Communications Technology

As of Tuesday morning, the 8GB iPhone 3G is no longer for sale on Apple’s Web site.

To be clear, that’s the 2-year-old iPhone 3G, not the year-old iPhone 3GS. But Apple has been offering a steep discount on the 3G since last year and now it appears customers no longer have the option to buy it online at all. Apple hasn’t responded to a request for comment about it.

But this isn’t very surprising. Apple is widely expected to introduce a new iPhone at the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference on June 7, an event that’s now just a few weeks away. It’s very likely that once the new iPhone hits stores, the iPhone 3GS will take the 3G’s place as the discount model phone.

The clues that a new phone is imminent have begun to pile up: Wal-Mart announced it is cutting the price on the 16GB iPhone 3GS to $97, an indication that the retailer is trying to blow out its stock of the device to make room for new products. Earlier Tuesday there were reports that Apple was casting for a new iPhone commercial. And last week came a report that one of Apple’s contract manufacturers was in the process of fulfilling a huge order for iPhones.

Of course there was also the photo evidence from the lost iPhone episode. Last month, Gizmodo purchased and published photos of what is thought to be a prototype of the next iPhone from a man who found it in a bar after it was left behind by an Apple engineer

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US computer security giant Symantec said Wednesday it is buying a unit of VeriSign that secures online transactions for 1.28 billion dollars.

Symantec said it was purchasing VeriSign’s identity and authentication business, which provides certificates and encryption to allow for secure transactions online, in an all-cash transaction.

“With the anonymity of the Internet and the evolving threat landscape, people and organizations are struggling to maintain confidence in the security of their interactions, information and identities online,” Symantec president and chief executive Enrique Salem said in a statement.

“With the combined products and reach from Symantec and VeriSign, we are poised to drive the adoption of identity security as the means to provide simple and secure access to anything from anywhere, to prevent identity fraud and to make online experiences more user-friendly and hassle-free,” Salem said.

VeriSign operates the largest domain name registry in the world, managing domains such as .com and .net, and has been selling off parts of the company in recent years to concentrate on its core business.
Symantec is known to consumers for its Norton anti-virus software.

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Google on Thursday released free software that lets smartphones based on its Android operating systems be used as language translation tools.

Google enhanced its Goggles application to read and translate English, French, Italian, German, or Spanish after pictures of words are taken with cameras built into smartphones such as the Internet giant’s Nexus One.

“We are hard at work extending our recognition capabilities to other Latin-based languages,” Google software engineers Alessandro Bissacco and Avi Flamholz said in a message posted at the California firm’s website.

“Our goal is to eventually read non-Latin languages (such as Chinese, Hindi and Arabic) as well.”

Goggles is “computer vision” software that lets smartphone users do Internet searches based on pictures taken with the gadgets instead of typed in search queries.

Along with translation, the latest version of Goggles was enhanced to better read bar codes and recognize a larger array of artwork, products, and logos.

“Computer vision is a hard problem,” the engineers said. “While we are excited about Goggles v1.1, we know that there are many images that we cannot yet recognize.”

The latest Goggles program is available as a free download for devices running on Android version 1.6 or higher.

The software was released a day after Google introduced new a new look for its mobile Internet search results pages in the United States.
When you go to Google.com on iPhone or Android devices and enter a search, a tap on a button to the left of the search box on results pages reveals tools for refining queries.

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