Yearly Archives: 2011

China’s Huawei are offered to pick up a £50 million bill for equipment to line London’s sprawling subway system with mobile phone reception, a package it says it’s extending as a gift from Olympic host nation to another (London will host the 2012 Summer Olympics, reports Engadget.

The new system would enable emails and calls while on the tube.

Huawei said it would make its money back over time through maintenance contracts.

Full story: http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/21/huawei-offers-to-build-out-london-underground-cellular-coverage/

Nokia will be giving away one E7 smartphone and one Nokia-made Windows Phone to each developer in Launchpad, it’s program for mobile app developers and waive its tech support charges for developers for the next three months, according to SlashGear.

Launchpad is Nokia’s mobile app development program, usually priced at €300 annually but currently free for the first year. Membership is available – on an approved application basis – for individuals and companies, and regularly includes early access to APIs and SDKs, promotions in the Ovi Store and invitations to training events.

More: http://www.slashgear.com/nokia-giving-developers-free-e7-and-free-wp7-device-18134435/

Smashingapps has posted an article “Seven Tools To Start Your Hassle-Free HTML5 Project” reviewing HTML5 tools.

Tools include:
Initializr a HTML5 templates generator to help you getting started with an HTML5 project. It is built on HTML5 Boilerplate, a powerful HTML5 template. It will generate for you a clean customizable template based on Boilerplate.

and

Modernizr
HTML5 test
What’s my IP
SproutCore
SwitchToHTML5
When can I use

Full article: http://www.smashingapps.com/2011/02/17/seven-tools-to-start-your-hassle-free-html5-project.html

Over the last few months, several large companies cited Android performance problems for not upgrading some of their products. In order to benchmark and stress-test any hardware and OS component, a sound performance test and benchmarking toolset is required. The proliferation of Android based systems, as well as the rather rapid release cycle of new Android OS versions, further intensifies the necessity for a sound Android performance evaluation and stress-testing toolset. In other words, it is paramount to hardware, as well as OS design and development engineers to have access to a comprehensive Android toolset that allows evaluating and quantifying performance under real-world conditions at any level of the systems hierarchy.

To illustrate, actual systems performance consists of an application driven workload, the speed and availability of the accessed OS components, as well as the speed and availability of the involved hardware resources. Every OS is basically an abstraction provider, a reactive entity whose performance depends on the pattern of the application load imposed to it. More specifically, OS performance depends on both, the capabilities of the hardware interface that is being abstracted, and the way the OS abstractions are utilized by an application. In reality, not every application is using the same OS abstractions, as each application has its own access (code) path through the OS. It is a fact that prior to releasing new systems/products, virtually no company truly stress-tests (benchmarks) the product from a HW AND an OS perspective.

The DHTDroid v3.2 toolset addresses the above discussed issues in a comprehensive, pragmatic, and scientific manner. The DHTDroid v3.2 toolset allows HW engineers and Android SW developers alike to understand how the major OS abstractions depend on the speed and availability of the underlying hardware platform. From the start, the goal for the DHTDroid project was to implement a set of Android based systems benchmarks that generate an OS and HW abstraction vector that can be mapped to an actual application load (hence the toolset is universally applicable). Further, the performance behavior of different Android OS versions can be compared, and HW cross-comparison studies can be conducted. The DHTDroid v3.2 toolset consists of 9 individual macro benchmarks that stress-test the CPU, the TLB, the cache, the memory, the IO, and the NW subsystems, respectively. Some of the macro benchmarks can be individually customized to reflect an actual application workload behavior. Further, DHTDroid v3.2 provides 4 systems/support tools that aid Android developers in engineering high-quality products and solutions.

The earlier version of DHTDroid (v2.8) has been very well received by the Android community. Several HW and SW companies already use DHTDroid to baseline, stress-test, and benchmark their Android based products. The new version (v3.2) significantly augments on the status-quo, by streamlining the existing benchmarks while adding additional tools. To illustrate, based on feedback from the Android community, additional memory and IO benchmarks were developed. Further, a tool that allows aging a file system (for benchmark purposes) was added as well. In version 3.2, a script is provided to illustrate how to bundle several DHTDroid benchmarks into a single execution entity. DHTechnologies (www.dhtusa.com) released the DHTDroid v3.2 Android performance and benchmark toolset to the community in February 2011. The toolset and the documentation can be downloaded from the Resource page on www.dhtusa.com