Eugenia Loli Archive

Analysis: New Windows Vista Firewall Fails on Outbound Security

Microsoft touts Windows Vista as giving significant security improvements over Windows XP, and it offers the Windows Firewall, with its new two-way filtering feature, as one reason for that better security. But as shipped, the Windows Firewall offers little outbound protection, and it's not clear how outbound protection can be configured to protect against spyware, Trojans and bots.

KDE 4’s Sonnet Will Turbocharge Language Processing

With the Sonnet library for KDE 4, developer Jacob Rideout hopes to reinvigorate the field of desktop linguistics by adding automatic language detection and other innovative features. Sonnet is to be for KDE 4 what KSpell 2 is for the current version of the K Desktop Environment, providing spell-checking facilities to applications as diverse as the Konqueror Web browser, Kopete instant messenger, and KWord office software. Unlike KSpell, however, it will also provide grammar checking, multilingual tools, and perhaps even translation, dictionary, and thesaurus functionality across all of KDE.

Samsung’s Answer to the iPhone

Samsung is following Apple, MS & LG in the trend where cellphones involve "big, wide touchscreens" as their main look and feel. Their Ultrasmart F700 phone has a qwerty keyboard, 2.8" widescreen, 5 MP camera and 3G support. We are not sure at this point if this is a smartphone which allows you to develop and run native applications or if it's just a glorified "feature phone". The whole interface is based on Adobe's Flash while a recent press release along with the claim of "full HTML browsing" makes us speculate that the phone possibly uses the Opera web browser -- possibly on top of Linux.

Windows Mobile 6 Officially Announced

"I have a huge list of all of the tweaks that have been done to the operating system but I'll save that for next week. Also, if you're wondering, you can expect Windows Mobile 6 devices in the marketplace worldwide by second quarter 2007." More here (screenshots). Betas of WinMob6 also had integrated VoIP support via SIP in them, but it doesn't seem that this was announced along the other features.

Meet the LG Prada, iPhone’s Competitor; Google Maps for PocketPC

A new video showing the touchscreen-based UI of the LG Prada phone has hit YouTube. The phone is going head to head with the iPhone UI-wise and it shows the path that the majority of phones will look like in the years to come. It is not clear if the LG Prada is a smartphone that allows you to run native applications or just a 'feature phone'. On other mobile news, Google released a native Google Maps application for PocketPC and MS Smartphones (screenshots) that works better than the J2ME version.

Review: Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate

"Windows Vista is finally here for everyone and is soon to be made available on store shelves and pre-loaded on new PC's. Windows Vista has been five years in the making; throughout that time we have witnessed Microsoft reschedule the release of this 'major upgrade' over and over and over again. Microsoft, however, throughout that tumultuous time did manage to pick up the pieces and move forward." Read more of the multi-page review at ActiveWin.

Top Ten Freeware Applications for Symbian S60 3rd Edition

It's been about ten months since the first S60 3rd Edition SymbianOS smartphone hit the market. Nokia made a lot of changes to the underlying OS and broke compatibility with the ~1800 S60 2nd Ed. applications that were already available. Ten months later, there are about 220 applications for the new version of S60. This is a small list of the Top-10 freeware applications for your new S60 phone.