Nufone

Phones and laptops mapped

Google has gotten itself into a guffor again over privacy concerns raised by its Street View cars, which this time have been found to be collecting the locations of millions of laptops and phones.?

The cars had been recording street addresses and identifiers of devices using Wi-Fi networks, then making them available to the public until very recently.?

The Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libert?s, the French?government?body responsible for maintaining data protection, recently conducted an investigation into Google’s practices. They found the search giant had indeed been collecting hardware IDs and subsequently fined them?100,000 euros.?

Last time Google got itself into hot water over privacy issues, the company had accidentally taken emails and passwords via its Street View cars. The MAC address farming that took place this time could, as CNET reports, have simply been caused by a coding error.?

Thing is, short of knowing where a specific device was and when, it is not all that bad. Little can be learned about the individual and you would imagine major cities would have at least one smartphone or laptop in nearly every house.?

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Privacy Google Phones Laptops google street view

Google Street View cars invade mobile and laptop location privacy originally appeared on http://www.pocket-lint.com on Mon, 25 Jul 2011 17:18:00 +0100

Will the sensation go too?

The man responsible for the overall design and feel of HTC smartphones over the last 5 years has left the company for personal reasons.?

The news, which is likely to have a massive impact on the Taiwanese company in the coming months, will see the company’s VP of design, Scott Croyle, taking over the top spot from Horace Luke. ?

“Horace Luke, HTC’s chief innovation officer, has left HTC for personal reasons,” HTC confirmed in a statement to Pocket-lint. “Horace nurtured a culture of innovation at HTC and instilled a strong consumer design-focus among our employees who continue to raise the bar in designing products that capture our customers’ imagination. We are grateful for Horace’s many contributions to HTC and wish him well in his future endeavours.”

Luke has been one of the biggest driving forces at HTC and credited, by himself, with changing the company from a small white label handset maker for operators like O2 and Orange, to the massive brand that it is today.?

“I came to HTC with three big goals, to create something new out of something that has potential, prove that I could attract global talent and change a culture, and create products that truly change people’s lives. I think I’ve achieved that,” Luke told us in an interview in November 2010.

“I get involved in every detail of the product. Every detail. It doesn’t matter if it’s software, online strategy, branding, industrial design, I sweat every detail,” Luke added at the time.

In the past couple of months HTC has launched the HTC Flyer, the HTC EVO 3D, and the HTC Sensation.?

HTC has said that he will be replaced by Scott Croyle, HTC’s vice president of design who until now has headed up the company’s design agency One & Co in San Francisco.??

Tags:
Phones Biz HTC Horace Luke

HTC?s chief innovation officer, Horace Luke, leaves originally appeared on http://www.pocket-lint.com on Mon, 25 Jul 2011 21:57:00 +0100

Mozilla has big mobile HTML5 plans

Mozilla has announced plans to build a HTML5 based mobile phone OS, in a project labelled Boot to Gecko.

Speaking via a developers forum, Mozilla’s Andreas Gal stated that “Mozilla believes that the web can displace proprietary, single-vendor stacks for application development.”

He added: “To make open web technologies a better basis for future applications on mobile and desktop alike, we need to keep pushing the envelope of the web to include – and in places exceed – the capabilities of the competing stacks in question.”

Boot to Gecko will just use Android (“as little as possible”) for booting and drivers – although Gal has invited developers to suggest an alternative method should they disagree with Google’s platform.

The idea is that the OS will be web-based, like ChromeOS, so developers can work on an open and ubiquitous platform rather than dealing with several ecosystems as they currently have to.

The overall aim is for B2G to “pursue the goal of building a complete, standalone operating system for the open web.”

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Phones Operating Systems Mozilla Mozilla Foundation Firefox Boot to Gecko

Firefox OS coming to your smartphone originally appeared on http://www.pocket-lint.com on Tue, 26 Jul 2011 10:41:00 +0100

RIMour mill

BlackBerry has been all over the technology wires of late, with its company’s flagging fortunes and handset rumours regularly snatching the news limelight.?

The latest set of phones to leak could very well be the BlackBerry OS 7 handsets the company touted via Twitter. Given that they are what looks like final press shots, this seems ever more likely.?

First up is the Monza/Touch/Volt 9860, a touch screen-only handset and something yet to be confirmed by BlackBerry themselves. Specs wise, the Monza is to feature?a 1.2GHz processor, 768 MB of RAM, 4GB of internal memory and a?120 x 62 x 11.5mm body. Whilst not quite dual-core Android levels of power, stats like this should at least bring BlackBerry a little closer to the competition.?

Next in line for the leak parade is the Torch 2, which has had so much information released on it that it may as well have been out for several months. BlackBerry’s sequel to its current flagship handset is also 1.2GHz powered with that same 768MB or RAM that RIM know and love. Form factor is very much the same as the original, with internals being the main focus for change.

The VGA screen is almost identical, bar an alleged improvement in touch sensitivity. The 5 megapixel camera is also the same, except for a jump up to 720p recording.?A leaked Sprint roadmap is pointing to mid-August for both handsets to be released.?

It could very well be that these handsets are the ones to turn BlackBerry’s fortunes around, but given the disappointing sales of the PlayBook, a wholly decent tablet, it looks like RIM has just lost its sense of cool.?

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Tags:
BlackBerry RIM BlackBerry Torch 2 BlackBerry Monza 9860 BlackBerry Touch Phones

BlackBerry handsets due for announcement already leaked? originally appeared on http://www.pocket-lint.com on Tue, 26 Jul 2011 12:04:00 +0100

Is this no-frills phone too basic?

The Samsung Tocco Icon GT-S5260 is an updated version of the brand’s popular Tocco Lite and looks fairly similar, although it does throw a few extras into the mix – with the key update being the step up from a resistive touchscreen to a capacitive display. There is no 3G connectivity, keeping the Tocco Icon firmly in budget feature phone territory, but you do get Wi-Fi and Bluetooth to fill the void.

Design

Measuring a svelte 107.5 x 54 x 12.4mm, the Tocco Icon weighs 94g and sports a neat candy bar design. The shiny fascia is largely dominated by the display while the silver edges and glossy back cover give the handset a premium look. However, the glossiness has a tendency to pick up greasy fingerprints far too easily so keeping a cleaning cloth on hand might be a good plan. The minimalist design allows for just three buttons underneath the screen – dial and end keys and a central menu key for launching the app menu.?

On the left-hand edge of the you’ll find the?conveniently?placed volume up and down controls, while the right-hand edge is home to the power/lock key. The top of the unit is home to a 3.5mm for plugging in a pair of headphones, alongside a port for hooking up the charger.?Built-in memory is limited to a paltry 30MB, but you can can boost the memory up to 16GB by making use of the microSD card slot.

The inclusion of a capacitive touchscreen is a neat upgrade. The Tocco Icon’s touchscreen is nice and responsive and although not quite up to the standards that you’d expect from a top-tier smartphone, it’s one of the best we’ve seen on a handset in this price range.

The screen’s mediocre resolution means that that video playback isn’t brilliant, with images taking on a somewhat soft and grainy appearance. The colours are also rather washed out and it’s almost impossible to make out any details on particularly dark areas of the screen while colours, overall, look a little washed out.

User interface

The three-screen homepage can be customised by adding widgets that you want instant access to. All you need to do is tap the widget icon in the top corner of the screen, choose your widget and drag it onto the home screen. Options include a clock and calendar and shortcuts for email, LinkedIn, and Google. You can also add up to four new panels to the three that are there already – all you need to do is tap the widget icon, rotate the phone to landscape view and press the + icons.

Running on Samsung’s proprietary OS, alongside the brand’s TouchWiz 3.0 UI, the Tocco Icon is fairly zippy and navigating through colourful the icon-based menus is a piece of cake. Measuring 3 inches, the TFT LCD screen is impressively large for a feature phone, although the 240 x 400 pixel resolution certainly leaves a lot to be desired. Menus screens look reasonably clear and colourful but reading the text on web pages is a bit of a trial. Web browsing is reasonable, although nowhere near as fluid as the experience you’d get with an equivalent Android smartphone. You wouldn’t want to use it for accessing the Internet too much, but for checking the odd news story or fact it works well enough.

If you’re into your social networks (let’s face it – most of us are these days), then you’ll be pleased to hear that you can check into Facebook and Twitter and there’s also a Social Hub feature which collects these together in one menu with your text messages and email. However, it doesn’t actually display your updates and messages together on one screen – you’ll need to select each one separately to check out the latest tweets, updates and messages. That said, the Facebook and Twitter clients are easy to use and much smoother than some that we’ve seen on budget handsets. The phone also includes built-in IM clients from Yahoo! and Palringo.

Texting uses a conventional alphanumeric keypad, but the Tocco Icon also has an acceloremeter, so turning it on its side will bring up a QWERTY keyboard. However, even in QWERTY mode, the virtual keys are very small and we found that we hit the wrong keys frequently and had to go back and correct what we’d just typed.

Call quality is good – we found that it was easy to carry out calls, even in noisy environments, with clear sound and hardly any inteference. The handset is comfortable to hold while talking, although it’s just that little bit too small to employ the old “holding between chin and shoulder” manoeuvre for handsfree operation. You’re better off using speaker phone or getting a proper handsfree kit. There’s also a “fake call” mode, a Samsung favourite, for when you want to scarper from a situation without appearing rude. Once activated on the settings menu, you simply hold the volume key down and a fake call will appear on your phone. If you’re extra sneaky, you can even set a name and number to appear on the screen and record a voice message to make it sound as though there’s actually someone on the phone.

It’s easy enough to add email accounts from all of the major platforms – functionality is fairly basic, but it’s certainly good enough to keep an eye out for new messages and fire off any time-senstive replies.

Cameras and entertainment

The 3.2-megapixel camera with digital zoom is a fairly basic affair, but it does just about does the job. Along with the conventional single shot mode, a smile shot function will automatically take a snap when it detects your subject smiling, while a panorama mode can be used to stich several shots together into one long image. There’s no built-in flash, but there are several shooting modes, such as Sunset, Fireworks and Sports, which do a little to help image image quality in tricking shooting conditions. You can also set the white balance manually, or just leave it in auto mode. Unfortunately, there are none of the special effects that we’re increasingly getting used to seeing on cameras and smartphones, so you won’t be able to take your snaps in black and white or add any fancy colour filters. For remote shots, you can use the timer function, choosing between 2, 5 and 10 second delays.

Despite the relatively low megapixel count, the camera did pretty well on outdoor pictures, even during a rain shower with overcast skies, but the resulting images weren’t the sharpest we’ve seen from a phone. That said, they were certainly good enough for uploading to Facebook or showing to pals, even if the quality isn’t good enough to make it into the family album. The panorama mode was surpisingly good, stitching the pictures together seamlessly for a great panoramic shot.

The video recording is even more basic that the photo offering. Quality certainly isn’t the primary concern and you won’t find any high-def credentials here. Video capture is limited to a rather lame 320 x 240 resolution (at 15fps) or you can opt for 176 x 144 if you want to get more footage on the memory.

You can transfer your tunes across to the built-in music player using a microSD card, or with a Samsung charger/USB cable with the Tocco Icon supporting MP3, AAC, and WMA audio file formats. Once on the phone, tunes can be selected by artist, album, genre or playlist and the best bit is that the music player buttons are accessible on the home screen, even when it’s locked, saving you the job of having to unlock the screen in order to change tracks.

As you’d expect, the on-board speaker is fairly rudimentary but it does a perfectly good job of playing back music as well as turning the handset into a speakerphone. Likewise, the audio quality is pretty good when listening through a pair of headphones. The phone also sports an FM radio and unlike some devices, the tuner is located in the phone itself, rather than in the supplied earphones. This means that you’re free to swap to a different pair of headphones for radio listening if you choose or you can listen through the speaker.

You’ll also find a few other features on board the phone including a stopwatch, calculator, voice recorder and dictionary, along with Google Maps which is somewhat strangely located within the games folder.

The Tocco Lite does reasonably well when it comes to power, with its 1000mAh battery offering up to 780 minutes of talk time and up to 1000 hours on standby, according to Samsung. We found that the battery lasted pretty well, even while we were tinkering with all the on-board features for hours on end.

Being a non-smartphone certainly has its advantages when it comes to price – the Tocco Icon is available from around ?10 on a monthly contract and just under ?50 on a PAYG, while you can pick one up SIM free for around ?55.

Verdict:

Overall, the Samsung Tocco Icon isn’t a massive step up from the Tocco Lite, but the inclusion of a capacitive touchscreen is certainly a compelling reason to buy if you liked the original phone. The compact chassis, slick design and ease of use also add to the package, while the features such as the straightforward audio player and the sneaky fake call function may appeal to some.

While the screen is large, the resolution isn’t great and that combined with the fact that there’s no 3G connectivity means that web browsing isn’t brilliant, although it is just about usable. Likewise, the social networking offering is very basic. What you really miss out on, however, is all the fun that you’d get opting for an entry-level Android phone with much more potential.?

If your budget is tight, then the Samsung Tocco Icon offers you a reasonable touchscreen experience for your cash.

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Related links:
Review – Sony Ericsson Xperia X8
Review – Samsung Solid Immerse GT-B2710

Tags:
Mobile phones Samsung Samsung Tocco Icon GT-S5260 Phones

Samsung Tocco Icon originally appeared on http://www.pocket-lint.com on Wed, 27 Jul 2011 09:43:00 +0100