A look at gadget, game and geek happenings in the week ahead.
Havok coming to Android 2.3, optimised for Xperia Play
Havok’s physics engine will be available to use by Android games developers and will first hit the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play.
The company, founded in Ireland, said it has fully ported all seven of its products to Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) and worked with Sony Ericsson
Havok now has a fully optimised build of its product line ready for licensing for the Xperia Play to begin its arrival onto Android phones.
“As part of Havok’s overall support for the Android platform, we are very pleased to partner with Sony Ericsson to put the full power of the Havok product line into the hands of Xperia Play developers,” said David Coghlan, managing director of Havok.
“We were extremely impressed by the performance of the Xperia Play and the ease with which we were able to port and optimise our technology to the platform.
“This will enable developers to use Havok technology to create cinematic, rich 3D immersive games for Android smartphones with Xperia Play in the forefront.”
Google remotely malicious Android apps
In other Android-related news, Google’s Android team has said it has discovered malicious apps were being published and they have been removed from the Android Market and remotely from users’ phones.
The rogue apps affected devices in versions of Android which were lower than 2.2.2.
Google said the only information these apps managed to gather were details such as IMEI/IMSI numbers, used to identify specific mobile devices.
As well as removing them from the Android Market, Google also remotely removed them from affected mobile phones using their own security controls to do so.
Google is pushing an update to all affected phones to prevent these apps from accessing any more information on its devices.
Microsoft pushing users to move away from Internet Explorer 6
Microsoft has launched an initiative to eradicate Internet Explorer 6 from the face of the web.
This version on the web browser has drawn a lot of criticism since its inception in 2001. It has had numerous security issues and did not support many modern web standards.
However, as it was shipped as the default browser for Windows 2003 and Windows XP, many users kept it on their PC unaware of the issues it had.
Microsoft’s initiative encourages people to give up on IE6, saying “friends don’t let friends use Internet Explorer 6.”
They found usage of the older web browser is at 12pc worldwide, with China using it the most, at 34.5pc. Microsoft wishes to reduce IE6 usage to 1pc globally.
The site also encourages web developers to place a banner on their sites, which informs IE6 users that they are running on an older web browser and that they should upgrade.
