Intel porting Android 4.1 to work on Atom tablets, smartphones
Intel is porting the Android 4.1 operating system, also called Jelly Bean, to work on smartphones and tablets using low-power Atom processors, the company said this week.
The company did not provide a time frame for when the Android 4.1 port would be complete, or when the OS would be deployed in products.
"Intel continues to work closely with Google to enable future versions of Android, including Jelly Bean, on our family of low power Atom processors," said Suzy Greenberg, a company spokeswoman, in an e-mail.
Smartphones running on Intel chips are currently being rolled out with Android 2.3, code-named Gingerbread, and are due to get Android 4.0, code-named Ice Cream Sandwich, as an update, though a time-frame has not been provided. Read more...
SSDs still no threat to notebook hard drives
Notebook computers equipped with hard disk drives won't face a significant threat this year from those with solid-state drives (SSDs), according to a report issued by IHS iSuppli.
SSD-based notebook PCs like Apple's MacBook Air and Microsoft's new Surface tablet PC pose no short-term threat to the much larger universe of hard drive-based mobile devices in a sluggish notebook business, according to the . market research firm's report.
"SSD-equipped notebooks are faster, more lightweight and sport a thinner profile -- some of the characteristics that make them popular and desirable to consumers -- but they are also more expensive and feature less overall storage space," said IHS iSuppli analyst Fang Zhang.
For instance, a MacBook Air with a 64GB solid state drive can cost up to $999, the same price as an HDD-based notebook PC with significantly more storage capacity, Zhang said.
The survey indicates that consumers still value storage capacity over system performance. Read more...
Apple’s Siri-ous mistake
One thing that Apple has been known for is anticipating what consumers want in a device before they even realize it. It's what they did with the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad -- all devices that sparked high demand in categories that had been either dormant or fairly static.
Then came Siri.
Siri was around as a stand-alone app before Apple acquired it; and other apps such as Vlingo responded to voice commands -- including Google's voice actions on Android. But it was Apple's version of Siri that ratcheted up interest in mobile-device "personal assistants" that could help users organize appointments, send messages and fetch information. Read more...
Silent update speeds Firefox 14 uptake
In the seven days since its debut, Firefox 14's share of all Mozilla browsers went from 3% on July 17 to 46% on July 23, according to usage data collected by Irish analytics company StatCounter.
At the end of their first week, version 12 accumulated a 30% share of all Firefox browsers and version 13 accounted for 31%. Read more...
Cisco’s $5bn telly encryption biz gobble wins EU blessing
Networking giant Cisco's $5bn takeover of pay-TV software maker NDS was approved by Brussels' competition officials today.
The European Commission said its "investigation confirmed that the merged entity would continue to face competition from a number of strong competitors and that customers, namely pay-TV providers, would continue to have alternative suppliers in all markets concerned".
Staines-based NDS, which makes software to encrypt programmes and such like for broadcasters and cable companies, started life in Israel in 1988. It is 51 per cent-owned by the Permira private equity fund and 49 per cent-owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. Read more...
Skype: Nearly half of adults don’t install software updates
A new survey commissioned by Skype reveals that 40 per cent of adults do not always update their software when prompted to do so, and that 25 per cent skip software updates because they think they offer no real benefit.
The survey was offered on Skype's behalf to some 350,000 individuals in the US, UK, and Germany by internet pollster YouGov.
A quarter of the adults surveyed said they did not understand the benefits of software updates or what they were supposed to do.
About the same number said they didn't know how to check for updates, and another quarter said they'd need to be prompted to upgrade their software at least twice before they would do it. Read more...
Dell offers new laptops with Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Dell is expanding the range of laptops with Linux, with its new Precision mobile workstations being offered with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 OS as an option.
The company announced two models, the Precision M4700, which has a 15.6-inch screen, and the Precision M6700, which has a 17.3-inch screen. Dell will offer Windows 7, but is also offering Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 for specific regions. Dell did not provide information on the countries in which RHEL would be available.
The company over the last few years had scaled down its Linux offerings on laptops, saying the OS is targeted at specialist users. But Linux is staging a comeback on Dell's laptop, with the company planning to offer the XPS 13 thin-and-light laptop with Ubuntu 12.04, code-named Precise Pangolin, later this year. Dell is also pushing Linux to companies moving away from legacy Unix servers to industry standard servers. Read more...
Floodgates to open for Windows RT tablets in January
Got your scorecard ready? The road to Windows RT has been filled with speculation about the software (we're still faced with many unanswered questions), but the hardware side's been just as hard to nail down.
Right now, we know for a fact that Microsoft has promised to ship the Surface tablet for Windows RT when Windows 8 hits "general availability" on Oct. 26. Microsoft's RT tablet will run on an Nvidia ARM chip, but we don't know which one.
Just about everything else we know has appeared in dribs and drabs over the past few months. Microsoft has only mentioned and demoed Windows RT machines based on ARM chips from three manufacturers: Nvidia, Texas Instruments, and Qualcomm. And we've been hearing for months that Microsoft allowed each of the chip providers to choose just two hardware manufacturers. Read more...
Email in security hot seat with rise of cloud, BYOD
For most enterprises it is not enough to make sure their own email platform is secure. If their suppliers are not equally secure, they can be as vulnerable to criminal hackers and data leaks from human error as the weakest link in their supply chain.
The combination of a chain of usually small- to medium-size suppliers, the expansion of cloud-based email services and the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) trend among workers has created what Richard Parris, writing for BCW, calls a "complex melting pot of security challenges surrounding the secure transfer of sensitive data via email."
By now, the advantages and risks of BYOD have been well documented. While it promotes convenience, collaboration and mobile productivity among employees, it is vulnerable to malicious applications, theft and simple carelessness -- employees storing corporate data in public cloud services that are not secure, so they can access it anytime. Read more...
Apple wants ‘billions’ from Samsung in patent case
Apple will seek billions of dollars in damages from Samsung when a high-profile patent lawsuit between the companies goes in front of a California jury next week.
Details of Apple's claim were included in documents submitted overnight to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, where the trial is scheduled to begin on Monday.
"Samsung has reaped billions of dollars in profits and caused Apple to lose hundreds of millions of dollars through its violation of Apple's intellectual property," Apple's trial brief claims. Read more...