Water Proof SmartPhone: Sony Xperia Z

Water proof Smartphones are about to become fashion in a few days as all of us are so reluctant in caring our phones and sometimes we wash these electronic gadgets in water unknowingly.

Japanese phone maker Sony launched its flagship smartphone Xperia Z at an event in Delhi. Sony Xperia Z features a 5-inch full HD display, is water and dust resistant and sports a scratch-resistant glass body. The device costs Rs 38,900 in India and competes against the likes of HTC Butterfly, Nokia Lumia 920 and BlackBerry Z10, along with upcoming smartphones like Samsung Galaxy S IV and LG Optimus G Pro.

Hyundai using Smartphone as SmartKey

The car manufacturer Hyundai has announced that they will be using Smartphones to unlock there car doors using Near Field Communication(NFC) Technology. So this makes a Smartphone as a SmartKey, and Hyundai i30 will be the first car to have that facility.

If you’re the sort of person who’s always misplacing their keys, well, in two years’ time, you will not have to worry. Hyundai has recently demoed a system that will allow the unlocking of your car using just your cellphone. Sounds too much like something out of a James Bond film doesn’t it?

Many of us have seen, how a smartphone can be used as a car key but never been able to use it on practical front. And after a lot of effort, Hyundai has been able utilize NFC (Near field communication) to convert a smartphone into car key.

Rather than using Bluetooth, the system uses wireless Near Field Communication (NFC), allowing you to lock and unlock the car by waving your phone over a small tag on the car window. Hyundai has demonstrated this concept on a Hyundai's popular i30 in Germany, the smartphone integration technology will be available to car buyers in two years, according to a report on carsguide.au. 

Thanks to a small sticker (an NFC tag) on the window of your car, all you would have to do is swing your phone over it and the car in unlocked and ready to go. 

Along with keyless entry, Hyundai is also attempting to bring together a more personal experience to driving. A dock in the center of the vehicle would be a place where the phone could be seated for charging, from where, it will be able to transmit your playlists and radio preferences to the in-dash entertainment system. 

Along with entertainment, Hyundai also plans on being able to save seat alignment preferences, temperature preferences and any other personal settings to individual driver profiles, which will be assigned to specific phones. Essentially, if 3 different people drive the same car, all they have to do is place their phone on the little dock and voila!

The system can also store in-car preferences, including radio stations, seating positions and even mirror adjustment - with multiple profiles able to be saved for different drivers. If Hyundai has its way then the thought of attempting to integrate smartphone and car key, will not merely be known for its innovation but could also be used in the near future.

Apart from the NFC-based smartphone key, Hyundai is also looking to utilise the smartphone system on cars to improve reversing cameras and lane departure alert systems with similar technology. 

So this is how the world is changing now and in future we would also use Smartphones to start the car I THINK.!!!!:P

You can also have a look at how the Near Field Communication(NFC) technnology infects Android Remotely....Click Here.


 

Near Field Communication Can Infect Android Remotely

Android and Nokia N9's MeeGo operating system can be exploited by using near field communication (NFC), that too without any user interaction.


Near field communication (NFC), a new radio communication technology, which connects similar smartphones when they are touched or brought close to each other, is already in use in several high end smartphones. However, it can be a potential threat to Android and Nokia phones.

Charlie Miller, a security specialist at the Black Hat information security conference in Las Vegas used NFC to transfer malicious code to different smartphones without interacting with the smartphone owner. 


Miler studied the process of infecting via NFC for about nine months and focused on applications that use the radio interface like Google's Beam. Miler explained that, “if a victim's smartphone is placed in the vicinity of a tag that has been tampered with, the phone's browser will be launched and will access a web site – in this case one that contains malware exploits for Android,” according to The H Online report. A tag is an unpowered NFC chip.

The demonstration also revealed that majority of the Android devices are outdated and are easily vulnerable to this bug, which can infect devices without any user interactions using NFC technology.

Also, Nokia N9's MeeGo operating system got infected as it is programmed to arbitrarily accept NFC communication. Miller stated in The H Online report: "The file rendering applications contain numerous bugs that can cause buffer overflows and enable attackers to take control of a device."

An attacker can also activate the N9's Bluetooth interface via NFC and then pair the device with a notebook, after which it can be used to send premium-rate SMS text messages or call premium numbers, or can even be used to export address book, and access the N9's filesystem. 

With the ever expanding horizons of technology, data security remains a prime concern that needs to be addressed before deploying a large scale technological solution.