Archive

OK, Greenpeace, arrest me now as an eco-criminal. I must have single-handedly deforested a good tract of the Amazon rain forest over the last few days. In mitigation, I plead that this was because of the requirements of my job. I was testing the Samsung Galaxy Nexus. The device is sleek and sexy, ha...

Many Android devices ship with stripped-down office suite apps that offer limited functionality loosely based on the kind you'd get with Microsoft Office on your desktop. Having had a discussion recently with someone who now regularly travels without a laptop, depending solely on his Apple iPad for ...

As Android continues its breathtaking rate of growth, malware directed at the platform is keeping pace. Studies from McAfee and other antivirus software providers warn that Android is a breeding ground for malicious software. Google has come under fire as a result, with security experts pointing to ...

Last month, I succumbed to a peculiar urge to go out to my local, friendly big-box consumer electronics retailer and drop almost a hundred dollars on a product that had been panned by the critics on launch, had a dubious life expectancy because of that, and had been almost universally rejected by th...

Linux continues to grow both its reach and credibility among enterprise IT users and customers, bringing competition, price and time-to-market pressure and options to key markets such as cloud computing and mobile software. Looking at the coming year for Linux, these are the key areas to watch: clou...

With the leaked Honeycomb 3.1 operating system installed, my Logitech Revue Google TV box was, for all intents and purposes, driving a giant Honeycomb tablet. The only problem was that there wasn't really any nonsubscription, ad-supported content -- none that I was interested in, anyway -- on the bo...

The Kindle Fire, the Android-based tablet Amazon revealed in late September, could well be the next step in the ongoing metamorphosis of Google's Linux derivative into a proprietary operating system. Even if Amazon does not lock down its altered Android platform, it clearly has created a major fork ...

Quanta Computer has agreed to pay Microsoft a license fee for devices that run Google Android or Chrome. It is the latest deal in a series that Microsoft has inked with manufacturers using Android, and more lately, Chrome, in their products. Other notable wins for Microsoft have been Samsung and HTC...

My first experience with trying to consume news on-the-go was back in the eighties using the original CompuServe text-based online service -- the first commercial online service. The process generally involved trying to connect a laptop to the hotel phone system through a combination of alligator ...

Canonical will release its upgrade to Ubuntu 11.10 on Oct. 13. If you suffered through version 11.04 in hopes that something better would arrive in 11.10, you suffered in vain. For the typical user, very little of anything new is bundled into this latest Ubuntu upgrade. To be honest, my early hands-...

The number of attacks on Android devices has been rising over the past few months. The malware has exotic names such as "Zitmo," "DroidDreamLight," "Hong Tou Tou," "DroidKungFu," "YZHCSMS," "Geinimi" and "Plankton." In January 2010, Google removed more than 50 fake banking apps from the Android mark...

Android Honeycomb tablets are now on store shelves and vendor websites. Six months from Honeycomb's release, tablet makers have finally optimized their hardware to fit the new made-for-tablets OS version to their larger-than-smartphone screens. But where are the apps? Buyers of shiny new 8- and 10-i...

Google has reportedly pulled several Android mobile applications that were lousy with malware from its official Android Market. This follows a report earlier this week from Lookout Mobile Security, which claimed it found dozens of apps in the market that contained malicious code. The suspect apps ap...

A battle to set the model for cloud infrastructure is raging, according to Jim Whitehurst, president and CEO of Red Hat. "We're at a fork in the road," Whitehurst told a packed room of more than 200 people at the Open Source Business Conference Monday. "Now is the time that we're going to choose the...

Having covered Linux in the enterprise and business arenas for more than 10 years, I've seen some dramatic changes in the way the open source operating system is developed and used. However, never has there been as much change in the Linux landscape and market as right now, given the impact of cloud...