Intel Intros New Ultra-Compact 310 SSD Series

Intel's new line of SSDs offers X25 performance at one-eighth the size.

Wednesday Intel announced the release of its ultra-compact 310 Series of SSDs. The new line promises X25-performance at just one-eighth the size, measuring a mere 51-mm by 30-mm and only 5-mm thick. The drives also weigh just 10 grams, making them ideal for dual-drive notebooks and AIO desktops, single-drive tablets and low-power, rugged embedded industrial or military applications.

Skype iOS App Gets Video Calling... on 3G Too!

FaceTime just got nuked by Skype.

Skype released a surprise for iOS users on the iTunes App Store yesterday with its release of its Skype client version 3.0, which brought with it the ability to make and receive video calls.

SMS Messages Can Kill Mobile Phones

You may not think much of SMS messages hitting your phone every day, but two researchers revealed earlier today at a hacking conference in Berlin, Germany, that SMS could be used to attack and shut down individual cell phones or an entire carrier network.

The attack discussed at the 27C3 conference resemble the nature of a denial of service attack with a huge number of messages being sent of cell phones. In this specific case, Collin Mulliner and Nico Golde of the Technical University of Berlin tested cell phones in an isolated environment and shot 120,000 messages at them. The phones tested were simple feature phones (as opposed to smartphones such as the iPhone or Android devices) with just one processors as their operating systems usually shut down when just one application crashes. It is estimated that there are currently more than 4.6 billion feature phones in use today.

Samsung Making Galaxy iPod Killer With Android

A long way from the original Samsung Yepp.

The iPhone spawned the iPod touch, which is really just the iPhone without the phone part. The iPod touch is much more than just the music player that its other similarly named products are.

Apple Patents Drop Down Menu After 11 Years

Apple was granted two rather trivial patents on Tuesday.

One of them shows an app icon on a desktop GUI. The other one a transparent drop down menu. It took the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office only 11 years to understand and process the idea of a drop down menu.

Where were you in January of 2000? I had just moved from Chicago to San Francisco (I moved four times since then). I was anticipating the birth of our first son. Today we have three children. I was patiently waiting for the release of the Playstation 2. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office received a patent application from Apple for the design of a transparent drop down menu. It was approved on December 21, 2010.