Hasta La Gadget!

Adobe has been broadcasting as much as possible that Flash on Android is going away, although it’s been offering a grace period for those addicted to the plugin. It’s now time to wean yourself off. As Adobe warned earlier in the year, new installations from Google Play won’t be an option from August 15th onwards. Any downloads after that point will be limited to updates for existing installations or to those willing to raid Adobe’s archives — assuming would-be users aren’t already running Android 4.1, that is. While we’d still expect Flash to preserve some of its relevance in mobile as long as phones ship with it preinstalled, and alternatives like Skyfire persist, we’d strongly suggest getting comfortable with HTML5 and native apps from now on.

Filed under: Cellphones

PSA: Adobe halts new installs of Flash on Android as of tomorrow originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 14 Aug 2012 21:55:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Google is bringing good news to all Chrome users on Windows today. After two long years of working with Adobe to sandbox the Flash Player plug-in, the Google Chrome team is finally announcing its new plug-in architecture that improves the sandboxing of Flash on Windows. Google’s announcement today comes right after last week’s Chrome Stable release that included a new API known as getUserMedia. Google said that they were finally able to ship PPAPI Flash to all Windows Chrome users, thereby improving its security and stability, as well as performance down the line.

Windows XP users will also find the update nifty as Flash is also sandboxed on the old platform. “Chrome OS has had this deeper Flash sandboxing from the beginning, Linux has had it since Chrome’s last stable release, and Mac support is on the way. Ultimately, this means a safer experience for you as you browse the web,” said Viet-Trung Luu, Software Engineer for Google Chrome. “We take the security of Chrome extremely seriously, so we’re excited to be delivering these enhanced protections, and we’ve enjoyed collaborating with Adobe on this effort.”

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Google Chrome Browser Gets Native Flash Support, Could Google Bundle Flash With Its Chrome Browser?,

So you’ve gotten tired of using your iPhone’s flash. It does its job alright, but it’s nothing compared to a Nikon speedlight. That’s why the Paparazzo Light might make sense. It will make your iPhone a whole lot bulkier, but at least you’ll be able to take decent pics at night.

The Paparazzo Light is powered by a 300 Lumen LED that has two CR 123 batteries and has three different modes for brightness settings, for use in photos and vids. The examples that the team behind the flash have shown are quite compelling, so it definitely has some uses if you use your iPhone a lot. It snaps onto the base of the iPhone 4 or 4S, and can be easily removed and tossed in your bag when not in use – though it doesn’t look like it will work with most third-party cases.

The project was launched through the Kickstarter crowdfunding site. At the time of writing, it had amassed $4,500 out of a projected goal of $50,000 with 27 days to go. A pledge of at least $45(USD) will get you one of the first Paparazzo iPhone lights.

[via Ubergizmo]

Samsung isn’t content to leave fast NAND flash memory to traditional solid-state drives. Its Pro Class 1500 promises a big jolt to the performance of frequently pokey smartphone and tablet storage. By how much? That name is a clue — it reaches 1,500 IOPS (inputs/outputs per second) when writing data, which along with 3,500 IOPS data reads is about four times faster than any previous embedded flash chip Samsung has tested. In the real world, that leads to as much as 140MB/s when reading data and 50MB/s for writes. The speed comes after Samsung has thrown virtually every trick in the book at its new chips, including a dense 20-nanometer manufacturing process, quick toggle DDR 2.0 memory with its own controller and a new JEDEC memory standard with 200MB/s of bandwidth to spare. Samsung hasn’t named customers for the 16GB, 32GB and 64GB parts that are rolling out of the factories, although we’d do well to remember that a flourishing phone business doesn’t guarantee that the only major customer is Samsung itself: even in the face of legal challenges, Samsung still has at least one noteworthy client that tends to snap up much of its flash supply.

Continue reading Samsung starts mass-producing 4x faster mobile flash memory, kickstarts our phones and tablets

Filed under: Cellphones, Tablet PCs, Storage

Samsung starts mass-producing 4x faster mobile flash memory, kickstarts our phones and tablets originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 02 Aug 2012 01:18:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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You’ve seen the signs. No Flash Photography. But why do they exist? Imaging Resource’s Steve Meltzer did some digging about the continued existence of this law of the art world. More »