Want A $19/Month Mobile Plan?

A new wireless operator is gearing up to launch next week with plans offering unlimited data, voice and texting for $19 a month and no contract.

Republic Wireless, a division of Bandwith.com, will provide the service through Voice over IP using the nearest available Wi-Fi hotspot starting Tuesday, Nov. 8, a spokesman confirmed via email.

When a wireless phone user is traveling, the service will be provided through traditional cellular connections, initially over the Sprint network.

One important catch: Republic will require that its users have a new Android-based smartphone equipped with hardware and software that supports automatic switching from Wi-Fi to cellular. The device must have single phone number that works on both networks.

Republic hasn’t disclosed further details on phones the network will support. The company said more details will be made available on the launch date.

Republic calls its Wi-Fi and cellular mixture “Hybrid Calling,” a strategy it said reduces the costs for network services and makes the $19 flat monthly “membership” rate possible.

Republic estimates that smartphone users are within reach of Wi-Fi over 60% of the time, said the spokesman, Kevin LaHaise.

Source….

HP Makes Changes At The Top

HP has appointed former Boeing Company executive John Hinshaw as CIO.

In the newly created role of EVP of Global Technology and Business Processes, Hinshaw will oversee IT and shared and administrative services, including indirect and services procurement. Hinshaw also will be in charge of optimising business processes across the company.

Hinshaw was previously VP and general manager of Boeing Information Solutions at The Boeing Company, where he was responsible for running a new business.

Prior to Boeing, Hinshaw was SVP and CIO at Verizon Wireless. Earlier in his career he also served as a consultant with Accenture.

Hinshaw will join HP as a member of its executive council on 15 November, reporting to HP president and CEO Meg Whitman.

Meanwhile, HP also announced that Craig Flower has been promoted to SVP and CIO. Flower will be responsible for data management, application architecture, global business intelligence, sales, and product development and engineering applications. Flower has held a wide range of IT management positions within HP since 1984.

Source….

Is Motorola Mobility A Patent Pimp Too?

Motorola Mobility has received $228m in patent licensing deals.

Motorola Mobility, which is in the process of being bought by Google, confirmed in its accounts that in June 2010 the firm signed a licensing deal with an unnamed company for which Motorola would receive $175m and future royalties. Those future royalties stacked up to an impressive $228m in just the nine months leading up to 2 October 2010.

Google’s attempt to buy Motorola’s handset division was generally regarded as a move to acquire the firm’s considerable patent portfolio. Motorola’s handset division is widely credited with being one of the major contributors to the development of mobile phones and while the firm’s smartphones might not be as fashionable as devices from Apple, HTC or Samsung, it clearly has patents that can bring home the bacon.

Although Motorola did not disclose the name of the other party in its licensing deal, there is a better than average chance that it is Research in Motion. The two firms came to a “long-term, intellectual property cross-licensing arrangement involving the parties receiving cross-licenses of various patent rights” in June 2010.

Source…

Hackers Plan To Go After Fox

Anonymous plans to take out the Fox news network because of its coverage of the Wall Street Protests.

Dubbed “Operation Fox Hunt”, Anonymous announced the plans on YouTube to attack the Fox News website on the anniversary of Guy Fawkes Day. Anonymous is also planning to target former Fox News personality Glenn Beck as well as current Fox News representative Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly during “Operation Fox Hunt”.

Anonymous said that it has had a gutsful of “right wing conservative propaganda” and “belittling the occupiers” of the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations. Anonymous recently a distributed denial-of-service attack against the Oakland police department’s website after a 24-year-old wounded Marine home from serving two tours in Iraq was critically injured in the Occupy Oakland protest. Police allegedly threw an object that fractured the marine’s skull landing him in the hospital.

Source…

China Denies Hack Attack

China has denied involvement in hacking US environment monitoring satellites.

Last week the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission released a draft report about several incidents where US satellites were interfered with in 2007 and 2008.

The Commission did not say that the attacks were traced back to China, but it did cite China’s military as a prime suspect, due to the similarity of the techniques used with “authoritative Chinese military writings” on disabling satellite control.

The hackers gained access to the satellites on at least four occasions through a ground station in Norway. The unauthorised access lasted for between two and 12 minutes. While the attacks did no real damage, they did demonstrate that it is possible to hijack satellites, which is a worrying realisation when military satellites are taken into consideration.

China has a bad reputation throughout the world for alleged cyber attacks, often being the first to blame when a major attack has been discovered. The US has not been the only target either, with alleged attacks against Canada and France having been reported earlier this year.

“[The US] has always been viewing China with colored lenses. This report is untrue and has ulterior motives. It’s not worth a comment,” said Hong Lei, a spokesperson for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, according to Reuters.

Source….

Sony Buys Out Ericsson In Joint Venture

Sony has bought Ericsson’s stake in its mobile phone venture for $1.47 billion.

Sony Ericsson was the merger of two ailing phone makers back in 2001 and while some would question how strong the firm is now against its rivals, Sony has decided to buy out Ericsson’s stake by paying the firm around 41.47 billion. The move will result in Sony Ericsson, presumably renamed without the Ericcson suffix, becoming part of Sony’s operations and most importantly bringing its patent portfolio.

Both Sony and Ericsson have agreed to the deal, but said that the last 10 years worth of work was time well spent. Back in 2001 when the Sony Ericsson joint venture was announced both firms’ handset divisions were losing money, and while Sony Ericsson’s financials have never been superb, it has reported profits. The firm also claimed that its Android smartphones account for 11 per cent of the smartphone market.

Sony Ericsson has cited Google’s Android operating system as the reason for its success in the smartphone market. While the company doesn’t have any killer smartphones, its Xperia range certainly hasn’t embarrassed itself against competing smartphones built by HTC and Samsung.

Source…

Blackberry Delays Update

Last week at its BlackBerry DevCon conference, Research in Motion tried to get developers excited about the upcoming PlayBook OS 2.0 mobile operating system, to spur developers to create applications for RIM’s BlackbBerry PlayBook tablet, released last spring to poor reviews and low sales. But yesterday, RIM wrote in a blog post that it was delaying the release of the PlayBook 2.0 OS “until we are confident we have fully met the expectations of our developers, enterprise customers, and users.”

PlayBook OS 2.0 was originally promised for October 2011, but RIM has now set a target of February 2012. To meet the new February 2012 release date, RIM said it was dropping a key feature originally promised for PlayBook OS 2.0: its popular BlackBerry Messenger instant-messaging service.

Developers were looking forward to the promised October PlayBook 2.0 OS release in hopes it might spur sales of the poorly selling tablet, especially as the original timing would have taken advantage of the holiday sales season that will also see the release of the unified tablet/smartphone Android 4.0 “Ice Cream Sandwich” operating system and a bevy of new smartphones using Microsoft’s recently released Windows Phone 7.5 “Mango” operating system, in addition to Apple’s strong-selling iPad and new iPhone 4S, both featuring the recently released iOS 5 operating system.

The PlayBook OS is based on the QNX operating system that RIM bought in spring 2010 to be the basis for its tablets and, sometime in the 2012-13 timeframe, be the basis for a new operating system for its BlackBerry smartphones. Last week, RIM said that it will provide a unified tablet/smartphone operating system called BBX, based on the QNX/PlayBook platform. It said that applications developed for the PlayBook OS would be compatible with BBX, but did not make the same promise for BlackBerry OS apps.

Source…

Will Cortex A7 Accelerate Android?

Texas Instruments (TI) said ARM’s heterogeneous ‘Big.little’ architecture helps it accelerate Google’s Android operating system.

TI, which designs the popular range of OMAP system-on-chip (SoC) processors found in many smartphones told The INQUIRER that ARM’s newly unveiled Big.little architecture will help improve overall performance of the Android operating system.

Avner Goren, GM of OMAP Strategy at TI told The INQUIRER that ARM’s Big.little architecture, which uses Cortex A7 and Cortex A15 cores, addresses a different need than that of multi-core processors made up of identical cores.

Goren said, “We have been using heterogeneous multi-cores since 2002, we always had an ARM CPU coupled to accelerators for video, graphics, DSPs, image processing. This [Big.little] doesn’t change anything in this idea. On the contrary, it builds on this concept and it is another dimension. None of what was held here changes what we are doing in the rest of the system.”

Goren continued by saying that Big.little is a natural progression from the multi-core, accelerator-aided processors of yesteryear. “What we have held today doesn’t change the fact I would continue doing accelerators, DSPs, video accelerators and use [Cortex] M3s inside, but it changes what I’m doing on the high-level Android side.”

When ARM’s multi-core processors tipped up at Mobile World Congress earlier this year firms were banging on about it would be a golden age of power efficiency due to being able to run multiple cores at lower frequencies. Now less than a year later and with dual-core smartphones still having relatively poor battery life, it looks like that strategy has gone for a Burton. Goren admits that homogenous multi-core architectures do have a problem.

“Multicores give you scalability in a range, performance goes up and down within this range based on how many cores are active and what is the voltage level for these cores. On the other hand it has a floor, this floor is when you have one core running at the lowest voltage. What we have identified is a need for general processing power, meaning running Android, even at a lower [power] level,” said Goren.

Goren said ARM’s A7 processor will allow TI to ramp up the Cortex A15 core without hurting the ‘idle’ performance of the more frequently used Cortex A7 core.

Source…

RIM’s Troubles May Not Be Over

Law firms in the United States and Canada are considering possible consumer lawsuits against Research In Motion Ltd for last week’s BlackBerry outages, which for three days crippled email and messaging for tens of millions of users around the world.

Consumer lawyers say they are investigating whether customers have common claims against the BlackBerry manufacturer and might be able to band together in a single lawsuit.

While the outage did not rise to the level of seriousness comparable to a dangerous medication or tainted food, it inconvenienced and angered customers. Frustrated BlackBerry users, turning to blogs, message boards, Twitter and Facebook, complained about losing important emails and missing meetings last week.

Law firms are considering breach-of-contract or consumer-fraud claims, attorneys said.

A breach-of-contract claim could argue the company failed in its obligations to provide service and could include carriers for BlackBerry service as additional defendants, said attorneys exploring litigation against RIM.

Source…

Oracle Vs. Google Gets Postponed

The US Court has postponed the trial that could see an agreement reached between Oracle and Google over the use of Java in the Android operating system.

The case has been in court for over a year and was expected to finish at the end of October, but yesterday US District Judge William Alsup put it on hold.

According to Reuters the decision had been expected, but perhaps less likely was the judge’s other bit of news, that he might hand the case over to another judge.

Perhaps no one expected the case to go on this long, or perhaps it was just whoever controls Alsup’s diary, as he explained that he has another criminal trial to deal with, one that might last until February next year.

“Your case is huge and needs the attention of somebody who can give it more time than I can,” Alsup said, despite his familiarity with the case.

Source…

« Previous Page — Next Page »