Hewlett-Packard isn't going out of the PC business after all. Today, CEO Meg Whitman announced the company would continue to make and sell PCs, reversing a decision made by her predecessor Léo Apotheker in August -- a decision that riled investors and employees and led to his ouster in late September. Since the August announcement, HP's future has been repeatedly questioned, as has the competence of its senior management. The appointment of board member Whitman as CEO added to the criticisms.
Nokia has revealed the smartphones that it hopes will lead to the company's resurrection as the world's leading mobile vendor.
Last week at its BlackBerry DevCon conference, Research in Motion tried to excite developers about the forthcoming PlayBook OS 2.0 mobile operating system, to spur developers to create applications for RIM's BlackbBerry PlayBook tablet, released last spring to poor reviews and low sales. But yesterday, RIM said in a blog post that it was delaying the release of the PlayBook 2.0 OS "until we are confident we have fully met the expectations of our developers, enterprise customers, and users."
Windows Phone 7.5 "Mango," Microsoft's answer to Apple's iOS and Google's Android, draws you in immediately with its simple but sexy interface. It's very easy to get into messaging -- both traditional email and IM and newfangled Twitter and Facebook -- and launch widgets to track the weather or see your stocks. The colorful Windows Phone UI makes iOS look a bit dowdy, almost computerlike, and it really shows what a mess the Android Franken-interface is.
Google has finally unveiled Android 4.0, the unified version of its mobile OS for smartphones and tablets best known by its "Ice Cream Sandwich" code name. The revised Android, which made its debut on a Samsung Galaxy Nexus smartphone (video) also unveiled today, features a bevy of UI enhancements, social networking integration, and other APIs meant to encourage human and application-based sharing. Android has also beefed up some of its security capabilities, though most are in the form of API support that developers can use as desired.
iOS 5 has been out for a day now, and if you have a compatible iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad, you're probably still trying to get familiar with it. You can see its 20 top features in our slideshow "iOS 5 and iCloud: The InfoWorld visual tour" and see how iOS 5 stacks up against Android in our in-depth comparison. But if you want the quick summary of what's new in iOS 5, read on.
1
After months of hype, Apple has released iOS 5 for current iPhone 3G S and 4 owners, for iPad and iPad 2 owners, and for third- and fourth-generation iPod Touch owners. But the fact is that iOS doesn't exist in isolation. It competes with Google's Android OS, and the group of smartphones running Android now significantly outsells the iPhone. (It's a different story in tablets, where the iPad is trouncing everyone, including Android.)
A not-so-obvious improvement in iOS 5, which became available publicly today, is a major jump in HTML5 compatibility. InfoWorld saw surprising results in tests of iOS 5's Safari browser against the major mobile and desktop browsers. iOS 5 has 36 percent more HTML5 capabilities baked in than its predecessor iOS 4.3, 33 percent more than the current Android 3.2 "Honeycomb" tablet browser, and 61 percent more than the current Android 2.3 "Gingerbread" smartphone browser. InfoWorld ran the HTML5Test.com suite of HTML5 compatibility tests as part of an in-depth comparison between iOS 5 and the two Android variants.
was a polarising force that reshaped the tech industry several times
Apple co-founder, former CEO, and chairman Steve Jobs died today, Apple's board of directors has confirmed. He had been battling an illness widely believed to be pancreatic or liver cancer, and had stepped down as Apple CEO in late August saying he was no longer able to do the job. He had remained as Apple's chairman after promoting then-CFO Tim Cook to CEO.
Apple today unveiled the new iPhone, the iPhone 4S. More of an upgrade to the iPhone 4 than a new model (thus the lack of the "iPhone 5" moniker), the iPhone 4S uses the same dual-core 1GHz Apple A5 processor as in the iPad 2, up from the iPhone 4's 800MHz A4. Apple also claims it's increased the battery life and doubled the maximum speed of wireless communications on the iPhone 4S.
Concerned about sensitive corporate data that lives on employees' iPads finding their way to places they shouldn't? Symantec says it has an answer to that risk, and it won't get in users' way. In early 2012, it plans to deliver an extension to its data loss prevention (DLP) product that enables DLP filtering from the iPad or, more precisely, from files, emails, and any other communication sent via HTTP and HTTPS from an iPad through the network.
At 10 a.m. Pacific time today, Apple has something to show us all in an invitation-only event expected to last 90 minutes, culminating with what is all but certain to be the successor to the iPhone 4, which has been the subject of frenetic rumors for nearly a year under the "iPhone 5" moniker. Newly promoted CEO Tim Cook is also expected to reveal the release date for iOS 5 and iCloud, the Apple mobile OS and cloud-based syncing and backup service, respectively, that previous Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled in June.
Now we know. Microsoft's president for Windows, Steven Sinofsky, today revealed a "reimagined" Windows, which boasts a very different, tile-based user interface called Metro based on Windows Phone that is touch-savvy, runs on ARM processors as well as Intel x86 chips, and yet will also work on traditional keyboard-and-mouse PCs and run anything that runs on Windows 7. The new version, code-named Windows 8, is now in developer preview, with no release date yet set.
Microsoft has been teasing us for months with drips of promises for what the next version of Windows -- code-named Windows 8 -- will offer. It's said that Windows 8 and its radically different user interface will run on both Intel and ARM chips; thus, it will be available not just for traditional desktop and laptop PCs but for iPad-style tablets. Microsoft has said Windows 8 will not run on smartphones, which will use Windows Phone 7 instead. However, the Win8 UI seems to be based on that of Windows Phone.
