The Week That Was!

The Week That Was!

Techtree News Staff, Feb 28, 2010 1724 hrs IST

Time for another edition of Techtree's weekly news roundup! Here's where we take a look at the tech news that made headlines in the past week.

Video of Symbian^3 laden Nokia X10 Leaked
A leaked video on YouTube has revealed a possible interesting device from Nokia. The documents show, what is thought to be, some release documents for the Nokia X10. The X10 will be a Symbian^3 based handset expected to arrive in the near future. It boasts of a decent spec sheet that should make it a competitive phone once released. The name X10 might be slightly misleading, thanks to Sony Ericsson's Android based X10 that was released at the just concluded Mobile World Congress. The Nokia X10 will be a full QWERTY slider phone with support for multiple home screen support. The home screen will feature auto rotation as well. The phone will be powered by a very fast ARM Cortex A8 processor - currently found on devices like the Omnia HD and the Nokia N900. It will come with a 3.2- inch screen and 16/32 GB of on-board memory. The RAM will be capped at 256MB.

Bangalore Goes 3G, to get Number Portability Too
After the metro cities of Delhi, Chennai, Mumbai and Kolkata went 3G, it was the turn of Bangalore to get its first commercial 3G services last Friday. BSNL formally announced the launch of 3G in the garden city and with it bought high speed data access while on the move to netizens and cellular subscribers across the city. As of now, this would be a "basic" 3G service with just the high speed data access. BSNL has planned services like video on demand, games on demand, music, m-commerce, multimedia, telemedicine, education and e-governance. These would be unveiled in due course as the 3G user base increases.

Samsung to Announce Cheaper Smartphones
Samsung announced its own smartphone OS, the Bada, at the recently concluded Mobile World Congress 2010. It was also the occasion where the first Bada based handset, the S8500, was showcased. After the unveiling of the phone, Samsung went on to clarify that apart from being a hardware manufacturer, it is also investing over $112 million in the development and upgrading of the software part of its devices. Samsung seems to be optimistic about its Bada OS and asserts that it intends to make this platform a force to reckon with.

Twitter Users Hit by LOL Phishing Attack
IT security and data protection firm Sophos has warned Twitter users about a major attack against Twitter users this weekend. The attack, which seems to be still underway was designed to steal passwords and use hijacked accounts to spread money-making spam campaigns. The attack began on Saturday with many Twitter users finding that fellow members of the micro-blogging network had posted messages disguised as humorous links. These were nothing but phishing intended links to dubious sites. The messages included natural sounding ones like "Lol. this is me??", "lol , this is funny.","Lol. this you??" and "ha ha, u look funny on here", were accompanied with clickable links which redirected users to a fake Twitter login page hosted on a website based in China.

Fly Launches Dual SIM Social Networking Handset
After the launch of the MC 160 and the E 106 back in 2009, Fly Mobiles has announced the launch of yet another full touch dual-SIM phone called the Linkz (E 145) in India -- complete with all-in-one messenger and social networking abilities. The entire social networking features fall under the Fly Buzz! application. This umbrella application holds under it numerous applications including Nimbuzz, the all-in-one messenger service; Snaptu, the all-in-one social networking application multitude of Java games and Opera Mini, the most popular mobile browser in the world.

Apple Pushing iPhone OS to Other Platforms
As per a Job posting on the Apple site, the company is looking to expand its portfolio of iPhone OS based devices to more platforms. Computerworld's Seth Weintraub was one of the first guys who spotted it. The new job posting states that Apple is looking for a talented and inspired manager to lead a team focused on bring-up of iPhone OS on new platforms. Apple recently launched iPad, the first device running iPhone OS and we aren't counting the iPod Touch as a device since it's clearly a portable media player. We don't know what would come next, but it's quite possible that the next iPhone OS based product would evolve from existing products like the iPad.

Nvidia GTX 400 GPUs due on March 26
Nvidia said it will launch its much anticipated GF100 "Fermi" GPUs branded as GTX 400 series on March 26 at the Penny Arcade Expo 2010 in Boston. This news was broken by Nvidia via its official Twitter account which said: Apologies for the confusion around our most recent GF100 update. To clarify, launch date for GeForce GTX 480 and GTX 470 is March 26, 2010. Till date, Nvidia has shared a few details about the Fermi architecture based next generation GF100 GPU graphics cards but the performance was never spoken about. Earlier this month, Nvidia announced brand names of its two high-end GF100 GPU based graphics cards - GTX 480 and GTX 470.

Apple Bans Sleazy Apps after Complaints
Do you enjoy all those funny, suggestive apps on your iPhone or iPod Touch? We hate to tell you but all that fun might end soon as Apple has decided to ban all the sex-tinged apps that feature sleazy and sexually suggestive material from its Apps Store. Phillip Schiller, senior VP of Worldwide Product Marketing, said in an interview to The New York Times, "We were getting customer complaints from women who found the content getting too degrading and objectionable, as well as parents who were upset with what their kids were able to see." Over the last few months, several suggestive photos laden apps have been submitted to the Apple's App review bench. Obviously, kids and teens have been checking and using such applications from the App Store. Also, users have little knowledge about Parental Control options. Every setting to prevent kids and teens accessing sleazy material is right there Settings>General>Enable Restrictions.

Google Executives Convicted in Italy
An Italian court has convicted three Google executives for privacy violations on Wednesday. The three, which included Google's senior vice president David Drummond, former chief financial officer George Reyes and global privacy counsel Peter Fleischer, were convicted for allowing a video of an autistic boy being abused to be posted on Google's YouTube video service. The three convicted individuals received a suspended six-month sentence. While Google has said that this trial is a threat to Internet freedom because it would make it necessary to "screen" each and every video posted on YouTube - a task which is virtually impossible - the prosecutors counter that the trial was not about imposing censorship - but about balancing freedom of expression with the rights of an individual.

Yahoo and Twitter enter content sharing partnership
You will now be able to access your personal Twitter feeds across Yahoo's products and properties, including the homepage, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Sports and others. The Internet giant has joined hands with the micro blogging website to bring real-time Twitter content on Yahoo services like Profiles, Search etc. The best part here is that all Yahoo Account holders would be able to send Twitter updates without leaving the respective Yahoo services. For example, users would be able to view and reply toTwitter updates from Yahoo Mail itself.

LG KF350 'Ice Cream' Phone Launched
LG has announced the launch of its latest clamshell handset, the KF350 in India. Also known as the "Ice Cream" the KF350 is targeted at the fairer sex and has been launched on the eve of International Women's Day early next month. The KF350 is a clamshell device with a 2.2-inch QVGA, TFT display capable of displaying 262K colors. It also comes with an external LED Matrix display that can display the time and other notifications. The outer shell also has an arrangement of LEDs that can display various lighting effects. Other features include a 3-megapixel camera, QVGA video recording, FM Radio and a full-fledged music player. The KF350 comes with 25MB of internal memory that can be increased to 2GB using a microSD card. The phone comes with a WAP 2.0/xHTML, HTML browser and offer decent connectivity options with Bluetooth and microUSB.

Nokia N97 Mini Gold Edition Arrives
While Nokia is busy with its preparations to announce the new X and C-Series handsets, here is a gentle reminder from them saying that they have not forgotten their already launched handsets. How, you might ask? Well, by launching expensive, gold plated variants of older devices! So, what we have here is the Nokia N97 Mini Gold Edition. As made obvious by the naming scheme, the N97 Mini is just the standard N97 Mini - in a gold plated shell! Dressed in 18 carat gold and packed with apps like "ELLE 360Fashion", an application that helps the owner follow the latest fashion trends, it also tries to be a "fashion phone"

5 Billion Worldwide Mobile Subscriptions in 2010
A recent International Telecommunication Union (ITU) report suggests that the continuing upsurge in the number of people using mobile phones will continue through 2010. In fact, the number of mobile subscriptions will surpass the 5 billion mark sometime this year if the current rate of growth continues! This means that by the end of 2010, there will be 400 million more mobile subscriptions than in 2009. Last year, the ITU had reported the number of subscriptions to top 4.6 billion. Most of this growth is fueled by the developing and emerging markets - the biggest chunk probably from China and India. In developed countries, the rate of penetration of mobile phones is already well over 100 percent. The developing countries, on the other hand, have, on an average, just 57 percent of its people hooked to mobile phones.

The Week That Was!

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