The Revenge of the BlackBerry killers?
98075
Putting the Nokia E61i and Motorola Q9H head to head Review To say that I find BlackBerry-type phones unappealing is an understatement. So the prospect of using two of these phones was about as attractive as cleaning the wax out of my left ear by sticking a knitting needle through my right ear.â¦
581710
The BlackBerry, icon of wired urban professionals, has undergone an extreme makeover. And it's looking pretty good.
26905
Plus: Spammers go to jail, and laptops get LED backlights.
483306
Dan Farber: "It's not hard to imagine a contextual ad showing up every time you Twitter something. Twitter 'I am drinking beer with friends' and a Budweiser ad shows up. Now imagine the Twitter revolt." Oh yes there would be quite a revolt, a powerless one, unless there was an alternate service we could all switch to and then assuming we could get off our asses and actually switch. Yeah, we're good at screaming, but not too great at acting, here. I'm a bit of a Twit, myself, and I'd find it revolt-worthy if they tried to interrupt or punctuate discourse with product placements, but then Twitter's destiny is, imho, to be acquired by a phone company and sold as a feature that gives users a reason to use one brand of phone over another. Not as a way for advertisers to hitch their "messages" on our discourse. We've seen how well that has (not) worked with advertising on email. Not likely to work much better on Twits. Imagine if Nokia offered a cell phone with Twitter built-in, a checkbox for SMS users (default on?) -- "Do you want to send SMS messages to your buddy list?"  Don't you think the kids would go for that? (Maybe they can already do it, it's likely that I'm that cluelss.)
555721
By ANICK JESDANUN Associated Press  I've never wanted a BlackBerry and the 24-hour access to e-mail it provides. I figure I ought to enjoy my time away from a computer to read, think or listen to podcasts on my iPod.
594271
In this age of worms, zombies, and botnets, mobile computers themselves are a kind of Trojan horse. Do you know where that computerâs been? No, you really donât.
601707
IBM will donate 500 patents for free use. Also:  Yahoo joins Google with hard drive search engine & hellip;.  Inconclusive report on cell phones: Are they a health hazard? & hellip;. and more.
591513
Phreaks, spoofers and spammers want to invade your home computer, and the tricks of their trade include airsnarfs, wabbits and fork bombs.
301979
BlackBerrys and Bluetooth share an embarrassing trait -- these two uses of wireless technology have remained stubbornly irrelevant to many mainstream users, despite the benefits they might offer and the hype they often get in the press.
407747
A special kind of upgrade Vodafone's BlackBerry customers have been forced to collect all their email on their BlackBerries after an upgrade last weekend (September 23/24) put the web email service out of action.â¦
504530
Looks like I'll get the drive back soon. First I got a call from the Emeryville store, then I got a call from a person in Apple Executive offices (she gave me her name and number, but I'm not going to publish it here). I'll report back when I have more info. PS: The number of idiotic comments has gone way up.
256148
Not just a push email company...Really! Blackberry attempted to shake off its reputation as a maker of rather dull email devices by the launch of a real telephone, or at least, a close approximation thereof.â¦
47672
(InfoWorld) - What a world. We have to fight off viruses, zombies, bots, phishing, and on and on. Can you believe how many just plain evil people there are in the world? And what is their point? Simple thievery? To prove they are smarter than the rest of us? And think of all the money that's spent on defending, as best we can, against these miscreants or in cleaning up the mess when they get the better of us? Indeed, what a waste. While viruses have appeared on mobile devices, they are, thankfully, few and far between. Part of the reason for this has been a lack of standardization of software environments on handsets, and part is due to the minimal functionality that is typical on these products. It's hard for the socially challenged to overwrite boot sectors, corrupt data, or otherwise run amok on most cell phones today. Apple's decision to limit local software execution on the iPhone is undoubtedly due, at least in part, to a fundamental fear of hackers. While the Macintosh hasn't been much of a target for the hacker community, the iPhone could be a lot more tempting. There will be far more iPhones than Macs in the world in just a few years. Plus, Apple partner AT&T doesn't need the support headaches that come with having a large number of users jamming its 800 numbers with reports of bizarre symptoms on their iPhones. Regardless, being a Web services guy, I absolutely applaud Apple for moving the Web services art forward a notch or two with a very capable platform that might indeed replace PCs for many of us over the next decade or so. We don't need to run a lot of local code to have a meaningful IT experience while on the go. Of course, the iPhone will be hacked over time, requiring updates and fixes, just as is the case with the PC. There are already reports of hackers working diligently to unlock the phone so that non-AT&T SIM cards can be used, and to avoid cellular activation so that the device would be used only Wi-Fi networks -- with VoFi services, of course. Any programmable device runs this kind of risk, and defending against unauthorized code will remain a challenge for some time to come. Which brings me to a really obscure but very important, shall we say, "opportunity" for hackers. Last year, I wrote about one of the most exciting technology developments in wireless, software-defined radio (SDR). Basically, SDR simplifies radio hardware design by replacing specialized circuitry with software. Among the many benefits of SDR are over-the-air bug fixes, the ability to add new features on demand, and dynamic reprogrammability -- turning, for example, a GSM phone into a CDMA phone or even Wi-Fi or Bluetooth or UWB or whatever on the fly. With so much software at play here, the question has to be asked: Could an SDR get hacked? Suppose someone figures out how to build a virus that quickly spreads to SDR-based handsets, disabling them or using them as jammers or worse? What if those handsets are being used for public-safety applications? This is not to say that hacking is the only vector for wireless disruptions. After all, anyone can use a jammer to disable communications in a local area, and any moron with a reasonable shortwave transmitter can pretend to be an air traffic controller. That fact that we still use an unencrypted, unauthenticated communications protocol for such a critical service boggles my mind. The FCC is rightfully concerned about SDR hacking and has issued new regulations for SDRs that mostly attempt to deal with open source software in SDR applications. There is significant concern that open source software creates specific vulnerabilities that hackers could exploit. I don't think this is very likely for two reasons. First, open source isn't the same as open architectures. Each product vendor would of necessity keep certain elements of their implementation secret, locking out all but the most determined hackers. But secondly, and more importantly, the real issue is how to protect individual phones from ever loading harmful software. We already have pretty good techniques for this from the PC world, and there are many effective approaches to solving this particular security concern. It could even be argued that the technical scrutiny that comes with open source actually enhances security and integrity; the real issue is controlling what software, open source or not, gets onto the mobile device. As I noted in my last column, the big issue with SDR isn't hackers or security: It is the need to lower the power demands of SDR implementations so that they have a prayer of running on batteries. The road to SDR-based handsets isn't at all paved yet, but open source is a relatively minor concern.
220173
After months of hearings, Microsoft loses EU court battle and must strip Media Player, share code. Also: Federal judge refuses spammer's guilty plea.... Mobile companies dispute evidence that phone radiation damages DNA.... and more.
477823
âThe iPhone makes me mad,â proclaims Peter Svesson (AP Technology Writer). âNot, mind you, at the iPhone itself, but mad at cell-phone manufacturers who have saddled us for years with interfaces that lure us into labyrinths of menus.â Unlike cell phones with buttons that âcan mean âBackâ on one screen, âCancelâ on another, [and] âExitâ on a third,â iPhone âhas one button on its face. It always does the same thing: takes you to the top menu, where icons representing all functions of the phoneâmusic player, Internet browser and moreâare laid out in a clear manner. Wham, youâre out of the labyrinth.â That, Svensson laments, is âthe way it always should have been done.â
124497
The three-hour outage in Research in Motion's BlackBerry service has yet to be fully explained, but highlights two old stories: the problems with a single point of failure, and the CrackBerry.
622853
BlackBerry handhelds have been called addictive, invasive, wonderful &#151; and now, a threat to French state secrets. That, at least, is the fear of French government defense experts, who have advised against their use by officials in France's corridors of power, reportedly to avoid snooping by U.S. intelligence agencies.