Blue Bugle: Mobile, Desktop & Web Technologies

It’s finally here, BlackBerry 10 operating system and two new phones from BlackBerry (Z10 and Q10). Research In Motion, the company behind BlackBerry has renamed itself to ‘BlackBerry’. Yes, now there is only one brand and one operating system from BlackBerry. BlackBerry 10 was launched in an event conducted in New York yesterday, by Thorsten Heins, the CEO and Vivek Bhardwaj, the head of software development at BlackBerry. Let me tell you what we found interesting from this launch event. The New Stuff In the keynote, CEO Thorsten Heins gave us an overview of the devices and told us about dropping the brand name ‘RIM’ altogether. It will now be BlackBerry all over the world. Today, the home page rim.com redirects to BlackBerry.com. Most of the internal pages are still going to rim.com though. The update is going on, and the name change will be official in RIM’s annual shareholder meeting by the end of the year. BlackBerry has released two new smartphones—Z10 and Q10. Z10 is for t...

Are you careful about the security of your smartphone? For your Android device, Google Play store offers a number of antivirus apps. There are paid and free apps from professional companies like Avast!, Kaspersky, and Lookout, as well as free antivirus apps that install and work relatively faster. Among the security apps found on the Play Store, there are a number of free, lightweight ones, most of which enjoy a great number of downloads and high ratings. Most of the ratings are done by people who find the interface easy to use, but have no idea whether the app actually works or not. Many of us feel the app is great if the interface is cool, don’t we? It is painful to note that most of these free apps not only fail at most antivirus tests, but experts regard them to be incapable of detecting any threat. Last year, the latest mobile antivirus test report was published by AV-Test.org , in which they tested and rated the best and the worst antivirus programs among multiple platforms. ...

Thousands of smartphones get hacked every day. It has actually become sort of a problem today, and there are a number of apps that have been released to protect smartphones from theft. Here is an infographic I created that details the various methods the smartphone hackers are using to attack your device. The graphic is based on data found at Lookout.com . In order to embed the infographic on your blog, use the following code: <iframe src="http://infogr.am/How-are-they-attacking-you/" width="680" height="4130" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" style="border:none;"></iframe><br/>As found at: <a href="http://www.bluebugle.org/2013/01/smartphone-hacking-infographic.html"> Smartphone hacking | Blue Bugle</a> and <a href="https://www.lookout.com/resources/reports/state-of-mobile-security-2012">Lookout.com</a>

Lost your mobile phone? Got it stolen? If it is an Android phone , you could get it back easily if you installed one of the following apps. In the smartphone world, getting a phone stolen happens pretty often. In the UK, the Telegraph reported last year that about 264 mobile phones got stolen every day, and this is only the official count of stolen smartphones. In the US, CF News 13 reported by the end of last year that 113 smartphones get stolen every minute, and that could mean tens of thousands of phones are stolen every day. There has also been a report on the HuffPost of a chef being killed for his iPhone. If you have an Android phone, one of the following apps can get you your smartphone back pretty quickly. 1. Lookout Security & Antivirus Lookout app, available for free from the Android market, features a number of smart methods to locate your smartphone. The app can sound an alarm even in the silent mode to find the phone if you just misplaced it in your ap...

There are a number of factors affecting the purchase of a smartphone, such as the display, operating system, processor power, and price. Among them, I believe durability is also pretty important. There are protective cases for all types of smartphones, although they more or less make the phone look weird. I have never used protective case on my smartphones, although some of them have really needed them. A few days ago, I picked up one of the most popular smartphones in the industry— Samsung Galaxy S3 . I was impressed by the amazing hardware features it offered. However, when I picked it up, I could immediately feel the cheap plastic build of the phone that turned me off a bit. Many of Samsung’s phones lack in build quality, and that is the reason why none of the Samsung smartphones is there in this list. In the low end, probably the only Samsung device that can withstand any wear and tear is X-Cover Xtreme. The same is the case with Sony. Xperia line of smartphones contains device...

All the hype started in July, 2011, when Mozilla research director Dr. Andreas Gal proposed a project known as Boot to Gecko (B2G). This is a project aimed at creating an operating system that works with the Web rather than with apps as in Apple iPhone, Android devices, and Windows Phone. B2G project has flourished into today’s Firefox OS, which is a highly anticipated project by the Mozilla Corporation. With this development, Mozilla will also get into mobile operating system world. A few days ago, we saw Ubuntu coming to smartphones . We will see more about Firefox OS in this article. A Spanish firm, Geeksphone has released two Firefox OS smartphones yesterday. They are ultra low-end Keon and somewhat high-end Peak. Here are the technical specs of these devices. Property Keon Peak Display 3.5 inch HVGA (exact aspect ratio not available); multi-touch; technology used not available. 4.3 inch qHD (960x540 px); LCD IPS multi-touch ...

Last week, while researching online, I had to open a number of tabs on my Chrome browser. Following links, I had to open up even more tabs and finally the count reached around fifty or so, and the system started to slow down. I found it extremely difficult to browse further. I wanted to investigate which processes in the system were slowing the system down, and the steps I followed might be useful to you too, if you are also finding your computer rather slow. Here they are. The Tool You can use a number of tools for monitoring the programs and resources on your computer. Latest versions of Microsoft Windows come with one or two of them, such as Resource Monitor (resmon.exe) and the widely used Task Manager. But the tool that I would recommend is known as Process Explorer. It was developed by Microsoft subsidiary, Sysinternals. It is available as a free download from Microsoft Technet website . Get the ZIP file on your system. Process Explorer is a standalone utility: something t...

This is just an explanatory article, and we don’t intend to promote any illegal activities like spamming and hacking. Google “Hack Facebook account” and you will get to this particular website: HackFacebookAccount.org. It is a website that supposedly offers a way to hack a Facebook account. Now, anybody that has some experience with the Web knows it pretty well that this is simply a scam and there is no way a website like that can hack into Facebook accounts. Still, I would like to show you exactly how the service works to bust the simple myth that many people believe. 1. Go to the website and identify the account First of all, I went into the website, and identified my own Facebook account to hack into. I was presently not logged into my Facebook account. Here it is. I put in my Facebook account link, and the service correctly identified the account immediately. And it automatically started hacking the account (how very convenient, huh?) 2. Completed! The hacking complete...

Say you have been stranded in the middle of nowhere without any access to any emergency response services. Or you got mugged and left somewhere without help. At these times, if you have your smartphone handy, it will probably be able to bring you help from your loved ones. It is made possible by the new HelpBridge app from Microsoft. This is a new app that Microsoft’s ‘Disaster Response Team’ released a few days ago. The advantage of the app is that it is not only available for Windows Phone, but also for Android and iOS. So, it doesn’t matter whether you have a Galaxy S3 or an iPhone, you can still use this Microsoft app. What Does It Do? The app has two parts, essentially. One that can ask for help on your behalf and another that gives help to others that want it. The get help part is easy. As a first step, HelpBridge builds an emergency contact list on your smartphone. It asks you who you want to contact when you are in danger. You can select a few family members and friends to...