Research in Motion has long-held a stranglehold on all things mobile with the U.S. DoD. Time goes on, and things change. After being turned down by Apple to have access to the iOS codebase, both the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), have announced the release of separately developed hardened versions of the Android operating system (OS) in the past year. More notable was the related DARPA pilot program that deployed smart phones running the hardened version of Android to be tested in Read More

Google has rolled out yet another update to their troubled search engine algorithms. This update, belatedly dubbed “Penguin”, was supposedly targeted towards sites which engaged in spammy SEO tactics, but instead it appears to have penalized a wide range of legitimate and high quality web sites. Some of the biggest losers are sites many ByteGuide readers know well, including: comcast.com is one of the largest cable television companies and Internet service providers in the world. Comcast lost 31% of their visibility in the Google’s rankings. dslreports.com is one of our Read More

Recent changes by Google have created a boom in the SEO industry, but perhaps not quite the one Google engineers envisioned.  Google has been fighting a losing battle against “web spam” for many years, and this motivated them to engage in more aggressive tactics to keep their search results clean.  In the past, Google stated that there was nothing that a competitor could do to hurt your rankings in their search engine, but a few years ago they updated it to add “almost”: There’s almost nothing a competitor can do Read More

Consumer Electronics Show is one of the biggest technology shows on the planet. It is like christmas after christmas for techies as they get to see and try the latest and greatest gadgets, some of which could be months before their actual release to market. On top of that the show happens in Las Vegas providing attendees with an opportunity for a great post-show nightlife. In a nutshell CES 2012 was mainly about ultrabooks, yet more tablets, yet more smartphones, and the emergence of incredibly thin 55-inch (or bigger) OLED Read More

There’s a whole slew of new memory technologies coming up, all of which could be on the market within just three years, and all of which promise tremendous improvements in speed, capacity, and power efficiency. Those of us tech savvy enough to at least know we have DDR3 memory in our machines might expect DDR4 to be the next generation of memory, running at even greater speeds, and perhaps supporting even greater capacities. But as it turns out DDR4 is just one of the runner ups for the future of Read More

How quickly do things change when it comes to HP this year. Just earlier this year they were talking about emulating Apple’s strategy of end-to-end control of both software and hardware where webOS would be HP’s equivalent of iOS. Fast forward to now and under the guidance of the new CEO they are giving it up to the open source community, hoping other device makers pick it up and use it. The reaction of the technology press has varied from proclaiming this as the beginning of the end for webOS Read More

The first tablet running the brand new Android 4.0, also known as Ice Cream Sandwich, is priced at only $99 USD. The tablet is called Novo7 and is made by Ainol Electron from Hong Kong. At such a low price we might expect modest specs, but this tablet actually delivers respectably. It features a 7-inch capacitive touch screen, a front facing camera and a 2 megapixel back camera, both WiFi and 3G connectivity, USB 2.0, HDMI 1.3, and a microSD slot. Its internal architecture is a bit of a novelty Read More

As the bigwigs of the content industry tries to sponsor bills that would give them legal power to effectively censor web sites over mere suspicion of “intellectual property” infringement opposition is getting stronger and more vocal. As a reminder the bills in question are the PROTECT-IP Act in the US Senate, and SOPA (“Stop Online Piracy Act”) in the US House of Representatives. They are aimed at fighting online piracy, but provide powers that allow them to be used for far more than that, and put online businesses at constant Read More

After having trouble competing with Android and Apple smartphones Nokia today came out with the new Nokia Lumia phones in hopes of bringing back some of its former glory. Nokia calls these the first “real” Windows Phones, and they’re a product of a partnership it recently struck with Microsoft. The star of the Lumia line is Lumia 800 with an almost identical design to that of N9, a 3.7-inch screen, a single-core 1.4Ghz CPU, 512Mb of RAM, 16GB of storage (no SD card slot), and an 8 megapixel camera capable Read More

Google just released the Android 4.0 mobile operating system, and launched Galaxy Nexus, the first smartphone to be powered by the new OS. Android 4.0 is a major revision bringing a large number of new features and changes giving it a slicker user interface, more functionality, and some improvements to existing functionality. It is the first Android version meant to support both tablets and smartphones, and has some similarities to the existing Android Honeycomb tablet-oriented OS. Unfortunately, I couldn’t play with it, despite being an Android user. My HTC Desire Read More