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According to a e-newsletter sent out by SONY Singapore. The Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 will be launched in Singapore in 2010. As the e-newsletter is dated 10 Jan 2010. It is highly anticipated that the date of launch should be around the mid of next month. For Android supporters, January will be an Android month as Motorola Milestone will also be launched very soon.

Update : Sony Ericsson responded to our post that there is no confirmed date for the launch. It is scheduled for 1H 2010.

Kaspersky Lab Issues 2010 Cyberthreat Forecast

Hong Kong – December 30, 2009 – Kaspersky Lab, a leading developer of secure content management solutions, outlines the threats we can expect to see in 2010 as a result of cybercriminal activity.

In 2008, the company’s analysts forecast a rise in the number of global epidemics. Unfortunately, that forecast proved to be accurate: 2009 was dominated by sophisticated malicious programs with rootkit functionality, the Kido worm (also known as Conficker), web attacks and botnets, SMS fraud and attacks on social networks. So what can we expect from 2010?

According to the company’s experts, in the coming year we will see a shift in the types of attacks on users: from attacks via websites and applications towards attacks originating from file sharing networks. Already in 2009 a series of mass malware epidemics have been “supported” by malicious files that are spread via torrent portals. This method has been used to spread notorious threats such as TDSS and Virut as well as the first backdoor for Mac OS X. In 2010, we expect to see a significant increase in these types of incidents on P2P networks.

Cybercriminals will continue to compete for traffic. The modern cybercriminal world is making more and more of an effort to legalize itself and there are lots of ways to earn money online using the huge amount of traffic that can be generated by botnets. Today, it is mostly black-market services that compete to make use of botnet traffic. In the future, however, we foresee the emergence of more “grey” schemes in the botnet services market. So-called “partner programs” enable botnet owners to make a profit from activities such as sending spam, performing DoS attacks or distributing malware without committing an explicit crime.

The decline in gaming Trojans witnessed in 2009 is likely to be repeated for fake antivirus programs in 2010. The latter first made an appearance in 2007 and 2009 saw a peak in their activity and involvement in a number of major epidemics. The Kido worm, for example, installed a rogue antivirus program on infected computers. The fake antivirus market has now been saturated and the profits for cybercriminals have fallen. Moreover, this kind of activity is closely monitored by both IT security companies and law enforcement agencies. This makes it increasingly difficult to create and distribute fake antivirus programs.

“Malware will become much more sophisticated in 2010 and many antivirus programs will be slow to treat infected computers due to advanced file infection methods and rootkit technologies,” says Alex Gostev, Director of Kaspersky Lab’s Global Research & Analysis Team. “IT security companies will respond by developing even more complex protection tools. However, the malicious programs capable of bypassing these measures will remain more or less immune to antivirus programs for some time.”

When it comes to attacks on web services, Google Wave looks like it will be making all the headlines in 2010. Attacks on this new Google service will no doubt follow the usual pattern: first, the sending of spam, followed by phishing attacks, then the exploiting of vulnerabilities and the spreading of malware. The planned launch of the network-based Chrome OS is a noteworthy event, but the experts at Kaspersky Lab do not anticipate much interest in this platform from cybercriminals.

However, 2010 promises to be a difficult time for iPhone and Android. The first malicious programs for these mobile platforms appeared in 2009, which is a sure sign that they have aroused the interest of cybercriminals. The only iPhone users at risk are those with compromised devices, but the same is not true for Android users who are all vulnerable to attack. The increasing popularity of mobile phones running the Android OS in China combined with a lack of effective checks to ensure third-party software applications are secure will lead to a number of high profile malware outbreaks.

The detection of new vulnerabilities will remain the major cause of epidemics. These vulnerabilities will be detected in both software developed by third parties (such as Adobe, Apple, etc.) and in Windows 7, the new operating system that has just entered the market. If no serious vulnerabilities are detected, 2010 may well prove to be one of the quietest years for some time.

It seems like the highly anticipated Google Phone Nexus One is going to make it’s day in US on 5th January. A number of sites have posted leaked pictures of the pre-ordering form.

The phone will be available in contract with T-mobile or sold alone (unlocked) to residents of USA.

With a T-mobile contract, the price will be $179.99 and without contract, the upfront cost will be $529.99.

Source

GoodBye 2009, Welcome 2010. In 2009, we have posted many stories and articles ranging from mainboards to graphics card, from netbooks to mobile handsets. We also attended a number of events held locally and abroad.

In 2009, we see a trend of new innovations. For the mainboards, we see companies innovating new features on board. SATA3 first appeared in the form of an upgrade card on ASRock boards, eSATA also gets powered and can be shared with USB. Gigabyte came on with USB3 add on for their motherboard series. ASUS also joined in by offering an upgrade card for it’s P7P55 series of boards. It offered a USB3 and SATA3 support for the mainboard in the form of a PCIe card. MSI has one touch button overclocking. DFI joined in the fray with a Hybrid board. These are all very innovative ideas.

In 2010, the first wave would come from the Intel H55 series of mainboards to be announced in around a week’s time. The difference between the earlier G45 is that H55 now has the graphics core integrated into the processor itself. There is also hardware decoding of Full HD putting itself in direct competition with AMD and NVIDIA’s solutions using a separate chipset.

Graphics card wise, we see a lot more action from the AMD camp. There were lots of press releases flying around but you never get to see the cards. This is especially true for the AMD Radeon HD 5870, 5890. Retailers also jack up the prices to make more profits due to shortages. On the NVIDIA camp, it seems to be quieter as they’re preparing the next wave , the Fermi. It was orginally scheduled for Nov 2009 but is later pushed back to JAN 2010. There was a piece of news from Digitimes claiming that it is again postponed for a March launch. On the other hand, Intel’s long awaited graphics card project seems to be shelved. A lot of rumours were flying around claiming the the Intel’s architecture has reached it’s peak and can’t outperform the AMD and NVIDIA. Will Intel make a come back in 2010 ? Maybe maybe not.

This year, we also see more PC manufacturers making 1 litre desktop PCs. Some are powered by the vanilla Intel 945GC with ATOM 1.6 while some chose to use the NVIDIA ION 330 to help out in the graphics department. ASRock ION330HT BD is such a small bluray powered device which is definitely worth the penny that buying a bluray player. It can function as a desktop PC while ION taking the load for decoding the H.264 1080p movies.

In the mobile front, more and more people tends to go for Android powered phones lately. Readers seemed to be anticipating the launch of Motorola Milestone (known as Droid in US). HTC on the other hand has been busy with their Android power devices and the latest Windows Mobile 6.5 HD2 which created so much fuss on the net. Nokia on the other hand has been quiet while preparing their own derivatives of Linux and consolidating their next move. Sony Ericsson has Satio but most people are waiting for the Xperia X10 instead. Samsung still concentrates on it’s Omnia series but is also opening up it’s platform known as bada. LG on the hand launched feature phone LG BL40 which surprised the market with it’s 4″ large screen with multi touch feature.

On other news, we also covered the war between the telcos with it’s price war for Apple iPhone in Singapore. For those who are not aware, the iPhone 3G/3GS only had a sole distributor carrying it for over a year before it is available on two other telcos. The two other telcos upped the offerings almost every other day and the 3 telcos starts to outdo one another in terms of price, bundled offers and total cost of ownership. The other most important developing in Pay TV is that the highly sought after EPL broadcast rights and ESPN went to Singtel mio tv. As sports programmes are now split on two different platform, cable (starhub) and iptv (singtel). There was great discontent among football lovers as they would need to subscribe to two providers and two set top boxes. In the end, it would be more expensive. Both operators started reducing prices and bundling more goodies to attract subscribers.

2009 is an exciting year and 2010 should be another year with more announcements in Jan with the NexusOne, the google phone from Google themselves. Intel’s Clarkdale is slated for Jan launch too. So stay tuned to OCWORKBENCH and Join in our forums to discuss. We are planning some give away for year 2010 too. So, join in the forum today.

For a list of our news and articles, you can go to the link below. Other news can also be found on search engines.
Articles and Reviews in year 2009

Most of the first wave of Intel H55 boards should be based on a single PCIe slot that supports external graphics card running in PCIe x16. While this is the norm, some companies like ASRock has models that spots two PCIe full length slots. The purpose of it is to support the running of CrossFire on the H55.

Although not in Dual x8 mode, the second PCIe slot will run in PCIe x4 supported by the H55 chipset. The other 16 lanes will come from the processor.

It is definitely a plus point to have such support but 4X with a 16X will certainly run slower than a Dual 8x.

A report on digitimes reveals that Nvidia will delay Fermi architectured graphics card to March 2010, that is 3 mths frmo now. Initially it was scheduled for a November 2009 launch but was pushed back until CES in Jan 2010.

Nvidia plans to launch a 40nm GDDR5 memory-based Fermi-GF100 GPU in March, and will launch a GF104 version in the second quarter to target the high-end market with its GeForce GTX295/285/275/260, the sources pointed out.

For performance level markets, Nvidia will allow its GeForce GTS250, GT240/220 and 9800GT/9500GT defend against AMD’s Radeon HD 5770/5750, 4870/4850 and 4670/4650.

For the mainstream market, Nvidia will mainly push its GeForce 210.

Meanwhile, AMD will launch 40nm Radeon HD 5670/5570 (Redwood) and HD 5450 (Cedar) GPUs at the end of January or in February 2010, the sources noted.

Our reader sends in this chart scanned from a local paper. In the chart, the H55 is compared to three other platforms, G41, G45 and GF 9300 running on LGA775 E6550 @2.53GHz while the H55 runs with Pentium G6950 @2.53GHz. The LGA775 systems runs on 2GB DDR2-800 C5-5-5-18-2T while the LGA1156 system runs on DDR3-1066 @C7-8-8-21. Platform : Vista 32bits SP2.

From the chart, we can see that the H55 definitely runs better than the predecessors. When compared to GF9300, it is still slightly behind.

For those of you who wants to have a preview of how the Motorola Milestone functions before placing an order. Here is a 25 minutes video which will give you a better understanding of this gadget of the year.

Discuss here

According to posters on facebook and twitter, Starhub TV services went offline this morning around 10am. Subscribers were no longer able to watch their cable channels other than Mediacorp’s free to air channels carried on the cable network.

Subscribers are calling 1633 service line and been in queue for more than 1 hour to no avail.

Read comments here.

According to a report on Digitimes report, Diamond Flower International (DFI) has commented on recent market rumors indicating the company plans to quit the motherboard channel market, saying it will continue to develop new motherboards.

According to the rumors, DFI has notified its channel partners that it will no longer be aggressive in developing new boards and intends to mainly focus on clearing up its inventory as it gradually withdraws from the motherboard channel market.

A DFI spokesperson noted that although DFI’s channel motherboard shipments are forecast to drop to only about 40,000 units in 2009, accounting for just 3% of the company’s total revenues, the company will continue to work on new motherboard designs.

The company is currently developing next-generation Intel H55 and H57-based motherboards and is still selling the latest P55-based motherboard in the channel, the spokesperson added.

Source

now TV becomes available on PlayStation^®3

HONG KONG, December 24, 2009 – PCCW, Hong Kong’s premier telecommunications operator, today announced that they are to offer a new entertainment experience by making now TV available on PlayStation^®3 (PS3™)^*

Announced at the Asia Game Show 2009 exhibition for the computer games industry, this collaboration between now TV and Sony Computer Entertainment Hong Kong Limited (SCEH) is the first of its kind in Hong Kong.

A brand new TV-viewing experience will become available to gamers in Hong Kong, thanks to synergies identified between the expertise and market leadership position enjoyed by the two partners in their respective markets. PS3™ users will soon be able to watch a selection of now TV channels via an embedded now TV decoder application in the popular gaming console. A significant aspect of this move is that now TV broadcasts will broaden the reach of PCCW’s existing quadruple-play capability, by which infotainment and communications are extended to customers via TV, mobile, broadband internet and fixed-line platforms.

Rollout is planned for the first quarter of 2010, when promotional now TV trailers will be extended to Hong Kong-registered PlayStation Network (PSN) users for free. They will get access to now TV channels by contacting now TV for fast and easy subscription.

Ms. Janice Lee, PCCW’s Executive Vice President of TV & New Media, said: “In this era of digital entertainment convergence, we see a growing demand from consumers for seamlessly-integrated and readily available TV services via game consoles. We are very glad to be able to work with Sony Computer Entertainment Hong Kong Limited and believe the synergies we have identified between PCCW and SCEH will benefit both PS3™ game players and now TV viewers alike.”

Mr. Tetsuhiko Yasuda, President of Sony Computer Entertainment Asia, said, “We’re excited to connect now TV service, the leading pay TV operator in HK, with PS3, enabling players to watch TV programs by using PS3™. Beside existing functions such as enjoy high-definition Blu-ray movies, groundbreaking games and online services etc, very soon, PS3™ users will be able to enjoy fascinating TV programs of now TV. We will continue to deliver fun entertainment experiences for many years to come.”

Serving some 992,000 subscribers, now TV is currently delivered to customers via TV sets, the now.com.hk portal, mobile phones, the PCCW eye Multimedia Service and eye2.

The now TV decoder application will become available for PS3 TM users to download from the PlayStation Network (PSN) service via PCCW’s Netvigator broadband network during the first quarter of 2010. Details of pricing will be announced at a later stage.

*The new service requires users to subscribe to now TV service from PCCW, and to download and install now TV decoder application which enables PS3™ to function as a now TV decoder for service provisioning.

?”PlayStation” is a registered trademark, and PS3 is a trademark of Sony Computer Entertainment Inc.

About PCCW Limited

PCCW Limited (SEHK:0008) is the holding company of HKT Group Holdings Limited (HKT), Hong Kong’s premier telecommunications provider and a world-class player in Information and Communications Technologies. PCCW also holds a majority interest in Pacific Century Premium Developments Limited, and overseas investments including the wholly-owned UK Broadband Limited.

As the provider of Hong Kong’s first quadruple-play experience, PCCW/HKT offers a range of innovative media content and services across four platforms – fixed-line, broadband Internet access, TV and mobile. In addition, the Group meets the sophisticated needs of the local and international business community, while supporting network operators with cutting-edge technical services and handling large-scale IT outsourcing projects for public and private sector organizations. To learn more about PCCW and HKT, please visit www.pccw.com.

About now TV

now TV is one of the world’s largest commercial deployments of IPTV and Hong Kong’s largest pay-TV provider. It is delivered by PCCW Media, an operating division of HKT Group Holdings Limited (HKT). HKT is a wholly-owned subsidiary of PCCW Limited and holds the PCCW Group’s telecoms services, media and IT solutions businesses. PCCW/HKT is Hong Kong’s premier telecommunications provider and a world-class player in Information and Communications Technologies.

now TV serves Hong Kong with more than 170 channels of local, Asian and international programming, including exclusive content such as coverage of the top Spanish soccer league La Liga for three seasons commencing 2009/10. In addition, now TV is both a leading producer of news, sports and infotainment programming and a provider of a wide range of interactive services. now TV can be enjoyed on PCCW eye2, a portable media center with an embedded now TV decoder, and select now TV content and interactive applications can also be accessed via the Group’s 3G mobile network and broadband service. To learn more about now TV, please visit www.now-tv.com.

For more information, please contact:

Photo 1 & 2: Ms. Janice Lee, PCCW’s Executive Vice President of TV & New Media and Mr. Tetsuhiko Yasuda, President of Sony Computer Entertainment Asia, announced at the Asia Game Show 2009 that now TV will be available on PlayStation®3, offering a new entertainment experience.

OCWorkbench Team wishes every one Merry X’mas and Happy New Year. Tell us your aspirations for the coming year and post your well wishes at this link.

LG PRADA 3 to use Android; headed to Sprint in 2010?

There’s talk that LG’s next PRADA cellphone might adopt the Android OS. The so-called PRADA 3 is expected to have a QWERTY keyboard and touchscreen, and it’s also been suggested that US carrier Sprint will be offering the device. If so, it would make this particular luxury smartphone the first carrying the PRADA name to use CDMA rather than a GSM radio. There’s also some speculation that LG will be bringing the PRADA 3 along to CES 2010 next month, where they’ve scheduled a joint event with Sprint and – bizarrely – Brooke Shields.

Source

In Jan 2010, Intel will officially announce the new Clarkdale series of processors. In some reports found online, it seems that the new 32nm Clarkdale with integrated graphics core overclocks pretty well. In fact, it overclocks as good as it’s lynnfield counterparts.

A mid range 3.3GHz Clarkdale can easily be overclocked to 4.4GHz on AIR without much voltage bump. That is quite a good start for this new processor.

Below is a table showing the TDP and the Cache of the different cores under the Clarkdale stable :

Clarkdale processors are sold under both the Intel Core and Pentium brand names, with Pentium models having a smaller L3 cache.

Here are pricing information of the new processors

i5-670 = $284
i5-661 = $196
i5-660 = $196
i5-650 = $176
i3-540 = $133
i3-530 = $113

From the manual of GA-P55A-UD3P, it is stated that when the Turbo SATA3 or USB 3.0 is enabled, the PCIe graphics slot will drop from PCIe x16 to PCIe x8.

You would have to choose if you want maximum graphics performance or maximum disk performance. These new boards uses the NEC 3.0 chip and SATA 3 which requires more bandwidth than just PCIe x1. As the P55 and CPU does not have enough lanes to support, the PCIe x16 is reduced to PCIe x8.

Although PCIe x8 won’t give you much of a performance dip, it gives you maximum USB3.0 performance at the expense of the 8 lane instead of 16. Now the issue is, if we still want Turbo SATA3 and USB 3.0 and want SLI or CrossFire with 2 cards. Will the two PCIe slots be running at Dual 4x (4x + 4x) ? Do let us know if you own the P55 series of boards with NEC USB 3.0 on board.

Gigabyte has replied to us

First of all, if users really want to use CrossFire / SLI on a P55 motherboards, as you know the PCI-e x16 lanes will split into 2 x8 lanes, besides that users are still able to enjoy the benefits of USB 3.0 and SATA 6G.

It is only when user is using one graphics card, then the user is able to select whether he wants to use the full bandwidth of USB 3.0 or SATA 6G.  Of course, according to our manual had clearly stated the PCI-e graphics will operate in x8 mode. But the true fact is, there’s no identical performance drop comparing with a PCI-e x16 to a PCI-e x8 graphics.

Plus, our implementation gives users a more flexible choice and paying less money to enjoy USB 3.0 / SATA 6G.

When CF/SLI is running in dual 8X, the SATA3 and USB3 will be running in non turbo mode, getting the PCie lane from the P55 chipset instead of from the CPU, thus allowing the CF/SLI to run in Dual 8x mode.

GIGABYTE USB 3.0 Motherboard Microsite Helps Develop SuperSpeed Ecosystem –

– Offers info on GIGABYTE USB 3.0 motherboards and 3^rd party SuperSpeed products –

Thanks to our reader for sending in this news. A youtube video showing the interface of the Google Nexus One has leaked on the net. Some of the differences between the new and old includes the Gallery, Login screen and more. Below is the video.

The first mobile phone version of the popular web browser Firefox is “days away” from launch, the head of the project has told the BBC.
The browser, codenamed Fennec, will initially be available for Nokia’s N900 phone, followed by other handsets.

It is currently going through final testing and could be released before the end of the year, said Jay Sullivan at Mozilla, the group behind Firefox. The open-source browser will be able to synchronise with the desktop version.

Singapore’s StarHub has launched an MMS based daily news service with content provided by five Chinese newspapers. News updates will be delivered to subscribers via MMS according to a pre-set schedule, and will feature a condensed version of the day’s top stories as well as other articles of interest.