Steve Jobs talking at the Apple Press Conference dealing with the antenna problems.

Are antenna grip problems universal among smartphones? Even if they are, handset makers RIM, Nokia, and HTC are not happy with Apple for insinuating that the iPhone 4 isn’t alone in suffering from signal loss when gripped in a certain way.

During a press conference on Friday, Apple CEO Steve Jobs called media coverage of the iPhone 4′s antenna problems overblown. Jobs said that reception issues were something common to all smartphones, playing a video that showed smartphones from HTC, Samsung, and other manufacturers dropping signal when held in various ways.

Apple’s attempt to paint other smartphones with the same wide brush didn’t sit well with RIM, makers of the BlackBerry. Calling the whole saga “Apple’s self-made debacle,” RIM co-CEOs Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie didn’t mince words. “Apple’s claims about RIM products appear to be deliberate attempts to distort the public’s understanding of an antenna design issue and to deflect attention from Apple’s difficult situation,” they said in a statement obtained by CrackBerry. “RIM has avoided designs like the one Apple used in the iPhone 4 and instead has used innovative designs which reduce the risk for dropped calls, especially in areas of lower coverage.”

The co-CEOs also slammed Apple for its free case program, pointing out that all BlackBerrys can maintain “proper connectivity” without having to resort to cases and bumpers. They concluded by criticized Apple for shirking responsibility for its design choices by accusing other hardware makers of making similar antenna tradeoffs.

HTC was more restrained, even though a Droid Eris was shown dropping from four bars to zero during Apple’s video. Instead, HTC highlighted user satisfaction and a corresponding lack of complaints about the Eris’ design. “We have had very few complaints about signal or antenna problems on the Eris,” a company spokesperson told Pocket-lint. He said that only about 0.016 percent of Eris owners have complained to the manufacturer about dropped calls and signal weakness, compared to 0.55 percent of iPhone 4 owners.

Jobs also singled out Nokia, highlighting models from the Finnish company that ship with stickers on the reverse saying “don’t touch here.” Nokia defended itself, saying on its corporate blog that it considers antenna design a “core competence… for decades.”

Nokia says it designs its phones to account for real-world usage, including a variety of grips. “In general, antenna performance of a mobile device/phone may be affected with a tight grip, depending on how the device is held,” the company said. “That’s why Nokia designs our phones to ensure acceptable performance in all real life cases, for example when the phone is held in either hand. Nokia has invested thousands of man hours in studying how people hold their phones and allows for this in designs, for example by having antennas both at the top and bottom of the phone and by careful selection of materials and their use in the mechanical design.”

In the same way that widespread user and media criticism of the iPhone 4 antenna problem touched a nerve within Apple, the iPhone maker’s saying that its latest gadget is just one of many smartphones with signal loss problems has aroused the ire of its competitors. All handset makers are faced with antenna design challenges, but only Apple has managed to bring its antenna design decisions so spectacularly into the public consciousness. That’s not something Cupertino should feel good about.

With word of the iPhone’s reception woes travelling well beyond the blogosphere, it surely looks like a software fix will do little to stop the bleeding.

When Apple released its iPhone 4 late last month, users quickly began reporting reception issues when the phone was held a certain way. At first, the company played off the glitch as user error, telling owners not to hold it that way. When it realized the issue wasn’t going away, Apple admitted there was a problem, but pointed at a software rather than hardware issue. The company said that its software had been mis-reporting signal reception all along and that a retroactive patch to all iPhones would correct the issue. As we reported then, however, an independent analysis by the popular hardware news site Anandtech.com seemed to directly contradict this explanation.

Now, Consumer Reports agrees, stating that “It’s official. Consumer Reports’ engineers have just completed testing the iPhone 4, and have confirmed that there is a problem with its reception.” According to the review, testers tried several phones, bought at different locations, and compared results with other phone models. The results contradicted Apple’s claims that the reception issue was one that was “true of iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, as well as many Droid, Nokia and RIM phones.”

While many early adopters and tech watchers were well aware of the issue, Consumer Reports’ non-recommendation brings the problem to the mainstream. It’s no longer just a topic for the tech blogs and the back pages of newspapers, but rather an oft-repeated mantra of the five o’ clock news, mainstream media and talk radio. Cult of Mac’s Leander Kahney spoke with several public relations experts who agreed that an iPhone recall was “inevitable” in order to preserve “its brand image, its crown jewels, at all cost.”

Aside from the reception issue, however, Consumer Reports says that the iPhone 4 “sports the sharpest display and best video camera we’ve seen on any phone, and even outshines its high-scoring predecessors with improved battery life and such new features as a front-facing camera for video chats and a built-in gyroscope that turns the phone into a super-responsive game controller.” But before the magazine will issue a recommendation, it says, “Apple needs to come up with a permanent–and free–fix for the antenna problem”.

New data gathered from users of a free smartphone security tool shows the bad guys are increasingly going after smartphone users. According to Lookout, which offers a free lightweight mobile client with cloud-based security, backup, and anti-theft features, there were about nine pieces of malware and spyware per 100 smartphones as of last month — more than twice as many as in November 2009.

Even more worrisome is how rapidly these threats are hitting smartphones in comparison to the desktop: What took 15 years to evolve with the desktop machine is happening practically overnight in mobile handsets, security experts say. “We call this the 1999 factor: It feels like about 10 years ago in terms of prevalence of threats. There was a tipping point between 2000 and 2002 [for PC threats] that was driven by broadband” and more consumers going online, according to John Hering, CEO and founder of Lookout, formerly Flexilis. “The same trends are going to hold true here [with smartphones].”

Tyler Shields, senior security researcher with Veracode, says he has seen a definite uptick in malware arriving for smartphones during the past few months. “It’s coming at a much faster rate now. It’s difficult to quantify the amount of growth,” however, he says. Shields earlier this year developed and released proof-of-concept source code for a spyware app he created that forces a BlackBerry to hand over its contacts and messages. The spyware can also can grab text messages, listen in on the victim, as well as track his physical location via the phone’s GPS.

Spyware is the main type of malware Lookout sees being created for BlackBerrys, while Windows Mobile phones suffer more from traditional malware, and Androids from a little of both, according to Lookout’s data. “We’re seeing a pretty equal spread [of the threats] across these platforms,” Lookout’s Hering says. The firm doesn’t yet support the Apple iPhone in its app, so data on the iPhone isn’t included.

Why mostly spyware on the BlackBerry? Veracode’s Shields says it might be due to the heavy corporate use of BlackBerrys, which would make any data lifted from them more easily monetized. “The type of data on a BlackBerry generally is going to be corporate-centric and could be of interest to attackers,” he says.

A recent malware attack against Windows Mobile phones basically took an existing, legitimate smartphone app and booby-trapped it with malware: The 3D Anti-Terrorist app game for Windows Mobile was rewritten with auto-dialer malware, according to Lookout’s Hering. The app basically fires up the auto-dialer malware when the user runs the game. “It sits dormant for hours or days, and then wakes up and calls numbers at a premium rate — from Somalia to the South Pole,” for instance, he says. “The victim is then incurring charges but doesn’t notice until [he] receives the phone bill.”

A Windows codec and poker app also were hijacked, copied, and repackaged with malware. The apps are being distributed via typical mobile download and app store sites, such as sharewareplaza.com, geardownload.com, myzips.com, and top4download.com. “We’re seeing the same evolution on mobile as on the desktop: It’s going from notoriety [purposes] to trying to profit,” Hering says.

The malware attack vector being used against smartphones isn’t the SMS or email spam that was all the rage in the early days of mobile attacks. Instead, it’s following smartphone user behavior trends and exploiting downloadable applications, experts say. “Users are downloading apps at a huge pace,” Hering says.

And smartphones are actually more “personal” than PCs. They include GPS location, payment information, email, text messages, and records of who a user communicates with. Hering says today’s smartphone malware is all about grabbing personal information and, now, attempting to monetize it. “On the spyware side, you can imagine an app grabbing personal data that you’re unaware of [occurring] and transmitting that to a third-party location” where it can be resold, for example, he says.

Meanwhile, enterprises should be aware of the risks of breaches via their smartphone users. “They should be worried about this,” Hering says.

But the likelihood of another Operation Aurora-scale targeted attack isn’t as likely to hit via the smartphone just yet: “At this point in time, the PC [attack] model is so much easier and faster. I don’t foresee that level of coordination to target mobile devices at this point,” Veracode’s Shields says.

rugalFay is a application to help you keep track of your spending. Services like Mint.com are great but all they do is provide a general idea of how much money you have. This only helps if when have plenty of money or rarely spend it. Being a college student, I know swiping your card over and over again, writing a check here and there, and borrowing money from a friend can be very hard to keep up with unless you write it all down. Who carries around a ledger to document their spending? Grandma, maybe… rugalFay is nothing but an account ledger that can be used with almost any phone, not just a smartphone.

Some features are:

• SMS enabled, use text messages to record transactions and check balance
• Mobile version of site compatible with mobile browsers
• Native App for Android and iPhone
• Main site provides reports and charts to see how you are spending money

rugalFay accurately keeps track of your spending.

and yes…rugalFay is frugal in Pig Latin

How he plans on using the money:

I plan on using the money for the following:

• To promote and advertise
• Bring in another developer to help with native mobile applications
• Equipment such as phones for testing
• SMS fees
• Graphic Design

About the Developer:

His name is John Hiott. He is a 23 year old real estate agent. He is currently selling real estate while he finishes his 4 year degree in Computer Science. His passion has always been development. He started developing software on a Tandy his grandfather gave me when he was 10.

The word “brick” has many meanings. For basketball players, it’s used to describe the sound of a badly missed shot. And for iPhone owners who tried to sneak an early copy of the developers-only beta software, it means that their $300-smartphone has been reduced to an expensive paperweight. Apple showed off the next version of the iPhone software last week, which was made immediately available to members of its third-party developer program.

Application coders, who pay the $99 membership fee, get access to new features, including copy-and-paste, multimedia messaging, voice note recording and text-note syncing. The idea is to give developers a few months to test the nuances of the firmware and build new features into their apps. The software update will be available to the general public (free for the iPhone and $10 for the iPod Touch) in the summer. But some couldn’t wait and decided to snatch the beta from the many piracy websites that offer it for download.

Many were shocked when they hit a brick wall. After the update process, iTunes connects to Apple’s servers and attempts to… verify whether your iPhone or iPod Touch is registered as a developer’s device. If not, users are asked to join the developer program — or else. If you refuse, your pricey gadget is, as they say, “bricked.” It asks you to connect to iTunes, but when you do so there’s no escape. Because the firmware modifies certain files within the phone, you cannot downgrade to a previous version, third-party developers say. Folks who hoped to get a free ticket to the early release of iPhone 3.0 are expressing remorse across the Web.

What we have:

- Framebuffer driver
- Serial driver
- Serial over USB driver
- Interrupts, MMU, clock, etc.

What we have in openiboot (but hasn’t been ported yet):

- Read-only support for the NAND

What we don’t have (yet!):

- Write support for the NAND
- Wireless networking
- Touchscreen
- Sound
- Accelerometer
- Baseband support

Here is a video of a short demonstration:

Here is a LINK to download the files needed! Also, here is a LINK to the readme.txt if you would like to try it for yourself! So enjoy!!

This really gets my gears turning as to what they can produce, being as big as they are, I am sure they have the man power and resources to put together something huge and very good looking. I recently (in May) got my first smartphone that is now running Windows Mobile 6.1 and have loved all that it can do so far. With there only being a few minor problems that I have been able to find with it, I can only imagine what Google is going to be able to do  with their phone’s OS.

With Google doing so much lately in almost every side of the game… one can only imagine what they have up their sleeve for this new phone. If they are in the works of creating data centers that operate from boats using wave power… I have to hand it to them that they are pretty creative and only time will tell what they are going to throw at us with this new smartphone!

Links to some News Posts covering this new Google device!