Latest news

2011 was a success for Samsung in the mobile phone market by any objective measure.

Building on the momentum of their successful Galaxy S, they took the Android world by storm with its successor, the Galaxy S II. Later in the year they partnered with Google on what ammounts to the entire platform's flagship handset, the Galaxy Nexus.

At the same time, they strengthened their Windows Phone partnership with Microsoft and even took significant market share from Nokia in the feature phone market.

Thanks to a delayed iPhone launch, coupled with strong sales around the world, Samsung was the top smartphone vendor in the world in Q3. According to Reuters, the results for Q4 should be even better.

Analysts are expecting Samsung to report 35 million units shipped in Q4 according to a report from the news service. This would be an increase of around 25 percent over Q3. That is particularly impressive if you consider the iPhone 4S launched less than a month into the quarter.

According to the latest Net Applications data, Windows 7 is creeping up on its decade-old brother Windows XP in market share.

As of January 1st, Windows XP had 46.52 percent share, down from over 57 percent at the beginning of the year. Windows 7 jumped to 36.99 percent share, up from 24 percent at the start of the year.

Vista, the "in-between" OS that was mostly criticized by consumers, dropped to 8.44 percent, down from over 11 percent at the beginning of the year.

Other operating systems, including Mac OS X and Linux, remained distant followers totaling just 8 percent share.

Saudi hackers going by the name "Group-XP" have allegedly released the stolen personal info of 400,000 Israelis.

The group hacked One.co.il, the largest sports site in Israel, redirecting users to a new site where their login info and other personal data could be stolen. The group says they have credit card details, including expiration dates and security codes listed on the back of the cards, social security numbers, names, addresses, phone numbers and more.

Says the group: "We have hacked a lot of Israeli servers and extracted a lot of information about Israeli people. We decided to give the world a new year gift, about 400,000+ Israeli people information!!!"

One group member, "Oxmar," would go on to say that in total they have 1 million Israeli social security numbers and will release them in the future.

Israeli banks have refuted the claim, however, saying the hackers stole 15,000 credit cards, at most, and that those cards have already been blocked. Victims will be receiving new cards within days.

According to the latest data from StatCounter, Google's Chrome browser has finally surpassed Firefox, as Internet Explorer continues its gradual drop in global market share.

As of the new year, Internet Explorer (in all iterations) fell under 40 percent for the first time ever, to 38.65 percent. Chrome increased 1.58 percentage points to 27.27 percent, overtaking Firefox at 25.27 percent.

Google saw, by far, the strongest growth in 2011, jumping a full 11 percentage points. Firefox completely stalled out after years of taking share from Microsoft, and Microsoft has just been slowly falling every years since 2003 when it hit a peak 93 percent share. For the year, Firefox lost 5.41 percentage points.

Safari, thanks to strong Mac sales, moved to over 6 percent share, its highest ever.

There is very little that can stop Mozilla's woes at this point, even though the company just received almost $1 billion (over three years) from Google to have the company's search engine remain the default option on all new downloads. The move is seen as a way for Google to avoid anti-trust issues in the future when Chrome eventually moves to majority market share.

HP has sent out a "teaser" video today showing off their "Spectre" ultrabook.

The Spectre, which will likely be properly named at CES next week, will be the company's second ultrabook following last year's 13.3-inch Folio. The video itself gives no details on the device, but an FCC filing leaked last week implies it will have a 14-inch display.

Additionally, the device will likely use an extremely efficient Ivy Bridge processor. The processors, from Intel, are set for release in April.

Ultrabooks, which accounted to just 2 percent of all global PC shipments in 2011, are expected to jump to 13 percent this year and over 40 percent in 2015. So far there are no real competitors to the Apple MacBook Air, which was released in 2008 and defines the genre.

Microsoft has celebrated the death of Internet Explorer 6 in the U.S. with a cake frosted with the phrase, "Goodbye IE6!"

The software giant has made it a priority to kill off the decade-old browser, and it appears they have finally succeeded, at least in the U.S. Microsoft says that only 0.9 percent of users were running IE6, as of the new year.

Microsoft used data from Net Applications, which tracks notable data from browsers, operating systems and mobile applications. "IE6 has been the punch line of browser jokes for a while, and we've been as eager as anyone to see it go away," added Roger Capriotti, the head of IE marketing.

IE6 debuted in August 2001, alongside the first RTM of Windows XP.

Microsoft says that most of the IE6 users in the world are now in China, and NetApp says there are such a large amount that IE6 still amounts to 7.3 percent of global browser share. Many of the Chinese users are running pirated Windows XP operating systems, which came integrated with IE6, and are likely too uninformed or scared to try to update and tip off Microsoft to their piracy.

The U.S. Library of Congress has noted this week that the Republic of Belarus has now made it illegal for citizens to visit foreign websites.

Violating the law is considered a misdemeanor and you can be fined up to $125 for breaking it.

Reads the LoC's statement on the law, which goes into effect January 6th:

It appears that business requests from Belarus cannot be served over the Internet if the service provider is using online services located outside of the country. The tax authorities, together with the police and secret police, are authorized to initiate, investigate, and prosecute such violations.

Additionally, the Law states that the owners and administrators of Internet cafés or other places that offer access to the Internet might be found guilty of violating this Law and fined and their businesses might be closed if users of Internet services provided by these places are found visiting websites located outside of Belarus and if such behavior of the clients was not properly identified, recorded, and reported to the authorities. The Law states that this provision may apply to private individuals if they allow other persons to use their home computers for browsing the Internet.

That was quick.

Within two days of the community learning that Asus' new quad-core tablet has a locked bootloader, the company has stated that it will be releasing an unlock tool.

Over the weekend, members of the XDA forums posted that the Prime has a 128-bit encrypted bootloader, making it a lot tougher for interested devs to create and run custom ROMs on the tablet.

Says Asus via their Facebook page: Regarding the bootloader, the reason we chose to lock it is due to content providers' requirement for DRM client devices to be as secure as possible. ASUS supports Google DRM in order to provide users with a high quality video rental experience. Also, based on our experience, users who choose to root their devices risk breaking the system completely. However, we know there is demand in the modding community to have an unlocked bootloader. Therefore, ASUS is developing an unlock tool for that community. Please do note that if you choose to unlock your device, the ASUS warranty will be void, and Google video rental will also be unavailable because the device will be no longer protected by security mechanism.

Last week, we reported that on Christmas day, alone, 6.8 million iOS and Android devices were activated, 353 percent higher than the average of the first 20 days of the month.

The figures came via Flurry, the mobile app research firm and the data showed off how popular the smartphone operating systems have really become.

Today, the firm has posted an even more impressive record-breaking number, the amount of apps downloaded in the last week of 2011. 1.2 billion apps were downloaded worldwide across both Android and iOS, a large 60 percent jump over the average weekly downloads in December, which normally comes in at 750 million.

On Christmas Day, 242 million applications were downloaded, and Americans downloaded the lion's share at 509 million of the worldwide total. Following the U.S. are China (99 million); the U.K. (81 million); Canada (41 million); Germany and France (40 million each).

(Pic, source)

Archos has announced the release of their much-anticipated 80 G9 tablet with 250GB storage.

Unlike the base models of the Archos 80, the new G9 uses a 250GB 7mm "Thin HDD" to pack 250GB of internal storage, the most seen on any tablet, by far.

There are four models of the Archos 80, as follows (via Lili):

Archos 80 with dual-core 1 GHz CPU, 8GB flash storage for $299.99
Archos 80 with dual-core 1.2 GHz CPU, 16GB flash storage for $319.99
Archos 80 with dual-core 1.2 GHz CPU, 250GB hard drive for $369.99
Archos 80 "Turbo" with 1.5 GHz CPU, 16GB flash storage (unknown pricing for now)

The 8-inch tablet has a 1024 x 768 pixel display and comes with Honeycomb 3.2 installed. It is unclear when (or if) the tablets will get Android 4.0.

Buy them here: Archos Store or via Amazon.

According to a report from the BPI, digital music continued its gradual growth in the UK, but physical CD sales fell so far that overall the industry saw another decline.

CD sales fell 13 percent to 86.2 million while 26.6 million digital albums were sold, a 24 percent jump. In total, album sales fell 6 percent from 2010.

Fifteen albums had over 100,000 digital sales, led by Adele's "21."

The BPI blamed the UK government and piracy for the figures: "While other countries take positive steps to protect their creative sector, our government is taking too long to act on piracy, while weakening copyright to the benefit of the US tech giants. The UK has already fallen behind Germany as a music market. Unless decisive action is taken in 2012, investment in music could fall again - a creative crunch that will destroy jobs."

While piracy, as it has for the last decade (at least), played a part in the decline, the data seemed to imply that new streaming services were digging into sales, as well. Spotify and other unlimited music streaming services popped up everywhere in 2011, and normally cost the same as one album per month for access to millions of tracks on your PC or smartphone.

As part of CyanogenMod 9, the team behind the popular custom Android ROMs will tweak the default music player in Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, making it available to users with or without root.

The music player, while certainly capable, has very few ways to customize outside of some settings for playback or a tick for Google Music integration. The tweaked player will add a huge amount of customizations, say the Cyanogen team.

According to developer Andrew Neal (via Verge), "you'll be able to set custom shake actions (i.e. for next song or play/pause) that can work throughout the OS or when the screen is off, custom notification area controls that can have as many or few controls as you'd like, the ability to search Android Market, set ringtones and swipe-gestures throughout the app."

Furthermore, Neal is looking to add "a full theme engine" for anyone who wants to customize the looks of the app.

The latest phishing attack targeted Mac users, looking to steal their new Apple ID and credit card info.

RWW explains that the new attack redirects new Apple buyers to sign up for a phishing site that is created to look just like the real Apple sign-in page. The initial phishing email will come from appleid@id.apple.com, which is fraudulent.

Apple notes that all official Apple emails will come from an @apple.com domain and only from there.

Security firm Intego, which brought the attack to national attention, says the redirect link will take users to a numbered IP address and not an Apple URL. The sign-in page asked for personal info and credit card info tied to your Apple ID.

The attack began right after Christmas, preying on the expected surge in Apple Mac purchases.

Google has launched its information hub for the upcoming 2012 presidential elections, the night before the Iowa Caucuses.

The site, which will have U.S. and Egyptian editions, is the first website Google has exclusively dedicated to elections. Elections have had their place as categories in other Google content pages, like "News," but they have never had a dedicated page.

Google says the information on the page, which will be posted on large screens at the Caucuses, will include a political calendar, news articles on the candidates and their issues, the YouTube politics channel "and a trends dashboard that shows search trends." Mashable also notes the page will show off Google news mentions and YouTube views for each candidate.

Concludes the search giant: "As Nov. 6, 2012, draws closer, the site will evolve into a robust election hub where citizens can watch, learn, discuss, participate and perhaps even make an impact on the digital campaign trail as it blazes forward to the election of the next President of the United States."

Asus' new quad-core tablet appears to have a locked bootloader, much to the ire of developers.

Members of the XDA forums have posted that the Prime has a 128-bit encrypted bootloader, making it a lot tougher for interested devs to create and run custom ROMs on the tablet.

Motorola has had locked bootloaders for some time now, and HTC recently switched their stance and released software to unlock the bootloader on phones like the HTC Sensation. All future models will not be locked, said HTC CEO Peter Chou. The company's decision came directly after angry devs posted their disdain on sites like XDA.

The Transformer Prime, arguably the best tablet ever built, has the following specs:

Nvidia Quad-Core Tegra 3 Processor
Additional 5th core to reduce power consumption when 2 or 4 cores are not needed
10.1″ IPS+ display with Corning Gorilla Glass and 178 degree viewing angle
1 GB RAM (LP DDR2)
8 megapixel auto-focus rear camera with 1080P video capture and large F2.4 aperature
1.2 megapixel front-facing camera for video conferencing
12 hours of battery life, up to 18 hours when paired with the keyboard dock
2 color schemes: Amethyst Gray and Champagne Gold
2 storage options: 32GB and 64GB ($499 and $599 price points) with expandable storage via microSD
8.3 millimeters thick, weighs in at 1.29 lbs.