According to the recent research conducted by the road safety charity Brake and insurance company Direct Line you probably do just like tens of thousands of us. Despite of the risk involved 48% of drivers text and make calls while driving. The addiction to smartphones is evident and ominous, as nor dangers, neither sky-high fines and penalty points cannot stop us.

What is more, of this 48% of irresponsible drivers, 2 in 3 still use hand-held mobile devices increasing the risk and danger of a road accident.

The young are more likely to offend according to the above-mentioned research. On comparison among young drivers there are 17% more of offenders who text while driving than among the old. Moreover 21% of young people email, use Internet and apps at the wheel while only 9% of the old do the same.

Using phone while driving doesn’t differ much from drink-driving

According to Julie Townsend deputy chief executive at Brake using a phone at the wheel you are taking a horrendous risk with your own life and the lives of others. Many drivers who wouldn't dream of drink-driving are using phones at the wheel, oblivious that the effect on your reaction times is actually the same.

Director of motor underwriting and pricing at Direct Line Andy Goldby is of the same opinion: "Much more needs to be done to deter motorists from the dangers of using mobile phones whilst driving, as any action that involves taking your eyes off the road or your mind from the task increases your chance of a collision. Too many people are either still unaware that using a mobile phone can be a major distraction to their concentration while driving, or are simply ignoring the rules of the road.”

The Intellectsoft team would highly recommend all the drivers young and older be cautious and sensible at the wheel if not for yourself at least for the others. We also recommend checking our portfolio featuring loads of handy apps for drivers. In case you didn’t follow the charity Brake’s and our advice and got into a car accident the GEM Motoring Assist app would be extremely useful for you. Actually this app developed for the app’s eponymous company is an invaluable helping hand for the drivers and GEM members.

Experts and researches compared the two platforms once again: which one is more exposed to hacker’s attacks iOS or Android? According to the researchers from Black Hat Europe the latter appeared to be more vulnerable, thus extremely attractive for wicked hackers.

As in any activity in malware making the revenue should outstrip the cost of the system exploiting. Otherwise there is no point in doing it. Besides, hackers prefer easy and not too risky attacks.

Let’s take iOS for instance, being a closed and highly secured system it makes downloading hostile applications quite a challenge. Firstly, to load anything to App Store one has to pay 99 USA dollars. Secondly, a proper registration is required: hackers will have to identify themselves and give personal information which is not what they usually do. Thirdly, the risks are sky-high: at App store they review the code of each and every application submitted. Surely failures happen even at Apple, but if the wrong app gets through the initial review it will be detected within one week by the monitoring system.

As for Android it is not so protected. With only 25 USA dollars you are welcome to load apps to Android Market. Moreover the submission process is as easy as a pie: only online form is required. Provided we are all not so honest when filling out such forms, it’s obvious hackers may lie to Google too. Last but not least apart from the iOS platform Android makes possible runtime modifications.

We at Intellectsoft respect and work with both platforms – iOS and Android. Besides, we are sure that users jailbreaking their mobile phones and devices (and loads of peeps do that) are the most attractive for hackers regardless of the platform they use.

By the way free apps especially from third party app stores may harm mobile device in other way. Even if they do not embody some dangerous virus, they may simply steal your battery charge. Adds in such kind of applications are the great battery bandits indeed. According to the research carried out by Abhinav Pathak (a computer scientist from Purdue University in Indiana) free applications like Angry Birds for e.g. need not more than 10 — 30% of overall app battery consumption to run their core function. The report claims that approximately 75% of the remaining battery consumption from the app goes to collecting and transmitting information like GPS location back to the advertisers of the used application. One should be careful, as another time killer may turn out to be the phone battery killer as well.

By the way, our heartiest congrats to Barcelona for being chosen as the Mobile World Capital, i.e. that Barcelona will not only host Mobile World Congress through 2018, but will become a permanent technological and cultural centre concentrating the potential of worldwide mobile communications.

The Congress motto can be presented with just one word — “more”: each year the organisers aim for more attendees, more outstanding exhibitors, more CEOs delivering keynotes, more App Developer Conferences, etc. Last year organisers broke their own record with more than 60,000 attendances, 3000 CEOs, 1400 exhibitors, 2,900+ press members representing 1,500 media outlets and more than 12,000 Mobile App Developers. True to the name of the event, it is global indeed hosting attendees from 200 countries from all over the world. This year organisers promise to take MWC to a new level and break all the records yet again.

The 2012 MWC Congress will feature:

• A world-class thought-leadership conference including visionary keynotes and panel discussions
• A pioneering technology and product exhibition
• App Planet – the Centre of the Mobile Apps Universe
• The newest programme, mPowered Brands for global marketers and agencies to increase their knowledge of mobile marketing and connect with mobile players bringing their visions to reality
• Last but not least, the Global Mobile Awards programme highlighting cutting-edge innovations in the mobile world. By the way, each ceremony at MWC Awards is marked out with live performances by top stars!

Obviously, this year MWC organisers have excelled themselves! Just take a look at the list of MWC Keynote Speakers in 2012 featuring highly respected business celebrities: Ben Verwaayen, CEO Alcatel-Lucent, Li Yue, China Mobile, Rene Obermann, CEO Deutsche Telekom, John Donahoe, CEO eBay, Hans Vestberg CEO Ericsson, Eric Schmidt, Chairman Google, etc. The host for MWC 2012 will be comedian and songwriter Tim Minchin.

Intellectsoft just couldn’t miss this largest, most significant and most successful mobile event in the world, as all companies in the vanguard of mobile development trends will certainly be there.

Study volunteers admit that constant checking, rechecking, and triple checking for new notifications has them experiencing phantom vibrations, believing their phone is chirping for attention even in those rare moments it's not.

Most of the participants originally began using smartphones to keep up with work on the go, which quickly spiraled into 24/7 replies to emails, tweets, and Facebook messages. Have you ever noticed, that sometimes you just can't help twitting and posting even though it's time to go to bed or to start working or to have lunch, etc.? Not to mention countless fascinating and useful apps and various time killers that might keep you «busy» for a while.

Companies are starting to react to the pressures of work-life balance in the face of technology. Volkswagen, for example, shuts off its BlackBerry email server outside of office hours so employees can recharge without a mobile distraction. I shouldn't be surprised if there was some service to block Angry Birds and other time killers for people who simply cannot stop playing (or wasting time, to be precise).

We owe the progress in smartphone industry exactly to iPhone, as due to this Apple’s device smartphones around the world gave up stylus in favour of fingers, got huge touch-screen panels and mobile application development was taken to the whole new level with the App Store. By the way, Apple App Store is still the most prominent and profitable platform for mobile apps delivery.

For these five years Apple has launched five versions of its famous smartphone (iPhone, iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S), continuously extending its market share, which in the USA reaches 36% and in Europe – 20-30%.

By the way, being part of the iPhone Developer Program, we, at Intellectsoft, have immediate access to the most up-to-date development utilities and iPhone operating system software ahead of the release schedules. This results in a pleasant bonus for our clients: no more need to apply for membership when releasing content to the App Store; we'll take it upon ourselves to make sure the deployment is completed swiftly and the content is promptly released to countless iPhone users from around the world. However, we realise that some might desire to become members of the iPhone Developer Program themselves, in which case we'll gladly help in opening this account and submitting a thorough application.

Please, take a look at our iPhone portfolio to get a more in-depth review of our iPhone applications.

1. Mobile Application Developers

Mobile apps developers are obviously the hottest commodity in IT nowadays. The experts agree that this job will keep its first place during all the 2012, because there is a strong tendency among companies to adapt their Websites and apps for smartphones and tablets. By the way, these days we are one hair away from hitting an immense grandiose number of mobile apps existing. The search and analytics engine for the mobile marketplace Mobilewalla, submitted its own chart of mobile applications and at the moment this article was being written we had 3000 apps left before making it 1 million of apps. If you take your time and follow this chart checking it from time to time two days in a row, you might notice that the number grows drastically every couple of hours.
Another quite competent source providing objective insight on virtually any area of IT – Gartner – has made a few predictions of its own relating IT careers. Well, according to Gartner by 2015, mobile application development projects designed for smartphones and tablets will outnumber native PC projects by a ratio of 4-to-1. Today they are on par with each other. All in all, it’s obvious that the luckiest employees ever are mobile apps developers!

2. Software Developers

Mobile developers are followed by software developers who took the second place.
Second place is nothing to be upset about. After all, programmers are still in demand and that matters a lot. Companies need their share of Java, .NET, C#, SharePoint, and Web application developers.

3^rd, 4^th, etc. places

The third place goes to user experience designers, as the majority of apps whether for PCs or mobile devices are customer facing, these guys are simply indispensable.
IT Security Professionals are in the fourth place. The fifths place is taken by Data Warehouse Architects, Analysts and Developers. Infrastructure Professionals are ranked No 6.

P.S.: If you are a talented iPhone, android or blackberry developer, if you are looking for a great job in a dream team and like to play mafia and poker, don’t hesitate to contact us (hr@intellectsoft.co.uk)

— bugs affecting battery life are fixed

— multitasking Gestures for original iPad are added

— bugs with Documents in the Cloud are fixed

— voice recognition for Australian users using dictation is improved

We, at Intellectsoft , are always staying in tune with the latest technologies; therefore we already can work with the new iOS version.

However, things are not all so great with this new iOS 5.0.1. Hardly had Apple released the update, the users took to its support forums to complain that they were continuing to experience battery issues despite having downloaded the update and having reset their phones. The famous tech resource Mashable  conducted a poll, its results show that: 37% (3 772 votes) of respondents are still facing the same problems with the battery charge, 22% (2240 votes) claimed that the situation got worse, 14% (1424 votes) agreed that the problem was fixed and 26% (2 714) claim they have never had any battery issues (probably they have never had iOS-based devices either).

It’s peculiar that the recent complaints are similar at some extant to the ones made after upgrade to version 5. Apple claimed the problem was a software issue, and the iOS 5.0.1 update was issued to address it.

In their official statement to AllThingsD. Apple stated: “The recent iOS software update addressed many of the battery issues that some customers experienced on their iOS 5 devices. We continue to investigate a few remaining issues.”

There’s no doubt that Apple will keep improving its iOS and in time it will finally meet users’ expectations and will align with its sky-high price. The question is how soon will we be celebrating the event?

All in all, Intellectsoft wishes iOS users patience and reminds that from now on our brainy developers’ team can work with this iOS version (5.0.1).

The new device is positioned as the next affordable smartphone with a WVGA display and a digital TV-tuner. It is claimed to be very rich in features and, although lacking some must-haves, indeed presents a decent model to diversify Samsung’s smartphone portfolio.

To start with, the Galaxy Neo model is 115,9 х 56,9 х 12,14 mm large. It weighs 121,8 gr and features a powerful 800 MHz processor and a 512 Mb RAM that leaves the whole 158 Mb for extra-programs.

Neo is powered with Android 2.2 Froyo, features a Bluetooth v3.0, a USB, a standard 3.5 mm headset output, a Wi-Fi b/g/n, a microSD slot and a T-DMB TV-tuner. The 3.5-inch TFT display boasts a WVGA 800 x 480 resolution, while the stability is ensured by a 1500 mA/h battery.

The few drawbacks Galaxy Neo has are a 3-megapixel camera with no autofocus provided and the exceptional smartphone’s adjustment to Korean networks. The smartphone only comes in a CDMA-version and cannot be utilized in GSM-networks.

Some may think that such geo-oriented Android development leaves out all the potential buyers from the rest of the world, which is sort of unfair. On the other hand, the device is so classical, to say the least, that a huge number of analogical GSM-supporting smartphones may be found out there anyway.

Launched last week, the Internet shop offers a variety of Android applications to visitors who now can try them for 30 minutes before they make their decision regarding the purchase.

The “Test Drive” function is free and is embodied by a virtual Android smartphone. The emulator is controlled with a mouse that simulates touch-screen manipulations accompanied with sound effects. All the real-time testing is ensured by the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) web service and allows visitors actually try all the application functions.

So far, the application store only has 20 Android applications available for test drive and download, but the appealing test function will certainly be extended to all submitted apps sooner or later. At the same time, it is nice to notice that the Amazon Appstore offers more or less efficient applications as oppose to unpretentious apps by the numerous iPhone developers out there.

Unfortunately, the manufacturer’s transition to touch-screen smartphones didn’t solve the problem; neither did the change of the interface. Even the new director couldn’t fix the overall decay and help Nokia stop lagging behind, but take the most advantage of the rapid mobile progress.

Now it is simply a fact that Nokia is switching from Symbian to Windows Phone 7. Everyone was looking forward to seeing the new Finnish phones, when, all of a sudden, Nokia announced the delay of the launch of new devices.

Apparently, the release of the new smartphone is postponed till the actual upgrade of the Windows Phone operating system which is said to be scheduled for October of 2011. The Guardian says the new system will be officially upgraded to Windows Phone 7.5 and will have a code name “Mango”.

Strategically, the delay will certainly cause problems for the new smartphones’ start-up. Considering the delay of the WP7 upgrade and the upcoming release of numerous brand-new phones powered with other operating systems, Windows Mobile developers are jeopardizing the effect Nokia Corporation is aiming at with its fundamental revolution.