Nokia's 41-Megapixel PureView 808-Video and Photos

Nokia's new 41-megapilex smartphone, the PureView 808is not coming to the U.S.,Canada and Mexico.
When the PureView 808 goes on sale in May, the device will launch globally, with one exception — North America, according to a page on Nokia's developer Web site listing details of the device. Nokia unveiled the phone last month at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, garnering attention for its 41-megapixel camera.

The PureView 808 can capture 1080p video at up to 4X zoom and has "CD quality" audio recording. It has a 4-inch, 640-by-360 touch screen as well as a 1.3-GHz processor and 16GB of memory, plus a memory card slot.The PureView 808's appeal, however, derives from its ability to digitally zoom without throwing away resolution.But the device runs on the decade-old Symbian operating system, a "perplexing" choice given that Nokia said it is phasing Symbian out in favor of Windows Phone, PCMag's lead analyst for mobile, Sascha Segan noted in a previous article.

Nokia PureView 808 Video

"Symbian is also not very popular among U.S. operators, making the PureView unlikely to come to a U.S. carrier," Segan accurately predicted last month. "Nokia EVP Jo Harlow said the company has been working on the 808 for quite some time, implying that this device was in the works well before Nokia decided to move to Windows Phone."

But while the PureView 808 won't be coming to North America, all hope is not lost. Harlow said the PureView technology would eventually come to other devices. According to an article last week in the Finland-based newspaper Aamulehti, the 41-megapixel camera sensor will soon make its way to Windows Phones.

Google Removes RuFraud Scam on Android Apps

If you’ve been experiencing problems with third-party software from your downloaded apps from the Android Market, it may be because of a fraudulent software that keeps tricking its users to send premium text messages. You’ll be pleased to know that Google has already been notified of this alert and has since removed 22 apps, including Sim City and Angry Birds.

Based on an earlier report by BBC, Lookout (a San Francisco based company for mobile security) has properly informed Google about the existing apps that were causing the unnecessary action. Upon discovery of the RuFraud scam, app users were tricked into downloading an app disguised as a game or program. Later on, they discovered that they actually gave permission to send out a text message—costing them $4.65. At least 14,000 of these apps have been downloaded, Lookout added; with most of its affected users located in Europe. Even though attacks of the same kind are not uncommon, they have increased over the last few months.

The RuFraud Scam was discovered to have originated from Russia.

Lack of an Approval Process

Unfortunately, this can only be expected from the lack of an approval process coming from the Android Market. Compared to the Apple App Store and the Windows Phone Marketplace, apps can easily be uploaded to the Android Market. However, Android developers are required to adhere to the terms and conditions stated in the Android Market Developer Distribution Agreement.

Looking back to a previous ZDNet Asia report, Google said it would automatically remove apps which violated their policies and agreement. This includes inappropriate content or malware. Moreover, the Android Market plans to block the abusive developers who repeatedly commit these violations.

Call to Action

In lieu of this, security experts suggested that Google to perform a scan on its Marketplace. Apart from detecting malware and malicious apps, they can better enforce the security of its valued Android users. Considering that this is a heavily used platform, Google really needs to listen to these suggestions.

Ever since March this year, Google has already removed over 50 fraudulent apps including theDroidDream malware—which prompted infected gadgets to send out delicate data to an external command server. In June, it stripped down several versions of the same malware.

“The flexibility of the Android Market is great, but that comes at a potential price to security,” “It will also become a potentially bigger problem in the future. Android’s market share is going up, and so is the number of malware-infected mobile software,” said David Emm, a security researcher at Kaspersky Labs.

Emm also warned that the currently existing vulnerabilities in Android apps have a possibility of turning into larger security breaches throughout the Google network. Since Gmail accounts of its users are attached to the Android Market, a more serious security problem can cause a bigger problem.

Having recently exceeding its 10 billion app downloads, Google has given its users access totop premium apps at 90% offered only for 10 days. Unfortunately, many of these downloads have also produced an error; to which Google has issued an apology just a few days ago.

[Source: BBC]

How to send more than 100 SMSes in a day

If the telecom regulator's restriction allowing only 100 SMSes a day is ruining your late-night messaging spree with your friends (after all, you need each one of them), fret not. There are several options that offer a richer communication environment, unlimited messaging, and, are available for free. All you need is a smartphone, a free application and a basic data plan that can start as low as 99 per month.

A slew of applications - both proprietary and platform-agnostic - are available in the market. The best-known is the BlackBerry Messenger, known to all fans of the brand as BBM. Two people with BlackBerry phones can chat for free with each other no matter where in the world they are, and that too, in an encrypted environment.

This was the feature that had raised the hackles of India's home ministry and dominated the headlines earlier this year. Like many other messengers, BBM offers emoticons, real-time delivery and read receipts, among other features. Apple is expected to offer a proprietary messaging platform in the upcoming iOS5 operating system. Called iMessage (obviously), it will connect users of iPhones, iPad and iPod Touch. With this, Apple fanboys might restrict their social interactions to other Apple users.

But at a time Android devices and other platforms are steadily eating into proprietary smartphone monopolies, cross-platform messenger apps are rising in popularity. These apps are free and unhindered and offer many additional features such as group chat, multimedia messaging and push notifications. The only two requirements are that you need to have a data connection on your phone and your friends need to have the same app installed on their handset.

Here are a few of the popular ones. Kik is completely free and available for iOS, Android or Windows phones. With Kik, you get real-time delivery and read receipts when you send a message to a contact. It also allows you to have a group chat or share photos with your contacts.

LiveProfile is totally free too and available for iOS, Android and BlackBerry devices. Besides offering unlimited messaging, it also integrates with social networks such as Twitter and Facebook to figure out which of your friends are already using it. PingChat is available for iOS, BlackBerry and Android. You can send regular text, photos and video messages for free to up to ten people at a time.

Since RockeTalk is available as either a Symbian or Java app, it works on almost any device - including most smartphones and feature phones. It does regular data and photo messaging, but RockeTalk is different from the others because it includes communities where you can browse content shared by others.

Finally, WhatsApp has support for iPhone, Android, Symbian and BlackBerry. There's one key difference between WhatsApp and all the others. The others use a PIN, username or some sort of unique identifier - you have to add friends you want to chat with. WhatsApp reads the address book in your phone and automatically identifies which of your contacts is using WhatsApp - because each account is linked to a phone number and SIM card.

That's also why WhatsApp is not supported on the iPad and iPod Touch. WhatsApp is also the only messenger that's not completely free - you get one year of free usage, after which you pay $1.99 for every year of unlimited usage. Other advantages include support for offline messages location sharing and complete chat history.

Mozilla Prepping Mobile Operating System for the Web

 

App development is a big business, but one of the frustrating things about the process is that developers must focus on one mobile operating system or develop for several platforms. Mozilla is looking to change this with the development of a mobile OS for the Web that will initially borrow some components from Android.
The company, known for its Firefox browser, announced plans for the Boot to Gecko (B2G) project, which will focus on the development of a "complete, standalone operating system for the open Web."

"We will do this work in the open, we will release the source in real-time, we will take all successful additions to an appropriate standards group, and we will track changes that come out of that process," the group working on the project said in their announcement. "We aren't trying to have these native-grade apps just run on Firefox, we're trying to have them run on the Web."

B2G will draw some of its inspiration from Android. On booting, for example, the project will "prototype a low-level substrate for an Android-compatible device." When asked on the Google forums why the team was taking this approach rather than booting from a PC, Mike Shaver, vice president of technical strategy for the Mozilla Corporation, said "we might prototype some stuff on a PC, but the project is really about the device space. We had to pick somewhere, and this seems like where the energy is best spent."With desktop devices, meanwhile, it's often difficult to find "good open drivers ... without pulling in things like X," Shaver wrote.
Shaver insisted that B2G intends "to use as little of Android as possible." The team wanted to "start from something that's known to boot and have access to all the devices we want to expose."

Another forum user commented that Android often "brings a lot of baggage that's useful for building a mobile phone running Java apps but does less for bringing up a Gecko." Brendan Eich, chief technology officer at Mozilla, responded that B2G "won't be taking any of that stuff ... just the kernel and device drivers."
"These days the device makers are moving to Android. To get all the HAL benefits, we want to reuse its lower layers," Eich continued.

The idea behind B2G is to push the envelope of the Web, the team said. "Mozilla believes that the Web can displace proprietary, single-vendor stacks for application development," they wrote.
They pointed to the pdf.js project, which is tracking gaps in HTML5 that need to be filled in order for it to become a superset of PDF. "We want to take a bigger step now, and find the gaps that keep web developers from being able to build apps that are—in every way—the equals of native apps built for the iPhone, Android, and WP7," they said.

In addition to the Android-based prototype, developers said B2G will require work in several other areas, including the development of new Web APIs that will support things like telephony, SMS, camera, USB, Bluetooth, and NFC. It will also require a privilege model, which will make sure these new capabilities are safely exposed to pages and apps.

The team stressed that B2G is still "in its infancy," but said they wanted to discuss it publicly in order to get as much feedback as possible from inside and outside Mozilla. They encouraged interested parties to join the discussion online.In September, Mozilla Labs released a concept design (video below) for a hypothetical smartphone, dubbed "Seabird," but said at the time that it didn't plan to make the device.

New details on Apple iPhone 5 'revealed'

 

Apple Inc plans to introduce a new iPhone in September that boasts a stronger chip for processing data and a more advanced camera, according to two people familiar with the plans. The device will include the A5 processor, the more powerful chip that Apple added to the iPad 2 earlier this year, along with an 8 megapixel camera, up from the 5 megapixel model in the iPhone 4, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the details aren't public. Apple is also testing a new version of the iPad that has a higher resolution screen, similar to the one now used in the iPhone 4, one of the people said.

The iPhone is Apple's top seller, accounting for half of revenue last quarter. A faster chip will enable speedier data downloads and help the device vie with handsets being introduced by rivals such as Samsung Electronics Co that are powered by Google Inc's Android software. The iPhone's gains versus the BlackBerry partly explain why Research In Motion Ltd (RIM) last week forecast its first-ever quarterly sales decline.

The new phone will run the iOS 5 operating system Apple previewed at a developer's conference this month. Codenamed "Telluride," it will feature already-announced features such as improved messaging and photo-sharing, one person said. It's also designed to run on all of Apple's mobile devices, this person said. Until late last year, iPads, iPhones and iPod touches used slightly different versions of iOS.

Apple pushed back the release of the next iPhone -- its fifth -- to coincide with the release of the new iOS 5, the people said. Apple has not kept pace with Google in the smartphone market, projected by researcher IDC to reach almost 1 billion units by the end of 2015. This year, Apple is projected to account for 18.2 percent of the global market, compared with 38.9 percent for devices running Android, according to IDC in Framingham, Massachusetts.

Apple is also working to finish a cheaper version of the iPhone aimed at attracting customers in developing countries, the people said. This device would use chips and displays of similar quality to today's iPhone 4, the people said. Apple's work on a smaller, lower-priced version of the device was discussed by people familiar with the matter in February.

The screen resolution on Apple's new iPad would be about one-third higher than that of the iPad 2 and will boast a more responsive touchscreen, one of the people said. The new iPhone will closely resemble the iPhone 4, the people said. As Apple upgrades its mobile operating system it may eventually stop guaranteeing that all iOS apps run on older models, such as the iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS, one person said.