Mobile Tech Today

Samsung Offers Tiny, Superfast PCIe SSDs for Ultrabooks

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 12:30:55 -0500

Solid-state drives are continuing their march forward. On Monday, Samsung Electronics announced it has started to mass produce the first PCI-Express 3.0 SSDs for the new wave of Ultrabooks.

The thin Samsung XP941, available in 512 GB, 256 GB, and 128 GB sizes, will be provided to manufacturers for the next generation of slim notebooks. The new model provides a sequential read of 1,400 megabytes/second, which Samsung noted is the highest performance available using a PCIe 2.0 interface. The PCIe connection offers faster transfer speeds than SSDs using the SATA, or Serial ATA, interface.

This level of transfer speed, the company said, allows a drive to read half a terabyte of data -- or 10 HD movies as large as 5 GB each -- in only 36 seconds. Samsung said that is seven times faster than a hard drive, which would require more than 40 minutes for the same tasks, and it's more than 2.5 times faster than the fastest SSD using an SATA interface.

Six Grams

The new drive is available in an 80mm x 22mm form factor, weighing 6 grams, or about one-ninth the weight of an SATA-based 2.5-inch SSD. In volume, the XP941 is about one-seventh the size of a 2.5-inch SSD drive, allowing more room in a mobile device for, say, a larger battery.

Young-Hyun Jun, Samsung Electronic executive vice president for memory sales and marketing, said in a statement that the company's shipment of the XP941 makes it "the first to provide the highest performance PCIe SSD to global PC makers so that they can launch leading-edge ultra-slim notebook PCs this year."

Avi Greengart, an analyst with industry research firm Current Analysis, said SSDs have been coming from SanDisk, Intel, Kingston and others in addition to Samsung, which is the "largest flash memory vendor in the world."

Classic Technology Adoption

He...

Why Google's Project Loon is Smart Business

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 13:53:35 -0500

Google is once again proving that it's much more than a search engine or even a mobile-device company, with Project Loon. The initiative aims to bring "balloon-powered Internet" to isolated areas of the world.

With a tagline "Loon for all," Project Loon deploys balloons that float in the stratosphere, twice as high as airplanes and the weather. As Google explains it, they are carried around the earth by winds and they can be steered by rising or descending to an altitude with winds moving in the desired directions.

Practically speaking, people connect to the balloon network using a special Internet antenna attached to their building. The signal bounces from balloon to balloon, then to the global Internet back on earth.

Project Loon Pioneers

"Many of us think of the Internet as a global community. But two-thirds of the world's population does not yet have Internet access," Google said. "Project Loon is a network of balloons traveling on the edge of space, designed to connect people in rural and remote areas, help fill coverage gaps, and bring people back online after disasters."

Project Loon is starting this month with an experimental pilot project in New Zealand. Google said a small group of Project Loon pioneers will test the technology in Christchurch and Canterbury. Specifically, Google will launch 30 balloons for a small group of pilot testers, who will offer feedback that the company will use to refine the technology.

Greg Sterling, principal analyst at Sterling Market Intelligence, told us Project Loon appears to be a creative and clever way to bring the Internet to people in rural and remote areas of the globe. If Google is able to pull it off, he said, it would be a remarkable feat.

Of course, there are obstacles.

What's In It for Google?

"The company would need the cooperation of...

Authorities Want Smartphone 'Kill Switch' To Fight Thefts

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 11:26:24 -0500

Law enforcement authorities are calling on the smartphone industry to adopt technologies that would deter theft by squeezing the market for selling stolen devices. New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and San Francisco District Attorney George Gascon announced a nationwide Secure Our Smartphones Initiative that aims to see smartphone makers add a kill switch to mobile devices.

The initiative is a coalition of state attorneys general, district attorneys, major city police chiefs, state and city comptrollers, public safety activists and consumer advocates from around the country. The problem they are tackling is real and growing.

According to Consumer Reports, 30 percent to 40 percent of all robberies reported nationwide are cell phones being stolen. In 2012, 1.6 million Americans were victimized for their smartphones. A Harris poll of phone owners found that nearly 10 percent said their phone had been stolen at one point, and a recent study found that lost and stolen cell phones cost consumers more than $30 billion last year.

A Five-Pronged Strategy

"Smartphones have become a part of our everyday lives. Over half of the U.S. population owns a smartphone, creating an environment ripe for violent street crimes," Gascon said. "The cell phone industry cannot ignore that smartphone theft is a crime that can be fixed with a technological solution."

The Secure Our Smartphones Initiative will attempt to address this national epidemic by focusing on five key areas. The first is to analyze patterns, causes and trends behind the growing and increasingly violent problem of device theft. The initiative will also investigate the capability of manufacturers to develop technology that would deter theft, including a "kill switch" that would enable stolen devices to be permanently disabled, eliminating the economic incentives for would-be thieves.

The third prong in the strategy is to understand how the economics of device theft have affected...

Will Automakers Fear Apple's Move Into Cars?

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 07:54:31 -0500

Apple's move to more seamlessly link its new iOS 7 mobile operating system into car systems will force automakers to decide whether the computer giant is a friend -- or a threat to their in-car digital plans, analysts say.

The basic idea, as announced without much detail by Apple earlier this week, is to integrate a simplified, Siri-enabled application of iPhone functions into a car's dash screen and infotainment system. Apple named Honda, Mercedes, Nissan, Ferrari, Infiniti, Kia, Hyundai, Volvo, Acura, Jaguar and two General Motors brands, Chevrolet and Opel, as companies in discussions. But that leaves out other industry notables, such as Ford -- which already has a linkup with Microsoft.

It's easy to see why automakers are dividing up. Deciding whether Apple helps or hurts depends on "what the automaker is trying to accomplish," says Thilo Koslowski, vice president of automotive for consultant Gartner. "To be a leader or a follower."

On one hand, Apple's decision to provide a version of its latest operating system, iOS 7, for cars could create seamless continuity for iPhone users, basically making their car another Apple-powered platform for their mobile lives. Riding on the evolving operating system of the phone also helps solve the software part of bringing the latest infotainment to the dashboard on a budget.

On the other hand, though, Apple is well-known for cutting favorable deals for access to its technology. Drivers would be able to use its new operating system to access iTunes, the coming iRadio and other Apple services that previously might have been provided by other companies or the automakers themselves. Automakers have to decide whether they are surrendering control over access and content that they could sell.

At present, GM has a Siri-enabled Apple interface in its Chevy Spark mini-car and Sonic subcompact, both aimed at the youth market. To...

Self-Driving Cars Could Have Long Road to Acceptance

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 07:54:07 -0500

When it comes to self-driving cars, public relations is a bigger hurdle than technology, many participants at an autonomous vehicle conference [in Detroit].

"The technology maturation is there, but the public acceptance is not," says Michael Toscano, CEO of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, which sponsored the conference.

To understand the safety potential of autonomous vehicles, Toscano says, more people need to have vehicles with autonomous features already available, such as systems that hit brakes when crashes are imminent and ones that keep cars in their lane. "You have to experience the technology to know what you'll accept" when it comes to malfunctions, says Toscano. He says that if it was known that car accidents would kill 40,000 people a year, "Henry Ford wouldn't have sold a single car."

No one would question a cure for cancer that could eliminate as many as 80% of the deaths, he says, and that's what he believes eliminating the driver could accomplish.

Other opinions varied widely here on how much consumer interest there is in self-driving cars and how fast industry and government should move toward them.

Former Volkswagen and Audi self-driving vehicle expert Annie Lien said response to the "Piloted Driving" self-parking car Audi showed at the Consumer Electronics Show this year was overwhelming and showed early adopters are ready. The system, which includes technology installed in a parking garage, lets the vehicle find a space and park itself.

But General Motors would only give a time frame of between one and 100 years for fully autonomous vehicles. And Volvo said it largely canceled a program involving auto-nomous test vehicles that followed each other on a track.

While up to 97% of crashes are caused by driver error, the keynote speaker warned that the public is far less accepting of mechanical failure than human error. Massachusetts Institute...

Apple Exec Denies Fixing E-Book Prices

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 07:48:51 -0500

A top Apple Inc. executive described as Steve Jobs' right-hand man took the witness stand at a Manhattan price-fixing trial and denied scheming with major book publishers to drive up the cost of electronic books.

Eddy Cue was questioned about meetings he had in 2009 with chief executives of publishing houses about what they called their "Amazon problem" -- the discounted $9.99 price that Amazon.com set for e-books on its Kindle.

"They expressed to us that they wanted higher prices," he said under questioning by a government lawyer.

Cue was the chief negotiator in deals with the publishers that allowed them to set prices as high as $14.99 for sales in Apple's then-new iBookstore. But he denied that the deals were calculated to force Amazon into similar agreements that would raise its prices as well.

Jobs closely monitored the negotiations but was "indifferent" about the outcome for Amazon, Cue testified. However, when asked if Jobs knew that there was a chance that once the iBookstore launched, publishers would withhold best sellers and new releases from Amazon if it didn't adjust its prices, he responded, "I believe so, sure. Smart guy."

Cue also claimed he had no knowledge that the publishers were colluding with each other as he negotiated with them, despite phone records showing their chief executives were in constant communication.

"I don't believe they were working together to do the deal I was working on," Cue said.

Cue, a senior vice president of Internet and Software Services at Apple, oversees the iTunes Store, App Store, iBookstore and iCloud services.

He testified at a trial stemming from an antitrust lawsuit brought last year by the Justice Department accusing Apple and the publishers of harming consumers by devising a plan that allowed publishers to convert retailers into "agents" who were restricted from lowering the publisher-set retail price. The arrangement...

Keeping Your Data Safe from Spying

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 07:56:02 -0500

Phone call logs, credit card records, emails, Skype chats, Facebook message, and more: The precise nature of the NSA's sweeping surveillance apparatus has yet to be confirmed.

But given the revelations spilling out into the media, there hardly seems a single aspect of daily life that isn't somehow subject to spying by the U.S. agency.

For some, it's a matter of indifference who or what is rifling through their electronic records. Others, mindful of spy agencies' history of abuse, are more concerned.

Here are some basic tips to avoid having your personal life turned into an intelligence report:

ENCRYPT YOUR EMAILS

Emails sent across the Web are like postcards. In some cases, they're readable by anyone standing between you and its recipient. That can include your webmail company, your Internet service provider and whoever is tapped into the fiber optic cable passing your message around the globe -- not to mention a parallel set of observers on the recipient's side of the world.

To beat the snoops, experts recommend encryption, which scrambles messages in transit, so they're unreadable to anyone trying to intercept them. Techniques vary, but a popular one is called PGP, short for "Pretty Good Privacy." PGP is effective enough that the U.S. government tried to block its export in the mid-1990s, arguing that it was so powerful it should be classed as a weapon.

Disadvantages: Encryption can be clunky. And to work, both parties have to be using it.

USE TOR

Like emails, your travels around the Internet can easily be tracked by anyone standing between you and the site you're trying to reach. TOR, short for "The Onion Router," helps make your traffic anonymous by bouncing it through a network of routers before spitting it back out on the other side. Each trip through a router provides another layer of protection, thus the onion reference.

Originally...

Privacy: The Online Generation Wants It

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 07:52:57 -0500

Amid the debate over government surveillance, there's been an assumption: Young people don't care about privacy. Turns out, the generation that puts much of the "social" in social networking is much more complex when determining what personal information they want to share.

Sure, they're as likely as ever to post photos of themselves online, as well as their location and even phone numbers, say those who track their high-tech habits. But as they approach adulthood, they're also getting more adept at hiding and pruning their online lives.

Despite their propensity for sharing, many young adults also are surprisingly big advocates for privacy -- in some cases, more than their elders.

That attitude showed up most recently in a poll done over the weekend for the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press and The Washington Post. The poll, tied to the disclosure of broad federal surveillance, found that young adults were much more divided than older generations when asked if the government should tread on their privacy to thwart terrorism.

Fifty-one percent of young adults, ages 18 to 29, said it was "more important for the federal government to investigate possible terrorist threats, even if that intrudes on personal privacy."

But 45 percent said personal privacy was more important, even if it limited the ability to investigate possible terrorist threats.

In contrast, less than a third of adults, age 30 and older, told pollsters that preserving personal privacy was more important, while about two-thirds placed higher value on permitting terror investigations, regardless of privacy infringement.

The young adults were much more in line with their elders when asked about the government monitoring specific modes of communication. Pollsters found that a slight majority of adults -- including 18- to 29-year-olds -- said it was "acceptable" for the government to secretly obtain phone call records.

But a similar...

Hands-Free Texting and Calling Are Not Risk-Free

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 07:37:48 -0500

The increasingly popular voice-activated, in-car technologies that allow drivers to text, talk on the phone or even use Facebook while driving still allow for dangerous mental distraction, according to a study.

In the most comprehensive study of its kind to look at drivers' mental distraction, the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety found that as mental workload and distractions increase, reaction time slows, brain function is compromised, and drivers scan the road less and miss visual clues, researchers say. This could potentially result in drivers being unable to see items right in front of them, such as stop signs or pedestrians.

The study sought to measure the impact of cognitive or mental distraction on driving.

The other two types of driver distraction, visual and manual, which involve the eyes and the hands doing something like looking at a cellphone while sending a text have been studied much more extensively.

"There's a sort of arms race (among auto manufacturers) over what's going into the car these days," said David Strayer, a University of Utah cognitive distraction expert who co-authored the new report. "Any function that can be put in the car is being put in the car without a full examination of whether it should go in the car."

The foundation's research, which involved 150 drivers, follows a smaller study by the Texas Transportation Institute released in April, which found that texting while driving using a voice-to-text application was just as dangerous as texting manually.

Drivers in the AAA Foundation study were analyzed while engaging in eight different distracting activities as they "drove" on a sophisticated driving simulator and in an instrumented vehicle on residential streets in Salt Lake City.

Researchers measured brain waves, eye movement and other metrics to assess what happens as drivers listened to an audio book, talked on the phone or responded to voice-activated e-mails...

Promise of Mobile Payments Slow To Emerge

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 07:57:11 -0500

Imagine: You've just finished pumping a tank of gas and it's time to pay up. Instead of having to swipe your card, enter your PIN, and wait for the system to approve the transaction, you simply wave your smartphone across a terminal and leave.

The technology to make these mobile payments has been available for years -- so why isn't everyone using it?

In short, it's because the market is young, highly competitive and not yet standardized. Fledgling start-ups and corporate behemoths alike are all vying for a piece of the pie.

The biggest issue is a lack of consensus over which specific technology should spearhead the market, sort of like the old VHS-Betamax war. However, mobile payment may involve even more service sectors -- from banks and payment processors, to network operators and third-party software developers -- making for a complex, highly competitive field.

Large companies are pushing for a set of mobile standards called near-field communications (NFC). This hardware-based technology can transmit small amounts of data over a short distance -- between a smartphone and a payment terminal, for instance -- making it perfect for what the industry calls "contactless" transactions.

Plenty of current smartphones come with built-in NFC chips, including the Samsung Galaxy Nexus and the HTC One. Apps such as Google Wallet allow users to make contactless payments at NFC-enabled terminals -- like any of the 300,000 MasterCard PayPass locations, including McDonald's, Rite Aid and Hess.

If that sounds like a hassle -- buying an NFC-capable phone, to use with a specific app, which only works with specific payment terminals -- it's because it is. There are simply too many variables.

This high barrier to entry has persuaded some major players, including Apple, to forgo NFC altogether. And when the maker of the world's best-selling smartphone isn't on board with something, consumers just...