Cellphone shoppers generally judge wireless carriers based on their networks’ speed, size and—above all—reliability. But reliability extends to customer service. Will your carrier be able to help when something goes wrong? And can you get your questions answered in a timely fashion?

With that in mind, we performed a survey of the country’s four largest service providers—AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon Wireless—to determine which offers the best service and which could use some lessons in customer appreciation.

How We Tested

To get a complete view of each carrier’s customer support options, we visited two of their brick-and-mortar stores, placed two phone calls to their tech-support hotlines and tried to connect with them via their Web services. For our tests, we used purchased phones (instead of review units) to help ensure we received genuine user experiences.

Our test beds included an AT&T Motorola Atrix 4G, a Sprint EVO 4G, a T-Mobile G2x and a Verizon Wireless Motorola Droid X. To ensure our testing was fair, we posed the same three questions to each carrier’s service representatives: “How can I tether my phone to my notebook,” “How can I upload photos from my phone to Facebook?” and “How do I improve my phone’s battery life?”

Best and Worst Carrier Customer Service

• Introduction and How We Tested
• AT&T
• Sprint
• T-Mobile
• Verizon
• Final Verdict

How does it work?

You start by creating a specific “handle,” or nickname, and then look up friends. From there, you can challenge them in a number of ways.

Sometimes you simply compare stats and scores through leaderboards, such as how many pieces of fruit you’re able to slice in Halfbrick’s “Fruit Ninja.” Other times, you can challenge players directly in online play, such as a round of “Real Racing 2.”

Whatever happens in your games is automatically tracked through the program. You can see how many friends are on your list (and which ones are currently playing), how many games you’ve played and how many Achievements you have unlocked.

What are Achievements?

Certain accomplishments in a game earn points called achievements. You may win achievements for beating a “boss,” a tough guy, at the end of a particular stage, for instance, or for finishing a game in its entirety. Game Center automatically tracks achievements. You can visit a menu for each game to see what your score is and what achievements you may be missing.

Game Center can compare your achievements with those of your friends and automatically rank everyone, adding a competitive edge to each game.

How do I find friends?

Finding your friends is as easy as entering their handle, if you have it, or doing a search on their real name. Then you can invite them to be a friend. Of course, they can do the same for you.

Some games can pair you up with random players. Afterward, you can track whom you’ve played and ask any of them to be friends, should you feel like playing them again. The “Infinity Blade II” game, for example, has an extensive list of players. So it shouldn’t be a problem to make new friends.

What can I play?

Most newer games work with Game Center. What’s more, it doesn’t matter what kind of player you are: whether a fierce warrior in “Infinity Blade II” or a casual gamer who prefers “Angry Birds.”

Oh, and if you see someone named TheDCD tearing up the charts, don’t be afraid. It’s just me.

Article provided by TechNewsDaily, a sister site to Laptopmag.com.

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Today, you’re free to hack around those restrictions. And you don’t always need to be a tech whiz. With some iPhones, for example, you have been able to visit the website jailbreakme.com with your phone’s browser and just press a button. After that, it’s “jailbroken,” and you can install apps from anywhere, not just Apple’s App Store.

These changes aren’t always purely for fun. Some deaf people have hacked Android phones, for example, to allow them to make video calls using a sign-language interpreting service called SVRS.

But soon, all that could be illegal if jailbreaking is ruled to be copyright violation. Today is the last day that the U.S. Copyright Office is accepting input on whether it should continue allowing you to jailbreak your phone. Technically, doing so could violate the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA, a strict law against “circumvention of technological measures applied to copyrighted works.”

Software is considered to be copyrighted work, so jailbreaking your phone by changing its software could be considered “circumvention.” The penalties, at least on paper, can be severe — up to $25,000 – though it’s unlikely to go that far. “I’d say people will be more at risk of getting threatening letters from lawyers,” said Mitch Stoltz, staff attorney at the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation, or EFF.

Cellphone tinkerers got a reprieve in July 2010 when the U.S. Copyright Office agreed – based on input from EFF — to exempt mobile devices from the DMCA. But the exemption is temporary, and will expire later this year if the government decides not to renew it.

Even now, it applies to only “wireless telephone handsets.” It doesn’t mention iPads and other tablets, though they often run the same software as the phones. It certainly doesn’t cover other gadgets such as game consoles. In fact, Sony sued a man named George Hotz in 2011 for jailbreaking the PlayStation 3 to run additional software and for offering downloads on his website that would enable other people to do the same.

(We asked Sony on Wednesday and Thursday to comment, but they were unable to reply in time for publication. The same happened with Apple and Google.)

For that reason, EFF is asking not only for extension of the phone exemption, but also for protection for hacking tablets and game consoles. Stoltz is upbeat. “We’re pretty confident that we’ve shown that there are a lot of legal and valid reasons for jailbreaking devices,” he said.

Other groups are going further. The Free Software Foundation will ask the copyright office to exempt essentially every electronic device. Brett Smith, their license compliance engineer, was finishing the organization’s comments to the Copyright Office as we spoke to him on Thursday night. “We’ll support an exemption for as much jailbreaking as we can get,” he said. Smith declined to provide a list that would limit what they wanted covered, but he said “yes” to every item we asked about, including game consoles, tablets, PCs, PC software, home automation devices, robotic toys and TVs. Then he added home network routers and modems.

Aaron Williamson, a staff attorney at the Software Freedom Law Center, said his organization is also pushing for broad exemptions. “If you buy anything — whether that’s a phone or a computer or a tablet or a toaster — you have the right to control the software running on that device and have it do what you want it to do,” he said.

Article provided by TechNewsDaily, a sister site to Laptopmag.com.

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Microsoft has demonstrated that its upcoming Windows 8 operating system will work on ARM-based processors many times in the last few months, but the company has been mum on when that version of the software will be available for testing and what kind of apps it will run. Now, we have more details.

In a post at the company’s Building Windows 8 blog, software president Stephen Sinofsky said not only does the manufacturer intend to release Windows 8 on ARM devices at the same time as Windows 8 for x86/64 chips, he also said Windows 8 for ARM will support desktop versions of familiar Microsoft apps, including versions of Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and Internet Explorer 10.

Until today’s post, there had been some debate about just how Microsoft would support its familiar Office software in the Windows 8 for ARM interface. Many figured the software would run only the Metro interface (just like Windows 8 for x86/64 chips), but it now looks as though Office 15 will also support a non-Metro, desktop-like UI. Other prominent features of the desktop Windows ecosystem, including File Explorer, Internet 10 and other OS components, will also work in desktop-like interfaces on Windows 8 ARM devices.

Earlier this week, Microsoft announced a public demo of Windows 8 at the Mobile World Congress convention in Barcelona, Spain on February 29. It is expected that a beta of x86/64 OS called Windows 8 Consumer Preview will be released afterwards. There’s still no specific time frame for Windows 8 on ARM, but it looks like that beta release won’t come long after.

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According to The Wall Street Journal, the new service, which is simply called Drive, would allow users to upload and store their music, video, and other files to Google’s servers where they can later be retrieved from any web-connected device.

The service, the Journal says, will feature a smartphone and tablet app for mobile users, similar to those offered by the aforementioned Dropbox, SugarSync, and to a lesser extend Apple’s iCloud. Apple’s service is currently only available to iOS 5 users. In the report, the Journal cites sources familiar with Google’s Drive as saying the service will make it to market in the coming weeks or months.

Drive will in all likelihood offer users a certain amount of storage space for free. Users looking for more space will probably have to cough up some cash. The interesting thing here is that Google already offers some form of web-based storage for photos, videos, and documents via Picasa, YouTube, and Google Docs. What makes Drive special is it will be the first time Google allows its users to storage all of their files in one place.

Since cloud storage and mobile computing go hand-in-hand, we’re curious to see if Google will integrate Drive with its Android operating system. Could a cloud-ready Ice Cream Sandwich be on the horizon? We’ll just have to wait to see.

via The Wall Street Journal

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It’s finally happened. Google has, at last, released a beta version of its Chrome browser for Android. Unfortunately for the hordes of Android fans out there that have been clamoring for a mobile version of Chrome, this release is only available for Ice Cream Sandwich due to the operating system’s unique hardware acceleration capabilities.

Since Chrome for Android will eventually replace Android’s browser, we decided to pit the two against each other in a mobile browser battle royale. And to spice things up a bit, we also threw the most popular alternative Android browsers into the mix including Opera Mobile, Dolphin HD, and Firefox. To determine each browser’s speed we used a Samsung Galaxy Nexus running on Verizon’s 4G LTE network and ran the browsers through a couple of synthetic tests and some real-world browsing. The results show a browser that’s full of potential, but one that’s slower than many of its third-party competitors.

SunSpider JavaScript Test

SunSpider measures the amount of time it takes a browser to run through a series of complex JavaScript functions. The test ultimately gives us a good an idea of how quickly each browser can load webpages that use a large amount of JavaScript and perform certain dynamic actions. The less time it takes to complete the test, the better.

Firefox ran away with this round, finishing the SunSpider test in just 1.7 seconds. Chrome for Android came in second place with a time of 2.1 seconds. The stock Android browser wasn’t far behind, completing the test in 2.2 seconds. Opera Mobile and Dolphin HD took the longest, finishing in 2.4 and 2.5 seconds, respectively.

 Peacekeeper Benchmark

Peacekeeper is a synthetic benchmark that measures a browser’s overall performance. Results are measured in scores rather than times. The higher a browser’s score, the better it performed during the test.

Surprisingly, it was the Stock Android browser that took the top spot in this test with an average score of 467. Chrome for Android was close behind, notching a 444. Dolphine HD came in a distant third-place with a score of 416, while Firefox and Opera Mobile trailed with scores of 320 and 219, respectively.

Loadtimer Test

Loadtimer.org is an excellent tool used to measure how long it takes to open a specific webpage. We ran the test using a series of different sites and, and averaged the results to get a standard page load time.

In the end, it was Dolphin HD that offered the fastest average load times at 6.7 seconds, followed by Opera Mobile at 7 seconds. Firefox pulled into third place with an average 8.2-second load time, while Chrome and the stock Android browser came in fourth and fifth place with 8.4 and 14 seconds respectively.

Screen Real Estate

One thing you’ll notice when you load Chrome on your phone is the amount of screen real estate you gain versus the stock Android browser. In fact, of the five browsers we tested, Chrome provided the largest area of viewable space on Laptopmag.com taking away just 95 pixels with its toolbar. We measured the toolbars’ pixel size because it is a constant across all devices despite any difference in physical screen size. The stock Android browser offered the second largest amount of screen real estate, with its toolbar taking up 104 pixels. Firefox offered a little less than that with its 114 pixel toolbar. Trailing Firefox were Dolphin HD and Opera Mobile, which featured 184-pixel and 191-pixel toolbars, respectively.

Tabbed Browsing

With Chrome for Android, Google decided to switch up the way it displays browser tabs. Instead of stacking new tabs on top of each other like in the stock Android browser, tabs in Chrome look like a deck of cards that’s been fanned out. Pull the first tab down and it will reveal the tab immediately behind it. Pull the tabs down all the way and they will turn towards you ever so slightly. Open a new tab, and it slides neatly over the previous tab. It’s a cool little touch, that goes a long way in adding style to the browser. Like the stock Android browser, you can also swipe away tabs that you want to close.

Of course, you don’t have to go into the tab view to navigate through your tabs. Chrome also allows you to swipe between them from the main browser screen, an action none of the other browsers support. Overall, we preferred Chrome’s tabbed browsing to the other browsers in our roundup. The animations were fun and made the tabs feel like an extension of the browsing experience rather than a separate part of the program.

 Conclusion

Chrome Beta for Android adds some fun changes to the browsing formula and looks to be a good start for Google. But in the end the browser wasn’t as fast as its third-party competition. That said, Chrome is already able to outclass the stock Android browser in two of our three performance tests , making it a solid step forward in the evolution of Google’s mobile browser development. Hopefully, the company can add the needed zip to Chrome as it makes its way from beta to its final release. For now, the compelling tab management feature alone may put it over the top with some users.

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We just got our invitation to Microsoft’s debutante ball in Spain for Windows 8 beta– dubbed Windows 8 Consumer Preview–which will take place on February 29th during Mobile World Congress and will hopefully culminate in the release of a public beta of Windows 8. Though the OS will still need some primping and preening before it’s official release later this year, it’ll give the general public a chance to dance with the new Metro user interface, the same interface overlay that’s currently on Windows Phone. 

Microsoft has stated that their goal with Windows 8 is to optimize the tablet experience while still providing the power and versatility needed for desktop users. Users will be able to purchase apps from the Windows Store for simplified software installation across a variety of devices. We got a hands-on look at the developer preview of Windows 8 and came away impressed not only by the operating system’s touch capabilities, but also by how well it handled on a traditional laptop. 

LAPTOP will be at Windows 8 Consumer Preview’s debut at Mobile World Congress in Spain later this month, so stay tuned.

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It’s not quite Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but it’s pretty close. Software developers and corporations are working on ways to give your smartphone split personalities: one dedicated to work and the other to play. The BYOD, or “bring your own device,” movement—along with the “open” nature of Android—is helping make dual-purpose smartphones a growing trend.

One of the benefits of BYOD is reduced overhead for companies because they can minimize or eliminate hardware and wireless plan costs. Encouraging employees to use their own smartphones can also reduce calls to the IT department, as employees generally have a better understanding of their personal devices than corporate-issued ones.

But with those benefits come significant risks.

Storing corporate data on a user’s personal phone puts that information in the crosshairs of any malicious software the user may encounter through the web or apps. And with app stores—particularly the Android Market—serving as veritable playgrounds for spyware and viruses, the need to protect corporate data on employees’ phones has become more important than ever.

So far, organizations have turned to mobile device management solutions to clamp down on the spread of malware and potential data leaks. But this approach often requires employees to grant their company’s IT department complete access to their personal devices, something most privacy-conscious users find less than desirable. That’s where split-personality or dual-profile software solutions comes in. Offered by companies including Enterproid and VMware, these new solutions separate a user’s smartphone into two profiles: one for work life and one for personal life.

The New Dual Mode

Here’s how the solutions generally work: When logged into your personal profile, you can use your smartphone just as you normally would, without worrying about whether someone from IT can see which apps you downloaded or websites you’ve visited. “It’s really helping with the privacy issue, because as an end user, I may not want IT to see everything I’ve downloaded onto my personal phone,” explained Stacy Crook, senior mobile enterprise research analyst with IDC market research. “It’s about a separation of the data.”

But it’s not just about privacy. The dual-profile approach creates a virtual barrier, ensuring that apps you download can’t interact with any important corporate data stored on your phone. These work profiles also give IT departments the control they need. Logging into your work profile also means you are automatically bound by the restrictions placed on your phone by IT, giving businesses the ability to lock down the app store, camera, and web browser. Log back into your personal profile, and you’ll have access to your phone’s features again.

Because the space is still in its infancy, there are only a few major players working on dual-profile solutions. Here’s a quick breakdown.

1. Enterproid

Although it was only founded in 2010, Enterproid recently teamed with AT&T to bring its Divide dual-profile solution to the carrier’s business users under the name Toggle. Toggle functions by creating a work profile on a user’s phone that can only be accessed via password. By default, you are automatically logged into your personal profile. Only after opening the Toggle app and entering your password can you access your work data. To help differentiate the two profiles, Enterproid has skinned the work side with Toggle-specific backgrounds and icons.

To get Toggle on your phone, you simply download it from the Android Market. Once it’s installed, your IT department connects your work profile to your company’s corporate server. From there, IT can let you download specific apps as well as updates for those apps to ensure you’re running the latest and most secure versions. The software gives IT the ability to wipe corporate information from an employee’s device and manage employee access to company resources.

Employees gain the ability to access their corporate e-mail, calendar, and other data. The software also features a set of native Android business apps. And because they run in your work profile, they are encrypted and compliant with your company’s use policies.

Enterproid CEO and co-founder Andrew Toy said his company jumped behind the dual-profile concept because “it enables companies to have what they want in terms of management and control and security. And on the personal profile, there is no effect whatsoever. The IT guys simply don’t have visibility in that area.”

According to IDC’s Crook, the Divide/Toggle solution is better suited for small and medium businesses because of its simplified method for dealing with BYOD. The one downside to Toggle, however, is that it only works on Android devices.

2.VMware MVP

Best known for its desktop virtualization software, VMware has teamed with Verizon Wireless to bring its Mobile Virtualization Platform to Verizon’s line of Android phones. The service puts a hypervisor on employees’ devices, providing access to a virtualized Android operating system. When logged into MVP, your company’s IT department can remotely manage and provision a corporate workspace on your Android device while leaving your standard Android operating system completely untouched.

“If I decide to go with the VMware/Verizon solution, I’m going to actually have two separate operating systems, one real and one virtual,” Crook said. Users can log into a virtual desktop where they can securely access corporate information. No information accessed through the virtual desktop can be saved or copied to a user’s Android profile either. All information is isolated from an employee’s personal profile.

While MVP and Enterproid offer similar services, they differ in how they are managed. “With AT&T it’s the same instance of the operating system that the data is operating on,” Crook explained. “With the Verizon solution, you are going to have a partition of operating systems. So you are going to have the base Android operating system where your personal information is going to sit and then you are going to have a virtual operating system where your corporate information is going to sit.”

Unlike Toggle, MVP is built into the kernel of a phone’s operating system. As a result, it will be limited to users who have phones with that kernel built in. But Verizon says it is already in contact with its Android OEM partners—including LG and Motorola—to have them include the software on their phones.

And while Toggle could work well for small and medium businesses, Crook told us that MVP is better optimized for an enterprise setting. That’s not to say it’s a better solution. But VMware already has the ear of the enterprise thanks to its other virtualization solutions.

3. BlackBerry Balance

RIM’s BlackBerry is synonymous with mobile enterprise network access. The company pioneered a solution for employees connecting to corporate data while away from the office. RIM is acutely aware of the BYOD trend’s growing momentum and has introduced its BlackBerry Balance service to meet that challenge. Like Toggle and MVP, the service separates an employee’s personal data from corporate data. But unlike those solutions, Balance doesn’t create separate work and personal profiles. Instead, Balance lives directly on a user’s smartphone and is accessible by IT through a standard BlackBerry Enterprise Server.

That, according to Crook, is a result of RIM’s decision to build the software directly into the BlackBerry BBX operating system. “It’s a micro-kernel architecture so there is all kinds of partitioning already going on in the OS that allows them to do the BlackBerry Balance model,” she explained.

With BlackBerry Balance, users are prevented from copying and pasting corporate information into their personal applications. IT can also remotely wipe business information from a user’s BlackBerry if he or she loses their phone or leaves the company.

Users also don’t have to open another program to access corporate data. If an action they are trying to perform isn’t permitted by IT, then they will simply see a blacked out box. For instance, if you try to copy something from your corporate e-mail to your personal e-mail, the copy command will be locked. But like VMware’s MVP solution and AT&T’s Toggle, BlackBerry Balance is limited to a set user base: BlackBerry owners.

Bottom Line

If there is one drawback to this dual-profile approach, it’s that it limits IT departments’ access to employees’ devices, making it a poor fit for industries dealing with extremely sensitive material. Healthcare and financial companies, for example, may need to take complete control of an employee’s phone if it stores sensitive information.

So which of these solutions is best? Because the BYOD market is still new—and dual-profile services are even newer—a clear leader has yet to be established. There are also several other solution providers looking to make some noise in this space, including OK Labs and Red Bend Software. One thing is for certain, though. More and more employees will want to bring their smartphones into the workplace, and businesses can either prepare now, or be left out in the cold.

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The Symantec employee was actually a law-enforcement agent, and offered YamaTough $50,000 not to publish the source code for pcAnywhere and an older version of Norton Anti-Virus.

In the email conversation, which began Jan. 18 and was leaked to Pastebin yesterday (Feb. 6), YamaTough repeatedly pressures “Sam Thomas,” the purported Symantec representative, to wire $50,000 to an offshore account in exchange for destroying the source code to Norton Anti-Virus and pcAnywhere.

Extortion turns into sting

“We will pay you $50,000.00 USD total,” Thomas told YamaTough on Feb. 1. “However, we need assurances that you are not going to release the code after payment. We will pay you $2,500 a month for the first three months. Payments start next week. After the first three months you have to convince us you have destroyed the code before we pay the balance. We are trusting you to keep your end of the bargain.”

Thomas, despite the Symantec email address that he began the conversation with (he later switched to a Gmail account), was not a Symantec employee, and the $50,000 was bait to reel in YamaTough and any accomplices, according to a Symantec spokesman.

“The email string posted by Anonymous was actually between them and a fake e-mail address set up by law enforcement,” Cris Paden, Symantec’s senior corporate communications manager, told SecurityNewsDaily.

(Paden consistently refers to YamaTough as “Anonymous.” While the hacker has been getting encouragement on Twitter from prominent Anonymous members, there is no independent evidence that he has been actively working with them.)

“Anonymous actually reached out to us first, saying that if we provided them with money, they would not post any more source code,” Paden said. “At that point, given that it was a clear-cut case of extortion, we contacted law enforcement and turned the investigation over to them.”

“All subsequent communications were actually between Anonymous and law enforcement agents — not Symantec,” Paden added.

YamaTough gets frustrated

Those heated emails show YamaTough, using a Venezuelan email address, becoming increasingly frustrated with Symantec’s excuses for why the company couldn’t immediately honor his deadlines.

“If we don’t hear from you in 30m we make an official announcement and put your code on sale at auction terms,” YamaTough wrote on Jan. 25. “We have many people who are willing to get your code. Don’t [mess] with us.”

On Jan. 30, Thomas asked YamaTough to “be patient” and said, “We are really trying to work with you but we can’t meet all the deadlines that you keep throwing at us.” YamaTough replied, “You have 24 hours for a definite answer.”

Late last night (Feb. 6), the law-enforcement sting ran into a wall. YamaTough wrote, “There is no time, yes or no, pcAnywhere is ready to be distributed, 10 min.”

Shortly afterwards, a link to the pcAnywhere source code appeared on the file-sharing site The Pirate Bay. Paden confirmed that it is, in fact, the actual code.

Source code hits the Web, Symantec is ready

“We can confirm that the source code is legitimate,” Paden said. “It is part of the original cache of code for 2006 versions of the products that Anonymous has claimed to have been in possession during the last few weeks.”

Symantec, Paden added, had a contingency plan ready.

“Symantec was prepared for the code to be posted at some point, and has developed and distributed a series of patches since Jan. 23rd to protect our users against attacks that might transpire as a result of the anti-virus code being made public,” Paden told SecurityNewsDaily.

He said Symantec has reached out to its customers in the past few weeks, urging them to install version 12.5 of pcAnywhere to reduce the risk of their systems becoming compromised in the wake of the leak.

The pcAnywhere leak may just be the first drop in a coming flood, Paden said.

“We also anticipate Anonymous to post the rest of the code they have claimed [they] have in their possession,” he said. “So far, they have posted code for the 2006 version of Norton Internet Security and pcAnywhere. We also anticipate that at some point, they will post the code for Norton AntivirusCorporate Edition and Norton Systemworks. Both products no longer exist.”

Article provided by SecurityNewsDaily, a sister site to Laptopmag.com.

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