Android Outranks IPhone in Latest ComScore survey

Google's Android outranked Apple's iPhone in total smartphone subscribers in the U.S. at the end of the fourth quarter of 2010, according to survey data released on Monday by market research company Comscore.
Android jumped to 28.7% of the 63.2 million U.S. smartphone owners at the end of December last year, up from 21.4% at the end of September, ComScore said. It based its findings on a survey of more than 12,000 smartphone subscribers ages 13 and older.
Android's upward climb put it in second position behind Blackberry maker Research in Motion at the end of December, pushing down Apple iPhone subscribers from second to third place by the end of the fourth quarter. The iPhone had 24.3% of U.S. subscribers at the end of September, rising to 25% by the end of December.
Subscribers to RIM's Blackberries dropped from 37.3% down to 31.6%, ComScore noted.
Android's ascendancy has been shown in other reports, including those from research firms Canalys and IDC .
Users of the Palm and Microsoft operating systems also declined over the last three months, despite the introduction of Windows Mobile Phone 7, Comscore noted.
Similar to IDC's finding that Samsung led the worldwide smartphone market in shipments, ComScore said Samsung led in the U.S. with 24.8% of subscribers using Samsung devices at the end of December, up from 23.5% at the end of September. Samsung was followed by LG, Motorola, RIM and Nokia.
Nokia had more than 33% of the global smartphone market at the end of 2010, retaining its top position worldwide, IDC said. However, ComScore put Nokia's subscriber number at just 7% in the U.S. at the end of December.
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Google translation 'app' hits iPhone

Google software that turns iPhones into interpreters became available at Apple's online App Store on Tuesday.
Google software that turns iPhones into interpreters became available at Apple's online App Store on Tuesday.
"The new app accepts voice input for 15 languages, and - just like the web app - you can translate a word or phrase into one of more than 50 languages," Google engineer Wenzhang Zhu said in a blog post.
"For voice input, just press the microphone icon next to the text box and say what you want to translate."
Google Translate for iPhone uses the same speech synthesizing technology as a version of the program released last month for desktop computers, according to the engineer.
The Mountain View, California-based Internet powerhouse in January added language translation capabilities to Android-powered smartphones with software that lets the handsets translate conversations in real time.
Google's Android surged past iPhone last quarter and is closing in on the Blackberry as the most popular smartphone platform in the United States, market tracking firm comScore said Monday.
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Hackers attack Italian government site: ANSA

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi arrived at the EU summit on February 4 in Brussels. Software hacker group "Anonymous" launched attacks Sunday against the Italian government's website citing political grievances, ANSA news agency reported.
Software hacker group "Anonymous" launched attacks Sunday against the Italian government's website citing political grievances, ANSA news agency reported.
"Anonymous" announced its distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) assaults earlier in the day, saying they were launched because "the political and economic situation in Italy has become unstable."
The website (www.governo.it) did not immediately appear to be blocked.
DDoS attacks are efforts to overload websites with so many simultaneous requests that computer servers can't handle the load and freeze or crash.
Police had alerted the site and its manager of the potential attack ahead of time, allowing them to put counter measures in place.
A loose-knit group of online global hackers, "Anonymous" previously attacked government websites in Egypt and Tunisia, both roiled by anti-government protests, among other sites.
Last Thursday, it apparently zeroed in on Yemen, where the website of President Ali Abdullah Saleh, presidentsaleh.gov.ye, was inaccessible following calls by "Anonymous" members to attack it.
In December, the group also claimed attacks on the websites of Visa and Mastercard among others, in revenge for their stances regarding whistleblowing website WikiLeaks.
In its announcement on Italy, the group skewered the judiciary system and government, which it said was "implicated in prostitution, including minors," in apparent reference to a sex scandal dogging Italy's prime minister Silvio Berlusconi.
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Kepler spacecraft recovered from safe mode

The spacecraft returned to science data collection after an outage of 64 hours.
The likely cause was corrupt star tracker data that resulted in a false momentum alarm on the spacecraft.
Fault protection software reacted properly in making the spacecraft safe until the project engineers could contact the spacecraft and review telemetry.
An anomaly response team will continue to evaluate the telemetry to understand the root cause of the corrupt star tracker data and develop further mitigations.
While conducting recovery of the spacecraft from the Safe Mode event, the project downloaded science data from the spacecraft's solid state recorder that was collected since Jan. 6.
That data is now being routed to the Kepler Science Operations Center where it will be processed for the science team's evaluation.
The team is making plans for the next science data collection download and spacecraft quarterly roll.
Provided by JPL/NASA (news : web)
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