Size is power in the mobile networks business, but it’s only one of the reasons Nokia is acquiring Alcatel-Lucent.Nokia estimates the company that will emerge from the planned buyout will be the second-largest vendor of carrier infrastructure by revenue, a bit smaller than Ericsson and slightly larger than Huawei Technologies. In a price-competitive industry where technology is constantly evolving, that matters, analysts say. But size alone isn’t reason enough to justify the €15.6 billion (US$16.5 billion) deal.As consumers watch more videos and use more apps on mobile devices, vendors are developing new technologies on multiple fronts to make sure networks can keep up with the demand. Putting up more conventional cells doesn’t cut it anymore, so they’re turning to exotic approaches like millimeter-wave beams and LTE networks that can use the same frequencies as Wi-Fi. Vendors are already jockeying for influence over 5G, the next generation of wireless specifications expected by 2020.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
We've all enjoyed a good moan about our cellular phone service over the years. Iffy coverage, bizarre billing practices, and infuriating customer service have all provided a source of jovial dinner table chat in my home. As the expression goes: you've got to laugh or you'd cry.But our trials are nothing compared to what some people experience. Many in rural areas have no service at all.Those unfortunate souls have, until now, had no redress. When powerful telco won't provide service, you simply don't have service.However, in Mexico, that's changing. Just as individual citizens in some Mexican communities have bandied together to create their own prisons (due to a lack of them), citizens are also creating their own local cellular systems.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft’s mobile apps will be integrated into a future version of Cyanogen’s Android-based operating system, as CEO Satya Nadella steps up efforts to make the company’s software more popular on Google’s platform.Cyanogen and Microsoft announced a partnership on Thursday that will result in Bing search, Skype, OneDrive, OneNote, Outlook, and Microsoft Office becoming part of the Cyanogen OS, which uses a heavily modified version of the Android interface.Exactly what this will look like remains to be seen, but Microsoft said it will create “native integrations” with Cyanogen’s operating system. That hints at integration that goes beyond pre-installed apps and well-placed icons.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Apple yesterday announced that WWDC 2015 will kick off on June 8 and run through June 12. The event will take place at San Francisco's Moscone West event center and, per usual, will showcase upcoming versions of OS X and iOS.“The App Store ignited an app ecosystem that is simply amazing, forever changing the lives of customers and creating millions of jobs worldwide,” Apple's Phil Schiller said in a press release. “We’ve got incredible new technologies for iOS and OS X to share with developers at WWDC and around the world, and can’t wait to see the next generation of apps they create.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Huawei Technologies is betting its all-metal P8 and the P8max will help the company make further inroads into the high end of the smartphone market.Following in the footsteps of the Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge from Samsung Electronics and the HTC One M9 is no easy feat, but Huawei is hoping it has developed a product that can compete with those devices.The P8 has a 5.2-inch, 1080-by-1920-pixel screen and is powered by a HiSilicon Kirin 64-bit processor with eight cores running at 1.5GHz or 2GHz. It has 16GB or 64GB of integrated storage and 3GB of RAM. The integrated storage can be expanded using a microSD card.Huawei has also worked to make the P8 look more premium. The device has an all-aluminum unibody that’s just 6.4 millimeters thick.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Automated teller machines have been around for decades, but surprisingly few changes have been made to the technologies that run them. That’s about to change.NCR on Wednesday rolled out new software that will transform ATMs to use the cloud with Android and a thin-client model of computing. The result, it says, will be a big boost in security as well as dramatically lower costs.Most of the world’s 2.2 million or so ATMs today are essentially thick-client PCs, and the vast majority of them—as much as 75 percent—run Windows XP, NCR says. It’s perhaps no wonder that security is an issue, yet banks typically must still administer updates manually to each ATM in their network.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Currently, millions of drivers are traveling around our cities collecting data on road traffic with their smartphones. The objective: crowd-sourced traffic conditions.Drivers simply install an app onto their smartphones. The device collects data, and then the system shares the nuances of traffic jams with other app users for the "common good," as Google's Waze, the app's developer, describes it.Waze and the GPS sensor
In that case, speed and location is calculated by the smartphone's GPS sensor. Waze has somewhere between 20 and 50 million users, depending on who you listen to.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
VMware is combining iOS and Android encryption features with its own network virtualization platform to offer more secure access to enterprise applications and resources.Today, organizations typically provide mobile users access through a secure VPN gateway connection into the data center where applications and data reside.But while this perimeter-based approach secures the communication, it doesn’t protect against attacks that hack remote employees and use their secure connections. Once inside, hackers can move between workloads in the data center with few controls to block propagation, according to VMware.VMware contends it can solve this problem in a way that’s easier to manage than VLANs through what the company calls network micro-segmentation in the data center. That means that at the network level users can only access their own resources from a smartphone or tablet, limiting what they as well an enterprising hacker can do.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
As I wrote last week ("What's behind Microsoft's not-to-crazy startup spending spree?"), the Redmond company has been making acquisitions at an historic rate to start the calendar year. And today we hear that Microsoft has consumed yet another firm: Datazen, a Toronto maker of mobile business intelligence and data visualization technology for Windows, iOS and Android devices. Datazen
Datazen analytics for mobile devicesTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
An Apple a day keeps the doctor away, unless that doctor is now gathering your health data through your Apple iPhone.Apple is embarking on its boldest push yet into health, with a new open source framework for letting medical researchers and software developers gather health data from iPhone owners and build health-related apps. Apple officially opened the framework, called ResearchKit, to all researchers and software developers on Tuesday, after announcing it at an event in March.The idea behind ResearchKit is that, given the iPhone’s prominence, it will allow for much more health data to be collected than through typical studies, helping researchers and clinicians to increase their understanding of diseases and health conditions. Researchers can tap into the framework to gather the data it has collected, while third-party app developers can build health-related apps on top of it.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Office of Naval Research today said it had successfully demonstrated a system that lets small-unmanned aircraft swarm and act together over a particular target.The system, called Low-Cost UAV Swarming Technology (LOCUST) features a tube-based launcher that can send multiple drones into the air in rapid succession. The systems then use information sharing between the drones, allowing autonomous collaborative behavior in either defensive or offensive missions, the Navy said.+More on Network World: The weirdest, wackiest and coolest sci/tech stories of 2014+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The rush is on to sue the U.S. Federal Communications Commission over its net neutrality rules, with three trade groups filing legal challenges Tuesday.The agency now faces five lawsuits related to the regulations.Mobile trade group CTIA, cable trade group the National Cable and Telecommunications Association [NCTA] and the American Cable Association, which represents small cable operators, all filed lawsuits Tuesday.The three new lawsuits all challenge the FCC’s decision to reclassify broadband as a regulated, common-carrier service, reversing a long-standing agency position that it is a lightly regulated information service. The CTIA lawsuit also focuses on the reclassification of mobile broadband.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Android has a bad reputation when it comes to security, which is unfortunate because it's the biggest mobile platform around in terms of market share. Gartner says Android claimed 80.7% of the worldwide smartphone market in 2014. We know that the BYOD trend has sparked a dramatic rise in personal mobile devices being used for work, and the bulk of those devices are running Android.
As the most popular mobile platform around, it's inevitable that Android is going to be targeted by cybercriminals. Cisco's 2014 Annual Security Report found that 99% of mobile malware in 2013 targeted Android devices.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Here in the United States and other fully developed countries, it's easy to get accustomed to always-available computing infrastructure. In other parts of the world, that's not always the case.
That's why on a recent excursion to Peru, including visits to Lima, the Amazonian rain forest, and (of course) Machu Picchu, I was particularly interested in the local computing infrastructure and how people used it. So I paid close attention to the technology around me. Some of these facts may seem obvious to veteran travelers, but I thought they were worth noting.See also: 5 things I learned living with just a smartphone for 2 weeks
Almost everyone has a mobile phoneTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Sharp has developed a 5.5-inch display with 3860 x 2160 pixel resolution, which is equivalent to “ultra high definition,” also known as 4K.The prototype LCD display, which could be used in smartphones in the future, has a pixel density of 806 pixels per inch (ppi) and was shown off last week at the China Information Technology Expo in Shenzhen, China. It was part of a larger, 12.5-inch IGZO panel.Sharp hasn’t decided on a schedule for mass production yet. “Currently there are no driver ICs for small 4K panels, so the panel is not ready for mass production at this point,” Sharp spokeswoman Miyuki Nakayama said via email.The company wants to develop and mass-produce 4K screens for clients’ phones but it’s too early to say whether they will be used in Sharp’s own Aquos line of smartphones, she added.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
This vendor-written tech primer has been edited by Network World to eliminate product promotion, but readers should note it will likely favor the submitter’s approach.We love to ask the question, “Which is more secure: iOS or Android?” But if you really want to drive secure mobile productivity you’re going to have to start looking at the bigger picture.The longstanding Android vs. iOS debate is understandable because these mobile OSes power the majority of devices employees bring to work today. But two trends in the mobile world are uprooting the traditional arguing points -- and changing the mobile security landscape overall. They highlight our need for an actionable, multi-layer security approach, not just putting your hope in the OSes of two major mobile players.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
I recently returned from a 12-day vacation in Peru and, because I was going to be moving around a lot, I decided to brave the trip with just my iPhone 6 Plus. No laptop. No tablet. And only the lowest-level AT&T Passport international roaming plan: $30 for 30 days of $1/min phone calls, unlimited texting, and a minuscule 120MB of data.As it turned out, I did pretty well. Since this was a vacation, I wasn't planning on doing any real work, just monitoring email to make sure nothing important was blowing up back home, and passing along urgent (and semi-urgent) emails that couldn't wait for my return.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It's a recent Saturday and I'm searching for Spider-Man -- the comics version -- at the Harvard Book Store in Cambridge, Mass. Entering the busy shop across the street from the famous university, one must shuffle carefully through the entrance to avoid bumping into other shoppers.Navigating in Seattle: New uses for collected dataTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
While we won't have official figures on Apple Watch orders until Apple issues a statement, some preliminary figures suggest paint a rosy picture for Apple.According to the research firm Slice Intelligence, Apple Watch orders on day 1 nearly topped one million units. The report was initially relayed by QZ which summarized pertinent portions of the report as follows:
Almost two-thirds of pre-orders were for the less expensive, aluminum Sport line, which starts at $349. About one-third of pre-orders were for the stainless-steel Apple Watch collection, which starts at $549. The gold “Edition” series, which starts at $10,000, didn’t represent enough US pre-orders to show up in Slice’s report.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here