Apple iPhone 4S review

The first time you see Apple’s highly anticipated iPhone 4S, you might be a little surprised. That surprise will come from the fact that it looks nearly identical to last year’s sleek metal-and-glass iPhone 4.

But the hardware is only half the story. The introduction of the iPhone 4S marks the debut of Apple’s newest mobile operating system, iOS 5. The new OS is not only loaded with some important improvements — from how notifications about missed calls and other messages are displayed to how your device connects to your computer — it also introduces an innovative, voice-activated “intelligent assistant” named Siri. This is arguably one of the most meaningful updates to the iPhone we’ve ever seen.

First, the basics: The phone is being sold in the United States on Verizon, AT&T and now Sprint in three capacities (16GB, 32GB and 64GB).

The new phone touts a faster processor than its predecessor (a custom chip Apple designed called the A5) and a new cell radio that can work on both CDMA and GSM networks, so the Verizon and Sprint models will be able to function overseas.

The device has an eight-megapixel camera with improved optics and, as a result, the 4S took some of the cleanest photos I’ve seen in any mobile device. Apple has done a similarly excellent job with video. The iPhone 4S captures 1080-pixel content, and does so with the same crispness and polish that it lends to its still photos, meaning the phone could easily stand in for a dedicated point-and-shoot camera.

The iPhone 4S has an improved antenna design as well. The company claims the phone can “intelligently” switch between its two antennas. In my testing, I did seem to be getting more bars more consistently, though it’s tough to say if it made any big difference in terms of call quality.

Apple also boasted of faster download speeds over certain 3G networks, though I saw little improvement compared with the older iPhone, and the speeds paled in comparison to the 4G LTE service that Verizon offers.

But there’s no LTE option here, no larger screen, no new body design, no set of stereo speakers, it doesn’t do 3-D, and Apple didn’t add a kickstand.

Now on to the software. For starters, gone are those intrusive pop-up notifications. Now when you get an alert, you see a small notice at the top of your screen. Apple takes a page right out of Android’s playbook and utilizes a window to collect all of your notifications in one place.

The company has also included a new messaging component in iOS called iMessage. Think of it as a BlackBerry Messenger killer. The service is free and works across 3G or WiFi connections, and it’s really fast.

iOS 5 allows you to wirelessly sync your device over WiFi, meaning you don’t have to plug in a cable to transfer files or backup your phone.

Perhaps the biggest breakthrough feature in the new operating system is called Siri.

Siri is one of the more novel applications Apple has produced. Utilizing a combination of voice recognition, logic and text-to-speech, the software can interpret casual requests and follow conversations. With Siri, you can ask to get directions, send text messages, schedule reminders or appointments, get suggestions on where to eat, and lots more. Siri can even answer not-so-basic questions such as,“Who wrote ‘Jane Eyre’?”

Siri understands what you’re saying and the context in which you’re saying it. The software also learns things about you and the people you communicate with.

The crazy thing about Siri is that it works — at least most of the time — better than you’d expect. It understands and responds to you in a way that’s so natural it can sometimes be unsettling. The software even has a good sense of humor.

That’s not to say Siri is without issues. Sometimes it misunderstands you or can take too much time to get answers to your questions because it has to connect to Apple’s servers for data.

Still, while Siri may not be finished yet, it acts like something straight out of a science-fiction story.

The iPhone 4S is launching alongside another new Apple service called iCloud, which is free. iCloud can back up your data, music and app purchases and documents, keeping them synced across multiple devices. In my testing, it worked nearly flawlessly and was painless to set up.

Looking at all these pieces combined, the iPhone 4S is an astoundingly good phone. The lack of a larger display, a new design and LTE service may put off some buyers, but that won’t change the fact that 4S is a force to be reckoned with. Indeed, Apple has said that pre-orders of the iPhone 4S exceeded 1 million within the first 24 hours the device was on sale.

The iPhone 4S reminds me again of just what makes Apple’s products so special. It’s not really specifications or apps, but some other, intangible spark.

Is this the best phone ever made? That’s debatable. But I can tell you this: It is pretty cool.

How to Identify and Avoid Phishing Scams

Phishing is a form of social engineering technique used by hackers to gather sensitive information such as usernames, passwords and credit card details by posing as a trustworty person/organization. Since most online users are unaware of the techniques used in carrying out a phishing attack, they often fall victims and hence, phishing can be very effective.

With the dramatic increase in the number of phishing scams in the recent years, there has also been a steady rise in the number of people being victimized. Lack of awareness among the people is the prime reason behind such attacks. This article will try to create awareness and educate the users about such online scams and frauds.

Phishing scams usually sends an email message to users requesting for their personal information, or redirects them to a website where they are required to enter thier personal information. Here are some of the tips that can be used to identify various phishing techniques and stay away from it.

 

Identifying a Phishing Scam

 

1. Beware of emails that demand for an urgent response from your side. Some of the examples are:

• You may receive an email which appears to have come from your bank or financial organization stating that “your bank account is limited due to an unauthorized activity. Please verify your account asap so as to avoid permanant suspension”. In most cases, you are requested to follow a link (URL) that takes you to spoofed webpage (similar to your bank website) and enter your login details over there.
• In some cases, phishing emails may ask you to make a phone call. There may be a person or an audio response waiting on the other side of the phone to take away your credit cards details, account number, social security number or other valuable data.

2. Phishing emails are generally not personalized. Since they target a lagre number of online users, they usually use generalized texts like “Dear valued customer”, “Dear Paypal user” etc. to address you. However, some phishing emails can be an exception to this rule.

3. When you click on the links contained in a phishing email, you will most likely be taken to a spoofed webpage with official logos and information that looks exactly same as that of the original webpages of your bank or financial organization. Pay attention to the URL of a website before you enter any of your personal information over there. Even though malicious websites look identical to the legitimate site, it often uses a different domain or variation in the spelling. For example, instead of paypal.com, a phishing website may use different addresses such as:

• papyal.com
• paypal.org
• verify-paypal.com
• xyz.com/paypal/verify-account/

 

Tips to Avoid Being a Victim of Phishing

 

1. Do not respond to suspicious emails that ask you to give your personal information. If you are unsure whether an email request is legitimate, verify the same by calling the respective bank/company. Always use the telephone numbers printed on your bank records or statements and not those mentioned in the suspicious email.

2. Don’t use the links in an email, instant messenger or chat conversation to enter a website. Instead, always type the URL of the website on your browser’s address bar to get into a website.

3. Legitimate websites always use a secure connection (https://) on those pages which are intended to gather sensitive data such as usernames and passwords, account numbers or credic card details. You will see a lock icon  in your browser’s address bar which indicates a secure connection. On some websites like paypal.com which uses an extended validation certificate, the address bar turns GREEN as shown below.

In most cases, unlike a legitimate website, a phishing website or a spoofed webpage will not use a secure connection and does not show up the lock icon. So, absence of such security features can be a clear indication of phishing attack. Always double-check the security features of the webpage before entering any of your personal information.

4. Always use a good antivirus software, firewall and email filters to filter the unwanted traffic. Also ensure that your browser is up-to-date with the necessary patches being applied.

5. Report a “phishing attack” or “spoofed emails” to the following groups so as to stop such attacks from spreading all over the Internet:

You can directly send an email to spam@uce.gov orreportphishing@antiphishing.org reporting an attack. You can also notify the Internet Crime Complaint Center of the FBI by filing a complaint on their website: www.ic3.gov.

4 Ways to Identify Safe Websites on the Internet

On the whole Internet, there are approximately more than 150 million active websites up and running. As a result, it often becomes a real challenge for the users to identify safe websites that are trustworthy and reputed. Have you ever wondered to know the reputation of a website before placing the order? Need to know whether a given website is child safe? Well, here are some of the ways to identify safe websites on the Web.

 

1. WOT or Web Of Trust (www.mywot.com):

WOT is a great place to test the reputation of your favorite website. WOT gives real-time ratings for every website based on the feedback that it gets from millions of trustworthy users across the globe and trusted sources, such as phishing and malware blacklists. Each domain name is evaluated based on this data and ratings are applied to them accordingly.

Trustworthiness signifies the overall safety of the website. A poor rating may indicate that the site is associated with threats like Internet scams, phishing, identity theft risks and malware. For more information on phishing, you may refer my other post on how to identify and avoid phishing scams.

 

Vendor reliability tells you whether a given site is safe for carrying out buy and sell transactions with it. An excellent rating indicates superior customer satisfaction while a poor rating indicates possible scam or bad shopping experience.

 

Privacy indicates about “to what extent the site respects the privacy of it’s users and protects their personal identity and data”.

 

Child Safety indicates whether the content of a given site is appropriate for children. Site contents like sexual material, nudity and vulgarity will have a poor Child Safety rating.

 

In most cases, the WOT ratings are found to be highly accurate. To check the reputation of any given website, just visit www.mywot.com type-in the address of your favorite website and click on “Check now”. This tool alone can tell you a lot about the reputation and safety level of a website. However, in addition to this, I am giving you another 3 handy tools to identify safe websites on the Web.

 

2. McCafee SiteAdvisor:

McCafee SiteAdvisor is a free tool that is available as a browser add-on. It adds safety ratings to your browser and search engine results. You can download it fromwww.siteadvisor.com.

 

3. StopBadware:

Using this tool, you can check whether a given site is said to have involved in malware activity in the past. To check this, go tohttp://www.stopbadware.org/home/reportsearch and enter the URL or domain name of a website and click on “Search Clearinghouse ”. If the search does not return any result, that means the site was never involved in any of the malware activity in the past.

 

4. Google Pagerank:

Google PageRank is another great tool to check the reputation and popularity of a website. The PageRank tool rates every webpage on a scale of 1 to 10 which indicates Google’s view of importance of the page. If a given website has a PageRank of less than 3, then it is said to be less popular among the other sites on the Internet.

 

However, PageRank will only tell you how much popular a given website is and has nothing to do with the safety level of a website. So, this tool alone cannot be used to evaluate a website’s safety and other factors.

 

PageRank feature is available as a part of Google Toolbar. You can install Google Toolbar from http://www.google.com/intl/en_uk/toolbar/ie/index.html.

5 Ways to Speed Up Your Windows PC

If you have a Windows PC that is not maintained properly on a regular basis, it’s performance will most likely tend to degrade with the passage of time. 

To counter this decreased performance, visiting a computer shop isn’t the only solution. Rather, it is possible to improve your computer’s performance yourself. Here is a way to save your money and squeeze more speed out of your Windows PC.

 

Steps to Speed Up your PC

 

1. Free Up Disk Space by eliminating junk files and unused programs from your computer

• Remove temporary Internet files.
• Empty the Recycle Bin.
• Remove Windows temporary files.
• Uninstall Programs that you no longer use.

 

2. Periodically perform Hard Disk Defragmentation.

• Goto Start -> All Programs -> Accessories -> System tools
• Open the Disk Defragmentor program
• Click on Analyze Disk

 

3. Clean Up your Registry (Highly Recommended)

Cleaning up your Windows registry plays a major role in increasing the speed of your computer. Unfortunately, Windows doesn’t provide any in built tool for cleaning the registry. So, you have to use a commercial registry Cleaner like PC Health Advisor to do this.

Every time you install/uninstall a program or make changes to your computer, a new entry is added to the registry. So, with the passage of time, a large amount of unwanted or invalid entries will get accumulated which begins to clog your registry. This will result in decreased performance of your PC causing error messages and system crashes.

4. Remove Unwanted Programs from the Start-Up

• Type msconfig in Run dialog box and hit Enter.
• Now in the System Configuration window, goto Startup tab
• Uncheck unwanted programs that you wish to remove from the start-up programs

 

5. Scan for Malware programs like viruses and spyware

The presence of virus and spyware programs can bring down the performance of your computer down to it’s knees. So install a good antivirus software and keep it updated so as to stay away from malware programs