IDC announced expectations for the future of the smartphone market. There are no major surprises, but one rather disappointing one is BlackBerry. In fact, analysts predict that the Canadian manufacturer this year will cut their deliveries in half compared to last year. Current year will end with a share of only 0.8%, down from last year's 1.9%, while until the 2018., BlackBerry will drop to 0.3%.

Alternative release of Android, CyanogenMod, has recorded more than 10 million installations, according to the statistics of the project site.

The company Ericsson in its Mobility Report predicts that in the period from the end of this year until 2019 the smart phone market will experience a big boom. In the same period, revenues from smart phones will increase by 10 times. By 2016 subscriptions on smart phones should overtake those on the so-called "dummy" mobile devices.

Intel has released its new chip ZMM 7160 which supports 4G LTE networking and is designed for installation in smartphones and tablets. The chip is already used in Samsung's Galaxy Tab 3 tablet devices which are sold in Europe and Asia.

Samsung has announced a breakthrough in cellular technology that should help us get to 1Gbps on a cellular network by 2020. The new network is, of course, going to be called 5G and represents a huge improvement over current data transmission rates. What is interesting about the announcement is that we are now seeing a similar technology available in the form of 802.11ac for the home. Does Samsung’s break through show how cellular and traditional wireless have become the same technology?

The company AT&T's growth in the realm of new cell phone service subscribers is 57% lower than expected for this quarter. Who's to blame? Well, other than AT&T of course, Verizon and the iPhone, apparently. AT&T relies heavily on the iPhone for its user base, and the new iPhone 5 has been in such high demand, but has also a low supply.

Microsoft has made Windows Phone 8 semi-official at its Windows Phone Developer Conference happening right now. We call it semi-official because right now Microsoft is not showing off any hardware running it. They are waiting to have that announcement later. So while the OS is out of the bag and we have some new information no one has made any specific announcements of support for the new OS.

Security is the bane of every network in the world. It is the reason why so many IT technicians end up burnt out or (in the case of men) bald. We all know that the only secure system is one that does not allow anything (and I mean ANYTHING) to connect, or input to the system. As soon as you connect a system to any type of input device or medium (say a network/the Internet) you open up vulnerabilities.

Even the most sophisticated firewall can be gotten around with time, effort and some creativity. This is all just the wired networks; we have not even begun to talk about wireless networks. These handy security holes create a whole new level stress for the IT technician. After all with not much more than a laptop and the right Lunix ISO you can grab packets out of the air and find out the WEP, WPA and if you are patient enough even WPA2 keys. True you can add RADIUS (Remote Authentication Dial In User Service) and certificates into the mix if you have the budget, but what about the home user? Or even better… what about our cellular networks?

For a long time it was thought that wireless could be secured with simple encryption and trusted networks. Then we found that these data packets can be intercepted in route and either spoofed or blocked creating a security breach. This, in extremely simplistic terms, is a Man-in-the-Middle attack and it is a very dangerous one.

Fortunately some researchers at MIT have developed a protocol that can potentially prevent these be encoding a specific transmission sequence in the originating packet. The sequence is a series of ones and zeros (data and silence) that when put together indicate to the receiving party that this is the correct sender.  It does this in multiple ways to prevent, blocking, Collision, and spoofing of packets which are used by the most common Man-in-the-Middle attacks.  The nice thing about this new protocol is that it can be applied to almost any network including both 4G network types.

Source NetworkWorld

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Not too long ago I made a comment about the iPhone losing ground in the smart phone market. Not too long after that I started looking at the mobile phone market; not because I was trying to find some information about on smartphone purchases, but because I was interested in a new phone. The phone I was replacing is one of the most popular Android based phones on the Market. It was actually one that many people went to after the issues with the iPhone 4 (the grip of death). In fact that is how I ended up with my HTC EVO 4G from Sprint. The phone that caught my eye was another HTC phone. This was the HTC EVO 3D. This is a dual core high performance phone with a 3D Screen that does not need glasses to view.  So I went out and picked one up, let’s see if it was worth the money and time.