Jon Zilber of Palm today announced in their blog that besides Electronic Arts also Epic Games support the webOS platform. Epic Games is in the middle of porting their Unreal Engine 3 onto Palm’s webOS. Epic’s Unreal Engine is well known from games like Unreal Tournament.
Epic is going to offer licenses for developers to create new and astonishing games for the Palm webOS platform.
Together with Palm’s Plug-in Development Kit (PDK) it will soon become very easy for developers to port visually appealing games to the webOS platform.
On the Black Hat 2010 conference in Crystal City notorious smart card hacker Christopher Tarnovsky explained how he managed to hack current Trusted Platform Modules by Infineon.
This time Tarnovsky managed to read secured data from TPM chips like RSA and DES crypto keys. His approach took six months and a lab consisting of devices for about US$ 200,000. After having found out the exacty way to compromise Infineon’s chips it took only six hours to compromise an XBox 360’s TPM chip.
On the Black Hat 2008 in Amsterdam Tarnovsky said he was offered US$ 100,000 to crack the Xbox 360’s TPM:
A Microsoft engineer is wondering: “Did you take an interest in the processor of our Xbox360 game console?” – “I was offered 100’000 dollars to break it”, says Tarnovsky. “But I replied that that wasn’t enough.”
For people generally interested in approaching smart card security check this article with a video Wired.com featuring Tarnovsky in his security lab.
Tablet PCs seem to be the next big thing. After Apple’s smartphone revolution with their iPhone, it seems the next big market revolution might be the Tablet PCs.
Steve Ballmer of Microsoft introduced one of the Tablet PCs – a prototype of the HP Slate – last week on the CES 2010. In his presentation the HP Slate is of course running Windows 7, what else, but there are rumors it might also be shipped with Google’s Android. We suppose Amazon’s Steve Bezos will not really like it, because Steve Ballmer showed the HP Slate running the PC Kindle application.
Dell seems also be ready to enter the Touch PCs’ market with the Dell Slate. Gizmodo.de got photos of a prototype of Dell’s Slate. Dell’s Slate has a 5-inch screen, most likely an OLED, a SIM slot and a 5 megapixel camera.
If Apple was a typical tech company they would also have showed something to the public on the CES, but Apple isn’t. Anyway there are enuff rumors floating around about Apple’s Touch-Mac – rumored to be named Apple iSlate. According to Reuters Apple might be launching the iSlate in Q2/2010. It is expected to have a 10 or 11-inch display and a aluminium case. TheStreet.com reports that Apple’s Slate will be shipped with a P A Semi CPU, instead of Intel based Atom CPUs. This could be also the reason, why Atom CPU has been removed from Mac OS X Snow Leopard’s latest update 10.6.2. It is widely expected that Apple will announce the iSlate on Januar 27th, 2010.
Kara Swisher of AllThingsD interviewed Mr. Podfather Prefather Jon Rubinstein of Palm at the CES. Although he seems to have been highly involved in the development of Apple’s iPhone back in the days when he was Apple’s senior vice president of hardware engineering, he said he never used an iPhone. Well… All in all he wasn’t telling too much, but when Kara asked him, if Palm will do a Tablet aswell, Rubinstein answered: “(..) we designed webOS to scale and it could be used in different form factors.”
Quite a bunch of news for the Palm community has been presented by Palm’s CEO John Podfather Prefather Rubinstein. Find the whole video presentation at the end of the summary.
II. WebOS Update 1.4
WebOS 1.4 will be released in February, 2010 (in the US at least, we Europeans are still waiting for 1.3.5). WebOS 1.4 will feature:
Video Recording
Adobe Flash 10.1
better Battery Life and
improved performance
III. WebOS Plug In Development Kit
For developing native 3D games Palm secretely extended their development tools with a plug in kit, that allows to write code in C or C++.
IV. Native 3D Games
Moreover Palm showed they are in the know what their customers will like and how to explore more markets besides the Linux community. As of today some 3D games have been released to the U.S. American AppCatalog:
Need for Speed Undercover
The Sims 3
Monopoly
Asphalt 5: Elite Racing
Let’s Golf!
Glyder 2, and
X-Plane
IV. Palm Pre Plus coming to Verizon
A special version of the Palm Pre is coming to Verizon Wireless, only 7 months after the initial release of the Palm Pre to the Spring network. Verizon’s Palm Pre Plus is coming with 16GB Ram, a reworked slider mechanics and a tethering plan. Verizon is said to have one of the best 3G coverage in North America. We suspect the Palm Pre Plus to be SIM locked.
Don’t ask, better listen. Emika‘s debut single is scheduled for january 2010 on NinjaTune.co.uk. The Scuba’s Vulpine remix has already been released and is a free mp3 download. Enjoy…
The last weeks are full of rumors if AT&T will prolong their exclusive contracts with Apple. Rumors say the original contracts are gonna expire in the middle of 2010.
Thus allowing Apple to negotiate with different carriers like Verizon or T-Mobile. T-Mobile is currently the exclusive partner for Apple in Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, and the Czech Republic.
AT&T is said is willing to prolong their contracts until the end of 2011, but Verizon and T-Mobile seem to be secretely testing Apple’s forthcoming device named internally iPhone 3,1.
Although beta versions of Adobe Flash for the Palm Pre seem to be available soon (at least for developers), end users will have to wait significantly longer.
