Communications Technology

Want something different from your regular cellphone? Something that performs the function of a traditional mobile phone and yet is packed some non-traditional phone features? How about the Garmin-Asus collaborative product called the nuvifone G60 which is scheduled to be released on July 27 in Singapore and perhaps in the U.S. soon - this new mobile boast of three main functions dubbed - call, search and view map.

The Garmin-Asus nuvifone G60 integrates navigation and location based services, and is being touted as an all-in-one, LBS-centric touchscreen phone, mobile web browser and personal navigator. The phone’s main screen is highlighted by three primary icons namely, “call”, “search”, and “view map.” It allows users to scroll through the other icons just by swiping their fingers across the displays. It also has a built-in accelerometer that lets every screen to be viewed in either portrait or landscape navigation.

The view map feature lets users receive turn-by-turn voice-prompted directions to millions of destinations powered by preloaded maps of North America, Eastern and Western Europe some specific regions in Asia and the Pacific. The phone has a real GPS receiver with hotfix. This is in addition to the A-GPS (assisted GPS) that the phone has. Making the phone even more useful is the fact that it is preloaded with millions of points of interest or POIs which is useful for navigation purposes.

Other features of the Garmin-Asus nuvifone G60 include - “where am I” for location exact latitude and longitude coordinates of the user’s location.

For its mobile phone features, the Garmin-Asus nuvifone G60 has 3.5G data connectivity, SMS text messagin functionality, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, 3MP Camera, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, 3.55″ anti-glare displa and provides up tp 4hours talktime.

No Tags

A HACKER attack shut down Twitter overnight, and Facebook and LiveJournal were also “looking into” possible site problems.

A post on the Twitter blog by co-founder Biz Stone said that Twitter was the victim of a denial of service attack, a technique in which hackers overwhelm a website’s servers with communications requests.

“We are defending against this attack now and will continue to update our status blog as we continue to defend and later investigate,” read the posting.

Facebook was also experiencing problems.

Facebook spokeswoman Brandee Barker said the company was looking into it and would have an update “as soon as possible”.

The Twitter outage began at about 9am, according to Ken Godskind, chief strategy officer at web performance monitoring company AlertSite.

The site still had access problems a few hours later.

LiveJournal was also hit with the DDoS attack, PC Mag reports.

“The company cannot 100 per cent confirm that it is the same attack that plagued Twitter this morning, but “it would be a huge coincidence if they aren’t tied to one another,” a spokesman said.
Things are now back to normal on LiveJournal.com, he said.

No Tags