TechieGroups

AMERICAN APP DEVELOPER Daniel Amitay has published the most commonly used passcodes on Apple Iphones in his blog.

The post on student and Iphone developer Daniel Amitay’s blog reveals the passcodes most commonly used to get onto Apple’s shiny Iphones. He conducted the research using his own app called Big Brother Camera Security.

The 10 most common passcodes according to Amitay’s findings are, in descending order, 1234, 0000, 2580, 1111, 5555, 5683, 0852, 2222, 1212 and 1998. The top ten passcodes used to unlock the Iphone make up 15 per cent of all passcodes in use.

Amitay didn’t spend forever looking over peoples shoulders and writing down passcodes 204,508 times but used his app to record the data. He anonymously recorded passcodes that people used for his application.

His app for the Iphone, which takes a photo of anyone using your phone without permission, uses a lock screen that’s almost identical to the one used by the Iphone itself. For this reason he thinks his findings should correlate well to what people use for their passcodes for the Iphone.

There’s also the fact that most people like to use the same codes for things to avoid confusion and forgetting things.

Among the same digit passcodes are ones that spell words, that is, 5683 spells ‘Love’. Amitay wrote that passcodes ranging from 1990 to 2000 are all in the top 50, and 1980 to 1989 are all in the top 100, and he said, “I would interpret this occurrence as a subset of users that set their passcodes to the year of their birth or graduation.”

If the findings really do match the actual passcodes of Iphone users then with the top 10 codes making up 15 per cent, nearly 1 in 7 Iphones can be unlocked within 10 blind attempts.

A day after he put his blog post up Apple removed Amitay’s app from the App Store. In a tweet Amitay said, “The Apple gods that be have removed Big Brother Camera Security from the App Store. Working on getting it back on!” µ

AN ANALYST has attempted to clear up confusion over whether PC sales are rising or falling, coming to the conclusion that overall PC sales are declining by a considerable amount.

Horace Dediu, an analyst at Asymco, said that he made his own analysis of how well the PC market was doing after reports from IDC and Gartner failed to highlight the causes of changes, failed to segregate by operating system instead of vendor, and failed to include devices that do the same thing as PCs, such as Apple’s Ipad.

Dediu discovered that since the first quarter of 2010, PC sales growth has been falling. By the first quarter of 2011 growth was down to only 7.5 per cent, well below its peak growth of nearly 30 per cent a year prior.

Windows systems have seen the worst slowdown, flattening out at the end of 2010 and declining slightly by two per cent in the first quarter of 2011. The category shared its peak with overall PC sales in early 2010, making the drop even more dramatic.

Mac computers have also seen slowing growth, but nowhere near the same rate. Growth has dropped from over 30 per cent to around 22.5 per cent.

Apple is doing well overall, however, with growth of 272 per cent, up from the just over 30 per cent figure it had in the first quarter of 2010. Most of this boils down to the Ipad. When we take the Mac PCs figure out of the equation we’re left with a roughly 250 per cent growth for the Ipad alone.

The findings suggest that the growth of Ipad sales might have had a direct impact on the growth of PC sales, but Dediu classifies the Ipad as “the new PC”. However, many other analysts consider it a “media tablet”, a term that Dediu dislikes, since he regards media viewing is one of its least common purposes.

Even if we drop the Ipad from the equation, we still end up with overall PC sales growth down and Windows PCs losing out the most. µ

IPHONELESS MOBILE OPERATOR Verizon has outed Motorola’s successor to its Android powered Droid handset.

The creatively named Droid 2 will be launched on Verizon’s network sometime next week and will see both Motorola and Verizon try to build upon the success of the original Droid. That handset has become the most popular Android phone and is still highly rated almost a year after its launch.

Since then Verizon has embraced the Linux based Android operating system, putting out a number of well-received phones such as the Droid X. However the Droid remains popular among business types who want a hardware keyboard to input large swathes of text.

It seems that Motorola hasn’t changed much in terms of design, though the colour scheme Verizon has chosen makes the Droid 2 look a little Mickey Mouse. Nevertheless, the aggressively styled ‘lip’ still remains, although the device seems to have softer edges.

Since Verizon runs a CDMA network, a change of radio will be required before the Droid 2 heads over to Blighty. In the past that trip resulted in the Droid being renamed the Milestone and it’s likely that a similar name change will also happen this time around.

Confirmed specifications of the Droid 2 are scant, however the US retailer Best Buy has revealed that it intends to flog the device for 9 (£125) when signing up for a multi-year contract. It is expected that the device will go for about 0 (£380) without Verizon’s subsidy.

Rumours abound that the Droid 2 will tip up next week, though it is not known when the device might turn up in the UK. µ