Apple today began taking pre-orders for the recently launched iPhone 5, the latest iteration of its iconic smartphone. Within a few hours, the Apple Store website showed shipping time of two weeks for all variants of the device -- 16, 32 and 64GB.

As with all iPhone launches, Apple has received a tremendous response for the recently unveiled device. The first lot of all-new iPhone 5 will be shipped on September 21, while the devices being sold at the time of writing this story were scheduled to be delivered on September 28, a week later. Apple has also put two devices-per-user limit on its online store.




When pre-booking for iPhone 5 started, many buyers encountered problems on the website, such as store under maintenance message, reported CNET. The overwhelming online sales response indicates that those who choose to buy iPhone 5 from Apple stores and carriers like AT&T, Verizon and Sprint should gear up for long lines and hours of waiting.

Apple iPhone 5 features a 4-inch Retina HD display, A6 processor that is twice as fast as iPhone 4S, iOS 6 and 4G LTE compatibility. Unveiled on September 12, it is the first iPhone to come out since the death of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.





In the US, the 16, 32 and 64GB variants of the device are available at $199, $299 and $399, respectively, while the unlocked versions will cost $649, $749 and $849. The prices of unlocked iPhone 5 in Canada, UK, France, Singapore and Hong Kong have been revealed, while prices of the same for India have not been disclosed yet.

Filled up the space on your mobile phone or tablet? As long as you have working internet on both ends, you can access your home computer's hard drive from anywhere.

Use Your PC as a Personal Cloud

To do this, you need to set up remote access to your computer — simpler than it sounds. A small server application needs to be installed on your home computer. LogMeIn (www.logmein.com) provides free server software for Windows and MAC OS X.

Once the server is running, you simply need to log in to your account (free registration required) using a web browser on any computer or phone/tablet. You can then remotely control your home system to run programs or transfer files to and from it.

Another alternative to remotely access your files is to purchase a network-connected hard drive like the Buffalo CloudStation (Rs16,000 onwards).

The CloudStation comes in various storage capacities and connects to your internet router/modem using Ethernet. Once you set it up (an easy wizard is provided), you can view, stream or download files from it using a web browser.

Access Data Using Your Phone

If you prefer a dedicated way of accessing your content on your mobile/tablet device instead of using a web browser, there are various free apps available for the popular smartphone platforms.

Like the browser method, these apps require that a server software be installed on your home PC for accessing files remotely. Tonido, a free app for iOS, Android, Windows Phone 7 and BlackBerry works great over Wi-Fi as well as 3G. Head to www.tonido.com to download the desktop server software for Windows, MAC OS X or Linux.

Once you link the app to your computer at home, you could be anywhere in the world and can stream musicdirectly to your phone, access and download files from your computer and upload photos/videos taken from the phone back home. The app has a custom server address that makes setting it up super-easy.

Another app, Polkast converts your computer into your personal cloud for free. The Polkast server software (www.polkast.com) lets you choose which folders to share. Plus, there is no limit on file transfers to and from the PC, which makes it great for transferring large files.

Stream Music From Your PC

Although apps like Tonido offer audio and video streaming to your remote mobile device, lack of on-the-fly transcoding (file conversion) can lead to long wait times depending on your connection. If audio streaming is your main priority, use the free Subsonic app (iOS, Android).

You can get the desktop software for Windows, Mac or Linux at www.subsonic.org. It takes some time to get started since you need to first create an account and set up the folders to be shared. You also need to provide a custom name for a 'webserver' that the app on your phone/tablet connects to. 

Your mobile device, which has limited local storage, could use your home PCs huge hard drive as a repository. Or you could use conventional cloud storage solutions like Dropbox to stream music and photos. Whatever you need done, there's a 'cloud' way to do it. 

Samsung Electronics launched its new Galaxy Note tablet in three major markets on Thursday, hoping that a stylus-type pen and split-screen function will stand the new device apart from rival Apple Inc's iPad.

The company, facing accusations that it copied the design and some features of Apple's iPad and iPhone, said the Galaxy Note 10.1 would be a "game changer" from rival tablets, on which users usually only view one application at a time.

The device can have two apps active on a split-screen, while an 'S-Pen' seeks to solve tablet and smart-phones' sometimes clunky keyboard and input functions by allowing users to write and sketch on the screen.

Analysts, however, were sceptical of its ability to make inroads into Apple's huge lead in the tablet market given plans to price it at $499 for 16 gigabytes of memory and WiFi-only - the same as the iPad.

"When you look at the price and overall consumer awareness about Samsung tablets, it's not likely to be a big success," said Park Young, an analyst at Woori Investment & Securities in Seoul.

"Tablets are getting cheaper and even Apple is rumoured to be preparing a cheaper iPad. Consumers also tend not to spend much on tablets any more as smartphones can do most of the entertainment functions that tablets offer."

Marc Chacksfield, deputy editor at British tech website TechRadar, said that, while the new tablet had some positive features, it felt cheaper in the hand than the iPad and might not win buyers over if priced similarly to the Apple product.

"Couple this with an influx of low-priced Android tablets entering the market (headed up by the Google (GOOG.O) Nexus 7) and Samsung may struggle to compete," he said in an email to Reuters.

GRAPHIC: Apple earnings r.reuters.com/nez59s

GRAPHIC: Samsung earnings (incl Q2 global smartphone data) r.reuters.com/few99s

PRODUCT RANGE

A jury begins deliberating next week in a high-stakes patent trial launched by Apple against the South Korean firm.

Ben Wood, head of research at analysts CCS Insight in London, said the S-Pen was Samsung's big bet on differentiating its tablets from Apple's.

"It's an area where we expect them to put a huge amount of focus, some of that will be as a result of Samsung's desire to show it is a company that innovates in the light of all the negative publicity from the litigation," he said.

The U.S. debut of the Galaxy Note 10.1, which uses Google's Android software, comes just three months after the second version of Samsung's flagship Galaxy Tab 10.1 went on sale in May. Samsung is also expected to unveil a tablet running on Microsoft's (MSFT.O) new Windows operating system within months.

While Apple has a single 9.7-inch iPad, Samsung's line-up includes products of different sizes - from 7.7 inches to 10.1 - while late last year it created the hybrid phone-cum-tablet, or phablet, category with the 5.3-inch Note, which has sold more than 10 million units since October.

A revamped version of the Note smartphone is expected to be unwrapped in Berlin later this month.

Apple sold 28.8 million iPads in January-June, giving it 64.4 percent of the market, according to one industry estimate. Samsung sold 4.4 million tablets for a 9.9 percent market share.

The new Note 10.1 features a quad-core processor with 1.4 GHz clock speed, a 5 megapixel rear camera and 1.9 megapixel front-facing camera, which also detects the user's eye movements to prevent the device from going into standby mode.

The 32 GB model will sell for $549, versus iPad's $599.

In Seoul on Thursday, Samsung shares closed unchanged at 1.345 million won in a market down 0.05 percent. Shares in Apple closed down 0.1 percent on Nasdaq on Wednesday.

Apple may be the most valuable company in the world, but when it comes to security, the Cupertino-based company doesn’t hold a candle to Microsoft.

Kaspersky Lab co-founder and chief executive Eugene Kaspersky on Wednesday told CBR that Apple is a decade behind Microsoft in terms of computer security. ”I think they are ten years behind Microsoft in terms of security,” Kaspersky said. “For many years I’ve been saying that from a security point of view there is no big difference between Mac and Windows. It’s always been possible to develop Mac malware, but [Flashback] was a bit different. For example it was asking questions about being installed on the system and, using vulnerabilities, it was able to get to the user mode without any alarms.”

More than 600,000 Macs were infected by the Flashback trojan virus before it was discovered earlier this month and the exploit it used to infect OS X PCs was patched. “Apple will understand very soon that they have the same problems Microsoft had ten or 12 years ago,” Kaspersky said. ”They will have to make changes in terms of the cycle of updates and so on and will be forced to invest more into their security audits for the software.”