‘iPhone’ Most Searched Term On Internet

Apple’s iPhone edged past major news events, celebrities and pop stars as the most searched term on the Internet in 2011, according to Yahoo!

The digital media company said the smartphone proved more popular than reality television celebrity Kim Kardashian, pop star Katy Perry and singer and actress Jennifer Lopez, who placed in the top five.

American Casey Anthony, the woman acquitted of the murder of her young daughter after a highly publicized trial, was No. 2.

“This is the first time since 2002 that we have had a gadget at No.1, which is an iPhone.” Vera Chan, a Web trend analyst at Yahoo!, said in a conference call announcing the results of the review now in its 10th year.

“Even though the product has been around for four years it just became such a major news story,” she added.

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at&t iPhone 4S Has Fastest Speeds

A study measuring the performance of the iPhone 4S on the three major U.S. wireless carriers found AT&T to be the best in Web browsing and data downloads and uploads when compared to Apple’s latest smartphone on either the Verizon Wireless or Sprint networks.

iPhone newcomer Sprint was found to be superior with its iPhone 4S for network voice quality on the uplink (when the user is speaking), but Sprint was also about five times slower in Web browsing and data downloads than AT&T, according to the study released Friday by Metrico Wireless, a mobile performance measurement company. Verizon finished in the middle on those data tests, but trailed the other two carriers in voice quality.

Metrico measured five performance factors shortly after the iPhone 4S was launched on all three carriers in October: whether calls could be connected and held; voice quality; data performance; Web browsing by page load speeds and video performance.

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Sony Buys Out Ericsson In Joint Venture

Sony has bought Ericsson’s stake in its mobile phone venture for $1.47 billion.

Sony Ericsson was the merger of two ailing phone makers back in 2001 and while some would question how strong the firm is now against its rivals, Sony has decided to buy out Ericsson’s stake by paying the firm around 41.47 billion. The move will result in Sony Ericsson, presumably renamed without the Ericcson suffix, becoming part of Sony’s operations and most importantly bringing its patent portfolio.

Both Sony and Ericsson have agreed to the deal, but said that the last 10 years worth of work was time well spent. Back in 2001 when the Sony Ericsson joint venture was announced both firms’ handset divisions were losing money, and while Sony Ericsson’s financials have never been superb, it has reported profits. The firm also claimed that its Android smartphones account for 11 per cent of the smartphone market.

Sony Ericsson has cited Google’s Android operating system as the reason for its success in the smartphone market. While the company doesn’t have any killer smartphones, its Xperia range certainly hasn’t embarrassed itself against competing smartphones built by HTC and Samsung.

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30% Of BlackBerry Users Want Out

The BlackBerry smartphone and its maker, Research in Motion, were in serious trouble even before last week’s global service disruption.

More than 30% of BlackBerry users in large companies said in September, a month before the outage, that they were looking to use a different smartphone device in 2012, according to a survey of 243 smartphone users in companies with more than 10,000 workers by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA).

“With last week’s outage, I suspect the 30% number is even higher,” said Steven Brasen, the EMA analyst who conducted the survey. “User satisfaction with BlackBerry is by far the lowest of smartphones. A huge number are dissatisfied.”

Brasen said the survey found that 11% of BlackBerry users in large companies are “completely dissastisfied” with the device, while only 2% of iPhone users and 0% of Android users are completely dissatisfied with their smartphones.

Brasen said the opinions of end users are becoming very important to IT executives.

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Will Help Desks Become Extinct?

Tom Soderstrom, CTO at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), views everything through the clouds.

NASA’s JPL uses 10 public or private clouds to store everything from photos of Mars for public purview to top-secret data.

Pretty soon, Soderstrom told attendees of Computerworld‘s SNW conference, data stored by large enterprises like NASA will be measured in Exabytes; one Exabyte is equal to 1.5 billion CDs or a million terabytes.

And, he noted, the only place to store Exabytes of data is on public and private clouds.

The good news is that with data in the cloud, people will be able to “work with anyone, from anywhere, with any data, using any device at any time,” he said.

And the not-so-bad news is that IT help desks, as we know them, will become a thing of the past, and IT workers in general will have to rethink how they approach application development and security.

“Now the workforce and consumers of IT are becoming mobile. Have you ever called a help desk for your mobile device? What do you do? Probably, the first you do is Google or Bing it. If you can’t get the answer there, you ask your kids. If you can’t get your answer there, you ask your friends who are like you. For us, that’s the workgroup,” Soderstrom said.

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Sprint Finally Gets The iPhone

Sprint Nextel confirmed that it will offer the next version of Apple Inc’s iPhone, ending months of speculation about whether it would become the third U.S. carrier to sell the popular device.

But the No. 3 U.S. mobile provider would not say whether its iPhone would come with a flat-fee service for unlimited data use – an offering analysts see as Sprint’s only hope for making its iPhone more competitive than rivals.

While selling the device should help Sprint keep subscribers from fleeing to other operators, some analysts worried whether the costs would outweigh the benefits because Apple phones come at a steep premium to other devices.

This is a huge gamble for Sprint and people are justifiably worried that they won’t be able to make any money doing it. It’s not a company that’s in great financial shape right now,” said Stifel Nicolaus analyst Chris King.

Analysts questioned how Sprint will be able to find the money to pay a premium to Apple on top of its obligations to pay back billions of dollars in debt and its plan to spend about $5 billion on an network upgrade in coming years.

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Will The FTC Block The Google?

The FTC has asked Google for more information about its $12.5 billion acquisition of Motorola Mobility. Google is buying the outfit as a defence against Apple and Microsoft patent law suits, however in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Motorola said it received a request for “additional information and documentary material” from the U.S. Department of Justice’s antitrust division.

According to Reuters, Motorola said Google also received a similar request and repeated its expectation the deal would close by the end of 2011 or early 2012. Writing in his bog, Google Senior Vice President Dennis Woodside said the DOJ’s “second request” was “pretty routine” and there was nothing to see here, move on please. Google usually gets a note from the FTC even if it buys lunch for a client. A similar one appeared when it bought ITA Software.

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Tool Created To Hack BlackBerry Passwords

A Russian security firm has upgraded a phone-password cracking software with the ability to figure out the master device password for Research in Motion’s BlackBerry devices.

Elcomsoft said on Thursday that before it developed the product, it was believed that there was no way to uncover a device password on a BlackBerry smartphone or PlayBook tablet. BlackBerry smartphones are configured to wipe all data on the phone if a password is typed incorrectly 10 times in a row, the company said.

Elcomsoft said it figured a way around the problem using a BlackBerry’s removable media card, but only if a user has configured their smartphone in a specific way. In order for Elcomsoft’s software to be successful, a user must have enabled the feature to encrypt data on the media card.

The feature is disabled by default, but Elcomsoft said around 30% of BlackBerry users have it enabled for extra security.

The company’s software can then analyze the encrypted media card and use a brute-force method to figure out a password, which involves trying millions of possible password combinations per second until one works.

Elcomsoft said it can recover a seven-character password in less than an hour if the password is all lower-case or all capital letters. The software does not need access to the actual BlackBerry device but just the encrypted media card.

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Cisco Offers Free iPad/iPhone Video App

Cisco announced improvements to its video product line Thursday to make it easier for businesses to create and share video, including a free app coming soon for iPhone and iPad devices.

The free app will make Cisco’s existing Show and Share software available for iPad and iPhone in late October through the Apple App Store, Cisco officials stated via a Webcast earlier this week.

Show and Share is Cisco’s video-sharing software, which allows users to search and watch videos as well as record and upload their own videos. That software has been available on other hardware, but until now not for the iPhone and iPad.

Also, Cisco said it is integrating its existing Show and Share with its Media Experience Engines 3500 and itsTelePresence Content Server, although it didn’t yet name the products that will provide the integration. Also, a new software release of the 3500 allows it to support Flash, H.264 and Windows Media formats.

An existing software tool called Pulse Video Analytics will soon allow searches of video content by keyword or speaker in the Cisco Show and Share product.

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Most Tegra 2 Tablets Will Get ICS

Sources have confirmed that most Tegra 2 tablets you know will get Ice Cream Sandwich. We are still sniffing around to find out if the ICS is going to end up as Android 4.0 but it will bring phones and tablets much closer and should ship in October or November.

Many Asus, Samsung, Toshiba, Lenovo, Sony and any other Android 3.x compatible tablets on market will have a chance to get the new one. The upgrade will come as manufacturers get it ready and customized for its tablets but most tablets will ship with Android 4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich, probably early next year at the latest.

This is good news for many who were brave to buy the first generation of tablets not based on Apple’s architecture and it will help Google to gather even more momentum for 2012. 2012 looks like a year when Google will be ready for real war against Apple, but at the same time, Android supporters fear that Windows 8 will get a lot of attention when it ships in late 2012.

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