics compression codec called ASTC (Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression), which  optimizes GPU performance and increases battery life.

As we have told all of you before no system is secure. We have watched now as Android malware writers are using social engineering to mass-market spam and now we are seeing the first proof of concept of a method to “hack” Apple’s In-App purchase feature. We mentioned in our recent coverage of the Anrdoid.Dialup malware that this feature was not only vulnerable, but also could be used as a vector for attack and the installation of other malware.