Micro Phone Lens could turn your smartphone into a 150x microscope

The $42 lens could turn your smartphone or tablet camera into a power microscope.

Thomas Larson of Seattle has developed a Micro Phone Lens that attaches to your smartphone or tablet’s camera and offers a 150x magnification microscope.

The Micro Phone lens just sticks to your devices camera and can be pulled off when you’re done. Users just need to press on it to adjust the focus and use the default camera app. All you need is a light source and a microscope slide to view the things around in detail. The recommended camera resolution for the lens is 5MP and according to the site, the final product will be able to resolve features as tiny as 1.5-1.6 microns.

The project has raised money via the crowd funding site - Kickstarter. Larsen has already reached past his $50,000 goal through the site. The Micro Phone Lens is quite inexpensive as it comes for $42 only (which will get you the lens plus the full assortment of accessories). At this price the lens is a lot cheaper than dedicated microscopes with a comparable magnification which makes it ideal for home or school use.

Researchers at California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have developed a new 'light-bending silicon chip' that can turn your smartphone into a projector. The new chip eliminates the need of expensive and bulky lens used in traditional projectors. Ali Hajimiri and his team added that soon the technology would be incorporated into a smartphone to change it into a projector, with no need for a separate lens.

Source: Kickstarter

Read More

Google increases Android security with continuous malware scanning

Google's new Android security feature will check your smartphone constantly to make sure that installed applications are not infected with malware

Google has announced a change in its Android security system that will ensure that apps on your smartphone are safe from malicious software. "Verify Apps" by Google earlier used to scan apps for malicious code at the time of installation. "From now on, the program will expand and will continuously check the device even after installation to make sure that apps are “behaving in a safe manner," Google announced in a blog post.

The continuous app scanning will mean that if an app changes permissions on a later day, (like the ability to access your calendar, read your messages, etc.), Google’s Android Verify Apps program will keep a check on them and make sure they are not affected by malware. The new continuous checks use the same app-scanning technology that Google already uses for Android and also in its Chrome browser. Google adds that the regular “Verify apps” feature in Android has been used more than 4 billion times till now.

Verify Apps is a part of Google’s Android “bouncer” program released in February 2012. These 'Bouncer' scans check every app in Google Play Store against a list of known malware bugs and if an app is flagged as malicious, the app will send a warning to the user asking them not to install the app or Google may even block it. The Verify Apps feature is enabled for Android devices running v2.3 or higher.

The new security feature comes after a fake anti-virus app Virus Shield was discovered on the Google Play Store last week. The top rated app was available for $3.99 from the app store and claimed to protect your smartphone from harmful malware. After thousands of users downloaded the app, it was discovered that the app actually didn't do anything. Google has since then removed the app from the Google Play store.

Source: Android Blog

Read More

Android 4.4.3 arriving soon, features leaked online

After various rumours of the upcoming Nexus devices, some fresh details of an upcoming Android update has been leaked on the web giving an idea what Google will be bringing to the mobile platform

A new Android update is expected to arrive soon as a change-log including some fixes has been leaked. The new update will be 4.4.3, so this is definitely not a major release, rather a slight bump from the current Android version. This also means that there won’t be any major changes in terms of looks of the UI.

The update was seen on a Nexus 5, however there is no confirmation regarding the release date. We are presuming that the update should arrive on or just before Google’s upcoming I/O event along with a pair of new Nexus devices.

Here is the list of fixes that are expected to arrive in the 4.4.3 update:

• Frequent data connection dropout fix
• mm-qcamera-daemon crash and optimization fixes
• Camera focus in regular and HDR modes fixes
• Power Manager display wakelock fix
• Multiple Bluetooth fixes
• Fix for a random reboot
• App shortcuts sometimes got removed from launcher after update
• USB debugging security fix
• App shortcuts security fix
• Wi-Fi auto-connect fix
• Other camera fixes
• MMS, Email/Exchange, Calendar, People/Dialer/Contacts, DSP, IPv6, VPN fixes
• Stuck in activation screen fix
• Missed call LED fix
• Subtitle fixes
• Data usage graph fix

Source: Android Police

Read More