For those lucky enough to attend, the Mobile World Congress (MWC) was recently held in Barcelona. Thailand was represented with John Nuvo seen wandering the halls collecting information. Ironically there were not as many new phones announced this year compared to previous ones. The focus was more on tablets and operating systems. MWC was larger in area this year and showcased plenty of devices; the problem was that not many of them were brand new. The existing phone range this year was, of course, quite broad _ from low-priced versions right up to large, fully functional fast-connectivity units like the Huawei Ascend P2 and everything in between.
There was a lot of attention on 7-inch tablets, probably because Apple has now entered that market space. There were no Windows or Google booths this year, and the Chinese were the big players in terms of new stands and devices. Nokia, Samsung and LG showed off their new mid-range devices, but all eyes will be on the next event in New York where the Galaxy S4 is expected to be announced.
Asia and the US are leading in the implementation of 4G but those in Europe need not worry because they will be leading in the race to implement 5G. This is according to Neelie Kroes, the vice-president of the European Commission, who said so at the MWC. Since the definition of what 5G is or will be is still somewhat vague and, for the moment, not that distinguishable from 4G, I guess Europe could get around to implementing 4G and simply call it 5G and declare victory.
In other news, someone has demonstrated 150mbps using a 4G network which kind of makes Australia's NBN, locked into fibre and due to be implemented over the next decade or so, look somewhat out of date.
It took a while, but Internet Explorer 10 for Windows 7 is now available and if you are part of auto update it will soon be on a computer near you. If you are really keen you can download it instead. If you have Windows 8 then it is already installed and this update for Win 7 is a backfill. It took Microsoft nearly two years to get it running on Win 7, which shows how many changes there have been for Windows 8 internals. Corporate users will need to install the Internet Explorer 10 Blocker Toolkit to stop this specific update while they test everything.
According to the blurb, "IE10 brings the same leading standards support, with improved performance, security, privacy, and reliability that consumers enjoy on Windows 8, to Windows 7 customers". They claim it is 20% faster, adds support for 30 new web standards, a 60% increase, including some new hardware acceleration. You can prove this to yourself by downloading the Internet Explorer Test Drive site that includes a fully functional, self-solving version of Minesweeper written in HTML5 and some other web-based technologies as a showcase of the new browser. There is, however, no consensus on how well Microsoft has implemented some web standards. Even with its faults, I still use Firefox though many are saying how well Google's Chrome has developed.
It took a court case and a $100 million payout, but Apple is finally going to do something about the default handling of credit card payments to iTunes, something I pointed out a while back.
The issue is simple: Apple requires the registration of a credit card or similar when registering for iTunes, a typically mandatory requirement. Some children grabbed their parents' iProduct and started paying for all kinds of things like fruit, vegetables, ammunition and currency as they played their games and accessed sites. After the shock when the billing cycle ended, the parents brought a class-action suit.
The case hinged on a 15-minute authorisation window after a user signs into an iTunes account. An Apple ID and password are required for purchases on iTunes-linked credit cards, but only for those 15 minutes after signing in.
After that the children were able to buy items of up to $99.99 (3,000 baht) with just one click. Apple has since changed the parental controls on devices, allowing users to disable in-app purchases, or requiring a password before every transaction.
Since this only applies to the US, it begs the question how many parents in other countries are being skinned in this way with Apple making 30% on every transaction?
In the "how safe is your info?" department this week, Bank of America data was grabbed and published by Anonymous in response to what they claimed were some very sloppy analysts that linked the group to trigger words such as "homosexual" and "jihad".
They claim that the bank is running an online intelligence-gathering operation against hacktivists, something that has been exposed in the past. The result this time is over 6GB of archives containing details on hundreds of thousands of executives from different corporations. A reminder that your info is not safe in any digital form.
James Hein is an IT professional of over 30 years' standing. You can contact him at jclhein@gmail.com.