Further whetting appetites for its new smartphone, Samsung tweeted an image this evening that is presumably the Galaxy S4, which is expected to be unveiled Thursday. The very dark image, depicting only the upper left corner of what appears to be a smartphone with the familiar Samsung brand at the top, appeared on the South Korean electronics giant's official U.S. Twitter feed
Mozilla's Firefox browser will have no place on Apple devices so long as Apple continues its unfriendly attitude toward third-party browsers, Jay Sullivan, vice president of product at Mozilla, said. The nonprofit Mozilla, which pulled Mozilla Firefox Home from Apple's App Store in September 2012, is not currently building a version of its Firefox browser for iOS, nor does the company plan to, said Sullivan.
Android's Gingerbread operating system has sticking power, but it's finally starting to loosen its hold. New numbers from Google show that nearly half of all Android devices are running versions of 4.0 and above - surpassing Gingerbread's individual installed base. Ice Cream Sandwich, 4.0, and Jelly Bean, 4.1 and 4.2, combined run on 45.1 percent of Android devices, according to numbers from the two week period ending on March 4. This is a 2.5 percent increase over last month.
Google yesterday pushed out its first update to its mapping software on Apple's iOS, adding a few new features. Chief among them is integration with a user's Google contact list, a feature that will pull up any addresses you have stored with Google, and not just on your phone. The update also adds a new option in the search menu that will quickly look for nearby points of interest, including restaurants, gas stations, movie theaters, and coffee shops. You could search for these things before, but the new menu means you don't actually have to type out the search.
Ever wanted something specific from the Google Play store but didn't want to fork over the cash for it? Well, maybe this is the week to do it. Google announced yesterday that in honor of Google Play's first birthday, it was offering a week of deals and discounts in its media and app store. The Web giant is giving special deals on music, movies, books, magazines, TV shows, and games.
The first results of Opera's WebKit brain transplant are now available for people to try: a beta version of Opera for Android. The new version uses Android-native user-interface elements but preserves many Opera features such as Speed Dial. It gets some new features, too, such as Off-road Mode to enable a proxy-browsing technology designed for slow network connections and the Discovery tool for people who want to browse content tailored to their interests.
In response to discovering that hackers were actively exploiting two vulnerabilities in Java running in Web browsers, Oracle has released an emergency patch that should deal with the problem. Oracle wrote that these vulnerabilities may be remotely exploitable without authentication, i.e., they may be exploited over a network without the need for a username and password. For an exploit to be successful, an unsuspecting user running an affected release in a browser must visit a malicious web page that leverages these vulnerabilities.
ownCloud is a free software suite, written in PHP, that provides file storage, synchronization, and sharing. It provides the same basic features of Dropbox or Box.net. It also provides a whole lot more. ownCloud was started three years ago when Frank Karlitschek wanted a free software alternative to proprietary solutions. In the time since the project has attracted a dedicated group of core contributors, made several significant releases, and is available in 42 languages. It’s also spun off a commercial project to drive development of ownCloud for enterprise users.
As promised, the Ubuntu Touch Developer Preview for smartphones and tablets is now available for download. The Developer Preview is the precursor to the full launch, pencilled in for early next year, and is likely to be unstable at times. Aaron Souppouris previewed the phone UI last month, and more recently had a look at the tablet UI running on a Nexus 10 tablet.
In an attempt to satisfy cloud-computing power users, Google launched its Chromebook Pixel, a $1,299 laptop with a high-resolution touch screen that's now the flagship of the Chrome OS fleet. It is a 3.3-pound computer that brings a lot more polish to a product family that's been much more about low cost. Chrome OS runs Web apps in the browser rather than native apps written for traditional operating systems such as iOS or Windows, and the focus so far has been on consumer machines with a low sticker price and business machines that are cheap to manage.
