Apple's iPhone hot but Android handsets on fire

An outbreak of iPhone fever made Apple the hottest smartphone maker worldwide at the end of 2011 but handsets powered by Google's Android software were shaping up as true winners in the market.

Worldwide shipments of smartphones soared 54.7 percent in the final three months of 2011 from the same period a year earlier, with California-based Apple making the most popular models, according to an IDC report released Monday.

Smartphone makers shipped 157.8 million units in the fourth quarter of 2011, compared to 102 million in the same period the prior year, IDC reported.

A total of 491.4 million smartphones were shipped during the year, up a "strong 61.3 percent" from the 304.7 million units in 2010, according to IDC.

Apple had a 23.5 percent share of the global smartphone market, followed by Samsung and Nokia with 22.8 percent and 12.4 percent respectively.

"So-called 'hero' devices, such as Samsung's Galaxy Nexus and Apple's iPhone 4S, garner the bulk of the attention heaped on the device type," said Kevin Restivo, senior research analyst with IDC's Worldwide Mobile Phone Tracker.

"But a growing number of sub-$250 device offerings, based on the Android operating system, have allowed Google's hardware partners to grow smartphone volumes and expand the market concurrently."

While Apple tightly controls iPhone hardware and software, Google makes the Android mobile device operating system available free to smartphone manufacturers who have been building it into ranks of handsets.

Android and iPhone smartphones accounted for slightly more than 90 percent of US smartphone sales in the fourth quarter of 2011, industry-tracker NPD Group reported on Monday.

Android commanded 48 percent of the market compared to Apple's 43 percent, according to NPD.

NPD figures indicated that Android handsets were more popular with first-time smartphone buyers in the United States, with its share of that market at 57 percent compared to Apple's 34 percent in the fourth quarter of last year.

Hacker releases Symantec source code

A hacker released the source code for antivirus firm Symantec's pcAnywhere utility on Tuesday, raising fears that others could find security holes in the product and attempt takeovers of customer computers.

The release followed failed email negotiations over a $50,000 payout to the hacker calling himself YamaTough to destroy the code.

The email thread was published on Monday, but the hacker and the company said their participation had been a ruse. YamaTough said he was always going to publish the code, while Symantec said law enforcement had been directing its side of the talks.

The negotiations also might have bought Symantec time while it issued fixes to the pcAnywhere program, which allows customers to access their desktop machines from another location.

"Symantec was prepared for the code to be posted at some point and has developed and distributed a series of patches since January 23rd to protect our users against known vulnerabilities," said company spokesman Cris Paden.

Mysterious Sounds Reported Around the World

Ever wished parenting could be just a tad more civilized? A little less filled with yogurt stains and 2 a.m. wails, perhaps?

A new book has a solution: parenting a la Francais. American mom and Paris resident Pamela Druckerman makes her case in Bringing up Bebe, which comes out Feb. 7.

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Druckerman, an American and former Wall Street Journal reporter, has raised her three children in Paris. Curious as to how French babies slept through the night and toddlers sat politely at the table, she set out to investigate. The book details her findings, most of which stand in direct contradiction to last year's hot momtini-hour topic: Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua. For example:

When your 3-year-old screams for snack, American parents tend to throw the nearest tube of squeezable applesauce at her as quickly as possible. Not so in France, where parents delay gratification. "I'm now convinced that the secret of why French kids rarely whine or collapse into tantrums - or at least do so less than American kids - is that they've developed the internal resources to cope with frustration," Druckerman writes.

When a 6-week-old cries, American parents usually sprint to offer comfort. In France, parents pause first.

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"French parents believe it's their job to gently teach babies to sleep well," Druckerman writes. "They don't view being up half the night with an eight-month-old as a sign of parental commitment. They view it as a sign that the child has a sleep problem and that his family is wildly out of balance."

When American women take a break from their kids, it's often a guilt-ridden hour with cell phone at the ready. French women think it's unhealthy to spend all their time with their kids. "Children -- even babies and toddlers - get to cultivate their inner lives without a mother's constant interference," Druckerman writes.

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According to a Good Morning America poll, however, not all Americans are buying it: 76 percent said they preferred the hands-on, American style.

Photo: French actress Catherine Deneuve with her son Christian Vadim just a few days after his birth in 1963. Credit: Corbis

Mind-Reading May Be Reality Soon

By looking only at maps of electrical activity in the human brain, scientists were able to tell which words a person was listening to. The discovery is a major step toward being able to “hear” the thoughts of people who can’t speak.

"If someone was completely paralyzed, or if a patient had locked-in syndrome with no movement, but the brain was still active and we could understand it well enough, we could develop devices to take advantage of that and restore communication," said Brian Pasley, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley.

"It's still very early," he added. "And a lot of work still needs to be done."

For decades, scientists have been trying to understand how our brains manage to process audible sounds and extract abstract meaning from words and sentences. As part of that effort, lots of work on animals has helped narrow in on the brain regions involved in hearing and responding to sounds.

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To see how those findings might be applicable in people, Pasley and colleagues enlisted the help of 15 patients with epilepsy or brain tumors who had electrodes attached to the surface of their brains in order to map out the source of their seizures. With electrodes in place, participants listened to about 50 different speech sounds in the form of sentences and words, both real and fake, such as "jazz," "peace," "Waldo," "fook' and "nim."

After mapping out the brain's electrical responses to each sound, the research team found that they could predict which of two sounds from the study set the brain was responding to, and they could do it with about 90 percent accuracy

LG Optimus Sol (LG E730)

The "Sol" in the phone's name means "Sun". In order to make the Optimus Sol visible in sunny conditions, the handset has what LG call an "Ultra AMOLED" display. This 3.8" 800 x 480 pixel panel is the latest iteration of AMOLED technology, and since LG have a strong reputation in display technologies then there's a good chance that it will be every bit as good as they say.

Unlike the not very popular Optimus 3D, the Optimus Sol does seem to address a real market. If you try to use a standard TFT LCD display outdoors then the ambient light does wash it out and make it difficult to read, but even AMOLED displays suffer somewhat when the sun is really bright. Electronic paper displays, such as those found in the Amazon Kindle and Motorola FONE work very well in sunlight, but they are useless in the dark. AMOLED based displays seem to offer the best compromise in these situations.

One side effect of the different technologies is the different power drain characteristics. TFT displays always draw the same amount of power from the battery, no matter what is displayed. AMOLED screens draw more power from the battery when they are brighter and much less when darker, so LG are shipping the Optimus Sol with a specially designed dark UI to maximise battery life.Display aside, this is a fairly typical upper midrange Android smartphone with a 1GHz single core CPU and 512Mb of RAM, a 5 megapixel primary camera plus a VGA video calling camera, WiFi 802.11 b, g and n connectivity plus 3.5G, DLNA, a media player, FM radio, Bluetooth, GPS, a microSD slot (with 2GB in the box) and all the usual Android features. An NFC variant should also be available, although NFC is not installed as standard. The operating system is Android 2.3 with LG's own Optimus UI on top.

nlike the previous PRADA phones, the LG PRADA 3 (we will call it that for the sake of simplicity) is a fully featured smartphone with a technical specification than can rival some of the best in its class.

The LG PRADA 3 is an Android 2.3 smartphone with a bright 4.3" 480 x 800 pixel display, an 8 megapixel camera with 1080p HD video capture and a dual-core dual-channel 1GHz CPU with 1GB of RAM.

The high-end technical specifications are combined with a carefully designed handset that is very much in line with PRADA's design philosophy, plus a unique and very understated user interface that looks distinctly different from other Android devices.

At just 8.5mm thick, the PRADA 3 is a very slim device and some clever trickery by the designers actually makes it appear much thinner. The back of the handset has PRADA's Saffiano pattern on it, and the overall design is quite pleasing although fundamentally this is just another black slabby smartphone.

Samsung Star 3 and Star 3 DUOS

The Star 3 is not a million miles away from last year's Star II or Galaxy Y in terms of features. It's worth pointing out that the Star II though that currently retails for about €80 SIM-free, a lot cheaper than the €120 the Galaxy Y goes for, so we can expect the Star 3 to be under €100 too.

The display is a 3" 240 x 320 pixel panel, on the back is a basic 3.2 megapixel camera. The Star 3 lacks 3G support, but it does come with WiFi and EDGE data instead. There's no GPS and the Star 3 isn't a smartphone, although it does support a range of social media and internet applications.

Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc S

The Xperia Arc is one of the more elegant Android smartphones on the market, and with a large 4.2" 480 x 852 pixel display panel, it has one of the best screens as well. The weak point in the original Xperia Arc was the processor - it launched with a 1GHz single-core CPU just at the point that high-end competitors were switching to dual-core, so this useful update makes the Xperia Arc S much more competitive.Other improvements seem to be mostly software based with access to content from "Music Unlimited" and "Video Unlimited" in certain markets, plus enhancements to the camera and video output and numerous other software tweaks. The operating system is Android 2.3.4.

Sony Tablet S and Sony Tablet P

The Sony Tablet S is a somewhat conventional looking Android tablet, but it is perhaps the Sony Tablet P that will steal the show. The Tablet P comes with two displays with a hinge down the middle, so it folds up like a book, measuring 180 x 79 x 26mm when closed.

This design may seem completely mad when compared to conventional Android tablets, but this approach works well on a much smaller scale with the Nintendo DS. For example, you can use the bottom screen as a game controller while playing the game in the top screen, but obviously this will require a specially written application.The twin displays on the Sony Tablet P are each 5.5" 1024 x 480 pixel panels. Inside is a 1GHz dual-core processor with 512BMB of RAM. The Tablet P ships with Android 3.2 and supports both WiFi and 3.5G connectivity. Internal memory is just 4GB, but the Tablet P also has a microSD slot with a 2GB card in the standard sales package. On the front is a VGA camera for video calling, and on the back is a 5 megapixel primary camera with HD video capture.

Sony Xperia ion Preview

Heading exclusively for the AT&T network in the US, the Xperia ion is presumably a taste of things to come as far as the rest of the world is concerned. And if this is what Sony are offering the world during 2012, then it looks like it could be a very good year.

This is a powerful beast. Inside is a 1.5 GHz dual-core processor. On the front is a 4.6" 720 x 1280 pixel HD display and an HD camera for video recording. On the back of the Xperia ion is a 12 megapixel Exmor-enhanced camera with 1080p HD video capture capabilities. The Xperia ion is a 4G LTE device, one of a number of new 4G devices for AT&T and other US carriers.