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In an update on the CyanogenMod blog today, Cyanogen gave us our first details on device support for the forthcoming Ice Cream Sandwich-based CyanogenMod 9: the first SoCs supported will be TI's OMAP 4, Qualcomm's MSM8660 and MSM7x30, and Samsung's Exynos. Support for NVIDIA's Tegra 2 tablets should also come early. As we reported previously, we should begin to see builds of CM9 for some devices as early as January.

While these newer chips will get early attention, Cyanogen said that support for most of the devices compatible with the Gingerbread-based CyanogenMod 7 would be forthcoming – he singled out Qualcomm's QSD8250 and the Google Nexus One as examples of what the team would be targeting on the low-end. Unfortunately for some, he also singled out the original Motorola Droid (which uses an older TI OMAP3430 and just 256MB of RAM) as a device which definitely wouldn't be supported, advising Droid owners that it is "time to upgrade."

He went on to detail some of the changes and challenges in development – while Google added features in Ice Cream Sandwich that obviate the need for some of CM7's customizations, the team still plans to improve the process for users who build CyanogenMod from source code manually, and also to introduce a new music app, file manager, and app launcher. Ice Cream Sandwich has also broken a number of proprietary graphics and camera drivers, but Cyanogen is confident that these obstacles can be overcome.

Source: CyanogenMod Blog

THE COMPUTING GIANT IBM has become the second largest information technology company by market capitalisation, surpassing Microsoft.

Big Blue, which ditched its PC business back in 2005, now focuses on bigger hardware, software, services and consultancy. The company has been seeing its share price slowly rise while Microsoft has had a horrible year. Now IBM’s market value – its share price multiplied by the number of shares outstanding – is at 4bn while Microsoft’s market value is 3.2bn.

Microsoft overtook IBM back in 1996 and until now has never finished a day ranked below Big Blue on the stock exchanges. Microsoft’s peak market capitalisation came in the heady days of 2000 when it was valued at 0bn. Ever since then it’s been on a slide down to its current position.

Last year Apple surpassed Microsoft to become the most valuable information technology company on the market, though unlike Apple, both IBM and Microsoft are generally seen as blue-chip investments, meaning they are expected to offer steady, if unspectacular returns for investors.

IBM’s decision to dump its legendary PC business was a shock back in 2005, similar to HP’s recent announcement that it too will look to spin-off its PC business. However given the financial success IBM has had since then, seeing its profits and share price increase, this might give the new HP CEO, Meg Whitman, a reason to follow through with Leo Apotheker’s decision.

IBM still has a long way to go if it is to overtake Apple, which has a market capitalisation of 2.1bn. However IBM aims to double its operating earnings to per share by 2015, meaning that Apple will have to flog ever more shiny toys to stay ahead of IBM. µ

ANALYST OUTFIT IHS Isuppli claims that smartphones will make up the majority of mobile phone sales by 2015.

Isuppli’s forecast puts global smartphone shipments topping one billion in 2015, a doubling of the current figure, which stands at 478 million. The upshot of this is that smartphones will make up 54.5 per cent of phone shipments in 2015 while presently accounting for just 32.5 per cent.

According to Isuppli the rapidly growing low-end smartphone market will fuel the rapid growth. Francis Sideco, senior principle analyst of wireless communications at IHS Isuppli said, “With their affordable prices, low-end smart phones are attractive to first-time users and to consumers in emerging economies where subscriber levels are rising at the fastest rates of all regions of the world, such as China, India, South Asia and Africa.”

Last year smartphone newcomer ZTE scored a big win with its Blade low-cost handset. Rebadged as the San Francisco and sold for around £100, it was an very compelling Android smartphone. More recently the incredible price cuts on HP’s Touchpad and Pre 3 have shown the appetite there is for cut price smartphones and tablets.

Isuppli claims that Samsung has benefited the most in recent times with its smartphone shipments going from strength to strength. The firm pegs Samsung’s shipment growth at 600 per cent for the second quarter of 2011 but interestingly puts that down to low-end smartphones that were popular in China and Latin America. However it can’t hurt to have the ultra-desirable Galaxy S II headlining its range, either.

What Isuppli’s forecast goes to show is that smartphones are becoming mainstream. The expensive devices that were purchased by early adoptors will still remain but mass market consumers, the ones who do not particularly care to spend the best part of £400 on a device, will be catered for between now and 2015. µ

JAPANESE ELECTRONICS GIANT Sony won the ‘Most Epic FAIL’ Pwnie award at the Black Hat USA security conference on Wednesday after multiple security breaches this year.

The news comes as no surprise as Sony company was the sole nominee in that category – and it was a no-brainer really.

Sony was slated for its response to hackers publishing the PS3 ECDSA key. “Apparently unfamiliar with how the internet works and how difficult it is to remove the piss from a swimming pool, Sony proceeded to try erase the information from the internet and sue GeoHot et al. into oblivion. Needless to say, this was about as successful as the MiniDisc,” the Pwnie organisers wrote.

Of course, as everyone knows, the legal crackdown transformed Sony into the public enemy number one of hackers everywhere, a position no one would ever want to be in. The compromises of the Sony Playstation Network (PSN), the Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) network and other Sony web properties that followed made the company a worthy candidate for the Most Epic FAIL Pwnie.

The judging panel, made up by renowned security researchers HD Moore, Mark Dowd, Halvar Flake, Dave Goldsmith, Dave Aitel, Dino Dai Zovi, Alexander Sotirov, and Ralf-Philipp Weinmann selected the hardware manufacturer for five separate security failures.

The Pwnies are awarded every year for nine categories of security achievements: best server-side bug, best client-side bug, best privilege escalation bug, most innovative research, lamest vendor response, best song, most epic fail, epic 0wnage and lifetime achievement.

Another win that we anticipated was in the lamest vendor response category, where RSA Security took home the prize. “They got hacked, their SecurID tokens were totally compromised, and they basically passed it off as a non-event and advised customers that replacing the tokens is not necessary … until Lockheed-Martin got attacked because of them,” the judges explained.

The most contested Pwnie award was probably the Epic 0wnage one. The infamous Stuxnet industrial sabotage worm battled Anonymous, Lulzsec and alleged WikiLeaks source Bradley Manning to come out on top.

The Pwnie for Best Server-Side Bug went to Juliano Rizzo and Thai Duong for their ASP.NET framework padding oracle attack, while the Best Client-Side Bug Pwnie was awarded to Iphone hacker Comex for discovering the Freetype vulnerability in IOS used by Jailbreakme.

Researcher Tarjei Mandt who found multiple user-mode callback vulnerabilities in the Windows kernel took home the Pwnie for Best Privilege Escalation Bug and Piotr Bania’s work with kernel security techniques made him worthy of the most Most Innovative Research award.

Finally, the Lifetime Achievement Pwnie was awarded to the The Pax Team, whose Pax Linux kernel patch and address space layout randomization (ASLR) mechanisms changed the entire defensive security field. The main coder behind Pax is an anonymous developer.

“In an environment where Microsoft awards 200k USD for mitigation ideas that they can then patent and monopolize, he has freely shared his ideas – out of intellectual openness, but also out of a rather endearing mixture of humility and incredulity at the general retardedness of others,” the Pwnie judging panel noted. µ

THE FRUIT THEMED Ipad beats its rivals to be a most efficient product, according to a teardown analysis performed by IHS Isuppli.

In fact other tablet makers might take note. Apple’s halo device is so efficient because Jobs’ Mob controls both the operating system and the hardware design of its Ipad.

“Since Apple controls both the operating system and hardware design of the iPad, it is able to attain design efficiencies that other tablet manufacturers cannot,” according to Wayne Lam, analyst at IHS. “These efficiencies become obvious in areas like the memory and the battery, where Apple maintains advantages in cost, space savings and performance compared with every competitor in the business.”

This contrasts with the methods used by other tablet makers such as those that build devices that run the Android OS. You might think this would mean that an Android tablet could leave your pocket lighter, or that you might get less for your money, but Apple’s notoriously high markups mean that those outcomes are not in any real danger of being the case.

Apple takes a “vertically integrated” approach to its products, from the operating system through the user interface to the hardware design, down to the selection of individual parts used in the device, according to Lam.

Apple’s control over the operating system allows it to reduce costs by limiting the quantity of memory in the Ipad.

The current generation Ipad 2 has only 512MB of SDRAM, half that of the 1GB used in competitive designs.

This memory reduction results in a nearly cost reduction in the Bill Of Materials (BOM) of the Ipad 2 compared to other tablets. Likewise, the original Ipad contained half as much SDRAM as comparable competitive devices with single-core applications processors.

Also, Apple’s tight management of its product design, software integration and component selection allow the Ipad’s battery to be thinner than all competing tablet designs while still having the largest capacity.

Ever the trend setter, Apple is setting the pace in the tablet market in the areas of pricing and display size, with the Ipad’s 9.7-inch screen becoming the default standard in the market.

The IHS Isuppli teardown analysis also illustrates the trend toward multi-core processors in tablet designs. And this trend is set to continue with the introduction of tablets featuring quad-core processors for even more enhanced performance. µ

The pricetag of Lenovo's ThinkPad X100e has come down a couple of hundred dollars from its lofty perch when it entered the market more than six months ago, but it still remains a pricy alternative to CULV and Atom-based ultraportables. The X100e is saddled with AMD's outdated Congo platform, but is there more to a notebook than just the hardware under the hood? We think so, and we took the ThinkPad X100e for a spin to prove that the platform isn't always what counts.