MODDING: blogs

Nokia’s application store, Ovi Store, is now accepting content from developers, and will launch in May. In our latest developer feature, Richard Bloor speaks to Eric John, Director of Media Product Marketing for Nokia Services, to discuss the developer proposition offered by Ovi store. There’s questions on operator billing, supported content types, platform support and more.

Researchers who have trained a tiny virus to do their bidding said on Thursday they made it build a more efficient and powerful lithium battery. They changed two genes in the virus, called M13, and got it to do two things: build a shell made out of a compound called iron phosphate, and then attach to a carbon nanotube to make a powerful and tiny electrode.

The technology is inherently green because it involves a live virus. “We are having organisms make the materials for us,” Belcher said. “We are confined to temperatures and solvents — water — that organisms can live in. It's a clean technology. We can't do anything that kills our organisms.”

April 1 has come and gone and in the minds of many people the Conficker worm turned out to be a joke instead of the major Internet security event that might have been envisioned. Was the hype good, or bad, and who is to blame?

A member of the Conficker Working Group, a consortium of companies and experts formed to eradicate the worm, had this to say: “The focus on April 1 ignored the fact that malware is out there and it is not detected easily and it has counter measures,” said Dave Dittrich, an affiliate researcher at the University of Washington. People tend to blame the security vendors for hyping viruses so they can sell more products. But in this case, everyone CNET News talked to about Conficker downplayed the digital disaster scenario and said things would likely be fairly quiet on April 1, as they were.

Asustek Computer has reorganized its businesses into three major groups - handhelds, components and computing, while first-tier PC vendors Dell and Acer are also restructuring their operations, according to company and industry sources. Asustek in February said its operations would be reorganized into six major groups - notebooks, Eee PCs, Eee family, handsets, motherboards, and graphics cards. But the company changed the plan and implemented the three-group structure on April 1, the sources said.

Acer is working to reorganize its businesses around individual brands - Acer, Gateway and eMachines - and it will focus on operating the brands in different market segments to allow the company to make flexible adjustments to counter the market fluctuations, according to the sources. Dell in January announced that it will organize globally around three major customer segments large enterprise, public sector, and small and medium businesses. Dell's consumer business is already organized globally.

Yesterday marked ‘day one‘ of the Symbain Foundation. The Symbian Foundation announced the commencement of the beta testing of its new website and that 81 companies have applied for membership (50 of which are first time endorsers). The new logo of the Symbian Foundation was alo unveiled: Symbian, in stylised letters, underlain by a yellow heart. Read on for more.

OCZ Vertex SSD RAID-0 Performance @ Benchmark Reviews and other reviews from around the web can be found by visiting our forums!

Lower power consumption and heat output are the least impressive benefits of Solid State Drives. The real payoff is in the practically instant response time and high-performance throughput. Once SSDs could outperform their HDD counterpart, it was all about price and capacity. Adding up to 64MB of Elpida DRAM to the buffer has permanently solved stuttering problems, making raw performance the last bottleneck. An Indilinx 'Barefoot' internal controller commands the bank of Samsung K9HCG08U1M DRAM modules, allowing a single OCZ Vertex SSD to offer impressive capacity with unmatched performance. But what if we put two Vertex SSDs into a striped RAID-0 array? Benchmark Reviews tests the speed and bandwidth of two OCZSSD2-1VTX120G SSDs against! the fastest storage products on the planet in this OCZ Vertex SSD RAID-0 performance article.

As CJ puts it, “It’s been a long time coming”. The brand new ShoZu release for S60 5th Edition/touch devices is now live (v4.01). ShoZu is the premier third party photo and video blogging client and works with just about any service. You can download ShoZu for S60 (all varieties) from m.shozu.com on your phone.

Ricky Cadden, on Symbian-Guru has published an interview with Symbian’s David Wood, covering all aspects of the Symbian Foundation set up, plans for the future and much, much more. This has been a big week for Symbian, it’s ‘Week One’ for the Foundation and there will be some in depth coverage coming from Rafe very shortly.

Yet more from the BBC, who are on something of an April roll this week…. You may remember that we were first to bring you news of their next-gen mobile home page revamp, accessible for the last month through a ‘beta’ URL? Well, this has now been tidied up and made official. Some quotes from the BBC below, but all you really need to do is go to bbc.co.uk/mobile in your phone browser and follow your nose from there. All the beta functions are there, including iPlayer integration (and live TV links, see above news item) for UK residents owning compatible phones and connecting over Wi-fi.

Today, NEC Asia announced their new portable DLP projector, NP52, that features 1,600:1 contrast ratio, 2,600 ANSI lumens brightness and weighs just 1.7kg. The NP52 is available now at SGD1,999 and comes with 2-year limited warranty.