Google’s Chrome and Apple’s Safari posted record numbers in January while Microsoft’s Internet Explorer lost ground for the sixth month running, Net Applications says.

View full post on Macworld

Yesterday we mentioned the Google Developer Day event that took place in Germany, but we didn’t come across this cool little bit of Android awesomeness until today. Looks like a group of 72 Android developers got together to set a blinkenlights world record using the Blinkendroid app. What exactly does that entail? Blinkendroid allows a singular image or animation to be displayed across many screens, turning each small display into part of a much larger one. But why should I attempt to explain it? See for yourself below:

[via AndroidCommunity]

View full post on Android Phone Fans

Computer World determined how long Android updates took for the four major carriers and for the 5 major manufacturers. Google’s Android 2.2 upgrade, best known as Froyo, came out in June, 2010. Froyo has slowly made its way onto handsets around the world. Some phones got the software within a matter of days. Others waited weeks or months.

The chart above shows the percentage of Android phones upgraded to Froyo on each carrier within 2010, while a second chart shows how long, on average, each carrier took to deliver the software. Verizon takes top honors for its Android upgrades with a third of the carrier’s qualifying Android phones received Froyo within the software’s first six months.

The chart above shows the percentage of Android phones upgraded by each manufacturer within 2010; a second chart shows how long, on average, each manufacturer took to deliver the software. HTC is the best manufacturer, with 50 percent of its Android phones having been bumped to Froyo within 2010. Its average upgrade time is also relatively impressive, at 56 days. Motorola comes in second for number of upgrades, and Samsung is third. Dell, LG and Sony bring up the rear.

Ivan Seidenberg discusses Verizon’s adoption of the iPhone with Charlie Rose on Business Week.

About 26 percent of AT&T’s iPhone owners plan to switch to Verizon this year, according to one survey.

Only 4% of Verizon’s customers plan to switch in the next 90 days. In comparison, 10% of Sprint/Nextel’s customers say they plan to switch, as do 15% of both T-Mobile’s and AT&T’s.

View full post on dailywireless.org

Supernova in Galaxy UGC 3378 (Image from Royal Astronomical Society of Canada Press Release)

A 10 year old girl from New Brunswick now holds the record for being the youngest person to discover a supernova, according to an announcement by the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada. Press release here. Kathryn Aurora Gray of Fredericton found the Supernova (located in galaxy UGC 3378), while being supervised by her father, Paul Gray and family friend, David Lane.

By the way, this was the 7th supernova discovery Kathryn’s father has been a part of, although his first wasn’t until he’d reached the grizzled age of 22.

From the National Post.

View full post on GeekDad

HTC’s outlook through the end of the year looks promising to them as they plan to rake in at least $3.3 billion after doubling smartphone shipments to 9 million units. For the entirety of the year, they expect to reach 24.5 million units – more than double the amount of units they shipped in 2009.

Android will play a key factor in their success, just as it always has, but let’s not forget that HTC’s banking heavily on Windows Phone 7. They have several phones launching this quarter for carriers around the globe, but it remains to be seen how much momentum Microsoft gets thanks to their generous push.

And yet, HTC still expects Android to gain share rapidly, saying to Reuters:

We believe the overall pie is still big enough to have at least three to four tier-1 players enjoy the growth momentum.

But that growth momentum will take a skid, they expect, as other competitors aren’t sleeping on the Android or Windows Phone 7 train. LG and Samsung are two of the biggest supporters of Microsoft’s extensive mobile re-branding, and they both have their cards in the Android space, as well (with Samsung being more notable than LG in that particular regard.)

Competition is healthy, folks, and there’s no doubt it’s plentiful. 2011 will be a great year for smartphone addicts.

View full post on Android Phone Fans

BoxTone Announces Record Growth in Third Quarter of 2010 Driven by Success of Mobile Service Management Software
ORLANDO, Fla.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–BoxTone today announced record growth in the third quarter of fiscal year 2010, registering a more than 50 percent increase in sales, compared to the third quarter of fiscal year 2009.

Read more on Business Wire

Apple handily beat Wall Street estimates for the fiscal fourth quarter, by reporting earnings of $4.64 per share on revenue of $20.34 billion for the three months ending in September.

View full post on Macworld

Samsung 3Q earnings likely to fall from record
Samsung Electronics, the world’s biggest seller of computer memory chips, forecast Thursday that third-quarter operating profit likely eased from the previous quarter’s record high amid signs that growth in global demand is waning.

Read more on AP via Yahoo! Finance

Here’s an interesting use of Android. Meet the Looxcie Wearable Camera. It looks like a bluetooth headset on steroids, and in fact that is what it partially is. Looxcie is also a digital camera that can record video with 480×320 resolution at 15FPS onto an internal 4GB flash drive, for a total of 5 hours of footage.

How does Android come in you wonder? Looxcie also comes with an Android app that works as the editing tool which will allow you to use your Android phone as a viewfinder, video editor, and remote control. Here’s what else Looxcie can do:

• Automatic focus, automatic light adjustment with a 62-degree field of view
• 10-hour battery life
• Instant clip capture of the last 30 seconds of recording while continuing to record
• Incoming calls will mute audio recording for privacy
• Instant sharing to email, Facebook, Youtube, and Twitter

All in all, Looxcie seems pretty neat, but my first thought was that the videos would look like the shaky-cam from hell. I was wrong, check out the demo video below:

Looxcie works with most Android devices running 2.x; the officially supported devices are:

• HTC- Aria, Nexus One, Evo, Incredible
• Motorola- Droid, Droid 2, Droid X
• LG- Ally
• Samsung- Capivate

Looxcie will be available on Amazon for about $199. You can read more about Looxcie at their site.

Source: Electronista

View full post on AndroidSPIN | Your No.1 source for Everything Android.

Google Music — or a version of what Google plans for Music to be — was shown off way back at I/O along with the debut of Android 2.2. It has since then been assumed that the launch of Music would most likely coincide with the launch of Android 3.0 (Gingerbread). From what has been revealed so far, the service will offer cloud-based functionality such as streaming from a desktop system to your Android handset as well as the ability to push song and album downloads directly to your phone. But when, exactly, does Google plan to unleash their counterattack on Apple’s iTunes?

The word is Andy Rubin has been hard at work in an attempt to get the service up and running by the holiday season, which does go hand-in-hand with the rumored release timeframe for Gingerbread. The problem is, so far Rubin and Google have failed to get any record labels to sign on to their music store. It isn’t that they don’t want to. One exec speaking on conditions of anonymity said, “finally here’s an entity with the reach, resources and wherewithal to take on iTunes as a formidable competitor by tying it into search and Android mobile platform. What you’ll have is a very powerful player in the market that’s good for the music business.”

See, music execs would love to have someone come along and take the power out of iTunes’ hands, or at least alleviate some of the hold Apple has on the digital music distribution industry. But for the same reason negotiations with Google may take a while. Record labels are very protective of their intellectual property, if you hadn’t noticed, and are pretty hung up on big profits at the same time. We expect most if not all major distributors to hop on board, though whether or not negotiations will delay the debut of Google Music remains to be seen.

[via BGR]

View full post on Android Phone Fans

In a gigantic waste of the Earth’s precious resources, the world record for the most amount of simultaneous “soda” and Mentos geysers has been broken by over 2400 people of all ages in a Mexico City theme park, beating the previous record-holder, China, by more than 250.

Sure, it looks like it was fun (not as much as Eepybird’s Rocket Car though), but nearly 5,000 liters of Coke were just poured down the drain, over 2,400 plastic bottles needlessly crushed and what about all those plastic ponchos? Let’s not even get started on the greenhouse gases used in the production and transportation of the materials.

I seriously hope they at least recycled it all.

Read more (if you really need to) on the UK’s Channel 4 News site

View full post on GeekDad

An Apple patent describes technology that would record audio and take pictures of iPhone thieves.

View full post on Macworld

Computer security researcher Chris Paget has built a device for just $1,500 that can intercept GSM cell phone calls and record everything that’s said, reports the AP.

The attack showed Saturday at the DefCon conference in Las Vegas, illustrated how he could intercept phone calls made by fellow hackers in the audience. Paget said he hopes his research helps spur adoption of newer communications standards that are more secure.

“GSM is broken – it’s just plain broken,” he said.

GSM is considered 2G, or “second generation”. Phones that run on the newer 3G and 4G standards aren’t vulnerable to his attack, says the AP.

Paget’s device tricks nearby cell phones into believing it is a legitimate cell phone tower and routing their calls through it. Paget uses Internet-based calling technology to complete the calls and log everything that’s said.

Paget didn’t record or play back any calls, but he could have. His IMSI catcher can get around cell phone encryption by simply telling the connecting phones to drop encryption. “If I decide not to enable encryption I just disable it,” he said. “It’s that simple.”

The International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) is a unique number associated with all GSM and UMTS phones. It is stored in the SIM inside the phone and is sent by the phone to the network. It is also used for acquiring other details of the mobile. To prevent eavesdroppers identifying and tracking the subscriber, the IMSI is sent as rarely as possible and a randomly-generated Temporary Mobile Subscriber Identity is sent instead.

Cell phone interception is illegal in the U.S. And while the FCC had raised questions about his talk, Paget believes that his demonstration was legal because his device was operating in the 900MHz band used by Ham radio devices. Coincidentally, that 900MHz band is used by GSM devices in Europe “As far as your cell pones are concerned I am a European radio transmitter.”

Paget also demonstrated Extreme-Range RFID (pdf), with a distance of 217 feet, which, he believes, is a world record. “My equipment is capable of far more, says Paget. That 217 feet used just 10W of RF power; my current amp is rated at 70W and will probably deliver a hundred watts if it’s cranked right up – it should be plenty capable of 500+ feet reads,” said Paget.

Gen2 RFID tags that operate in the 902-928MHz band. Many retail chains such as Walmart use Gen2 to tag high-value items. They are currently being issued as part of the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative; this includes the US Passport Card, the NEXUS, the FAST tag (used by the DOD and Walmart), and SENTRI border-crossing cards, as well as the Enhanced Drivers Licence that is currently being issued by several US states and many Canadian provinces. Paget increased the range to hundreds of feet by using 13dB gain antennas and a 70 watt linear amp.

Whereas GPS tracking requires an active cellular or satelite link, RFID tracking can be active or passive. It works like radar, but bounces back a unique identity number.

Paget concludes:

Finally, we must consider the theoretical limit for such a system. The largest parabolic dish in the world is the 300-meter Arecibo radio observatory; at 900MHz this dish has an effective gain of around 70dBi. Applying a legal-limit amateur radio transmitter (as is sometimes allowed) of 1500 watts to this dish gives a read range of around 317 miles – well into the range of low-earth orbit.

NROL-26 reportedly packed a 100 meter dish. The 5-to-6 ton eavesdropping satellite was launched on January 18, 2009, and designed for monitoring terrorists, with a 350 foot antenna. Bigger antennas would likely require bigger rockets. Blimps may prove to be more cost/effective for tracking Walmart merchandise, of course.

The second-generation UHF RFID standard (Gen 2 RFID) from EPCglobal, is also used by Wal-Mart for tracking socks, undershirts and underwear carrying Electronic Product Codes (EPCs). They are typically deactivated on purchase. You are what you wear!

Many species of animals have been microchipped with RF-ID tags, including parrots, horses, llamas, sheep, pigs, rabbits, deer, ferrets, snakes, lizards, alligators, turtles, toads, fish, mice, and prairie dogs — even whales and elephants. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service uses microchipping in its research of wild bison, black-footed ferrets, grizzly bears, elk, white-tailed deer, giant land tortoises and armadillos.

USGS and USFWS are tracking fish movement in the Columbia River by implanting juveniles with radio tags, which are more effective in shallow water.

Related RFID stories on Dailywireless include; RFID Meetup, RFID: Bigger Than Ever, Geosync Spies, Tracking Salmon on the Columbia River, RFID: Feared and Praised, Tracking al-Qaeda, Man on the Moon: Later, Tracking Tags: Push & Pull, RFID Talks Trash, 2009 Boston Marathon, Sensor Nets Get Social, Cardiac Telemetry via Bluetooth, Researcher Clones RFID Passports While Driving, Partnerships for RF-ID/WiFi Monitoring Expand, WiFi Tracking Tags from AeroScout, PanGo & Ekahau, and 101 Mobile Healthcare Applications.

View full post on dailywireless.org

Apple reported $15.7 billion in sales — a quarterly record — and profits of $3.25 billion for its fiscal third quarter. The company saw strong sales growth for both the Mac and iPhone, as well as an impressive debut for the iPad.

View full post on Macworld

Apple has reportedly blown past all previous launch-day records. Oppenheimer’s Yair Reiner guesses that 1.5 million were sold on day one. That’s one and a half as many iPhones as Apple sold in three days in 2009 and 2008.

Here’s his math:

• 600,000 pre-ordered in the U.S.
• plus 100,000 non- reserved units sold day of at Apple stores (average 500 per store)
• plus 50,000 sold into Best Buy (~45 per store, according to our checks).
• Then multiply by two for international.

Some 77% of early iPhone 4 buyers are upgrading from old iPhones and 16 percent switched to AT&T from another wireless service, down from 28 percent last year, says Piper Jaffray.

“We think Apple will sell between 1.0 million to 1.5 million iPhones in the first three days (including preorders),” writes Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster in a report to clients issued early today, one day after the new iPhone 4 went on sale.

There have been 50 million iPhones sold so far (along with 450,000 iPads). Steve Jobs said Apple is expected to sell some 37.3 million iPhones during 2010, an increase of 35% over his estimate of 27.7 million for calendar year 2009.

View full post on dailywireless.org

iPhone 4 sets record sale pace despite gaffe
Sales of Apple Inc’s latest iPhone blew away expectations in its first day on the market despite shortages and an embarrassing online ordering glitch that thwarted many shoppers.

Read more on Reuters via Yahoo! News

Apple iPhone 4 sets record sale pace despite gaffe
Sales of Apple Inc’s latest iPhone blew away expectations in its first day on the market despite shortages and an embarrassing online ordering glitch that thwarted many shoppers.

Read more on Reuters via Yahoo! News

Mint Muenze Oesterreich Sells Gold to a Record Level
Austrian mint Muenze Oesterreich has been flooded with orders for purchase of gold. The crisis in Greece has raised the sale of gold coins. Because of fear that euro will be hit hard by the crisis people are rushing to purchase gold before it gets beyond their reach. Since April 243,500 ounces of gold have [...]

Read more on Puggal

Cartoon Sprint: Added Hurdles only knows broken English and it’s incredibly simple, nevertheless, many people can’t bring themselves to put it down. Like many of the hand-drawn apps that came before it, Cartoon Sprint even made it into the Top 100 for awhile.

In Cartoon Sprint, you are a hurdler stick figure or a sprinter stick figure. You sprint by pressing one of four buttons when it blinks red, and not pressing it when it doesn’t (pressing the non-red buttons slows you down). To jump hurdles, touch anywhere on the screen once you get to the yellow line before the hurdles.

There are two things you should know about Cartoon Sprint: Added Hurdles. One: the game is really simple. I don’t mean Galaga simple or Street Fighter simple. I mean Commodore 64 simple. These graphics make those antelope cave paintings in France look like Avatar. And, two: it’s really, really addictive. (…)
Read the rest of Cartoon Sprint: Added Hurdles: New Record of Personal!

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Cartoon Sprint: Added Hurdles: New Record of Personal! | Best iPad Apps | Best Free Apps

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Samsung set to top record Q1 as recovery builds
By Miyoung Kim

Read more on Reuters via Yahoo! Singapore News