Major security issue in latest HTC Android

A major security vulnerability has been discovered in recent HTC Android phones that would make the recent location tracking issue in iOS seem trivial in comparison.

Discovered by the people at Android Police along with Trevor Eckhart, this issue plagues HTC's latest Android phones such as the EVO 3D, EVO 4G, Sensation and Thunderbolt.

What is happening here is that these HTC phones are logging user data such as email addresses, SMS data, location, phone numbers, system logs, etc. thanks to a suite of logging tools installed by HTC in the latest updates to these devices. But while simply collecting the data may not be bad enough, the devices unfortunately make this data accessible to any application that can connect to the Internet.

This would allow someone to write an application that would take advantage of this vulnerability and misuse that data and who knows, they may already be doing that. Android Police believes that there is enough information in there to clone your device.

There is a lot more to this than what we have discussed here and we would urge you to visit the source link to get complete lowdown. It must be said that this is deeply troubling and the full blame falls on HTC. After failing to initially respond to Trevor's attempts to contact HTC, the company has now finally responded on the matter and assured that they are working on it. Hopefully a fix is issued soon.

Do note that this issue is only faced on the latest HTC devices running the latest firmware. If you have an older device or a newer rooted device running a custom ROM then you have no reason to worry about.

Alleged Nokia Searay

A very legit looking image of the Nokia Searay has just been leaked by The Nokia Blog. The image is allegedly from T-Mobile Germany and has a short description of the phone on the side.

If we translate the text to English, we get the following result:

Drive safely to your destination with Nokia - including 3D. Representation and voice navigation Windows Mobile 7.5 (Mango) operating system. 3.7" brilliant domed AMOLED display.

The phone itself looks identical to the N9, as it did in all the previous leaks, which means it is also very easy to fake an image like this. Just like The Nokia Blog, we're finding the idea that Nokia would call the final version of this phone by the name 'Searay' a bit hard to swallow. More so because recently Nokia opened a poll to decide the name for their series of Windows Phone 7 devices, with options like Phoenix, Genesis, etc. This means the actual phones will probably be called something like the Nokia Genesis N1 rather than simply 'Searay'.

Things are yet to get finalized though, so eventually they might just go with individual names instead of having a name for the series. Whatever it is, we'll find out before the end of this year.

Sony Ericsson Xperia PLAY gets four top EA games

The Sony Ericsson Xperia PLAY owners are in for a real treat as the manufacturer just announced that its gaming smartphone will be getting four top titles for free. The four popular EA games that you can get if you happen to own an Xperia PLAY are Dead Space, Battlefield Bad Company 2, Need for Speed Shift and Need for Speed Hot Pursuit.

That’s a first-person shooter, a third person shooter and a couple of racing games, all of the highest quality. To get them you just head to the Game Launcher and start with the downloading. Needless to say, you will be better if you use a Wi-Fi network for that.

The promotion should be available to every Xperia PLAY owner, regardless of their carrier or country and will be valid until January 15 2012.

Happy playing!

MeeGo to be merged into Tizen

There are some good news and some bad news for the MeeGo fans out there. The good news is that their platform isn’t dead, despite Nokia giving up on its development. The bad news is that MeeGo will have to go through another transformation in order to live on. So it’s so long to MeeGo, long live to Tizen.

Latest news is that Intel has finally found the partner it was looking for to help it shape MeeGo in Samsung. The Koreans will join Intel and The Linux Foundation in the development of Tizen – a new open-source project, of which Meego will become a part of.

The encouraging thing is that the MeeGo team will be joining the project as well and they are assuring us that the transition from MeeGo to Tizen will be smooth for developers.

The new OS should mostly count on HTML5-based applications, as their creators believe that this is the future. However, there will still be an NDK released for those that prefer to do native code.

The new platform and its SDK should come in Q1 2012 so we’ll soon find out how the transition goes. It will also be interesting to see how the new OS will affect Samsung’s proprietary Bada and if the Nokia N9, which just started shipping will ever get to run Tizen.

Nokia’s Meltemi is not the codename for the Linux-based replacement for S40 at all

Surely the news from a few days ago about Nokia working on a Linux-based OS to replace the S40 UI was really good stuff. Unfortunately, the rumored Meltemi project is not an S40 replacement.

As it turned out, the Meltemi is the codename for the Windows Phone project, so the Meltemi is actually no news. Here is why:

Back in last April The Register UK had already confirmed that Meltemi is Nokia’s codename for their Windows Phone project.

We all got swept up by the fact Meltemi is a name of a wind much like previous MeeGo editions, but Meltemi is actually a type of wind common for the Aegean Sea. So the name is a sea-thing that’s a perfect fit for the codenames of the Nokia’s Windows Phone-based devices such as Sea Ray and Hydra.

So, the rumor about the Linux-based OS for S40 entry phones turned false. This doesn’t mean there isn’t something exciting coming to the S40 platform (including support for the Qt framework and more powerful hardware) , but there is no substantial rumor to suggest it so far.

Samsung Pink Ribbon edition

Probably not many of you are aware of this, but October is the National Breast Cancer Awareness Month both in the Europe and in the US and in order to show its commitment to the issue, Samsung Netherlands in cooperation with KPN telecom starts selling special Pink Ribbon editions of the Galaxy S Plus and Ch@t 335.

Both handsets will feature white back panels with the special Pink Ribbon logo, showing support to patients with Breast Cancer and hopefully increasing the awareness of the disease, which is not fatal if caught on time. For each unit sold, Samsung will donate €10 to the Pink Ribbon Charity organization. According to its estimates, Samsung hopes to donate a total of €150,000. I hope the sales exceed Sammy’s expectations.

And here’s how the Pink Ribbon edition of the Samsung Ch@t 335 looks like.

Both devices and are on offer by Netherlands’ service provider KPN with the option of a one or two-year contract. If you live in the Netherlands go ahead and check out the offers for Galaxy S Plus and Ch@t 335.

Speaking of charity, have you recently donated to any and if yes, to which causes?