Wi-Fi

Users will soon be able to avail themselves of Wi-Fi roaming. The Wi-Fi Alliance along with the Wireless Broadband Alliance are developing standards for the new service following the same offering in the mobile industry.

The idea of the initiative is to allow travellers to fire up their PC/tablet/smartphone and have it automatically log onto the nearest Wi-Fi network that has a roaming agreement with the home network.

A court in the Netherlands ruled that hacking into Wi-Fi connections is not a crime providing any connected computers remain untouched. Meantime, the guidance does not imply that piggy-backing (or leeching) open wireless networks is not a crime.

Android based smartphones perform better than the iPhones when it comes to loading web pages. Blaze.io, a mobile website optimization company, conducted the study that involved over 40,000 downloads of web pages belonging to the Fortune 1000 companies.

The study revealed that the iPhone loaded web pages 52% longer than Android and on average Android took 2.1 seconds to render non–mobile-optimized web pages, while the iPhone took 3.2 seconds. Android phones outdid the iPhone on site-loading time by 84% of the time.

When countries like Egypt switch off Internet connectivity for their people nations like America have a lot of means to reconnect it again and the US military have a number of options to do it. The only one problem about it is: “It could be considered an act of war,” says John Arquilla, a leading military futurist.

It turns out that the US military has a number of devices, many of which are classified, to restore connectivity to repressed population whose rulers cut them off the rest of the world.

News about the iPhone do not cease being topical as more and more reports are coming about new features and opportunities of Apple’s flagship phone. Now in addition to that Verizon is launching its own iPhone there is a report that the iPhone 4 on Verizon Wireless would include new Personal Hotspot capabilities, enabling users to connect up to five Wi-Fi enabled devices. It should be noted that while Verizon iPhones may get the feature first, all iPhones will have the feature in iOS 4.3.

Latest rumors report that next year Apple will be producing three versions of its flagship computer tablet iPad, or to be more precise, its version 2.

Joseph Tsai reported on Digitimes: "Apple is expected to release three versions of iPad 2, supporting either or a combination of Wi-Fi, UMTS and CDMA, for 2011 with mass production to start as early as the later half of January. Apple will ship about 500,000-530,000 units to channels in January with shipment ratio of Wi-Fi, UMTS and CDMA models at 3:4:3, according to industry sources, citing upstream component makers."

Skyhook Wireless, a company that offers services for pinpointing a mobile device's location via nearby Wi-Fi signals, launched two lawsuits against Google. One complaint was filed in US District Court claiming patent infringement. The other was filed in Massachusetts state court alleging unfair and intentional interference with its contractual and business relations with handset manufacturers such as Motorola.

All that noise in the media about the antenna issue in iPhone 4 has nothing to do with the owners of the device as the new study shows. ChangeWave Research published the results of the research which revealed that most Apple iPhone 4 users feel very good about their purchase.

“Reliable sources” cited by a website Unbeatable report that the new iPod touch that is to come in September will include a 5-megapixel camera, a front facing webcam for FaceTime video calls over Wi-Fi along with gyroscope and accelerometer for improved gaming.

As it is usually the case that iPhone leads the innovations and iPod follows them many observers believe that the next generation touch will have some of the iPhone 4 latest features.

Today the country we are to explore is Ghana, which appeared to be the only African state that managed to reach the quarterfinals of the current World Football Championship. The name of the country means "Warrior King", derived from the ancient Ghana Empire. The Republic of Ghana is a country located in West Africa, bordered by Côte d'Ivoire to the west, Burkina Faso to the north, Togo to the east, and the Gulf of Guinea to the south. In 1874 the British established the Gold Coast Crown colony in the Empire of Ghana.

Cisco Systems Inc announced the launch of its own tablet computer device which, however, will be meant for business customers. This week it unveiled Cius which is a lightweight, 7-inch tablet based on Google Inc's Android operating system.

Cisco presents its Cius tablet which can work both on short-range WiFi and high-speed mobile wireless networks as a collaboration and communication device for enterprises.

Researchers at the University of Texas found that most Wi-Fi enabled access points don't properly implement the protocol designed to reduce the power drain on mobile devices. As a result the performance gets inconsistent. However, the researchers believe the issue can be addressed successfully.

It is known that the power saving mode allows mobile devices to shift to a "sleep" mode between packet requests. But the practice shows that most devices stay in a fully powered up state until the completion of the entire transfer.

AR.Drone, a toy helicopter, or “quadricopter”, will come to US stores in September according to the France-based developer Parrot. The toy that can be controlled by any of the three Apple mobile devices including iPhone, iPod and iPad was unveiled earlier this year at CES in January. AR.Drone is made of fiber and relies on four fans for lift and thrust.

Sony Ericsson has announced its latest Android-based smartphone Xperia X8. The phone, cheaper than Sony Ericsson's flagship X10, uses the Android operating system, has a 3-inch screen and a 3.2 megapixel camera.

It has all the usual messaging and media features of any other smartphone: 3G HSDPA connectivity, Assisted GPS, Google's apps, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, push email and so on.

The X8 is expected to come in the third quarter. The price is unknown yet.

Sony is launching a new touchscreen-equipped all-on-one PC line. Scheduled to debut in July this year the Vaio J series features a 21.5in display with 1920 x 1080 resolution and "multiple lamp" backlighting. It's driven by a 2.26GHz Intel Core i3-350M processor and an Nvidia GeForce 310M 512MB graphics chip.

Other specifications include 4GB of DDR 3 memory, a 500GB 7200rpm hard drive, a multi-format DVD writer, 802.11n wireless networking, Bluetooth and a webcam.