Samsung’s tablet is called the Galaxy, it runs the latest version of Google’s Android operating system (Froyo) and the specs are as follows 

• 7-inch TFT LCD with 1024 x 600 resolution (WSVGA)
• Weighs 380 grams
• 1GHz Cortex A8 processor
• 16GB or 32GB internal storage
• microSD expansion for up to 32GB additional storage
• Front-facing 1.3 megapixel camera and rear 3 megapixel camera with flash
• 4,000mAh battery
• 3G data / voice (there’s a speakerphone and Bluetooth for phone calls, but no earpiece)
• 5GHz dual-band 802.11n WiFi
• Full HD video playback

Hopefully the Galaxy will be released in the UK in October.

Toshiba version of the iPad is called the Folio 100, it also runs the Android (Froyo) and the specs are as follows

• 10-inch screen
• Weighs 760g
• SD card slot
• 16GB of onboard memory
• HDMI connector
• USB 2.0
• Wi-Fi
• Bluetooth
• 1.3-megapixel webcam
• 7 hours (65 per cent web browsing, 10 per cent video playback, 25 per cent standby) battery life

This will also be released in the UK in October and the price is expected to be around the £330.

So unlike the iPad both the Galaxy and Folio 100 will run Flash movies. With this sort of price being offered it should rival the iPad for sales.

Mrs Bean joined the site in 2008, one year after she registered on Facebook. She soon attracted attention for being the oldest “tweeter”.

Her celebrity followers included singer Peter Andre, Chris Evans and ex-prime minister’s wife Sarah Brown.

“You could not dislike Ivy,” said Mrs Wright.

“She didn’t have a bad word to say about anybody. She was a real lady, an inspiration.”

Mr Andre, who met Mrs Bean in September 2009, said he was “saddened to hear that Ivy has passed away” and offered his condolences to her family.

“She was a lovely woman who had a brilliant sense of humour and we have stayed in touch since we met.”

Media gaze

Mrs Bean accessed social networks using a computer given to the home by the local social services authority in 2007. Although the machine was originally intended for staff training purposes, staff decided to open it up to residents, said Mrs Wright.

Soon after joining Facebook in 2007, Mrs Bean was soon receiving 15-16,000 messages a day. She was introduced to Twitter one year later.

Her tweets were about her daily life and her friends.

Her last one on 6 July read: “going to have my lunch now will be back later”. Mrs Wright had looked after her Twitter feed while she was in hospital, after being taken ill in June.

Mrs Bean enjoyed the publicity that surrounded her, she said. “She loved every minute of it. The media was a big part of her life. She would not have expected to go quietly.”

O2 has announced that it will be selling the handset in the UK, but has yet to
confirm its prices.

“iPhone 4 is the biggest leap since the original iPhone,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “FaceTime video calling sets a new standard for mobile communication, and our new Retina display is the highest resolution display ever in a phone, with text looking like it does on a fine printed page. We have been dreaming about both of these breakthroughs for decades.”

Taken from a original article by Joe Fernadez

Only last Friday, the iPad, which combines the mobility of a smartphone with the speed of a laptop, went on sale in the UK, and also launched in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain and Switzerland. The original UK launch date had been set for late April.

The 32GB iPad, with its 24.5cm (9.7in) touchscreen, looks like an enlarged iPhone and costs £499, while the 64GB version costs £599.

It will go on sale in nine more countries next month, including Ireland, and analysts at RBC Capital Markets estimated that by the end of the year, over eight million units will have been sold worldwide. The success of the gadget has underlined the renaissance of Apple, which last week overtook Microsoft as the biggest technology company in the world by market capitalisation.

Apple’s statement last night did not give a breakdown of the sales. Mike Abramsky, an analyst with RBC in Toronto, estimated the US will account for 57% of sales, with France and the UK being the next two biggest markets, where he predicted 805,000 and 585,000 will be sold this year.

Analyst Daniel Ernst of Hudson Square Research told Reuters last month that he had estimated sales for the three months from April to the end of June at 1.25m. It took just under a month for Apple to notch up one million sales of the iPad, making it more popular than the iPhone, which took 74 days to hit the same figure in 2007.

Apple has not announced sales targets for the iPad. At the launch of the iPhone in 2007, chief executive Steve Jobs said he hoped to sell 10m by the end of 2008 – it sold 16m.

The iPad has already attracted a cult following among Apple enthusiasts. Stephen Fry said in Time magazine he was “not prepared for how instant the relationship I formed with the device would be”, and David Pogue in the New York Times said it was “designed and built by a bunch of perfectionists”.

Fry queued in the rain with other Apple enthusiasts outside the company’s Regent Street store when the gadget went on sale last week, even though he already owns a device. He said he was “completing the circle”, having been in San Francisco when Apple announced the device in January, and present at the US launch in April: “There’s a camaraderie among Apple users, particularly long-serving ones – we remember in 1997 when we were being laughed at and told we would only get spare parts in hobby shops because the company was absolutely on the floor.

“I’m sure a lot of people will mock it as being some sort of pseudo-religious or cult atmosphere, but it’s just genuine enthusiasm.”

Before it went on sale in the UK, demand was so intense that people tried to order it by using forwarding companies with offices in the US.

Taken from an original article by Tim Webb from the Guardian

In recent weeks, Adobe Flash has been heavilly criticised by Apple boss Steve Jobs.

In a report to BBC News, Jonathan Gay said, Flash “will continue to be the dominant tool” for media on the internet. He also said he thinks iPhone users will see “support for Flash…sometime in the next few years”.
Mr Gay, who is no longer involved with developing the video and animation software, helped to create the FutureSplash software that later became Flash, and describes himself as its “architect”.

Apple’s iPods and iPhones have proved hugely popular, and few doubt the technologies have helped to promote innovation in smartphones and portable music players.
But Apple founder Steve Jobs’s decision to challenge Flash, which is used to help distribute a vast array of media across the internet, has come under close scrutiny.

In a letter posted on the Apple website, he argued that Flash had “one of the worst security records in 2009″, “has not performed well on mobile devices”, and “is the number one reason that Macs crash”.

Yet iPhone users browsing the web find it frustrating that video and other animated content distributed with Flash cannot be viewed.

Instead, they see an empty square where the content would be. This is because there is no so-called “plug-in” for Flash on the iPhone’s web browser, Safari.

Earlier this year, Adobe was busy creating software that would have helped iPhone App creators translate Flash website content for use on the iPhone.

But a recent change by Apple to the iPhone and iPad developer’s agreement effectively prevented developers from using the technology.

Jonathan Gay said: “Apple is building their tightly controlled application platform to push the mobile internet world to a model like traditional mobile phone and cable TV businesses, where there is a gatekeeper who controls the platform and gets a fee from all the transactions on the platform.”

“This would drive a very profitable business for Apple,” he said.

“Flash grew from the PC and Web era where players are free, run on lots of devices, and there are no gatekeepers controlling what developers could do with the platform.

“As a consumer, I’d much rather see the PC and web model move to mobile phones than the closed mobile phone world taking over rich applications on the mobile internet,” he added.

Mr Gay said that the current dispute has its roots in the early days of the iPhone, when Apple struck an important deal with Google, the parent company of YouTube.

The deal saw YouTube convert all of its content so it was compatible with a specialised iPhone YouTube application.

“[Steve Jobs'] ability to convince YouTube to do this for the original iPhone launch was a key driver for the iPhone’s initial success, and now he wants the rest of the web to follow”, he said.

Previously, YouTube had used Flash for distributing its own video. Ironically, Mr Gay said that YouTube’s adoption of Flash had been the key to it becoming a widely used standard for video on the web.

“Much larger companies like Microsoft, Apple and Real Networks … were focused on … building businesses around their players and content delivery.

“The YouTube guys then used Flash to decisively demonstrate that there was an opportunity for short video integrated well into a web page. Flash video took off from there. “It is surprising to me that it’s taken so long for a big company like Apple to mount a visible challenge to Flash’s leadership role for video on the internet,” he said.

Much emphasis as an alternative to Flash has been placed by Mr Jobs on the latest web standard, HTML5, which is currently undergoing development.

In an open letter on Apple’s website, Jobs said that HTML5 “lets web developers create advanced graphics, typography, animations and transitions without relying on third party browser plug-ins (like Flash). “HTML5 is completely open and controlled by a standards committee, of which Apple is a member.”

He added that whilst Adobe says that “75% of video on the web is in Flash”, what they don’t say is that “almost all this video is also available in a more modern format, H.264, and viewable on iPhones, iPods and iPads.”

However, Mr Gay said that “HTML5 may be a good solution for building video websites like YouTube but it won’t be as rich a media platform as Flash is today.
“H.264 is not an open standard from my perspective.”

He explained that the Flash developers wanted to use H.264 when they first added video support to their software, “but the patent licensing fees would have cost around $5m (£3.5m) per year.”
He also said that “it would be a waste to orphan the enormous investment that has already been made in Flash content.”

He added: “I think that the more open approach of Google with Android will put competitive pressure on Apple to support the full web and we’ll see … support for Flash in Safari on the iPhone sometime in the next few years.”

Mr Gay is an iPhone user himself, and thinks “it’s a great device”, but is ready for a change. “I would guess that my next phone will be an Android phone because I think the more open Google model will meet my needs and the needs of the carriers providing the phones better.”

This article was taken from BBC Technology, originally written by Jonathan Frewin.

On Friday 30th April, Steve Jobs wrote an open letter defending Apple’s decision not to allow Flash technology on many of their products.

He was making the point that Flash was made for an era of “PCs and mice” and performed poorly when translated to run on touchscreen smartphones and handheld devices.

Adobe then responded and now they have said that they wish to further themselves from Apples products.

The following is the response from Adobe, taken from an original article on BBC Technology.

Kevin Lynch, Adobe’s chief technology officer, wrote in a blog posting: “We feel confident that were Apple and Adobe to work together as we are with a number of other partners, we could provide a terrific experience with Flash on the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch.”

Currently, none of these products can run the Flash technology which is used on many websites to power media players, games and other animations.

However, added Mr Lynch, Adobe has decided to shift its focus to get Flash working well on gadgets made by Google, RIM, Palm, Microsoft, Nokia and others.

He said Adobe expected to release Flash Player 10.1 on Google’s Android operating system in May and then for it to be on general release in June.

“From that point on,” he wrote, “an ever increasing number and variety of powerful, Flash-enabled devices will be arriving which we hope will provide a great landscape of choice.”

The letter came soon after Adobe announced it would stop making tools that allow developers to quickly translate Flash code to run on Apple gadgets.

These allowed developers to make applications once and then distribute them for use on various phones and operating systems, including Apple’s iPhone.

Adobe’s announcement followed a change to the terms and conditions of the licence that software developers must sign when writing code to run on Apple products.

That change banned developers from using automatic translation tools, effectively forcing them to develop two applications – one for Apple products and one for everything else.

Other Adobe executives have commented on Mr Jobs’ letter.

Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen told the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) that “when you resort to licensing language” to restrict development, it has “nothing to do with technology”.

He said it was now “cumbersome” for developers who were forced to have “two workflows”.

Mr Narayen said the problems highlighted by Mr Jobs were “a smokescreen”.

He added that if Flash crashed Apple products it was something “to do with the Apple operating system”.

He said he found it “amusing” that Mr Jobs thought that Flash was a closed platform.

“We have different views of the world,” Mr Narayan told the Wall Street Journal. “Our view of the world is multi-platform.”

“A message came up on the screen saying your PC has a virus, click here to remove it, surprisingly they do and hey presto the virus which wasn’t on the computer in the first place is now.”

The following story comes from BBC Technology.

Fake anti-virus software that infect PCs with malicious code are a growing threat, according to a study by Google.
Its analysis of 240m web pages over 13 months showed that fake anti-virus programs accounted for 15% of all malicious software. Scammers trick people into downloading programs by convincing them that their PC is infected with a virus.

Once installed, the software may steal data or force people to make a payment to register the fake product. “Surprisingly, many users fall victim to these attacks and pay to register the fake [anti-virus software],” the study said. “To add insult to injury, fake anti-viruses often are bundled with other malware, which remains on a victim’s computer regardless of whether a payment is made.”

‘Be suspicious’

The study, which was presented at the Usenix Workshop on Large-Scale Exploits and Emergent Threats in California, analysed websites between January 2009 and February 2010.

It discovered more than 11,000 web domains involved in its distribution of fake anti-virus. More than half of the fake software – which predominantly targets Windows machines – was delivered via adverts, Google said.

Graham Cluley of security firm Sophos, who was not involved in the study, said that one of the key ways that hackers spread fake anti-virus was so-called black hat search engine optimisation techniques.

“The hackers track trending news stories – such as the death of Michael Jackson,” he said. “They then create websites stuffed with content, which in many cases can appear on the first page of search results.” Anyone clicking on the link, he said, would be confronted with a pop-up with a link to fake anti-virus software.

Google uses tools to filter out booby-trapped websites, but the firm said that hackers were managing to avoid detection by moving between domains quickly.

Mr Cluley said that people should be familiar with their own anti-virus software and should “always be suspicious” if they were confronted with a pop-up telling them you need to download something extra or spend money to clean up a computer.

“If you already have anti-virus installed you shouldn’t need to do that,” he said.

I was amazed to realise that it has been 25 years since the first dotcom address was registered.
To help give you further details of how dotcom has grown to what it is today, please read on.

In March 1985, Symbolics computers of Cambridge, Massachusetts entered the history books with an internet address ending in dotcom.

That same year another five companies jumped on a very slow bandwagon.

It took until 1997, well into the internet boom, before the one millionth dotcom was registered.

"This birthday is really significant because what we are celebrating here is the internet and dotcom is a good, well known placeholder for the rest of the internet," said Mark Mclaughlin, chief executive officer of Verisign the company that is responsible for looking after the dotcom domain.

"Who would have guessed 25 years ago where the internet would be today. This really was a groundbreaking event," he said.

Commercialisation

For most of the late 1980s and early 1990s hardly anyone knew what a dotcom was.

The need for some sort of organising principles became apparent as more bodies connected into the fledgling internet but there is confusion as to the exact genesis of dotcom.

It is unlikely that the early dotcoms were thought of as businesses as the early internet was not seen as a place for commerce but rather as a platform for governmental and educational bodies to trade ideas.

Scholars generally agree that a turning point was the introduction of the Mosaic web browser by Netscape that brought mainstream consumers on to the web.

With 668,000 dotcom sites registered every month, they have become part of the fabric of our lives.

Today people go to dotcom sites to shop, connect with friends, book holidays, be entertained, learn new things and exchange ideas.

"Dotcoms have touched us in a way we could not have imagined," Robert Atkinson of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) told BBC News.

"It used to be, 10 years ago you could live an okay life if you weren’t engaged on a dot com site on a daily basis. You could get what you needed.

"But today we see how dotcoms have enriched our lives that if you are not engaged you would be fine but much further behind than the rest of us."

Proof of that Mr Atkinson said can be seen with how dotcoms have commercialised the internet "bringing consumers choice and value and businesses greater customer reach and profits".

A study by the ITIF claims that "the average profitability of companies using the internet increased by 2.7%".

The research also found that the economic benefits equal $1.5 trillion, which it says is "more than the global sales of medicine, investment in renewable energy and government investment in research and development combined".

By 2020 the internet should add $3.8 trillion (£2.5trillion) to the global economy, exceeding the gross domestic product of Germany, it found.

The future

An estimated 1.7 billion people – one quarter of the world’s population – now use the internet.

Verisign’s Mr McLaughlin only sees that figure growing over the next quarter of a century.

"I think that the way we access information today, mostly still through PCs and laptops is highly likely to change; that the voice will be more important than text input.

"I think the whole fabric of how we access, search, find and get information is going to be radically different."

At the moment Verisign logs 53 billion requests for websites – not just dotcoms – every day, about the same number handled for all of 1995.

"We expect that to grow in 2020 to somewhere between three and four quadrillion," Mr McLaughlin told BBC News.

One quadrillion is one million billion.

It is a phenomenal pace of growth that would have been very difficult to predict 25 years ago when a small computer firm took the first pioneering steps into the connected world.

Story taken from BBC Technology news, written by Maggie Shiels

This week it has been confirmed that a new music file format MusicDNA, is being launched to try and replace the MP3. Its confirmed elsewhere that this is to be a replacement rather than run along side the MP3.

Bach Technology CEO Stefan Kohlmeyer says that MP3 was developed 20 years ago – by Bach’s technology partner, Germany’s Fraunhofer IDMT (Institute for Digital Media Technology) and Karlheinz Brandenburg, who is an investor in Bach – and although it was “great for its time” it doesn’t support multi media.

“Twenty years on from our first work developing the MP3, it is time for digital audio to once again evolve. Just as vinyl gave way to the CD and the CD to MP3, it is time for the MP3 to pass the baton onto MusicDNA,” says Kohlmeyer, who adds he has a host of support from record labels, including Beggars Group and Tommy Boy Entertainment, retailers, including the PeoplesMusicStore, and digital distributors, such as Germany’s Rebeat Digital.

For record companies it is a way of “repackaging products” and pushing new releases from artists to known fans. “We can get very indepth profiles of the music users,” adds the CEO, who says there might be many various price points for MusicDNA depending on the amount of content rights holders provide in each bespoke file.

Stefan Kohlmeyer, also adds "The MusicDNA technology could prove key in the fight against piracy. The information given with the legally downloaded files will update automatically with tour dates or releases, but pirated files will remain static. At the moment there is no real incentive to buy a legal file. If we concentrate on making the legal file, we can help the entire music industry," he said.

MusicDNA enabled files will play on any MP3 player and Kohlmeyer adds that people can also upload their complete iTunes libraries to receive enhanced versions of thousands of their music tracks. Fans can also customise their MusicDNA files after purchase

MusicDNA is launching a beta, or test, version this spring with a full roll-out at the end of the summer.

There are several advantages of the new file MusicDNA, one is that you are able to have embedded lyrics and artwork. The main advantage is that MusicDNA could be sent updates from either the record company or artist to show the latest news or even the artists tour images.

It will also be in competition with Apple’s iTunes LP, which gives users added content including bonus tracks, lyrics and video interviews.

No major labels are currently on board and the MusicDNA files are likely to be more expensive than current music downloads. Bach says the price will be set by record labels and retailers, but hopes it will be in a similar range to current digital files.

Time will tell if the life of the MP3 is coming to an end or not

The first worm to infect the Apple iPhone has been discovered spreading "in the wild" in Australia.

The self-propagating program changes the phone’s wallpaper to a picture of 80s singer Rick Astley with the message "ikee is never going to give you up".

The worm, known as ikee, only affects "jail-broken" phones, where a user has removed Apple’s protection mechanisms to allow the phone to run any software.

Experts say the worm is not harmful but more malicious variants could follow.

"The creator of the worm has released full source code of the four existing variants of this worm," wrote Mikko Hypponen of security firm F-secure.

"This means that there will quickly be more variants, and they might have nastier payload than just changing your wallpaper."

The picture of Rick Astley is believed to be a nod to the internet phenomenon known as Rickrolling, where web users are tricked into clicking on what they believe is a relevant link, only to find that it actually takes the user to a video of the pop star’s song "Never gonna give you up".

‘Stupid people’

The worm has so far only been found circulating in Australia, where the hacker – Ashley Towns – who wrote the program lives.

The 21-year-old told Australia’s ABC News Online that he created the virus to raise the issue of security.

It only exploits jail-broken phones that have SSH installed, a program that allows people’s to make changes to the phone’s file system.

The worm is able to infect phones if their owners have not changed the default password after installing SSH.

"What’s clear is that if you have jail-broken your iPhone or iPod Touch, and installed SSH, then you must always change your root user password to something different than the default, ‘alpine’," wrote Graham Cluley of security firm Sophos.

"In fact, it would be a good idea if you didn’t use a dictionary word at all."

After a phone becomes infected it disables the SSH service, preventing reinfection.

The code contains numerous comments from Mr Towns about his motivation.

One comment reads: "People are stupid and this is to prove it."

"It’s not that hard guys. But hey who cares its only your bank details at stake."

The worm can be removed by changing the phone’s password and deleting some files.

Some estimates suggest that up to 10% of all iPhones and iPod Touch are jail-broken.

The practice allows a phone user to install software and applications that have not been approved by Apple.

"Phone users may rush into jail-breaking their iPhones in order to add functionality that Apple may have denied to them, but if they do so carelessly they may also risk their iPhone becoming the target of a hacker," said Mr Cluley.

Taken from an original article byBBC Technology news