Nokia Lumia 800 Battery Fix Software Updates In the Works

The iPhone 4S isn’t the only smartphone suffering from battery life problems, the other day we heard that Nokia’s first Windows Phone smartphone, the Nokia Lumia 800 was having battery problems.

Nokia has now released a statement on their support forums, which you can see below, regarding the battery problems on the Lumia 800, and they intend to fix this by releasing two software updates.

A software update in early December will make some improvements to power efficiency, while a second update in early January introduces high voltage charging, increasing the Nokia Lumia 800’s battery power from 1300mAh to 1450mAh. These are scheduled improvements and will enhance the overall experience, but are not designed to address any issues that may be occurring with individual products

So it looks like the first update will land next month, followed by a second one in January, as soon as we get some details on when exactly these updates will be available we will let you guys know.

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Google Starts Future Proofing Gmail Security

Google has this week announced via a blog post that it is enabling, forward secrecy by default on its Gmail service. Which will make sure that any emails you have written today will stay as safe in the future when faster and more powerful machines will become available that might be able to decrypt the security.

Google explains that initially, only Chrome and Firefox will use the new forward secrecy by default, when using Google services, as at the moment Microsoft’s Internet Explorer doesn’t support the combination of ECDHE and RC4. But Google do hope to be able to support Internet Explorer in the future.

Google explains:

“Most major sites supporting HTTPS operate in a non-forward secret fashion, which runs the risk of retrospective decryption. In other words, an encrypted, unreadable email could be recorded while being delivered to your computer today,” he wrote. “In ten years time, when computers are much faster, an adversary could break the server private key and retrospectively decrypt today’s email traffic.”

For reference Perfect Secrecy as explained on Wikipedia:

“Perfect forward secrecy (or PFS) is the property that ensures that a session key derived from a set of long-term public and private keys will not be compromised if one of the (long-term) private keys is compromised in the future”

For more information jump over to the Google Blog post.

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RIM Announces BlackBerry Playbook OS Update

RIM has announced a new software update for their BlackBerry PlayBook tablet, and the udpate will bring a range of bug fixes to the device, as well as some new features which include Adobe Air 3.1 and Adobe Flash 11.

A new version of the BlackBerry® PlayBook OS is now available to all BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet users – BlackBerry PlayBook OS v1.0.8.4985. This free update can be downloaded over-the-air from your BlackBerry PlayBook tablet.

You can find out full details of what is new in the update over at RIM, and it is available as an over the air update.

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Siri Used To Control iPad App (Video)

On Monday we showed you a video of Apple’s Siri being used to control a home heating system, this was done by developer @plamoni who had managed to create a proxy server for Siri.

Now another developer has come up with a way to control an iPad app using an iPhone 4S and Siri, he used the code which was created by @plamoni, and the video below shows an app on the iPad being controlled by Siri.

Very interesting, it gives us an idea of what sort of functions Siri could possibly have in the future, and we wonder if Apple will open up Siri to developers so that it can be integrated into their applications.

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Google TV Apps Update Brings New Features

Google has announced on the Google TV Blog, that a number of their Google TV applications have been updates, these include the YouTube and Photo apps, this comes just a few weeks after Google released a major software update for Google TV connected devices.

Google has also said that they plan to update many of their other apps for Google TV, and we will also see updates from many of the third party application developers who also develop apps for the platform.

The video above shows the new YouTube features for Google TV in action, and you can also find out more details on the changes to this, and the photo app over at the Google Blog.

It will be interesting to see how Google develops their Google TV platform, and we have heard that manufacturers like Samsung and LG intend to join the likes of Sony next year.

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BenQ Joybee GP2 Projector For iPhone And iPod Touch Unveiled

Benq has unveiled and very neat and portable projector its created, in the form of the BenQ Joybee GP2. Which has been designed to be used with Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch devices, but can also be used with USB flash drives or SD Cards if required.





The new BenQ Joybee GP2 projector is capable of projecting movies and media at 720p resolution, and is equipped with a mini HDMI port and even includes 2 GB of internal memory to store your media files.

The BenQ Joybee GP2 projector is capable id fitted with a 100 ANSI Lumen brightness, using 3LED illumination and DLP projection, and is now available to purchase for $549.

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Google Blacklists File Sharing Sites : The Pirate Bay, isoHunt, 4Shared and More

This week Google has added a number of high profile file sharing sites to its blacklists, and removed them from its google.com search pages. The additions to Google blacklist which include, The Pirate Bay, isoHunt and 4Shared to name a few. Have now been removed from Google’s Auto complete and Instant searches. However the actual pages for the sites do remain indexed with Google pages and can currently still be found on other Google country searches.





isoHunt owner Gary Fung explained in an interview, with TorrentFreak :

“It’s a lot more subtle than the censorship attempts made possible by the pending PROTECT IP and SOPA bills, but it’s still censorship and it starts small. Google is increasingly becoming a self-righteous Big Brother of the Web. So much for ‘Do no evil’”.

Its thought that Google has implemented the new changes to stay on the right side of major movie houses and music studios.

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Samsung To Stop Producing Netbooks Next Year?

It looks like Samsung may be putting an end to its range of various netbooks, and instead concentrating its efforts on Intel’s new Ultrabook platform, as details of an email that Samsung has sent ot its trading partners has been revealed.

The email, which you can see below mentions that Samsung will discontinue their 10.1 inch netbook range, and will be producing 11.6 and 12 inch Ultrabooks instead.



“Following the introduction of our new strategy in 2012, we will discontinue our 10.1-inch (netbook) product range in Q1 2012, in favor of ultraportables (11.6 and 12 inches) and ultrabooks to be launched in 2012.”

It will be interesting to see what Samsung does with Intel’s Ultrabook platform, as soon as we get some more information we will let you guys know.

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Asus To Ship 350,000 Transformer Prime Tablets In December?

The Asus Transformer Prime is due to go on sale next month, and yesterday we heard that all the pre-order units of the device had sold out in 24 hours in Amazon, and now there are reports that Asus intends to ship 350,000 units of the device in December.

Asus is obviously looking to make sure that there are enough Transformer Prime tablets to meet demand, as the company were initially unable to meet demand for the original Transformer tablet when it was launched.



It will be interesting to see how popular the Transformer Prime tablet becomes, we suspect that the fact it is the first tablet to ship with NVIDIA’s new quad core Tegra 3 processor will make it extremely popular.

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SIM free Nokia Lumia 800 Hits The UK December 1st

We had expected the SIM free version of the Nokia Lumia 800 to be available from a number of retailers here in the UK at launch, unfortunately some retailers were told that the device would only be available through certain mobile carriers at launch.

Now it looks like we wont have to wait very much longer for the SIM free Nokia Lumia 800, as the guys over at Clove will have the device in stock form the 1st of December, and it will be available for £443 including taxes.



The Nokia Lumia 800 features Windows Phone 7.5 Mango, and it features a 3.7 inch AMOLED display, a single core 1.4GHz processor and an 8 megapixel camera.

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Acer Allegro Windows Phone Smartphone Goes On Sale in Europe

The Acer Allegro is due to go on sale in the UK and Europe next month, but it would appear that the device has already gone on sale in France, with one Freh retailer selling the Windows Phone device for 284 Euros.

The Acer Allegro features a 3.6 inch VGA touchscreen display with a resolution of 800 x 480 pixels, and it comes with Windows Phone 7.5 Mango.



Processing is provided by a single core 1GHz processor and there is also a 5 megapixel camera, 8GB of built in storage, and something which Acer calls Fast Charge, which is designed to charge you device 2.5 faster than other smartphone chargers.

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