Mobile

If you live in the UK and have been looking for another reason to invest in a Google Home smart speaker, Google just gave you one. The company is going to give UK users the ability to place free calls to mobile and landline numbers.

An update rolling out this week will add the new feature to Google Home speakers around the country. The feature was announced last year, and it brings the UK in line with the US -- and, importantly, it does not require tethering to a mobile phone, thereby trumping Apple HomePod.

Text messages via SMS are often used as part of two-factor authentication strategies to protect login accounts.

But a new and worrying study from Positive Technologies shows that real-world attempts to intercept SMS messages are 100 percent successful.

The IoT marketplace has grown, and is continuing to grow, at a rapid rate and this means developers and service providers have often struggled when it comes to collaboration with other networks and devices.

Communication services company Ericsson is using MWC 2018 to launch a new IoT Accelerator Marketplace aimed at making it easier for service providers to find IoT apps from the global ecosystem.

The Wikimedia Foundation is to kill off Wikipedia Zero this year. The zero-rated version of the online encyclopaedia was launched six years ago with the aim of providing free access to mobile users in numerous countries, but there has been a significant drop in demand.

The foundation has partnered with dozens of mobile operators around the world to provide free access to Wikipedia. Among the reasons for shutting down the program is "low awareness of Wikipedia outside of North America and Europe."

Apple raised the anger levels of some iPhone users when it was revealed that handset performance was being purposefully reduced to maintain battery health. Some of this anger was dissipated when the company offered up cheap battery replacements, but Tim Cook also promised that users would soon be able to opt out of performance throttling.

The option to disable performance reduction is due to hit the masses with iOS 11.3, and the second beta of this version of Apple's mobile operating system has now been released to developers. It gives us our first glimpse at what the new battery health features look like.

Documents that came to light recently suggested that the Trump administration was considering creating a government-controlled 5G network. It was an idea viewed in a dim light by the FCC, but now the White House has denied it has such plans.

Despite the unearthing of a memo to the contrary, the US government insists there are no such plans under consideration.

Leaked documents show that the Trump administration is considering plans to nationalize the 5G network. In the documents, seen by Axios, a senior National Security Council official says that a centralized, government-controlled 5G network is needed to offer security against China.

But while the government may believe it makes sense for it to be in control of the future mobile network, the idea has attracted vocal opposition. Among the opponents is FCC chairman Ajit Pai.

The Meltdown and Spectre bugs have been in the headlines for a couple of weeks now, but it seems the patches are not being installed on handsets. Analysis of more than 100,000 enterprise mobile devices shows that just a tiny percentage of them have been protected against the vulnerabilities -- and some simply may never be protected.

Security firm Bridgeway found that just 4 percent of corporate phones and tablets in the UK have been patched against Spectre and Meltdown. Perhaps more worryingly, however, its research also found that nearly a quarter of enterprise mobile devices will never receive a patch because of their age.

There are two types of businesses in today’s mobile-first world: businesses that have a mobile app and those that do not. The one thing that these two sides have in common is that both are looking towards progressive web apps (PWAs) and wondering what the impact of this new app experience will be and how it will change the mobile world.

Businesses that have already invested in developing a native mobile app are looking at PWAs cautiously. While these new apps represent a new frontier to be explored and leveraged to improve and expand on an existing app experience, they also have the potential to elbow native apps out of the spotlight. Thus, these companies may find that their investment into a native app was not as long-term as they anticipated.

Advertisers are keen for their ads to be seen, that goes without saying. But it's more important to be seen by the right people, hence the explosion in targeted advertising. Social media is a great way to gather massive amounts of data about people and deliver ads accordingly, but some mobile games take things further.

There are a large number of games for both iOS and Android which include Alphonso software. This uses smartphones' microphones to record audio which is then used to determine which TV shows and commercials you're watching -- and then deliver targeted ads accordingly. Is this being done in secret? Not really. Details of the activities are included in Alphonso software's privacy policy.

With consumers spending more of their smartphone time in apps worldwide, in-app advertising continued to be the main growth area in worldwide mobile ad spending and video ads are increasingly dominant.

Data from real-time advertising platform Smaato reveals in-app ad spend taking at least 85 percent of mobile ad spending in each of the top 20 mobile advertising markets worldwide.

A market cap of over $350 billion, daily volumes in excess of $10 billion, fast rising prices, a growing number of investors and little to no regulation all combine to make the cryptocurrency space a prime target for hackers. What's more, security is not exactly a main priority for many investors and exchanges, as numerous thefts go to show.

Making things even more complicated is the fact that lots of cryptocurrency apps, that let investors and trader store coins, have dangerous vulnerabilities that hackers can exploit to steal users' funds.

A new study of over 850 organizations around the world shows that all of them have experienced a mobile malware attack.

The research by cyber security company Check Point shows an average of 54 mobile malware attacks per business with Android and iOS platforms both proving vulnerable.

Samsung does not reveal much information about a new flagship smartphone before launch day, but the homebrew processor that powers it is introduced in advance. So, it did not come as a surprise to see the Exynos 9 Series 8895 making its official debut ahead of the Galaxy S8.

Things appear to be no different this time around. The Galaxy S9 is months away, yet Samsung just announced the Exynos 9 Series 9810 flagship processor that is likely to underpin it.

After weeks of rumors and speculation about a possible merger between T-Mobile and Sprint, the two companies have spoken out and said their discussions have amounted to nothing. In joint statements, the telecoms firms announced that merger talks have come to an end.

The companies were "unable to find mutually agreeable terms," and the decision has been made to "put an end to the extensive speculation around a transaction."