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WASHINGTON –– The Google Android system was used on 78.9 per cent of smartphones sold globally in 2013, a survey showed Wednesday.

The report by the research firm Strategy Analytics confirms the ascendancy of Android, which has extended its lead over Apple’s iOS, which is used on the iPhone.

“There is little doubt that 2013 was the year of Android,” said Neil Mawston, analyst with the consultancy.

“However, Android’s annual growth rate slowed to 62 per cent in 2013, its lowest level in the platform’s history. We expect Android’s growth to slow further in 2014 due to market saturation, and rivals like Microsoft or Firefox will be ready to pounce on any signs of a major slowdown for Android this year.”

The report said Apple’s global market share slipped to 15.5 per cent in 2013 from 19.4 per cent in 2012. Meanwhile Windows Phone grabbed third place with a 3.6 per cent share, up from 2.7 per cent a year earlier.

“Microsoft is now firmly established as the smartphone industry’s third major ecosystem, shipping 35.7 million units worldwide,” Mawston said.

“However, the Windows Phone platform is still struggling to gain traction in the low-tier and premium-tier smartphone categories and there remain serious weaknesses that Microsoft will need to address in 2014.”

Strategy Analytics said global smartphone sales rose 41 per cent last year to 990 million.

A report Monday by IDC said the total was just over one billion, with Samsung the largest vendor at 31.3 per cent.

Old tricks don’t work anymore, for users’ awareness and alertness are significantly higher than before. Fake e-mails that entice you with a substantial commission cut if you let them transfer millions of dollars to your account, and other similar scams are clearly outdated; they have become laughable matters. No one virtually believes them or falls in their trap anymore. It takes more than that today to deceive the online user. It takes a very insidious approach and some have gotten very good at it.

Direct attacks don’t work anymore, because of users’ awareness, the widespread usage of efficient software that provides efficient antivirus and anti-spam protection, and Internet security as well. So attackers and deceivers, whatever their intention, now use the most treacherous means to get to you.

False advertising comes first. You are browsing quietly, reading some news, when a small pop up ad appears on the side of your screen promising to reveal the secret of a successful diet that doctors have always known but have been hiding from you. Or it would be about the five things never to do if you want to avoid a heart attack. Or the secret to give up smoking overnight that the tobacco industry is afraid you may discover. It goes on and on…

Naturally you do suspect that something is not right but you go along with it thinking “What do I have to lose? What if it is true?” and you hit the play button of the ad. Usually it will take you on an endless video that creates some kind of cheap suspense and that keeps you listening and watching, without ever revealing the famous secret of course, but that tries to get you to subscribe to whatever service they want you to subscribe to in the end.

Most users start watching the videos. The majority understands the trick and stops after a couple of minutes, but a minority, say 2 to 5 per cent, goes to the end, gives in and takes the subscription.

Insidious advertising is turning into a major phenomenon on portable devices, hiding in the flabbergasting number of free applications you can find on the web, mainly on the Android platform.

There has never been a thing such a free lunch and the web is not going to change that — quite the opposite. When you download and install a free application, whether a game or a different kind of software, you can be sure that it comes with some form of ads you never wanted in the first place. In most cases but not in all, you can pay a premium and upgrade to the ad-free version.

This is not the worst that can happen.

If you are very careful, if you are web-wise and have a lot of time, you may read the warning notifications that are displayed by the software applications before you install them. They usually warn you about the risks associated with the application and that range from accessing your contacts, your mail, your Facebook account, to more sensitive information that may be stored on your device, including passwords, of course.

In plain, the application “reserves the right” to read and use your contacts, to get information about your identity, your habits, your taste, your device and your hobbies. Imagine the consequences! This is not just a potential hazard, it is real and it is happening every day. The large majority of users gladly accept the conditions and install the applications, happy to have them “free”. It is believed that a certain number of applications are designed with the explicit and unique intention of collecting information, nothing else.

It is time to realise that anything — absolutely anything — we do online, any application that is installed on our device and that accesses the Internet, are all prone to collect and send information about us, at various levels.

Protecting sensitive files with strong passwords can help, up to a certain degree. Strong passwords are made of 10 or more characters, with a combination of capitals, small letters, numbers and special characters. They should not have words from the common language. But even such protection is not an absolute shield. Those who can put their hand on your files will eventually be able to crack the code.

Besides, when today we keep thousands of files on even the smallest portable device, it becomes tedious to lock a large number of files with strong passwords.

There’s no cure for Internet insecurity and no magic protection against those who want your data at any price.

PARIS –– Doctors said Thursday they could treat peanut allergy by feeding children the very thing their bodies reject, so building tolerance that could save a life in case of accidental ingestion.

Small doses of peanut powder taken over several months seemed to induce tolerance in children with the potentially deadly allergy, a research team wrote Wednesday in The Lancet medical journal.

After six months of treatment, dubbed oral immunotherapy or OIT, 84-91 per cent of the children in a trial could safely tolerate daily doses of 800 mg (0.03 ounces) of peanut powder — the equivalent of about five peanuts, wrote the team.

This was 25 times the amount they could tolerate before the therapy, and much larger than any accidental dose is likely to ever be.

“The treatment allowed children with all severities of peanut allergy to eat large quantities of peanuts, well above the levels found in contaminated snacks and meals, freeing them and their parents from the fear of a potentially life threatening allergic reaction,” said study leader Andrew Clark from Cambridge University Hospitals.

“The families involved in this study say that it has changed their lives dramatically.”

The trial involved 99 allergic children aged seven to sixteen.

One in five of the kids receiving OIT reported “adverse events” — mostly mild itching of the mouth, the authors said.

They stressed that people should not try the treatment at home as more research was needed.

Peanut allergy affects about one in fifty children and is the most common cause of fatal food allergy reactions, said a press statement. About 10 million people around the world are allergic to peanuts.

Symptoms vary from mild to severe, from swollen lips or shortness of breath to anaphylactic shock, which can be fatal.

While “exceptionally promising”, the method remains experimental, Matthew Greenhawt from the University of Michigan Food Allergy Centre wrote in a comment also carried by The Lancet.

“It is unknown if OIT can produce lasting tolerance,” he wrote. 

WASHINGTON –– Walk into a room of people, and your smartphone can tell if you have a connection to any of them, if it can find the right data.

A social networking app called SocialRadar released Thursday analyses smartphone users’ social networks including Facebook and Twitter, and correlates that with location data, to let people know in real time about their connections to those around them.

While some apps already use geolocation data, SocialRadar aggregates information from major social networks and matches that with a smartphone’s location for “real-time intelligence”.

This means you can see in real time the people around you with whom you share a connection across several services.

“There are over a billion people with smartphones, and more than two billion social media profiles in the cloud, but no intersection of that information,” says SocialRadar founder and chief executive Michael Chasen.

Chasen, 41, who founded the education software tool Blackboard in 1997 and sold it in 2011 for $1.7 billion, says SocialRadar can be useful for business networking as well as for socialising.

“I can walk into a restaurant and find three people I’m connected to,” Chasen told AFP in an interview in SocialRadar’s office in downtown Washington.

“All this is in the cloud if you can connect this information.”

Chasen said he believes SocialRadar may be used for dating, “but I think it will be used for business too. It is the ultimate networking tool.”

SocialRadar aggregates and merges data from top social networks including Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Foursquare and Google+ with live location information from smartphones.

This enables users to find colleagues, friends and friends of friends if they are connected on one of the networks.

For technical and privacy reasons, SocialRadar provides this information only where users already have a connection, such as on Facebook or another network, or if they use SocialRadar. But Chasen said that still represents a lot of connections.

“What I want to know is who is near me and how I am connected,” he said.

The app can create alerts or search within a specific radius –– from a few hundred metres to several kilometres –– for people with connections.

SocialRadar has been released in North America for the iOS platform for iPhones, and a version is in the works for Android and for Google Glass — which would enable users to get information delivered for easy viewing.

Chasen said he is acutely aware of privacy concerns, especially about location information, and that SocialRadar allows its users to determine if they want to be visible or not to their social networking friends and connections.

“One of our top priorities in building this was allowing people to have complete control of their privacy,” he said.

The app can be set to allow a user to be public, seen only by friends, to be anonymous or invisible.

Eliza Doolittle in “My Fair Lady” says “the rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain.” If you remember the movie, it is Professor Higgins who makes her say this in the speech exercise he designs to break her Cockney accent. Audrey Hepburn as the coarse-mouthed flower seller Eliza, and Rex Harrison as the arrogant phonetics instructor Henry Higgins, immortalised Bernard Shaw’s characters from his play Pygmalion.

However, the little trip down memory lane mentioned above is just nostalgia. Also, the film trivia supplied has no connection to the rain-lashings I experienced in the last fortnight. I was, of course, not in Spain but in my home country India, where the gentle raindrops had assumed gigantic proportions and had become a torrential downpour.

The aqua assault was not restricted to the plains either. The mountains, the valleys, the plateaus and the beaches — every inch of Indian soil was water drenched and soaking wet. And there were puddles, puddles everywhere. A place so watery I had not seen in a long while.

Soon, I got accustomed to it and stopped jumping every time lightning streaked across the thunderous sky. Do Indian homes have lightening conductors? asked the voice in my head. Thoughts of electrocutions dampened the hypnotic urge of stepping out in the rain. An umbrella became an extension of my one hand and balanced the handbag bulging with hand-towels in the other. Drastic situations called for drastic measures, you see.

Dainty stilettos remained in their shoe-bags as flat, rubber soled ballet pumps, became my regular footwear. Within days I turned into an expert at smelling out houses with a clothes dryer versus those with a clothes line.

A big, four-wheel drive vehicle turned out to be my automobile of choice and I memorised the timings in the morning and evening, when it was suicidal to be on Delhi roads. Despite all necessary precautions, if and when stuck in a traffic jam, I learned to make long and useless conversations on the cell phone. With the mobile talk-time in India being possibly the cheapest in the world, I swapped from food recipes to life histories on my cellular handset. I also became an avid listener of the very many FM radio stations on offer, and became compulsively fidgety with the audio settings in any car. Every few seconds I had to switch channels, much to the annoyance of my co-passengers.

At every traffic signal I got emotionally blackmailed into parting with my hard earned money but I came home laden with overpriced trinkets, baubles, ill-printed bestsellers, magazines and so on.

Seeing the age old city of Delhi after a rain-wash is another eye opener. The foliage acquired a bloom and verdant greenery that is otherwise overlooked. The boast of it being the greenest city in Asia attained a tinge of truthfulness as I suddenly noticed the vast parks, the lush lawns and the canopy of closely planted trees.

By the end of my two week sojourn in the wetlands of India I became familiar with the erratic nature of rainfall. Water jets spraying at me did not bother me and I began to find music in the sound of raindrops falling on my head.

But incessant rain made me wistful for a bit of sunshine. I could not wait to get back to my country of residence. Landing at Queen Alia International Airport in Amman, glittering in sunlight, made my wish come true. Instantly!

SAN FRANCISCO — Apple reshaped technology and society when Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone seven years ago. Now, the trend-setting company is losing ground to rivals that offer what Apple has stubbornly refused to make: smartphones with lower prices and larger screens than the iPhone.

The void in Apple’s lineup is a major reason why the company’s quarterly revenue may be about to fall for the first time in more than a decade, much to the dismay of investors who are worried that Apple is losing its verve and vision.

Wall Street vented its frustration after Apple reported late Monday that it sold fewer iPhones than analysts anticipated during the holiday season. Apple compounded that disappointment with a forecast raising the possibility of a slight revenue decline in the current quarter. It would be the first time that Apple’s quarterly revenue has dropped from the previous year since 2003.

Apple has been relinquishing market share to Samsung and other companies that primarily make devices running Google’s Android operating system. Those competitors offer a broader selection of designs and prices than the iPhone and the iPad.

That trend is one of the reasons that Apple’s revenue growth hasn’t exceeded 6 per cent in any of the past three quarters. By contrast, Apple’s quarterly revenue was consistently increasing by at least 20 per cent two years ago and even exceeded 70 per cent during the 2011 holiday quarter.

Apple remains in stellar shape financially, coming off a $13 billion profit in its most recent quarter — more than all but a handful of companies make in an entire year. The Cupertino, California, company also is sitting on nearly $159 billion in cash.

But Apple’s stock is unlikely to bounce back to its previous high unless the company’s growth accelerates.

The challenges facing Apple have been most glaring in the smartphone market.

Phones in less affluent parts of the world are selling for less than $200. By comparison, iPhones sold for an average of $637 in Apple’s most recent quarter. Even Apple’s cheaper iPhone 5C is just $100 less than the high-end 5S.

Meanwhile, a variety of Android phones boast screens measuring 5 (12.7cm) to 6.5 (16.5cm)inches diagonally, while the latest iPhones are all four inches (10.2cm).

Apple’s insistence on catering to the upper end of the smartphone market with only one choice of screen size is undercutting the company’s growth, International Data Research analyst Ramon Llamas said.

“There is a gap where Apple is not playing, and it’s clear that many users want some of these other things in a phone,” Llamas said.

As a result, Apple’s share of the smartphone market fell from nearly 19 per cent at the end of 2012 to about 15 per cent last year, according to IDC. Samsung remains the market leader with a 31 per cent share at the end of last year, up a notch from 30 per cent in 2012.

Apple tried to widen the iPhone’s appeal with the cheaper 5C, which was essentially a recycled version of the iPhone’s previous generation. To make the 5C look like something new, Apple dressed it up in a brightly coloured array of plastic casings.

In Monday’s conference call with analysts, Apple CEO Tim Cook made it clear that the 5C didn’t sell as well as the company anticipated, though he didn’t provide specifics. Cook hailed the 5S model as the star performer in the company’s holiday quarter.

With the 5S leading the way, Apple sold 51 million iPhones in the fiscal first quarter. Even though that set a record for the company, it represented a letdown because analysts had projected 55 million.

Analysts suspect that many of those iPhones are being bought by repeat customers who love the mobile operating software and other services, as well as the cachet that comes with the Apple brand. Cook said Apple still attracts a “significant” number of first-time iPhone buyers.

Jobs carefully cultivated Apple’s luxury image before he died in October 2011, and Cook has given no indication he will risk tainting it with an inexpensive smartphone sporting lower-quality parts.

“Our objective has always been to make the best, not the most,” Cook said Monday.

NEW YORK — Google Glass is getting glasses.

Google is adding prescription frames and new styles of detachable sunglasses to its computerised, Internet-connected goggles known as Glass.

The move comes as Google Inc. prepares to make Glass available to the general population later this year. Currently, Glass is available only to the tens of thousands of people who are testing and creating apps for it.

Glass hasn’t actually had glasses in its frame until now.

Glass is basically a small computer, with a camera and a display screen above the wearer’s right eye. The device sits roughly at eyebrow level, higher than where eyeglasses would go.

It lets wearers surf the Web, ask for directions and take photos or videos. Akin to wearing a smartphone without having to hold it in your hands, Glass also lets people read their e-mail, share photos on Twitter and Facebook, translate phrases while travelling or partake in video chats. Glass follows some basic voice commands, spoken after the worlds “OK, Glass”.

The gadget itself is not changing with this announcement. Rather, Google plans to make various attachments available. Starting Tuesday, the Mountain View, California, company is offering four styles of prescription frames and two new types of shades available to its “explorers” — the people who are trying out Glass. The frames will cost $225 and the shades, $150. That’s on top of the $1,500 price of Glass.

Users can take the frames to any vision care provider for prescription lenses, though Google says it is working with insurance provider Vision Service Plan to train eye-care providers around the US on how to work with Glass. Google says some insurance plans may cover the cost of the frames.

Isabelle Olsson, the lead designer for Google Glass, says the new frames open the spectacles up to a larger audience.

She demonstrated the new frames to The Associated Press last week at the Google Glass Basecamp, an airy loft on the eighth floor of New York City’s Chelsea Market. It’s one of the places where Glass users go to pick up their wares and learn how to use them. Walking in, visitors are greeted, of course, by a receptionist wearing Google Glass.

“We want as many people as possible to wear it,” she said.

To that end, Glass’s designers picked four basic but distinct frame styles. On one end is a chunky “bold” style that stands out. On the other is a “thin” design — to blend in as much as possible.

Olsson said Google won’t be able to compete with the thousands of styles offered at typical eyeglasses stores. Instead, Glass’s designers looked at what types of glasses are most popular, what people wear the most and, importantly, what they look good in.

The latter has been a constant challenge for the nascent wearable technology industry, especially for something like Google Glass, designed to be worn on your face. When Google unveiled Glass in a video nearly two years ago, it drew unfavourable comparisons to Bluetooth headsets, the trademarks of the fashion-ignorant technophile.

In designing Google Glass, Olsson and her team focused on three design principles with the goal of creating something that people want to wear. These were lightness, simplicity and scalability. That last one means having different options available for different people — just as there are different styles of headphones, from in-ear buds to huge aviator-style monstrosities.

Google Glass currently comes in five colours — “charcoal”, a lighter shade of gray called “shale”, white, tangerine and bright blue “sky”. The frame attachments out Tuesday are all titanium. Users can mix and match.

“People need to be able to choose,” Olsson said. “These products need to be lifestyle products.”

NEW YORK –– Vitamin supplements marketed for infants and children often contain more than the recommended amount of individual vitamins, according to a new study.

Researchers found that in all but one case, the average vitamin content of those supplements exceeded what’s recommended.

“What we did is compare what’s on the labels for (children’s vitamins) to the recommended daily allowance or adequate intake,” Michael Madden told Reuters Health.

Madden is the study’s lead author from the Lake Erie College of Osteopathic Medicine in Erie, Pennsylvania.

The recommended daily allowance (RDA) or adequate intake of vitamins is set by the Institute of Medicine (IOM), which provides independent advice to US policy makers.

The RDA is the amount of a certain nutrient the average person should consume daily to meet the body’s needs.

For the new study, Madden and his colleagues pulled information from labels of dietary supplements from a government database in July 2013.

They reviewed the labels of 21 supplements intended for use among infants younger than 12 months old and 172 supplements intended for use among kids between 12 months and four years old.

Overall, the researchers looked at nine individual vitamins in the supplements intended for infants and 14 vitamins in the supplements intended for older kids.

They found vitamin D was the only vitamin that wasn’t listed in amounts above the RDA in products made for both age groups.

The average vitamin C level in the supplements was about equal to the RDA for kids younger than 12 months old. But in supplements made for older children, vitamin C levels were about five times the recommended amount.

Biotin, a vitamin that helps turn food into fuel, is often taken with hopes of making skin, hair and nails healthier. The researchers found the average amount of biotin in children’s supplements was between five and nine times the RDA.

They note in JAMA Paediatrics that the IOM recommends children not exceed the RDA for many of the vitamins included in the study.

The IOM says there are not enough data about potential side effects among children in those age groups for some vitamins and that kids should get those vitamins from food.

Duffy MacKay, however, said the IOM recommendations have not been updated in several years. Also, the new study did not distinguish between multivitamins and supplements that contain a single vitamin.

MacKay is senior vice president of scientific and regulatory affairs at the Council for Responsible Nutrition, a trade association representing dietary supplement manufacturers and ingredient suppliers, in Washington, DC.

“There are reasons why some of the vitamins would contain more than the RDA,” he said. For instance, single vitamin supplements could be made for kids who are deficient in that particular vitamin.

He also pointed out that the new research is based on a survey of supplement labels and did not identify or associate any health concerns with the use of the children’s products.

“I think parents should take a look at the product label and they should assess the levels with the daily recommended amounts and go into the healthcare provider and have a dialogue,” MacKay, who was not involved with the new study, said.

Dr Paul Offit, chief of infectious diseases at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, cautioned that the new study assumes the supplement labels are correct.

“That may not be true,” he said, adding that his own hospital has found large inconsistencies on supplement labels.

Offit, who was not involved with the new research, also said RDAs tend to be overestimates of what the average person needs and parents should make every effort to get their children the vitamins and nutrients they need in the food they eat.

“Be very careful about what you put in your child’s mouth,” he said. “You know that if you have a reasonable diet you should get the vitamins and nutrients you need.”

Madden said it is a good idea for parents to talk with their children’s doctors before giving them vitamins.