Revamped Cortana finally lands on UK mobe mass market Microsoft’s ravenous, data hungry ‘personal assistant’ Cortana has arrived on iOS and Android in the UK, and the app has been revamped. Cortana has been available here since July 2014 on Windows Phones, and last year on Windows 10. But “she” finally arrives on devices people actually use. The UI overhaul is to address the …
The few Windows users I know have put in place a lot of measures just to stop the slurping of data and worse, the W10 Adverts. Ok, one of them has a really shit hot Windows Admin for a son and he put it all in place.
Many others have dropped windows totally. As they are photographers, the 27in iMac is hard to resist.
The 5k screen is magnificent.
Cortana's speech recognition is generally excellent, but the lack of a voice activated wakeup (on winphone) greatly reduces it's usefulness in cars for example - not much point having hands-free speech-operated actions if you crash whilst groping for the little magnifying glass icon to turn it on. And although it is very good at inderstanding what you want to do, the range of commands it can actually execute is very poor which again greatly reduces the point of having it. As someone pointed out search results are woeful too, and although that's not really a Cortana issue, again it reduces the overall usefulness.
A Linux distro for smartphones abandoned by their manufacturers, postmarketOS, has introduced in-place upgrades.
Alpine Linux is a very minimal general-purpose distro that runs well on low-end kit, as The Reg FOSS desk found when we looked at version 3.16 last month. postmarketOS's – pmOS for short – version 22.06 is based on the same version.
This itself is distinctive. Most other third-party smartphone OSes, such as LineageOS or GrapheneOS, or the former CyanogenMod, are based on the core of Android itself.
A critical flaw in the LTE firmware of the fourth-largest smartphone chip biz in the world could be exploited over the air to block people's communications and deny services.
The vulnerability in the baseband – or radio modem – of UNISOC's chipset was found by folks at Check Point Research who were looking for ways the silicon could be used to remotely attack devices. It turns out the flaw doesn't just apply to lower-end smartphones but some smart TVs, too.
Check Point found attackers could transmit a specially designed radio packet to a nearby device to crash the firmware, ending that equipment's cellular connectivity, at least, presumably until it's rebooted. This would be achieved by broadcasting non-access stratum (NAS) messages over the air that when picked up and processed by UNISOC's firmware would end in a heap memory overwrite.
Researchers at the University of California San Diego have shown for the first time that Bluetooth signals each have an individual, trackable, fingerprint.
In a paper presented at the IEEE Security and Privacy Conference last month, the researchers wrote that Bluetooth signals can also be tracked, given the right tools.
However, there are technological and expertise hurdles that a miscreant would have to clear today to track a person through the Bluetooth signals in their devices, they wrote.
There are lots of software keyboards for smartphones and tablets alike, but one stands head and shoulders above the rest… However you can't have it.
Last year, Microsoft bought Nuance for just shy of $20 billion, mainly for its voice-to-text tools. Nuance also owned Swype, which it killed off in 2018. Microsoft, meanwhile, also owns Swiftkey, which it still offers.
The Reg liked both. We called Swype "The world's fastest text entry system", and said that Swiftkey's predictive engine was so good it was a "psychic keyboard."
First Look The /e/ Foundation's de-Googled version of Android 10 has reached the market in a range of smartphones aimed at the privacy-conscious.
The idea of a privacy-centric version of Android is not new, and efforts to deliver are becoming friendlier all the time. The Register interviewed the founder of the /e/ Foundation in 2020, and reported on /e/ OS doing rather well in privacy tests the following year. Back then, the easiest way to get the OS was to buy a Fairphone, although there was also the option of reflashing one of a short list of supported devices.
Now there's another option: a range of brand-new Murena phones. The company supplied The Register with a Murena One for review, with a pre-release version of the /e/ OS installed.
India's government has reportedly started probes into the local activities of Chinese tech companies Vivo and ZTE, prompting a rebuke from China's foreign ministry.
As was the case when Indian authorities seized $725 million from Chinese gadget-maker Xiaomi, the investigations focus on possible irregular financial reporting that may amount to fraud, according to newswire Bloomberg's original report on the matter.
A Bloomberg reporter asked about the state of the investigations at the daily press conference staged by China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which produces a transcript of each day's event.
Smartphone markets the world over are in decline, but that news doesn't appear to have reached North America, where the market grew by 4 percent in the first quarter of 2022.
Tech market analytics firm Canalys reported that smartphone manufacturers shipped a total of 39m units in North America in Q1 2022, and most of it was driven by Apple, which saw 19 percent growth in Q1 to reach 51 percent of the smartphone market in the US, Canada and Mexico.
Apple may lead the quarter in terms of shipments and market share, but Google was the growth leader: It added 380 percent to its North American market share from Q1 2021 to Q1 2022. Still, that only brought it to 3 percent of the market, putting it in fifth place.
Huawei's long established trading relationship with Leica to integrate the German camera maker's technology into its phones is over, the companies have confirmed.
From February 2016, all Huawei flagships were slated [PDF] to have Leica-developed lenses and branding.
The Reg was generally quite impressed by the combined products over the years.
Opinion It has been 14 years since Apple opened its App Store with its shiny shopfront of tempting toys and gloomy back office of rules and rentier revenues, but only now has the proposed EU Digital Markets Act threatened to end Apple's web browser engine monopoly.
And even then, it's only by 2024, when the App Store will celebrate its 16th birthday. Nobody ever accused market regulators of warp speed.
You'd be forgiven for remembering a much earlier monopoly browser decision, that of Microsoft's bundling of Internet Explorer with Windows. The courts alleged that was (US v Microsoft Corp) that illegal and Microsoft finally settled in 2001, nine years after antitrust investigations had started into the company. Not that it made much difference, with only one update to Internet Explorer in the next four years due to lack of competition. As the web went wild, browser innovation stalled.
Demand for chips needed to make smartphones and PCs has dropped "like a rock" – but mostly in China, according to Zhao Haijun, the CEO of China's largest chipmaker Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC).
Speaking on the company's Q1 2022 earnings call last Friday, Zhao said smartphone makers currently have five months inventory to hand, so are working through that stockpile before ordering new product. Sales of PCs, consumer electronics and appliances are also in trouble, the CEO said, leaving some markets oversupplied with product for now. But unmet demand remains for silicon used for Wi-Fi 6, power conversion, green energy products, and analog-to-digital conversion.
The CEO's "like a rock" comment came in the Q&A section of the call, after previous scripted remarks mentioned a "destocking phase" among SMIC clients.
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