80 Million Tablet Sales Expected By 2015

The fortune tellers at Juniper Research have looked into their crystal ball and project that the number of annual shipments of tablet devices will reach 81 million by 2015.

The assumption is based on the fact that more consumer electronics and handset manufacturers will enter the market.

It claimed that Android is allowing both new and existing device manufacturers to enter the market and products have been launched already by companies such as Dell with the Streak, Maylong’s M150 and Samsung’s Galaxy Tab.

Anthony Cox, senior analyst at Juniper Research said that competition for Apple is likely to arrive in earnest in 2011.

Earnest may be a small town in Hicksville USA.  Cox thinks that by then Jobs’ and Co. will have launched another version of the iPad and will still be upping the bar.

Apple, as first to market with its compelling hardware and content combination, will maintain its market lead for the medium term, Cox said.

Products using QNX for Blackberry smartphones, Windows Phone 7 and MeeGo will come to market in 2011 and of course the netbook market will be pressured. However Juniper thinks that netbooks will remain resilient in the business market.  Read more….

Lenovo To Launch LePad Tablet In June

In what appears to be the year of the tablet, Chinese PC maker Lenovo announced plans to sell its LePad tablet worldwide in June, but will first launch the device in China at the end of March, a company spokesman said on today.

The LePad, Lenovo’s first tablet computer, was unveiled in January during the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The device is built with 10.1-inch screen that runs the Android 2.2 OS on a 1.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor. (See a video report on LePad’s CES unveiling on YouTube.)

Lenovo said the device would be priced between $399 and $449. But at the time, the company was still unsure whether it would sell the product outside of China.

While Lenovo now plans on selling the tablet overseas, company spokesman Jay Chen couldn’t say which markets will be targeted.  Read More…

80% Of Browsers Found To Be At Risk Of Attack

About eight out of every ten internet browsers run by consumers are vulnerable to attack by exploits of already-patched bugs, a security expert said today.

The poor state of browser patching stunned Wolfgang Kandek, CTO of security risk and compliance management provider Qualys, which presented data from the company’s free BrowserCheck service Wednesday at the RSA Conference in San Francisco.

“I really thought it would be lower,” said Kandek of the nearly 80% of browsers that lacked one or more patches.

BrowserCheck scans Windows, Mac and Linux machines for vulnerable browsers, as well as up to 18 browser plug-ins, including Adobe’s Flash and Reader, Oracle’s Java and Microsoft’s Silverlight and Windows Media Player.

When browsers and their plug-ins are tabulated together, between 90% and 65% of all consumer systems scanned with BrowserCheck since June 2010 reported at least one out-of-date component, depending on the month. In January 2011, about 80% of the machines were vulnerable.  Read more….

nVidia Goes Quad-Core With Tegra

“You’ll have full photo editing, video editing, writing of documents, browsing the Web, all sorts of stuff,” Phil Carmak announced. Read more….

Conflicker Worm Still Wreaking Havoc

Security firm fighting the dreadful Conflicker worm claim that they have it on the ropes. The team of computer-security researchers said they managed to neutralize the worm’s impact by blocking its ability to communicate with its developer, who is still anonymous.

Unfortunately after years of trying fighting the Conflicker, security experts estimate the worm infects between five million to fifteen million computers.  The Conficker worm, showed up in 2008. The worms intent is to disable a computer’s security measures, including Windows software updates and antivirus protection, leaving machines vulnerable to more malicious software.  Read more….

Mobile Phone Security Threats On The Rise

Mobile phone security threats rose sharply last year as the growing popularity of Internet-enabled mobile devices like smartphones and tablets provided new opportunities for cybercriminals, security software maker McAfee said.

In its fourth-quarter threat report, released on today, McAfee said the number of pieces of new cellphone malware it found in 2010 rose 46 percent over 2009’s level.

“As more users access the Internet from an ever-expanding pool of devices -computer, tablet, smartphone or Internet TV- web-based threats will continue to grow in size and sophistication,” it said.

McAfee, which is being acquired by Intel for $7.68 billion, said it expected PDF and Flash maker Adobe to remain a favorite of cybercriminals this year, after it surpassed Microsoft  in popularity as a target in 2010.

It attributed the trend to Adobe’s greater popularity in mobile devices and non-Microsoft environments, coupled with the ongoing widespread use of PDF document files to transfer malware.  Read More….

Nokia Adopts Windows Phone 7 OS

Nokia will adopt Microsoft’s Windows Phone as its main smartphone strategy, the company stated today, after days of speculation on what it would do to compete with Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android.

The companies will also partner on mobile ads- Nokia will use Microsoft adCenter in mobile devices and on mapping- where Nokia Maps will become part of Microsoft’s Bing search engine. Nokia’s application and content store will be integrated into Microsoft’s Marketplace.

Before today’s announcement, Nokia CEO Stephen Elop had stated that Nokia needed to “decide how we either build, catalyze or join an ecosystem” to change its fortunes. In the end it decided to partner with Microsoft and join the Windows Phone 7 ecosystem.

Nokia will contribute its hardware design and language support to the partnership, and help bring Windows Phone to a larger range of price points, market segments and geographies, the companies said in an open letter from Elop and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. R ead More……..

Benefits of Cloud Computing

In a nutshell Cloud Computing is the process of having on-demand hosted computing services provided outside your own network environment through a vendor’s Public or Private Data Center. Cloud Computing can be broken into three distinct categories. They are SaaS (Software as a Service), IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), and PaaS (Platform as a Service).

Even though the concepts of Cloud Computing have been around for years, it still remains in its infancy. However, its adoption rate has been rather explosive lately, due in part to its seamlessness and ease of information integration.Cloud Computing has many benefits for medium and small businesses by way of collaboration and Productivity. For instance users will have the ability to work on the same projects in real-time from any location whether it’s the office, at home or an overseas location, at any time. The office never closes.

Another reason Cloud Computing has become so enticing is businesses can cut expenses on hardware and IT staffing to support the very same services as if they were on-site (Break/Fix issues are resolved by the vendor and the customer is never aware since services are redundant). Security is also enhanced because leading vendors adhere to higher levels of security features that are cost prohibitive to most medium and small businesses. In these days of high profile data breaches added security is must have.

Businesses should also consider their IT teams will not have a steep learning curve adapting to Cloud based services, since most user environment applications are similar in design to those they are accustomed to using today. Another added convenience is that Cloud Computing rids businesses of the old and costly software licensing requirement for every application/user. Cloud Computing allows the business to buy services on a time/usage metric.

If your business is looking to stay agile and save money, Cloud Computing may be the right direction to move.

Google Dethrones Symbian From Smartphones Top Spot

Google’s Android dethroned Nokia’s Symbian as the global leader in smartphone operating systems in the last quarter of 2010, ending a reign that began with the birth of the industry approximately ten years ago.

The changing of the guard reflects just how quickly Google, which offers its software to phone makers for free, has risen to the top of the smartphone market ahead of Apple’s rapid ascension. Google and Apple have revolutionized the smartphone market in recent years, sending Nokia scrambling.

In the fourth quarter, phonemakers sold 32.9 million Android-equipped phones globally, roughly seven times more than the year-earlier quarter, compared with Symbian’s sales of 31 million, according to Research firm Canalys.

The numbers also highlight Google’s success in battling Apple, whose shipments of its popular iPhone increased to 16.2 million from 8.7 million in the fourth quarter of 2009.

Unlike Apple or Nokia, Google does not make its own phone hardware but instead offers its Android operating system free to other phone makers who can customize it to suit their devices.

As a result, Android has become the standard software for many phone makers. U.S. phone maker Motorola Inc has even managed to stage a comeback of sorts by focusing solely on Android after years of heavy market share losses….. Read More

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