Technical Devices

During the past three years Qualcomm’s business has grown exponentially, outpacing even smartphone sales.

The company now owns 35 per cent of the market as of Q2 2011.

The Snapdragon S4 sets to build on that gain through the introduction of more processing power, improved power efficiency and built-in support for next-level technologies like LTE, HD Flash video and 4G speeds of up to 100mbps.

Qualcomm also detailed the type of optimised software experiences users’ can expect from the Snapdragon S4 chipsets once they arrive in handsets. Ren

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Hollywood has to resort to trickery to show moviegoers laser beams traveling through the air. That’s because the beams move too fast to be captured on film. Now a camera that records frames at a rate of 0.6 trillion every second can truly capture the bouncing path of a laser pulse.

See a video of a laser pulse moving through a Coke bottle, or bouncing off a tomato.

The system was developed by researchers led by Ramesh Raskar at MIT’s Media Lab. Currently limited to a tabletop inside the group’s lab, the camera can record what happens when very short pulses of laser light—lasting just 50 femtoseconds (50,000 trillionths of a second) long—hit objects in front of them. The

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Xmas Gift Guide With the likes of Bulletstorm, Gears of War 3 and Frozen Synapse narrowly missing out on my annual list of top ten games, it would seem 2011 has been a pretty decent year for videogames.

The vulture-eyed Reg reader will, however, notice the list is dominated by sequels and franchises – for which I make no apologies. It’s simply representative of the industry at present, and, in my opinion at least, reflective of their individual merits – each and every inclusion granted not because of the game’s pedigree but in spite of it.

If you’ll excuse the aside, it’s also worth mentioning the ubiquity of sequels usually heralds the end of each gaming generation. Wit

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If eBay leaks and unlocked models aren’t enough for you (and let’s not kid ourselves, it’s not), you’ll be pleased to know that the Palm Pre 2 for Verizon has just taken another big step… well, towards existing, if not towards actually being sold.  This scan from a Best Buy inventory system confirms that the big box store does plan on carrying the long-awaited Palm Pre 2 for Verizon and suggests, if you’re an optimist, that it will probably start selling the device soon.  That 12-30-2010 date clearly wasn’t much more than a placeholder and it’s a little late to get our hopes up for 2010… but with CES just around the corner, well, there are good things to come.

Yahoo Messenger users are in danger of getting their status messages changed without their consent and finding themselves inadvertently peddling malware.

The zero-day exploit is present in versions 11.x of the Yahoo Messenger client – including the very last released version – and allows remote attackers to very easily hijack the victim’s status.

“The status message change occurs when an attacker simulates sending a file to a user,” explains BitDefender. Full Article…