Day: December 6, 2017

China’s phone market is now dominated by five companies, none of which is Samsung

Dianne Jacobs

China is the most unique smartphone market in the world: a phone maker can be a global sales leader without ever treading beyond Chinese borders, and small upstart challengers can suddenly explode in popularity from out of nowhere. The latter aspect is becoming harder now, however, as the latest data from Kantar Worldpanel shows that China’s top five phone vendors are becoming a more solid and dominant group. Kantar reports that, for the calendar quarter ending in October, the top five of Huawei, Xiaomi, Apple, Vivo, and Oppo accounted for…

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Drone collisions worse than bird strikes for planes

Dianne Jacobs

A US study into drone safety has suggested that collisions with aircraft are more damaging than bird strikes. It said current aircraft manufacturing standards are not appropriate for the growth in drone use but stopped short of saying such hits could be fatal. The US Federal Aviation Authority said it will work with drone-makers to develop technology to detect and avoid planes. It estimated there will be 2.3 million drones in use by the end of this year.The FAA study recreated a collision between a drone and an aeroplane using…

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Google launches a data-friendly search app for users in emerging markets

Dianne Jacobs

Google is continuing its push to make its services accessible for people with lower-end mobile devices or slow internet connections after it introduced Google Go, a data-friendly search app. The app was first spotted in beta in August — when it was known as Search Lite — and now it has been released for select Android devices (here). At just 5MB the app won’t take up huge amounts of space on a device — that’s important because cheaper devices that are popular in emerging markets have limited capacity — while…

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Millions caught in virtual keyboard app data breach

Dianne Jacobs
Digitization

Security researchers claim to have found the personal data of 31 million Android users of the keyboard app Ai.type after finding an open database online. The app offers themed keyboards for phones and tablets.The researchers claimed data left visible included names, phone numbers, locations and Google queries. The boss of the Israeli company behind the app admitted the breach but said most of the data was not sensitive. Bob Diachenko, from the Kromtech Security Centre, part of security company Mackeeper, said the amount of data required by the app at…

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