The Security Situation Between iOS and Android

Security vendor Lookout just drew a diagram to describe the latest statistics of security situation between iOS and Android smartphone platforms, we know that smart phones have become housekeeper in our daily working life. A lot of personal data is recorded here. The safety of mobile phones is so important because mobile phone had affected the individual's privacy and property and other aspects.

iOS 5 Vs Ice Cream Sandwich 4.0: Google is worried about Siri

We have some interesting news to bring you in relation to the ongoing software rivalry between Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android platforms. Google CEO Eric Schmidt has just revealed that he sees Apple’s new Siri software as a competitive threat to Google’s business model.

If you ask any iPhone 4S owner for their thoughts on Siri, the majority will tell you that it is one of the most impressive things seen on a smartphone and another stroke of Apple’s magic where they take an existing technology and put their innovative spin on it.

On the other hand, most Android users will dismiss Siri at the first opportunity, by saying that Android already had it in the first place, and that it basically does the same funtions as Siri.

Recent comments made by Schmidt though may be deemed as a complete backtrack to previous comments made by the CEO in which he dismissed Apple as a competitive threat. Here is what he said at a recent U.S. Senate antitrust subcommittee, as reported from Apple Insider:

”Apple has launched an entirely new approach to search technology with Siri, its voice-activated search and task-completion service built into the iPhone 4S. Apple’s Siri is a significant development—a voice-activated means of accessing answers through iPhones that demonstrates the innovations in search. Google has many strong competitors and we sometimes fail to anticipate the competitive threat posed by new methods of accessing information.”

There’s a lot of information to digest there, but the clearest indication there is that Google do see Apple as a threat, and Siri is a big factor because of this. Ice Cream Sandwich will include some more voice to text features upon release, such as being able to send an SMS message to users just by voice only – similar to the way in which Siri works.

However, two innovative features that will be unique to Ice Cream Sandwich, are the Face Unlock and Android Beam features. Face Unlock will unlock your Android 4.0 handset by using face recognition only, while Android Beam will allow users to exchange data almost instantly between two Android 4.0 handsets using NFC technology. The upcoming Galaxy Nexus will be the first handset to showcase both when it launches later on this month.

What are your thoughts on the comments from Google’s CEO? If you are an Android fan, do you admit that Siri is very impressive, or do you believe that Ice Cream Sandwich will offer the same functionality in future software updates?

Source is
http://www.product-reviews.net/2011/11/07/ios-5-vs-ice-cream-sandwich-4-0-google-is-worried-about-siri/

Google -- Microsoft sues over Android because Windows Phone 7 has failed

The war of words between Google and Microsoft has heated up even further, with Google's patent counsel essentially charging that the only reason Microsoft has been going after Android phone makers for patent infringement is because Microsoft's mobile phone strategy has failed. He also warns that the patent system is broken and may dramatically slow down innovation.

Tim Porter, Google's patent counsel, was interviewed by SFGate. He pulls no punches about Microsoft's motivations for suing Android manufacturers, or threatening them with suits as a way to get them to pay royalties. He says:

This is a tactic that Microsoft has used in the past, with Linux, for example. When their products stop succeeding in the marketplace, when they get marginalized, as is happening now with Android, they use the large patent portfolio they've built up to get revenue from the success of other companies' products.

Porter takes aim not only at Microsoft, but at the entire patent system, and comes close to arguing that software simply shouldn't be patentable. First he says:

You can look at the development of the software industry and see a point when (software wasn't being patented) and it was a period of intense innovation. You didn't see Microsoft's first software patent until 1988. By that time it had come out with Word, not to mention DOS. So there's just no question you can look back and see that innovation happens without patents. It's also true that since there weren't patents, there wasn't software patent litigation.

Then when asked point-blank whether software should be patentable, he hems and haws, not quite calling for an end to software patents:

I think the question is whether the current system makes sense. During the period I talked about, software was protected by copyright and other legal protections. There are certainly arguments those are more appropriate.

Microsoft, of course, takes a very different approach, and says that the infringing Android patents cost the company money, and all it's doing is getting paid fairly for its work.

And Microsoft gets paid very well, indeed, by Android manufacturers who have signed royalty agreements with it. Goldman Sachs estimates that Microsoft will get $444 million from Android royalties for fiscal year 2012. Microsoft Executive Vice President and General Counsel Brad Smith and Corporate Vice President and Deputy General Counsel Horacio Gutierrez write in a recent blog that the Android agreements:

...ensure respect and reasonable compensation for Microsoft's inventions and patent portfolio. Equally important, they enable licensees to make use of our patented innovations on a long-term and stable basis.

Who's right here, Google or Microsoft? In this instance, I can't say that I know. But I do know that in general Google is right that the patent system is broken when it comes to software, and needs to be significantly reformed. Google's Porter points out that


The period of intense patent assertions (against things like the steam engine) resulted in decades-long periods of stagnation. Innovation only took off when the patents expired.

Source is
http://blogs.computerworld.com/19229/google_microsoft_sues_over_android_because_windows_phone_7_has_failed

iOS vs. Android Battle Repeats Mac vs. PC Clash: What's Next?

Smartphones and tablets are becoming the PCs of our time, and there are two major players in the game. Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android dominate smartphones, with RIM and Microsoft being niche players.

It all feels very familiar, harking back to the Mac vs. PC battle--and analyst Jack Brown suggests the outcome will be the same, with Android dominating by 2014. What can you learn from the past when choosing, using, and managing mobile platforms in the workplace?

Mac vs. PC

In the early days of personal computers in the 1980s, Apple developed the Mac, which allowed the average person to use a computer. It was easy to use, and much better for graphics work than anything else available, so software companies wrote for it, and publishers and graphic artists used it exclusively.

Microsoft released Windows not long after Apple’s introduction of the Mac, and as it improved, more software became available for the PC. Until there was parity, you could get most of the popular software on either Mac or PC. Since there was more competition in the PC market due to Windows being available through multiple hardware vendors, prices dropped, and sales grew.

Mac vs. PCToday, Microsoft owns the personal computer market, with Apple dominating only a few niches that tend to focus on creative arts like publishing, music and video. Finding your favorite software on the Mac is a challenge since coding for both platforms can be expensive, and most businesses release their software on the more dominant Windows platform.

iOS vs. Android

Many consider Apple’s iPhone, released in 2007, to be the first real smartphone, making it easy for the average person to have the power of a computer in their pocket. As the slogan suggests, “There’s an app for that,” meaning you could do almost anything with these elegant and easy-to-use devices. People flocked to the iPhone, developers wrote apps for iOS, and the competition took note.

Then Google released Android in 2008, and as hardware became available and units started selling, developers started releasing apps for it. Android could be licensed by any manufacturer, so many adopted it, and the variety of Android hardware spanned all price points. The Android Market matured and is on pace to overtake Apple’s App Store within months. And Android hardware outsells Apple’s by a 2-to-1 margin, according to a recent Nielsen report.

Innovator vs. Mainstream Player

iOS vs. AndroidThe two stories are similar, pitting the innovator Apple against a mainstream player--either Microsoft or Google--and a single-vendor system against a multi-vendor one. The innovative, single-vendor system sets the tone and gets early adopters, but the mainstream player with multiple vendors wins in the end due to lower costs and greater variety of options. In the tablet market, Apple currently dominates, with Android’s slow start to enter, yet analysts are predicting that in two to three years time, Apple will be the second-place contender.

The Lesson

So how does all of this affect small businesses using these platforms? In the past, many businesses started with Macs, supported a mixed environment of Macs and PCs for a while, and eventually went all-PC. The extra costs involved in managing two platforms on top of compatibility issues and software availability made the migration inevitable.

The same considerations apply now to businesses that must deal with mobile devices. Smartphones can do many tasks, but tablets are more capable for most business needs and are likely to play a part in most business strategies. Should you build your IT plan around iPads since they currently dominate the market? Or, do you wait a bit longer and design your plan around Android tablets, knowing they’re more likely to be the long-term platform in the end?

With today’s virtualization, remote access options, and cloud computing, compatibility is less of an issue, but managing hardware still is. In the end, waiting for Android tablets is the safe bet. The overall tablet market will be more mature, app and hardware availability will be better, and managing and integrating the devices in a business environment will be easier. It’s for these reasons that Android will become the standard for business, just like Windows did. What's your take?

Source is:
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/243080/ios_vs_android_battle_repeats_mac_vs_pc_clash_whats_next.html

Mobile industry needs Windows, handset vendors warn

Open Mobile Summit Senior mobile hardware executives have largely agreed that the mobile operating system market needs a strong offering from Windows Phone 7 to keep the market competitive.

Speaking during a forum at the Open Mobile Summit in San Francisco, executives said that Microsoft may be coming late to the sector with a serious operating system, but it was both needed and welcome. Several predicted strong growth for Redmond’s OS next year.

“Apple’s iOS is a closed system,” said Lixin Cheng, CEO of Chinese manufacturer ZTE’s U.S. division. “Android is mainstream, but I do believe the industry needs another operating system to keep competition healthy.”

Having just two operating systems available isn’t good for innovation, particularly when one of the two leading OSes was monopolized by Apple, he said. ZTE will be bringing out a range of Windows Phone 7 handsets in the US within the year, he explained, and the company saw Redmond as a player in the space.

Kevin Packingham, a senior vice president at Samsung, agreed. Samsung is one of the world’s leading Android vendors, but also has a very good relationship with Microsoft, and will be bringing out new Phone 7 handsets shortly.

“I would never characterize Microsoft as a ‘hedge your bets’ strategy,” he said. “We have a great partnership with Google, but Microsoft has done some very innovative things which will make it very popular.”

One firm, however, won’t be using Phone 7: Sony Ericsson. The company’s new chief technology officer Dr. Jan Uddenfeldt said that the company was now a solid Android shop and was also getting out of the feature phone business to concentrate on high-value smartphones, using Google's OS

“The growth in Android has been fantastic, up three times from last year,” he said. “We expect it to expand dramatically next year as well. That's the winning horse.”

Source is
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/03/mobile_industry_needs_windows/

Microsoft's Bing mobile app ships for iPhone, Android -- not Windows Phone

Microsoft has rolled out a new mobile app for Bing built with HTML5 and available first only to iPhone and Android users, not to Windows Phone users. It may be another indication that Microsoft is turning its attention away from its home-baked development platforms .Net and Silverlight and toward the industry-standard HTML5.

Because a version of Bing is already integrated with Windows Phone 7, the new Bing HTML5 app at first is available to iPhone and Android users only, with BlackBerry and Windows Phone 7 versions to follow at an unspecified later date. Internet Explorer 9 with support for HTML5 is one of the features touted with Windows Phone 7.5, the Mango release.

"The functionality of the app is based on HTML5 and currently only works on iPhone and Android phones. We're working to release a new Bing app for Windows Phone 7 devices in the future," a Microsoft spokesperson told Network World.

The new HTML5-based app, Bing for Mobile, brings the Bing search engine to mobile phones. It also includes features like Maps with a List/Split view, real-time transit information, a search history and a "deals" feature. The deals feature aggregates information from coupon sites like Groupon, LivingSocial and Tippr.

To be fair, Bing did get an overhaul with Windows Phone 7.5, and added features like voice searching, music search and camera/photo-based searching (Bing recognizes the text or the barcode).

Delivering Bing as an HTML5 app offers several advantages, says Santanu Basu, Microsoft's product manager of Bing for Mobile, in a blog post.

"Rather than tightly binding functions into a mobile client, we want to embrace the drive towards exposing our functions via an HTML5 experience. In order for search to advance, engines need to be able to call functions that are currently 'hiding' in apps," he wrote. "Using HTML5, our goal is to build a mobile experience that leverages the unique capabilities of the different platforms including camera support and voice search, while making the functions the apps can provide consistent across the platforms and -- in the future -- callable by engines to help people get from searching to doing."

This praise for HTML5 on mobile platforms may also be telling. Microsoft is seemingly pushing out its own development platforms in favor of the next revision of HTML, which supports rich multimedia applications and experiences. Windows developers, be they in the enterprise or ISVs, have invested years in effort and many training dollars in Microsoft platforms, from Win32 and COM to .Net, Silverlight and Windows Presentation Foundation.

With the introduction of Windows 8, Microsoft caused much consternation among developers by using HTML5 and JavaScript as the basis for its new Metro applications. Although Microsoft still plans that at least the next version of Windows and Windows Phone will support applications built on its own technologies, many pundits say the writing is on the wall.

Even last year, with the initial release of Windows Phone 7, Microsoft had been pushing developers into writing Silverlight applications for it. With support for HTML5 in Mango, these new Bing apps indicate that even Microsoft is starting to move on.

With the Bing for Mobile app and the missing Lync for Mobile app, even Microsoft will develop first for iPhone and Android over Windows Phone. Ironically, the one place Microsoft is dragging its feet in supporting its competitors' technologies is the area customers most want such support: remote access and Microsoft's cloud services.

Source is
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9221425/Microsoft_s_Bing_mobile_app_ships_for_iPhone_Android_not_Windows_Phone

Windows Phone 7.5 vs. Symbian: Managing contacts

Now that the Nokia Windows Phones have been officially announced, we’ve been taking a look at what Windows Phone 7.5 brings to the new handsets and how it compares to the experience of using a Nokia Symbian smartphone. Today we’ve been looking at how to add contacts to your phone.

While Symbian^3 makes it easy to add contacts to your Nokia smartphone, Windows Phone 7.5 goes a little bit further by letting you add a vast range of extra information to help you fine tune, navigate and use your contacts list. Making it easier than ever to keep track of all of your friend’s important information, the Windows Phone People Hub is a simple to use, yet incredibly powerful app for the Nokia.

To add a new contact, you tap on the People tile on the Windows Phone Start screen to open the People Hub, then tap the New button - illustrated with a plus sign - and select New Contact to start adding information. All the usual options are available, including name, phone number and email, and by tapping on any of the options, you can access a range of extra options via a detailed sub-menu.

Tapping on Name, for example, gives you the option to enter information into a choice of seven fields, letting you add details of your contacts first names, surnames, titles, suffixes, company name and nicknames, among others. Entering new information is easy via the large and user-friendly onscreen keyboard and, once you’re done, you just tap the Save button to exit back to the main menu.

To help you differentiate between your contacts, you can easily set custom ringtones and add photos to your contacts in a couple of easy clicks. Tapping on the Add Photo button takes you straight to the Windows Phone Pictures app, to browse your current photos and you also have the option to open the Camera app and snap a new photo on the fly. Tapping Ringtone works in a similar way and opens a seemingly never-ending list of available ringtones for you to choose from.

The option that really sets Windows Phone 7.5 apart from Symbian, though, is the option labelled Other, which lets you add a staggering array of related information to any of your contacts. As well as the option to add standard details, such as your contacts address, you can add details of their website, birthday, anniversary and even the names of their children and partner.

While the option to include all of this extra information is a very welcome addition, we were a little disappointed to see that your contacts don’t appear to link directly with other contacts, or with the Windows Phone Calendar app. We would’ve liked the option to enter details of a contact’s birthday and have it automatically set a reminder in our calendar, or to tap on the option to enter details of a person’s significant other and choose them directly from our existing contacts list, but this doesn’t appear to be possible yet.

Once a contact has been entered into your Nokia Windows Phone, you can then choose to merge that contact with other related contacts, using Windows Phone 7.5’s excellent Groups feature. Using Groups, you can better organize, categorize and communicate with your contacts, and it is just one of the great features that clearly sets Windows Phone 7.5 apart from its rivals.

And while it’s incredibly easy to add contacts manually, it’s even easier to import existing contact details from your SIM card into your Nokia Windows Phone. All you have to do is swipe to the right on the Windows Phone Start screen, tap Settings, then again swipe to the right to access your Applications settings, and scroll down to tap on the option labelled People. Here you’ll see an Import SIM Contacts button that you can tap to instantly your existing contacts to your Windows Phone.

Outdoing even Symbian’s excellent contacts features, Windows Phone 7.5 makes it quick and easy to add contacts to your Nokia Windows Phone and just as easy to communicate with them. After using the great features of the Windows Phone People Hub for just a few days, we’re already smoothly integrating them into our daily lives and wouldn’t want to be without them – one of the key signs of a truly great smartphone operating system.

We’ll be bringing you more new guides each day to all the great features that you can enjoy on the Windows Phones courtesy of Windows Phone 7.5 Mango, so stay tuned and let us know if there are any specific features that you’d like us to help you learn more about.