Android is the best selling active platform for mobile devices. It has key applications, middleware and an OS. Its mobile OS is actually based from the Linux kernel. Its apps (applications), which cater to the functionality of the devices, have ranged to over 250,000. All these can be downloaded through third-party sites such as Android Market, Android Zoom, Freeware Lovers, Coupon Croc and Android Freeware. One of the most heavily downloaded types of app according to recent studies are camera apps for Android phones.

The popularity of camera apps may come from the fact that people are drawn to accessible as well as affordable apps and to self-produced digital content which is then usually uploaded to major social networking sites like Facebook.

With these additions to the digital world, the ability to capture significant moments has become easier and more budget-friendly. To top it all, mobile phones these days even feature VGA-resolution cameras at the least.

Now, if you are an Android user then the biggest advantage you have is that you can download apps for free from the Android Market. With these camera apps for Android, you can turn your phone into a digicam in an instant. Here are some of the best camera apps to consider:

1. Camera360 – This app features color shift effects, tilt shift, HDR modes and even camera filter modes.

2. FxCamera – With this app, people will think a professional photographer took the shot. It features top-of-the-line camera filters, ads and a lightweight program.

3. Little Photo – Using this app, you can preview your photo subject and the photo effect. You can even layer several effects over one another and come up with various combinations of effects.

4. Camera Fun Free – This app helps you preview the photo effect on the camera viewfinder itself. You can do this even before you take the photo. All you need to do is point, shoot and review. It also features 6 effects or filters. If you want more effects, you can get the pro version but there’s a fee.

5. Retro Camera – With this app, your photos would look like Old School. You can choose from five cameras and five sets of film effects. Viewers would think that you used an analog camera when you snapped the photo.

6. PicSay – When you use this app, you can get tacky effects on your pictures. You can also add clip arts, images and even fonts to these photos. Furthermore, you can adjust the exposure, crop or change tint and color temperature of the pictures.

7. HDR Camera – This app helps you take two pictures and combine them for more depth of color. Since it uses HDR technology, you can ensure better quality photos.

There are several other camera apps for Android. Most are free to download but there are also those that are sold at an affordable price. Depending on your preference, you can now take quality photos using your Android phone.

MobiComp is a company that is not very originally named, since the company focuses primarily on mobile applications. At the current moment in time, the company has been around for less than a decade but has been able to develop three mobile applications that allow for enhanced functionality on the mobile level. The Portuguese company seems to have a talent for coming up with good mobile applications, which is perhaps the main reason as to why Microsoft went out of their way to acquire MobiComp.

While Microsoft will not say as much out loud, they are desperate when it comes to the mobile market. Their operating system was not worth anything to mobile users in terms of increased efficiency and with Apple’s release of products like the iPhone, it is quite clear that the mobile market was Apple’s re-entry into the computer game. Microsoft, through its own ineptitude, allowed the practically dead Apple Company back into the market and now they are reeling as Apple goes on the offensive and starts cutting into their sales.

Microsoft appears to be serious in their rhetoric about regaining some of the market. The acquisition of MobiComp appears to be a means to that end. The combination of Microsoft’s mobile Multitouch technology and the mobile applications of MobiComp suggest products in the future that might be in a position to challenge Apple for the mobile market.

As the technology market worldwide goes gaga over the superb implementation of Multitouch in Apple iPhones; Stantum is also all set to foray into the mobile phone sector. They are soon to introduce Pmatrix Multitouch technology for due integration in the mobile industry.

This was announced by Stantum Technologies in the recently convened Mobile World Congress (MWC). The USP of the 3.5 inch Pmatrix Multitouch display from Stantum is that, it would provide multitouch detection, with a multitouch sensor that can detect both fingers as well as stylus. And to add to convenience, the touch detection can work with nails as well.

But will Stantum be able to create the hype and the craze that followed with the iPhone Multitouch display? Apple Inc. with its very successful stint in the use of touchscreen for iPhones has swept the world of its feet with the fabulous interactive features. Users of iPhones can rotate, flip, drag and enlarge images; while at the same time list emails and store music.

Stantum has sensed the competition, and with its one-third worldwide sales accounting from the US markets; it surely must be coming up with something concrete and more innovative to take on the iPhone. By far Stantum has created milestones in product development with Multitouch technology from multitouch interaction, controllers, sensor design, intellectual property cores, software integration, and application programming interfaces.

While the world awaits the multitouch technology marvel from Stantum, which is all set to hit the market soon with its 3.5 inch Pmatrix Multitouch display; the company is confident that it will be able to offer unparalleled user experience for the userand a greater UI design flexibility for handset manufacturers and mobile application developers.

Stantum will its years of experience in providing Multitouch tecnology based products, is positive that with this new venture too, they can offer users with tailor-made, integrated and cost-effective Multitouch solutions to mobile applications to accurately fit their individual needs. Tipped to emerge as a major player in the mobile application industry, Pmatrix can identify an infinite number of contact points.

Active UI MultiTouch adds a small and multi functional plug-ins to your Windows Mobile Professional and Classic Pocket PC’s Today screen.
For instance, the V2R MultiTouch plug-in allows you to control WiFi, vibration, time and date, your alarms and device lock, or just to start any of the the other V2R Active plug-in’s:

MultiTouch adds the following V2R Active plug-in’s to your Today screen:

* V2R PhotoDialer 2, to call your favorite people directly from the Today screen
* V2R MediaPlayer, to listen to your favorite songs directly from the Today screen
* V2R Notifications, to be informed about the latest missed events
* V2R VExplorer, to add your favorite applications
* V2R Active UI, to start your favorite applications from the Today screen

Even more V2R’s Active UI MultiTouch allows you to use most of the animations you already got or you can find on V2R’s Bundles page.
V2R Active UI MultiTouch works with Windows Mobile 5.0 Pocket PC and Windows Mobile 6 Classic and Professional devices and is available free of charge from V2R.

In this TouchScreen Model, each pixel carries an optical sensor eliminating the need to place a film to the panel for touch screen functions, there by providing beautiful images without losing display image quality.

In Today’s World the TouchScreen abilities are becoming an integral part for many mobile devices such as SmartPhones, Digital Cameras, PDA’s (Personal Digital Assistant) and UMPC’s (ultra mobile pc), but traditional methods to provide such touch input capability requires bonding or laminating a film on the top of the LCD Panel, which leads to problems such as reduced display image quality and increased thickness for the display section of the device.

The major achievement attained here is by embedding an optical sensor in each pixel, this device has the ability to recognise multi touch input i.e, you can use two or more fingers at once to handle the data

For example, users can easily tap the screen with two fingers to enlarge or reduce a displayed map.

Also this device can be used as a scanner

scanner function can be used to scan in a business card placed on top of the screen, and further improvements to this function are expected to enable fingerprint authentication in the future.

According to Sharp the Sample shipments will begin in September of this year, with volume production slated to start next spring.
Some facts about the samples that will arrive in september this year…

Newly Developed System LCD
Screen size 8.9 cm (3.5-inch) on the diagonal
Pixel count 320 V x RGB x 480 H (half-VGA)
Note: Optical sensor built into each pixel
Applications Smartphones, digital cameras, etc.
Functions Touch screen (with simultaneous recognition of multiple touch points), scanner
Start of sample shipments September 2007

As a next step Microsoft researchers envisage a more compact prototype in which the touchpad
provides the image of the fingers without need of the clumsy webcam and boom. One suggestion involves a series
of light sensors which could map the movement of the fingers, while another involves tuning the capacitors in the
pad itself to detect the electrical field of the fingers.
“I can see LucidTouch changing the way users interact with PDAs and tablet computers, such as Microsoft
TabletPC,” says Baudisch. “In addition, I think LucidTouch will also offer substantial benefit for very small
devices. Think of a smart wrist watch featuring a touchscreen. If you used your finger on that touchscreen your
fingers would occlude the entire display. Using Lucidtouch, you would instead move your finger over the back of
the wrist band, yet the translucent overlay would map your finger motion onto the screen.”

A security firm has run the first remote exploits on Apple’s iPhone, proving that the widely popular smart phone is vulnerable not only to data theft but also to being turned into a remote snooping device.A trio of researchers from Independent Security Evaluators—Charlie Miller, Jake Honoroff and Joshua Mason—have created an exploit for the iPhone’s Safari Web browser wherein they use an unmodified device to surf to a maliciously crafted drive-by download site. The site downloads exploit code that forces the iPhone to make an outbound connection to a server controlled by the security firm.The compromised device then can be forced to send out personal data, including SMS text messages, contact information, call history, voice mail information, passwords, e-mail messages and browsing history.”We only retrieved some of the personal data, but could just as easily have retrieved any information off the device,” the researchers said in a report.

The researchers also wrote a second exploit to turn an iPhone into a bugging device to record audio that it then transmitted for later collection by a malicious party. This exploit entailed viewing another maliciously crafted site whose payload forced the phone to make a system sound and vibrate for a second. The researchers discovered they also could force the phone into other physical actions, including dialing phone numbers or sending text messages.

The iPhone runs a streamlined, customized version of the Mac OS X operating system on an ARM processor. Much of its security posture relies on restrictions against running third-party applications, instead only allowing JavaScript to execute in the device’s Safari browser within a sandbox environment.

The Safari browser itself has been stripped down as well. Apple, of Cupertino, Calif., sacrificed the use of plug-ins such as Flash and the downloading of many file types, for example, to minimize the iPhone’s attack surface.

However, that still leaves “serious problems” with the way security has been designed and implemented on the device, the researchers said.

They said that the most egregious problem with the iPhone’s security profile is that it runs all important processes with full administrative privileges, meaning that an attacker who compromises any iPhone application gains full access to any capability on the device.

Curbing administrative rights so as to curtail the reach of a successful attacker is a lesson learned long ago by Microsoft, for one. In its latest operating system release, Vista, one of the most notable security boosts is UAC (User Account Control), a security feature that limits user privileges as much as possible for most of a user’s interaction with the desktop. User rights are elevated only when necessary for administrative tasks, at which point a dialog box prompts the user to OK the escalation. Limiting normal permissions is a good thing, given that it limits the operating system surface an attacker can latch onto.

Not only does UAC limit the effectiveness of malicious code, but Microsoft, in its creation, also stands a good chance of breaking developers’ habit of granting too many rights, Gartner analyst Neil MacDonald has pointed out.

Aside from limiting the effectiveness of malicious code, the biggest impact of UAC, according to MacDonald, will be to change developer behavior so applications don’t demand that users have to run as administrators to use them.

Apple also dropped the ball on some other widely accepted practices when it comes to security on the iPhone. For example, as has been pointed out by other researchers, when designing the iPhone, Apple eschewed techniques such as address randomization and non-executable heaps, all of which make it harder to exploit the device and more difficult to develop exploit code with staying power.

“These weaknesses allow for the easy development of stable exploit code once a vulnerability is discovered,” according to the report.

To use another comparison to Vista, another security feature in the new operating system is Address Space Layout Randomization. ASLR’s job is to shuffle the address space deck, randomly locating programs in memory and making it tougher for attackers to pinpoint a target during an exploit of a vulnerable application. Symantec has determined that when implemented correctly, ASLR is “extremely effective” at mitigating memory corruption attacks.

The researchers have notified Apple of their findings and are holding off on releasing details until Aug. 2 to give Apple time to patch the security holes.

Via: BM

More than ever before, WorldWide Partner Conference was a serious demo fest with lots of cool technology shown off during the keynotes. Silverlight, Photosyth, Seadragon, Surface and more. Hats off to the WPC folks for showing off our innovations to an audience that sometimes only really gets to see (and sell) our business software. I already have lots of interest from UK Partners on Silverlight and Surface in particular. Needless to say I’ll need one of the latter for research purposes Check ‘em out

Microsoft Surface
Allison Watson picked her favorite demos of the week, including Microsoft Surface. Learn more about Surface, the first surface computing platform.

Live Labs Photosynth (and SeaDragon)
Watch how a three-dimensional image is created from two-dimensional photos. See photos from multiple angles and seamlessly zoom in or out of a photograph that’s gigapixels in size.

Windows Live for Windows Mobile
See some of the latest devices and services for mobility. Learn how to stay connected and quickly find local resources and data using Windows Live Search.

Microsoft RoundTable
Watch Allison Watson conduct a conference with partners from around the world with 360-degree cameras that can track any speaker in the room.

Microsoft Dynamics Live CRM
See a sneak preview of the upcoming Microsoft Dynamics Live CRM offering that will deliver a flexible and familiar user experience, through Microsoft Outlook, or a Web browser, with rich configuration and customization capabilities.

Microsoft Silverlight
See how the latest support program for interactive high-quality video and photo, can be used to intuitively organize and preview new media.

Windows Server 2008

Windows Automotive
See how the Ford Sync works, demonstrating some of the latest technology coming out of the Windows Automotive Business Unit.

Via: Steve C

Just when you thought Apple couldn’t do any worse that the iPhone, comes the rumor that they are planning to release a less functional version of the iPhone based on the iPod Nano.This rumor is based on a patent application Apple submitted on July 5th for a multi-function device with a circular touchpad control surface similar to the current Nano. Apple anticipates 10 million iPhones will be sold in 2008, that would be about 1% of the total cellular phone market. A less functional Nano version is speculated to help curb cannibalization of current iPod sales.I now have a question, since the iPhone doesn’t really do anything more than the current crop of smartphones using technologies from Blackberry and/or Microsoft, why would anyone want to buy one with less functionality? It would appear to me that the only people this might appeal to are Apple fans already. Stranger things have happened!The full story is available at this link: Apple plans cheaper, Nano-based phone: JP Morgan

Via: M&A