Toshiba is launching a new line of tablets running Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich in May and June, the company announced Tuesday. The "Excite" tablet family will come in 7.7-inch, 10-inch, and 13-inch sizes, and all will have Tegra 3 quad-core processors.
Juniper Networks says that Android malware samples increased by 472% between July and November last year - If you think viruses, spyware, and other security threats can't affect your smart phone, think again.
PC World goes through the five biggest threats to Android smartphone users and more importantly, the steps you should take to protect yourself.
Avira has released two free security tools - Avira Free Mac Security - offering virus and malware protection to Mac OS X users and Avira Free Android Security.
Their Android tool is not a virus scanner but rather aims to help secure the data on your mobile device and also enable tracking and retrieval should it go missing. Avira also offers an online account which you can use to track your phones location remotely and also set it into 'lockdown mode' in which the phone is restricted to calls to a fixed number and to emergency services only.
Marketing folks at Microsoft are in a bit of a pickle, after Microsoft's scheme to prove that Windows Phone software is faster than the competition has backfired.
Redmond cleared a marketing programme which claimed to award a $1000 laptop to anyone who could prove their iPhone or Android phone was quicker. The Smoked by Windows Phone campaign turned out to be a bit foggy when an Android user was shown to beat a Windows Phone and started to want recognition.
Georgia Weidman is a penetration tester, security researcher, and trainer. She's also one of the speakers at the upcoming HITBSecConf2012 - Amsterdam conference, where she will be presenting an inner look at the security mechanisms behind the permission model of Google's Android, looking for new and interesting ways of exploiting applications in order to gain elevated privileges.
The developers behind CyanogenMod, a popular third-party Android system ROM has announced that they have decided to no longer enable root access by default.
Future versions of CyanogenMod starting with version 9, will have this option removed by default however users will still be able to explicitly enable it.
After slightly more than ten weeks after the release of Linux 3.2, Linus Torvalds has released Linux 3.3.
For a long time, code from the Android project has not been merged back to the Linux repositories due to disagreement between developers from both projects. Fortunately, after several years the differences are being ironed out, various Android subsystems and features have now been merged. This will make things easier for everybody, including the Android mod community, or Linux distros that want to support Android programs.
Having difficulty gaining access to a pimp's Android phone they seized, the FBI has turned to Google for help. The FBI, which didn't have the right to search the phone without a warrant, obtained one in February. However, after sending it off to the FBI Regional Computer Forensics lab in California, technicians there “attempted to gain access to the contents of the memory of the cellular phone in question, but were unable to do so” says the FBI. Apparently they were defeated by Android's “pattern lock” screen.
The AV-TEST Institute, an independent anti-virus research provider, inspected 41 different virus and malware scanners for Android specifically testing for detection performance.
According to the report, about half of the scanners are not yet suitable for use mainly due to reliability of detection, with some products scoring a detection rate of less than 65% out of the 680 types of malware tested.
Google today introduced its answer to iTunes and iCloud called Google Play, which will offer cloud-based access to music, movies, eBooks and apps on Android smartphones, tablets, and on the PC. Since everything is stored online, you don't have to worry about losing files or syncing to get the content on the device you want to use.
