State Of The Mobile World – An Opera View

The latest report from Opera takes a look at the world of mobile webs as it has evolved in the year 2008, and discovers that a lot has changed in the year that is now coming to a close.

According to the report, the Oslo, Norway-based Company’s web browser for the mobile handset – the Opera Mini – has the largest number of users amongst BlackBerry Bold’s customers.

The company’s statistics also reveal that over 5.7 billion web pages were viewed by Opera Mini users on their mobile phones in the month of November 2008 alone. This figure is up by 303% in comparison to November 2007. In the US alone, the number of pages viewed using the Opera Mini jumped 200% since January 2008.

An interesting observation of the statistics is that even in countries with a relatively higher broadband landline penetration and lower web-enabled mobile phone usage, there is a discernible trend towards using the mobile web. The report predicts that the next one billion people will use the Web for the first time on their mobile phones, and only later on their landline connected PC desktop. This prediction has important significance for all players of the web mobile phone domain.

The full report from Opera may be viewed here.

New Version Of Norton 360 Antivirus Software Released

Cupertino, California-based Symantec Corporation today (December 30) announced the release of a beta version of Norton 360 version 3.0.

Norton 360 is a multi-layered security software that provides a range of protection to customer PCs, such as antivirus, antispyware, email scanning, antiphishing, rootkit detection, identity protection, website authentication, network monitoring, firewall protection, anti-spam and optional parental controls.

The new version, beta 3.0, performs a “smart” scanning that reduces scan time so that system resources are not hogged for more time than is necessary. The software keeps getting updated from the company’s central server on an instantaneous basis, so that protection against any latest threats can be handled. The beta version also has an inbuilt facility to manage users’ online identities by throwing a shield around usernames and passwords.

According to the company release, the beta version has facility to take multiple backup sets, so customers can backup their data concurrently on multiple destinations. This facility is especially useful in data center environments. Another feature highlighted by the release is a comprehensive diagnostic report that takes a snapshot of the entire network’s health along with a recommendation of appropriate fixes, so that center managers can take timely decisions.

Read more about the latest version of Norton 360 software here.

Linux Developers Can Now Use Adobe AIR 1.5

Linux Developers can now use the graphic capabilities of Adobe AIR 1.5 technology to design and develop their applications for their favorite operating system.

Adobe AIR 1.5 is a cross operating system runtime that enables developers combine HTML, Ajax, Adobe Flash and Flex technologies to deploy internet applications outside the browser and onto the desktop. The software is a product of San Jose, California-based Adobe Systems Incorporated, and can be downloaded free of cost from this site: http://get.adobe.com/air/.

Besides Linux, Adobe AIR has been hithertofore available on Windows (all flavors) and Mac OSX versions 10.0+.

Using Adobe AIR, Linux developers can deliver applications built with web technologies, without the need for a browser having to run in the background. Programs can be coded using any IDE of their choice, including ones provided by Adobe such as Flex Builder, Flash and Dreamweaver. Alternatively, any text editor can be used with the AIR SDK to build an application. Frameworks that can be used to create an AIR application include Dojo Toolkit, Ext JS, jQuery, MochiKit, MooTools, and Spry Prerelease.

Because AIR applications are desktop-centric, Linux developers will find it easier to couple the desktop’s powerful security features with their applications, as compared to web-based applications which have to contend with unpredictable attacks, including anonymous or untrusted websites.

Read more about Adobe’s new offering to Linux developers here.

ARM Announces Complete Support To Open Handset Alliance

Efforts to take the handset operating system and software application domain from the clutches of any proprietary behemoth got a boost today by the ARM announcement of its complete support to the movement.

The Cambridge, UK-based company, a market leader in the design of technology that goes into wireless, networking and consumer entertainment solutions. The company develops 32-bit RISC microprocessors, graphics processors, enabling software, embedded memories and high-speed connectivity products. Almost all modern mobile phones and PDAs are built upon ARM CPUs, thus accounting for over 75% of all embedded CPUs in the 32-bit category in the world.

The Open Handset Alliance is a group of 47 technology and mobile companies that have together collaborated to produce Android, said to be the first complete, open, and free mobile platform. (http://www.openhandsetalliance.com) The Android Operating system is in itself built upon the open Linux kernel, and utilizes a custom virtual machine exclusively designed to optimize memory and hardware resources in a mobile environment. The SDK for Android 1.0 was released in September 2008, and its source code is now available in the public domain.

ARM has committed to contribute its ARMv6 and ARMv7 architecture-based OpenMax DL libraries and knowledgebase on the ARM CPU and ARM Mali GPU architectures to the Android Open Source project.

Read more about ARM’s commitment to the Open Handset Alliance project.

Valve hits the sales

Valve are running a pc game sale until the 2nd of January with 10 to 75% off everything!

The deals can be seen here and include:

Call of Duty 4    25% off @ £22.49
Team Fortress 2    50% off @ £6.99 
Company of Heroes    25% off @ £10.49

Grab a digital deal while you can.

Next Page »