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Samsung Star now available with analog mobile TV receiver – S5233T

Tech Geek — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 13:21:55 +0000

Samsung is obviously bullish on its low-to-mid range Star handset. The all-touchscreen device, which is known as the Tocco Lite in the UK, is already available in multiple color options and even some special edition versions — all of which helped Samsung move more than 10 million units so far. Heck, we’ve even seen that the WiFi-enabled Star is in works…

Now they are releasing another variation of the device, which this time, comes equipped with an analog mobile TV receiver. It’s called the Star TV S5233T and has been recently launched in Southeast Asia, where folks are obviously keen on watching TV while on the go — the trend which we still wait to see hitting the mainstream in the Western world.

Rest of the specs seem pretty much unchanged (though we’re not sure). Telegent Systems’ analog mobile TV receiver is used in the device, while a special software is made to make browsing of TV channels user friendly — including the ability to flick the screen to change channels, one-click screen capture and record, on-screen keypad channel entry and reception of incoming SMS messages with continuous TV viewing.

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AT&T intros Airo Wireless A25is, rugged WinMo smartphone

Tech Geek — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 13:21:42 +0000

AT&T (NYSE: T) announced a new member of its rugged family, Airo Wireless A25is, which they say is the “world’s first intrinsically safe-certified smartphone.” Powered by Windows Mobile 6.1, the A25is has undergone intrinsic safety certification testing and approval for UL 913 (North America) and also meets rugged military specifications (MIL-SPEC 810-F/G). In other words, it is rated to survive a fall of almost 50 inches at least 26 times, be shock-proof across 1,000 miles of transport in a vehicle on shaky terrain, and withstand up to 95 percent humidity for 48 hours and immersion in up to five feet of water for 30 minutes.

Feature wise, Airo’s device comes with a 2.8-inch touchscreen, Bluetooth connectivity support, GPS, push-to-talk capability, dedicated button for notifications, and pre-installed GPS telematics application.

AT&T says the Airo Wireless A25is is designed for people communicating in industries that operate in potentially explosive environments including process and chemical manufacturing, the petrochemical industry, the military, utilities, as well as companies in the pharmaceutical and consumer packaged goods manufacturing industries.

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India’s G-Fone G588 is pretty much a BlackBerry clone with dual SIM

Tech Geek — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 13:21:30 +0000

There’s a new messaging device available in the ever-growing Indian market. It’s called G-Fone G588 and even though it feels legit, I can’t help but to compare it with the BlackBerry (NSDQ: RIMM) Curve 8900. However, instead of a trackball that’s found in RIM’s device, the G588 boast a D-pad (which I personally prefer).

Rest of the specs include dual SIM capability (works with both GSM and CDMA networks), 1.3-megapixel camera, 2.2-inch QVGA screen, FM radio, full QWERTY keyboard, and a microSD memory card slot. Software wise, it comes with Opera Mini, music player, email application, social networking client (powered by Nimbuzz), and an Indian calendar that “serves as a guiding force for the practice of various Hindu rituals and festivals.”

Availability wise, the G-Fone G-588 is sold via Bright Telecom for only 4,799 INR, which is about 5.

In a nutshell, it’s an affordable messaging device for business folks and individuals alike, and I’ve no doubts the carrier will manage to move tons of them…

[Via: Unwired View]

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A tale of two "red alerts:" Which Windows warnings should you heed?

Tech Geek — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 13:21:06 +0000

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

Literally every day at Betanews, we get at least one security vendor “alert” of some type, warning us to be on the lookout for the latest malware. The message is always the same: Advise users to stay vigilant, to keep patching, to upgrade their antivirus to the latest editions. But the profiles of the malware typically look the same, too — stuff you might click on by accident, links pretending to be from your “best friend” in an e-mail message, ads for products that look too good to be true.

For many of us, the situation is getting to be like the US’ terror alert level, which has remained at “Yellow” since the fall of 2007. We starting to forget what “elevated” vigilance means. And maybe that’s a problem, because lack of attention to advice about real threats could become as dangerous as lack of attention to any one of those miracle weight-loss links.

This isn’t an ad, it’s my opinion: Over the years, I’ve trusted the engineers at Sophos Labs to present down-to-earth analyses of possible security scares. This morning, I forwarded two recent reports from other well-known security vendors to Sophos’ Chester Wisniewski, reports about malware that didn’t fit the ordinary profile we tend to see from day to day.

The first report comes from ALWIL Software, publishers of Avast anti-virus, and it’s been heavily circulated since it was first issued last February. It speaks of the horrors of receiving unsolicited malware by way of JavaScript elements embedded in the ads that appear on Web sites — the sources of which, sometimes, innocent publishers have no control over.

“The malware usually spreads through Web infection placed on innocent, badly secured Web sites,” reads last month’s initial warning from the Czech Republic-based Avast’s Jiri Sejtko. “The ad infiltration method is growing in popularity alongside with the Web site infections. Now we are facing probably the biggest ad poisoning ever made — all important ad services are affected. It means that users might get infected just by reading their favorite newspaper or by doing search on famous Web indexers. User interaction is not needed in this attack — infection begins just after poisoned ad is loaded by the browser — it is not a type of social engineering.”

A chart from the ALWIL security research team showing what it claims to be the number of detected instances of malware sent by advertising platforms over a six-day period.

ALWIL’s research found the Fox Audience Network as among the ad platforms spreading the alleged infection, which the firm dubbed “JS:Prontexi.” On Tuesday, a public relations effort by the firm dubbed the malware a “widespread campaign,” leading to blanket coverage such as this story in Media Post on Tuesday, this story in the Danish BizReport earlier today, and this blog post on Photoxels, which contains the original press release in its entirety.

That press release stated as many as one in two online ads served worldwide was in danger of being infected by the malware the ALWIL team discovered. “JS:Prontexi highlights the lack of care shown by advertising services providers to actively screen the content they are distributing,” Sejtko is quoted as saying.

Can this problem truly be this bad — a malware component with a 50% worldwide Web reach?

“Infections on ad services are certainly of heightened concern,” Sophos’ Chet Wisniewski told Betanews earlier today, “yet this is almost a month old, and the miscreants who caused this incident have since moved on. To claim it as the biggest ad server compromise ever seems to me to be a bit of hyperbole.”
The moral of the story, according to the ALWIL press release: Pay attention to situations where you may think antivirus software like Avast is returning false positives…they may not be false. Again quoting Sejtko, “Consumers shouldn’t immediately accuse their antivirus program of a false positive when a familiar site gets blocked. There can be a real danger.”

The other “red alert” this week comes from McAfee Labs, as part of its new program of publishing “Consumer Threat Alerts.” One of the first such alerts yesterday concerns a worldwide “Facebook password reset scam.” Here, users worldwide are sent an ordinary e-mail — no graphics, no text formatting, just an e-mail with an attachment: “Dear user of facebook [sic], Because of the measures taken to provide safety to our clients, your password has been changed. You can find your new password in attached document. Thanks, Your Facebook.”

As McAfee’s threat alert from yesterday reads, “This threat is potentially very dangerous considering that there are over 400 million Facebook users who could fall for this scam. This is also the sixth most prevalent piece of malware targeting consumers in the last 24 hours, as tracked by McAfee Labs.”
Since this is also the type of phishing scam that we see here at Betanews every single day (sometimes every few hours), certainly this can’t be the kind of malware delivery mechanism that people fall for, can it? Haven’t people smelled this kind of scam long enough to spot it at a distance?

Surprise. As Wisniewski told us, this one deserves the red flag and the blaring klaxons.

“We are seeing very high volumes of this attack. Sophos detects the attachments as TROJ/Invo-Zip, which we talked about being involved in a similar MySpace attack this January. It then proceeds to infect you with Mal/FakeAV-BW (Fake Anti-virus). The same malware is also making the rounds as a fake delivery notification from DHL. The only thing unique is the extremely high volumes and the large user base that Facebook has that could be convinced to run the malware.”

So to recap: A completely unsophisticated e-mail attachment, of the garden variety we’ve seen for the last 15 year, is seen by Sophos as being more dangerous and widespread than an embedded JavaScript that one security researcher says has the potential of appearing in half the world’s online ads. The only way to ever find out the truth, is to ask the right questions of the right people.

Palm posts third quarter results: disappointing sales, more net loss

Tech Geek — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 13:20:53 +0000

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

Late in February, Palm issued a shareholder warning which said that profits for the full year were going to be “well below” expectations due to a surprisingly slow demand for Palm’s smartphones.

Today, the company issued its third quarter earnings report, and though the numbers were actually up against the same quarter last year (when Palm posted a net loss of million,) the company is still losing money; million to be exact.

True to the company’s warning last month, device shipments were up tremendously, but sales did not follow. Thanks to the newly-released Pre Plus and Pixi Plus on Verizon Wireless, Palm shipped 960,000 devices, but only 408,000 sold through.

Jon Rubinstein, Palm’s chairman and CEO said, “Our recent underperformance has been very disappointing, but the potential for Palm remains strong. The work we’re doing to improve sales is having an impact, we’re making great progress on future products, and we’re looking forward to upcoming launches with new carrier partners. Most importantly, we have built a unique and highly differentiated platform in webOS, which will provide us with a considerable – and growing – advantage as we move forward.”

Nvidia admits GeForce drivers responsible for fan problems, issues updates

Tech Geek — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 13:20:07 +0000

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

Download Nvidia ForceWare Drivers for Windows version 197.73 from Fileforum now.

Version 196.75 of Nvidia’s GeForce/Ion drivers were indeed responsible for fan overheating problems reported by users. That’s the verdict from Nvidia, which in a second round of responses to customer concerns has released version 197.73, which it assures users doesn’t have the problem.

According to a frequent contributor to Nvidia’s support forum, the problem was with the release version of the driver (other contributors reported no such problem with the beta). Specifically, version 196.75 ran the on-board graphics chip fan at 40% speed like it’s supposed to. But when the card got hotter, the speed boost failed to kick in.

As one tester verified, “Up to 72° [Celsius], the fan remains at 40%. At 73° it increases to 41%, at 74° to 42%, and at 75° it varies between 44 and 45%.”

To its credit, Nvidia’s response has actually been quite swift. Over the past few days, registered driver users received e-mail messages advising them to roll back to an earlier version. One Dell XPS M1730 customer tried that, only to find that certain data left behind from a simple uninstall made it impossible to reboot his computer except into Safe Mode — where, after a short time, it would freeze. A volunteer pointed out the M1730 is a laptop…and the 196.75 drivers were for desktop PC cards.

Other volunteers suggested the use of driver cleaning utilities such as Guru3D Driver Sweeper. Meanwhile, they advised others to use manual utilities to monitor their processor temperatures.

Though some long-time forum members were prematurely lamenting about how long they’d have to wait to see software fixes, they actually did come within a few days. But that wasn’t good enough for some who complained they lost their cards entirely. Over the weekend, prior to Nvidia’s announcement, one forum contributor commented, “I have filled out an error report form and it seems that all I (we) can do now is wait. The possible fixes I have heard include: RMA video card for a new one; buy a new video card. These seem like rather poor fixes.”

Sensing the onset of a possible customer revolt, forum contributor ImNutz4NvSLI (who, we can assume, is nuts for Nvidia SLI) attempted to put out the flames: “Paying attention to your GPUs temps is your responsibility. I can’t imagine a situation in which my GPUs would get to over 100c and I wouldn’t know about it. I am not trying to be cruel or insensitive, I am just stating it like it is. In this world today people are always looking for something for nothing, and looking to pass blame and not take responsibility for their own actions. While this driver may have broken automatic fan control on some users GPUs, certainly not all, fan control was still there to use and was working, all you had to do was pay attention to the temps.”

The contributor pointed to a thread he set up last Saturday, containing illustrated instructions for setting up manual temperature monitors in Windows. Utilities such as EVGA Precision, for instance, show little temperature indicators in the Windows system tray, and can even overlay game screens with temperature monitor information on-demand.

Windows Phone 7 lamely targets ‘life maximizers’

Tech Geek — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 02:21:24 +0000

As if the term “Windows Phone 7 Series” wasn’t lame enough, Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) is pushing its latest operating system at “life maximizers.”

What exactly is a life maximizer? Well, Microsoft has created elaborate characters that illustrate ideal WP7S customers. They are nearing their 40s, have white collar jobs, need Exchange support but still want to be able to use Facebook and GMail. In other words, a mobile professional who wants to use their device for work and play. I have news for you Microsoft: the target that wants that work/play balance is essentially every smartphone owner. I’m sick of companies carving out such narrow niches for their devices – Palm (NSDQ: PALM)’s mom ads for the Pre were disgusting – because the work/play elements should be table stakes by now. The major platforms should have no problem switching between a mobile version of Outlook and Gmail, or being able to play 3D games. You can differentiate with your hardware and application ecosystem.

Oh yeah, feel free to tell me what platform you think “life minimizers” use.

[Via Engadget]

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Short Order Cook is an iPhone App that tests your memory!

Tech Geek — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 02:21:21 +0000

Zero Emission has announced the release of Short Order Cook, a fast-paced casual game that challenges players’ skills of recognition, concentration and trains their memory. In Short Order Cook, at the outset of each level a food image on a kitchen ticket and its matching tile are revealed for a short time. Once the tiles are flipped over, the challenge is to memorize the location of the matching pairs as quickly and as precise as possible. After all pairs of images have been revealed, the user needs to correctly select the matching tile for each kitchen ticket when it turns over.

Key features are:

Over 50 unique food images
Original music and sound effects
Unlimited number of levels
Practice and Competition modes
Beginner to Insane difficulty
OpenFeint Enabled – Achievements, High Scores, Leaderboard and Social Networking

And if that wasn’t enough, the App is only £0.59 – bargain!

Short Order Cook (£0.59) [iTunes link]

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Samsung have a smartphone with a 3D display?

Tech Geek — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 02:21:17 +0000

Well yes, if the rumours are to be believed! TechDigest picked up on a story that came from Samsung Hub, regarding the SCH-W960 – apparently this device can do 3D via its screen, and not only that, can up-convert from 2D to 3D (now I think I’ve heard it all!). The device is apparently packing a 3.3 inch WVGA AMOLED screen, which is 3D capable – along with a comparably less impressive 3MP in the camera department. One other trump card it does have to play though is dual TV tuners – quite what standard really isn’t very clear though.

Apparently it’s even possible this device might its first outing at CTIA, but as with most things, we’ll have to see it to believe it.

Do you desire a 3D-screen device? Do you think it adds any value at all? I’d say not at all, unless you’ve got some killer content to back it up with – and seeing as 99.9% of proper 3D content seems to be movies, the perhaps you’re best off being a movie buff with a penchant for Mobile devices, to make best use of this device!

[Via: Techdigest via: Samsung Hub / Image via: Samsung Hub]

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Preliminary results: IE9 tech preview performs 7.8 times better than IE8

Tech Geek — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 02:21:01 +0000

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

In the first series of comprehensive performance tests comparing Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 9 technical preview, released yesterday, to stable Web browsers in current use today, Betanews confirmed superb speed gains by the IE9 chassis in specific categories. Not everything in the new IE9 was faster than IE8, but in the computational department, the development team’s Chakra JavaScript engine shows much-needed gains.

In anticipation of IE9, Betanews has been developing a radically improved set of performance tests to complement (and, in a few categories, replace) those we’ve used in recent months. Our objective is to determine not just how much faster IE9 is, but how much better and more efficient it will be, in computing data, in rendering on-screen objects, and in adapting to varying workloads.

Betanews estimates that the IE9 chassis on Windows 7 offers 9.32 times better raw computational performance than IE8 on Windows 7, on the same machine. That’s a welcome number due in large part to vastly improved scores in the widely respected SunSpider battery, as well as high scores in a new set of variable-workload computational tests produced by Betanews. Specifically on the SunSpider, the IE9 preview scored a 44.77 on Betanews’ relative performance index, compared to 5.59 for IE8. Our index is based on cumulative relative performance in each category of the test battery, compared against the score posted by an old, slow Web browser: IE7 on Vista SP2. This means, yes, IE9 (thus far) offers almost 45 times the computational speed of IE7 on the older operating system — easily the single largest surge we’ve seen between generations.

A recent dev build of Google Chrome 5 on Windows 7 scored a 69.83 on that same SunSpider index, followed closely by the first stable version of Opera 10.5 with 68.64.

As Microsoft embraces HTML 5, it’s also managing to eke out some marginal speed gains in the rendering department, although it must be noted that the IE9 chassis is running in an almost feature-less window with very minimal overhead. As of now, the IE9 preview offers 23% better rendering performance (CSS, DHTML, support for the Canvas element in HTML 5) than IE8.

Looking for the good

What Microsoft did yesterday was give outside developers, for the first time, direct access to just the engine of its next-generation Web browser, long before the functionality and usability features are attached to it. The reason, the Internet Explorer 9 product team says, is to elicit real-world feedback so that the product can be fine-tuned.

That describes exactly what we intend to do. Over the last few weeks, Betanews has been compiling a suite of next-generation browser tests, having taken into account the feedback we’ve received from both our readers and browser manufacturers, Microsoft included. As rapidly as browsers have evolved in just the past year, it’s become clear to us that when we compare brands, at one level, we truly are comparing apples to apple trees, or lawnmowers to bulldozers. When we concentrate on the prowess or power angle, with all the adrenaline-rushing metaphors and superlatives, we sometimes forget that sometimes, what the world really wants is an efficient lawnmower.

Last year, IE General Manager Dean Hachamovitch asked me to take a closer, fairer look at Internet Explorer. Specifically, he said that there were architectural efficiencies to be found in the product line, if only we took the time to look for them.

How I opted to respond to that challenge was to focus on one under-appreciated aspect of the Web browser that will become more important as its components are transported to six-core desktop systems on one end, and Snapdragon handsets and netbooks on the other: scalability. Specifically, I started exploring whether there was a way to effectively measure how well a browser handles increasing workloads, of ever higher orders of magnitude.

Mozilla helped to begin making scalability an issue with its introduction of the TraceMonkey JavaScript engine in Firefox. Tracers make problems that appear complex in coding simpler for their processing engines to execute, by pre-processing instructions ahead of time, converting and optimizing long sequences into easily digestible, assembly language-like instructions. Theoretically, the simpler and longer the sequences, the easier the digestive process should become.

So in this new era, it becomes necessary to test the efficiency of a browser’s capability to digest those long sequences, to make harder problems simpler for themselves. This is the scalability element which will represent 30% of the score in our revised Relative Performance Index.

Yesterday, Dean Hachamovitch played down the importance of just-in-time compiling as a factor in improving browser efficiency, promoting instead the option of moving the interpreter to a background process. But doing that alone, as we’re discovering now, may not effectively combat what has historically been IE’s biggest problem as a Web apps platform: the ability to fall off a cliff (see: “stack overflow”) when problems get especially difficult. On new tests involving sorting algorithms, for instance, where recursion easily becomes thousands of layers deep, IE8 can spin off into a coma.
So far, we have not seen the comatose effect in the IE9 tech preview, which could be the first sign of very good news for Web app developers.

What I was surprised to discover in crafting this new set of tests was that IE was not alone. Chrome can fall off a cliff too, just several orders of magnitude later (after 10 million iterations, for example, rather than 100,000). As the problem gets more and more complex, the gap between Chrome or Safari or the new Opera’s performance and that of IE becomes wider and wider…and wider. And that’s a problem because you could arbitrarily choose some point out in space, where Chrome is a thousand times faster than IE rather than, say, ten. Wait long enough and you might get 10,000.

And that, as IE proponents assert, would not be fair. It’s actually the reason we chose not to include Google’s V8 benchmark battery in our tests: because there does not appear to be a real-world correlation between the hundreds of times greater performance the V8 battery can report over IE, and the differences we see in ordinary use.

So the goal of our scalability tests is to recognize that smaller engines can still be efficient in what they do, even when they offer lesser horsepower. Maybe IE can’t run a 10-million-iteration test. But the difference between its performance in 100,000 iterations and in 10,000 can be compared to Chrome’s difference between 10 million iterations and 1 million. That factor may still be meaningful.

In the very first report of browsers’ scalability compared to IE7 in Vista SP2, the IE9 tech preview in Windows 7 scored a 6.57 compared to IE8’s score of 1.13. That means, we believe IE9’s new “Chakra” interpreter offers 581.4% greater efficiency than IE8 at speeding up when workloads increase.
Betanews is applying these new tests to the latest stable browsers from the other Top Five browser makers; and yes, Ross Perot fans, we’ll have the charts ready when the numbers come in.