New Download Content Available

The last days and weeks I did a lot of work regarding computer graphics and computer games in general. Now there is some new stuff available at my blog. First of all you can now download the executable Solaris application for Windows. However, this requires quite a lot of computational power and is only suggested for users with high end graphics hardware.

Go to Solaris download page

Moreover, I decided to write a paper about physics simulation in games. The paper features fundamentals about mechanics (Kinetics, Dynamics) that are needed in order to develop a simulation, formulas, theorems and also some ways to take care of the initial value problem are provided

Go to Physics Simulation for Games download page

Hope that some of you’ll try my application and that anybody reads my paper.

How To Activate Windows God Mode

What is a god mode? Normally, you might know that from games. In god mode you are invincible to your enemies. However, it seems that Windows also offers a cheat respectively a hack to generate a folder containing all necessary system control features. The god mode provides you with an extended control panel to control your machine.

Here are the steps to invoke the God Mode:

Create a new folder (right-click and click on “New Folder”). Right-click on the folder and click on rename, copy and paste this:

GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}

This folder will now be a shortcut to the Windows God Mode. The GodMode allows you to quickly access many Windows functions via a GUI. However, you have to be careful. God mode only works out for Windows Vista and Windows 7 and it is ONLY stable for the 32bit editions of the operating systems. If you try to install it on a 64bit machine, the explorer might crash and becomes useless. In this case, you have to boot in safe mode and delete the folder manually.

Apple iPad may not ship until June

Analyst cites “minor issues” with battery life and durability

In an otherwise positive report Tuesday anticipating the introduction of Apple’s (AAPL) tablet computer at next Wednesday’s “latest creation” event, Kaufman Brothers’ Shaw Wu introduces a note of uncertainty.

“We are also picking up,” he writes, “that the product would most likely not ship in volume until the June timeframe, as there may [be] minor issues that need more work including battery life and durability. We believe the timeline could be similar to the original iPhone, where it was announced in January 2007, but didn’t ship until six months later.”

Skipping past those “minor” concerns, Wu adds some color to the rumors that have been flying about:

• He describes the device as a hybrid between an iPhone/iPod touch and a Mac. “From our understanding,” he writes, “it is not intended to replace a Mac but to be somewhat of a ’super’ iPod touch where video, gaming, web browsing, e-books, and the ability to run multiple apps, would be enhanced with the much larger screen.”
• According to Wu’s sources, the device would rely on Wi-Fi, rather than AT&T’s already strained 3G network, to reach the Internet.
• Due to the $100 incremental cost of the large touchscreen, Wu expects the price point to be closer to $999 than $600, although he adds that carrier subsidies could lower the cost to end users.
• Wu expects Apple to sell as many as 1 million units per quarter, which jibes with reports from his supply chain sources that the company is talking about building 5 million tablets the first year.

ICQ 7.0 Is Released

21 hours ago, ICQ 7.0.1205 was released. The instant messanger comes with a completely new look and some really cool new feautres. It is now possible to link any feeds like Facebook, Twitter or Youtube directly to the instant messanger, read status messages and post status changes directly to your Facebook profile.

ICQ is a popular instant messaging computer program, which was first developed by the Israeli company Mirabilis, now owned by AOL. The first version of the program was released in November 1996 and ICQ became one of the first Internet-wide instant messaging services. The name ICQ is a homophone for the phrase “I seek you”. America Online (AOL) acquired Mirabilis on June 8, 1998 for US$407 million. According to Time Warner, ICQ has over 100 million accounts registered.

HTC Hero To Run On Android 2.1

The users of HTC Hero will be delighted to hear that their darling handset will now be in-built with Android 2.1, and will allow the mobile buffs to make use of this state-of-the-art feature on their handset. Google has already come under scanner due to the bugs found in its Android 2.0, but now the chief giant says that the latest and updated Android 2.1 could patch up the bugs and will get the users rid of problems being faced by them.

The news of making an official release of Android 2.1 was confirmed when Google came up with the leakage of a few screenshots showing Hero sprinting Android 2.1.

A slight update to 2.0 was also reported to come before the end of 2009 when Google last month had announced its Éclair. The phone has also kept the mobile buffs surprised since it has come in to view.

Though a mobile phone can run Windows Mobile or Android, it is also expected to make use of the HTC Sense look-and-feel. HTC is also reported to have finished the porting of its Sense to Android, as it is also expected to operate Android 2.1 without any difficulty.

Google also says that the Android 2.1 update might also patch up bugs, which were found in the Android 2.0 and also boasts of a slight GUI updates.

So now what exactly has to be done for the time being is that you will have to wait for the official release of Android 2.1 on HTC Hero. Well, the integration of Android 2.1 is quite sure to raise the eyebrows of mobile enthusiasts as the handset has already kept them awe with its latest features.

Let’s see if the built-in feature of Android 2.1 will have any effect on the sale of handset or it will go like others that have also come with the platform and are effecting the mobile world with their cutting-edge features and technology.

Hack Facebook… Accidentially!

A Georgia mother and her two daughters logged onto Facebook from mobile phones last weekend and wound up in a startling place: Strangers’ accounts with full access to troves of private information. The glitch – the result of a routing problem at the family’s wireless carrier, AT&T – revealed a little known security flaw with far-reaching implications for everyone on the Internet, not just Facebook users.

In each case, the Internet lost track of who was who, putting the women into the wrong accounts. It doesn’t appear the users could have done anything to stop it. The problem adds a dimension to researchers’ warnings that there are many ways online information – from mundane data to dark secrets – can go awry.

Several security experts said they had not heard of a case like this, in which the wrong person was shown a Web page whose user name and password had been entered by someone else. It’s not clear whether such episodes are rare or simply not reported. However, experts said such flaws could occur on email services, for instance, and that something similar could happen on a PC, not just a phone.

“The fact that it did happen is proof that it could potentially happen again and with something a lot more important than Facebook,” said Nathan Hamiel, founder of the Hexagon Security Group, a research organization.

Hey Facebook, That’s Not My Face

Candace Sawyer, 26, says she immediately suspected something was wrong when she tried to visit her Facebook page Saturday morning.

After typing Facebook.com into her Nokia smartphone, she was taken into the site without being asked for her user name or password. She was in an account that didn’t look like hers. She had fewer friend requests than she remembered. Then she found a picture of the page’s owner.

“He’s white – I’m not,” she said with a laugh.

Sawyer logged off and asked her sister, Mari, 31, her partner in a dessert catering company, and their mother, Fran, 57, to see whether they had the same problem on their phones. Mari landed inside another woman’s page.

Fran’s phone – which had never been used to access Facebook before – took her inside yet another stranger’s page, one belonging to a young woman from Indiana. They sent an email to one of their own accounts to prove it. They were dumbfounded.

“I thought it was the phone – ‘Maybe this phone is just weird and does magical, horrible things and I have to get rid of it,’” said Candace Sawyer.

The women, who live together in East Point, Ga., outside Atlanta, had recently upgraded to the same model of phone and all used the same carrier, AT&T. Sawyer contacted The Associated Press after reporting the problem to Facebook and AT&T.

Trouble in Transit

The problem wasn’t in the phones. It was a flaw in the infrastructure connecting the phones to the Internet. That illuminates a grave problem.

Generally Web sites and computers are compromised from within. A hacker can get a Web page or computers to run programming code that they shouldn’t. However, in this case, it was a security gap between the phone and the Web site that exposed strangers’ Facebook pages to the Sawyers. Misconfigured equipment, poorly written network software or other technical errors could have caused AT&T to fumble the information flowing from the Sawyers’ phones to Facebook and back.

Fortunately, Hamiel said, the vulnerability would be of limited use to a hacker interested in pulling off widespread mayhem, because this hole would let him access only one account at a time. To do more damage, the criminal would have to pull off the unlikely feat of gaining full control of the piece of equipment that routes Internet traffic to individual users.

AT&T spokesperson Michael Coe said its wireless customers have landed in the wrong Facebook pages in “a limited number of instances” and that a network problem behind those episodes is being fixed.

The Sawyers experienced a different glitch. Coe said an investigation points to a “misdirected cookie.” A cookie is a file some Web sites place on computers to store identifying information — including the user name that Facebook members would enter to access their pages. Coe said technicians couldn’t figure out how the cookie had been routed to the wrong phone, leading it into the wrong Facebook account.

He also said AT&T could confirm only that the problem occurred on one of the Sawyers’ phones, possibly because they had logged off Facebook on the other two before reporting the incident. Facebook declined to comment and referred questions to AT&T.

Not Universal

Some Web sites would be immune from this kind of mix-up, particularly those that use encryption. A Web browser would have trouble deciphering the encryption on a page that a computer user didn’t actually seek, said Chris Wysopal, cofounder of Veracode, a security company.

Sensitive sites and those used for banking and e-commerce generally use encryption. However, most other sites, including some Web-based email services, don’t use it. One way of checking: The Web addresses of encrypted sites begin with “https” rather than “http.” Facebook uses encryption when user names and passwords are entered, to cloak the sign-on from snoops, but after the credentials are entered the encryption is dropped.

It’s unclear how many people were affected by the problem the Sawyers discovered, and whether it was limited to Facebook.

The reason all three women experienced the glitch is a function of the way cellular networks are designed. In some cases, all the mobile Internet traffic for a particular area is routed through the same piece of networking equipment. If that piece of equipment is misbehaving or set up incorrectly, strange things happen when computers down the line receive the data.

Usually that means a Web site simply won’t load, said Alberto Solino, director of security consulting services for Core Security Technologies. In the Sawyers’ case, “somehow they got the wrong user but they could keep using that account for a long period of time. That’s what’s strange,” he said.

Odd Connections

The AP tried to contact two of the people whose Facebook pages were exposed to the Sawyers, but the calls and emails were not returned. It’s unclear whether they are also AT&T customers, though security experts said that’s likely the case.

Indeed, it was the case in a similar incident in November.

Stephen Simburg, 25, who works in marketing, was home for Thanksgiving in Vancouver, Wash., when he logged onto Facebook from his cellphone. He didn’t recognize the people who had written him messages.

“I thought I had gotten really popular all of a sudden, or something was wrong,” he said. Then he saw the picture of the account owner: A young woman.

He got her email address from the site, logged off and wrote the woman a message. He asked whether he had met her at some point and she had borrowed his phone to check her Facebook account.

“No,” she wrote back, “but I was just telling my family that I ended up in your profile!”

Simburg and the woman figured out they were both using AT&T to access Facebook on their phones. (AT&T had no comment because the incident wasn’t reported to the company.)

“I felt like I had been let down by the phone company and by Facebook,” he said.

He says he has put the incident behind him. But one piece of it remains: He and the young woman are now Facebook friends.

Billboard Porn Causes Moscow Traffic Jam

A midnight traffic jam near Moscow’s Kremlin has been blamed on a pornographic film that suddenly began playing on a giant billboard.  The nine-by-six-metre television screen began showing the two-minute flick in the centre of Russia’s capital. Stunned motorists slammed on their brakes to gawk at the blue movie. “They couldn’t believe their eyes,” state media RIA said, citing an unidentified witness.

Some managed to leap out of their vehicles to film the incident – the footage then posted on YouTube. But not long after Sky News Online stumbled on one censored clip, it had been removed from the video-sharing website “due to terms of use violation”. The advertising firm that owns the billboard said hackers broke into their system and switched on the scandalous short film.

“They were either acting out of hooliganism or were from a rival company,” the firm’s commercial director Viktor Laptev was reported as saying.

Moscow officials were studying the information and plan to heighten the security of data transmissions to advertising screens. There has been a ban on nudity on Russian TV since before the Soviet Union fell in 1991. Finally it turned out that a hacker is responsible for this action.

Things We’ve Learned From Computer Games

Many people believe that you cannot learn a single thing from computer games. However, there is a list with arguments that computer games obviously teach you a lot about real life:

• If you lool down, you can’t see your feet
• To heal injuries it is absolutely enough to rest for a few seconds in a corner or to sleep for one hour.
• A well-balanced meal heals bullet wounds and crippledness.
• To pick up any item just run over it.
• If an item is more useful than the item you are currently holding in your hands, it will be replaced automatically. The old item goes to your backpack.
• If you’re packing your rucksack carefully, there is always some more space for a rocket launcher.
• Princesses are exclusively rescued by Italian plumbers.
• You can slow down time, if necessary.
• To operate on human beeings it is enough to read threw a medical news paper.
• Frogs die in the water.
• To repair your car, just drive your car with 100 mph through the repair shop.
• You don’t need to go to toilet. Never.
• Doors can only be burst open if they are much brighter than other doors or the environment.
• In locked crates there are always items more valuable than in unlocked boxes. ALWAYS.
• Hard work and a good education does not result in experience and knowledge. But running around and killing monsters does.
• Every problem can be sovled by force.
• If you loose a race, it can be replayed as long as you are not the winner. Your challenger does not take it amiss.
• The cake is a lie.
• You are never too early, but always too late.
• Guards mostly walk through dark corridors without switching the light on.
• If you don’t know how to go on, just combine all items you possess. If this doesn’t work, go back were you came from. You have probably overlooked something.
• If you are pulling out a gun of your backpack, you will automatically see a crosshair, no matter in which direction you’re looking.
• The size of the crosshair is different for each weapon.
• If you’re reloading a weapon despite your magazine is not empty, the wasted munition is not lost.
• Every enemy dies, if you’re shooting frequently enough into his feet.
• If you are hit by a bullet, you will see red, but just for a few seconds.
• A wooden fence protects you from granate explosions.
• The Allies have won WWII with the help of a huge amount of lone warriors that eliminated strategic targets one by one.
• A military education can be done within five minits and three simple steps. First shooting training, second close combat training, third a parkour.
• You can travel to any place using your map. Only condition: You have been there before.
• Military troups are produced in barracks. A production cycle requires about 30 seconds for each unit.
• If you are shooting a corpse into the head, no blood splatters anymore (at least in Germany).
• Zombies only die if you a) shoot em into their heads or b) to souse them with gasoline to burn them down. Otherwise they will stand up again if you leave the room.
• Sooner or later you’re going to save the world single-handedly.
• For communication speech is not explicitely needed. Bending your neck is simply enough.
• A hellgate in your garden isn’t a reason to worry about.
• If you get out of water your wet clothes will dry within seconds.
• Lighting night vision goggles are also invisible in the dark.
• Flashlights work either forever or just for a few minutes. Afterwards they recharge themselves automatically.
• Despite 30 kg package you can sprint for hours. If you are carrying light package, you are exhausted more easily.
• If you are carrying a knife, you run faster. It does not matter how heavy your package is.
• There are rare items everywhere. You just have to search for them.
• Aliens never come in piece.
• Every problem can be solved using a holy granade.
• If you repaint your car, the police does not recognize you anymore.
• Red things explode. Always. Barrels, the color does not matter, do the same in 90% of the cases.
• Persons only say two or three phrases. Afterwards they repeat themselves.
• You can never carry more than 99 objects of the same type at the same time.
• 30 spear throwers can beat a tank.
• Sho-ryu-ken is the best phrase to start a brawl
• Pain killers also heal bullet wounds. Heart defibrilators also do.
• The bigger the boobs the more dangerous the woman (WTF – that’s true).
• Everything can be upgraded.
• All items can be created from one to three resources.
• Eventhough a big catastrophe is comming up, you have enough time to do some shopping.
• People knocking over guys in orange suites get bonus points.
• With cordless screwdrivers you can kill people. You can also blow up walls with them.
• If you die in Germany you will blink. Afterwards your body disappears.
• Also animals carry weapons around. They just don’t use them but drop them if they die.
• If you experience memory loss, you are going to save the world.
• Not every wolf has a fur. The same applies to bears.
• In Germany people have green blood, or grey, or black.
• Water kills you.
• Armor for female characters is effective despite it only covers a third of the body.
• Either you have gasoline or you have a chain saw but never both items at the same time.
• Wild bigs are human’s strongest enemies.
• If you can’t shoot it, collect it.

Browser Makers Hope WebGL Will Remake 3D

If you want to see the scale of browser makers’ ambition to remake not just the Web but computing itself, look no farther than a new 3D technology called WebGL. The WebGL vision is simple. You’re running around in a video game universe, blasting radioactive aliens – but you got there by visiting a Web site, not by installing the game on your PC. This sort of computationally demanding chore contrasts sharply to with today’s Web, whose top-notch programmers strain to reproduce bare-bones versions of the rich capabilities open to applications running natively on a computer.

WebGL, while only a nascent attempt to catch up, is real. WebGL now is a draft standard for bringing hardware-accelerated 3D graphics to the Web. It got its start with Firefox backer Mozilla and the Khronos Group, which oversees the OpenGL graphics interface, but now the programmers behind browsers from Apple, Google, and Opera Software are also involved. Perhaps more significant than formal standards work, though, is WebGL support in three precursors of today’s browsers – Minefield for Mozilla’s Firefox, WebKit for Apple’s Safari, and Chromium for Google’s Chrome. Opera has started implementing WebGL, too, said Tim Johansson, Opera’s lead graphics developer.

With a little tinkering – check the instructions and caveats below – you can give it a whirl, too. Overall, I was favorably impressed with the technology. Its performance certainly isn’t enough for a competitive first-person shooter, but it’s approaching utility for casual gaming. And because of how WebGL elements can be integrated with the rest of a Web site’s code, it’s got some advantages.

What is WebGL

WebGL is one of a handful of efforts under way to boost the processing power available to Web applications. It marries two existing technologies. First is JavaScript, the programming language widely used to give Web pages intelligence and interactivity. Although JavaScript performance is improving relatively quickly these days in many browsers, programs written in the language are relatively pokey and limited compared with those that run natively on a computer.

Second is OpenGL ES, a 2D and 3D graphics interface for devices such as phones or car navigation systems with limited horsepower. If a computer’s graphics system has an OpenGL driver, software written to use OpenGL can tap directly into the graphics system’s hardware acceleration. WebGL links these two so JavaScript programs can call upon 3D abilities, with the HTML5 technology also under development acting as glue.

However, although OpenGL is a reasonably well established technology in graphics circles, it’s a different beast for most JavaScript programmers. That means that just building support for WebGL into browsers isn’t enough to establish the technology; programmers also must learn WebGL.

WebGL is a very low-level API [application programming interface], so it’s not for the faint of heart. OpenGL’s shading language, GLSL, is itself an entire programming environment. So doing even simple things in WebGL takes a lot of code

What is it like?

If you don’t want to suffer the slings and arrows of pre-production software, here are my thoughts about my testing. Overall, I’d say WebGL has potential. It’s certainly not blazing fast, but it can spin 36 shaded miniatures of Earth and Mars at 60 frames per second on an Apple MacBook Pro.

These test results show the frame rate on a MacBook Pro running the latest builds of Chromium, Minefield, and Safari. The test shows a spinning 3D Earth and Mars. Bear in mind this is only one test of pre-production software.

A view of the spinning globes demonstration.

Some of the demos taxed my dual-core machines’ processors, and they were hardly anything eye-popping. But there were differences in the three browsers’ abilities. WebKit seemed to handle WebGL with the least strain; its animations ran with significantly higher frame rates than Minefield or Chrome. I wouldn’t judge or praise any of them too dramatically at this early stage and on limited benchmarks, though. So what’s it good for besides casual games at this stage? Not much–perhaps a little eye candy here and there, 3D models of products you’re thinking of buying online, and mapping and virtual-world applications. But as with many technologies, it’s important to lay a foundation on which future developments can be built.

It’s not clear that Google’s Chrome OS vision will conquer the world and the browser will be the universal application foundation. It is clear, though, that there are plenty of Web applications today, that there will be more tomorrow, and that they’ll need better interface technology. With most of the browser backers pushing it and graphics hardware increasingly common, WebGL has serious potential.

Not the only game in town

JavaScript has been streamlined with widely used libraries such as the Dojo Toolkit, jQuery, the Yahoo User Interface (YUI) library, and most recently, Google’s Closure Tools. Packaged in a similar way, WebGL could be made more approachable for some tasks, too. That’s where another 3D Web technology, a Google browser plug-in called O3D, could be a factor. O3D, still under development, provides a higher-level 3D graphics interface. It could be rebuilt out of WebGL components, though, and Google believes that eventually will happen.

It’s an interesting idea, but we haven’t done this so far. It’s definitely possible to create higher level retained-mode renderers (like O3D) that are implemented on top of WebGL, and we expect that this will likely happen at some point. There are potentially some performance issues, but we’re working to resolve those by making some changes to V8.

Gregg Tavares, a Google O3D programmer and longtime game developer, detailed some of those performance issues in a mailing list posting. “WebGL is a very cool initiative but it has a lot of hurdles to overcome,” he said. “JavaScript is still slow in the large scheme of things. Maybe at sometime in the future WebGL will have added enough features over basic OpenGL to be more powerful or JavaScript will have gotten a few orders of magnitude faster but at the moment…”

The Windows Connection

Another hurdle to be overcome is OpenGL driver support on graphics cards. High-end cards found in professional workstations support it, but for mainstream Windows machines, Microsoft’s Direct3D is a more common interface to accelerate 3D graphics. WebGL dovetails with OpenGL, but it’s possible to link to Direct3D, too, said Arun Ranganathan, chairman of the WebGL working group and standards evangelist at Mozilla. “There’s no technical impediment to running on Direct3D. We’ve been careful so we don’t introduce such impediments,” Ranganathan said. Added Vladimir Vukicevic, a Mozilla programmer who’s been leading the WebGL charge, “On Windows the Direct3D drivers are often higher quality than the OpenGL drivers.”

Of course, there’s more to the world than Windows. Khronos Group spokesman Jonathan Hirschon pointed out that smartphones ship with OpenGL ES; the iPhone 3GS supports version 2.0.

Microsoft didn’t comment on its plans for WebGL. It isn’t a member of the Khronos Group, but of late it’s been looking more favorably on Web standards when it comes to Internet Explorer’s design. Adobe Systems’ Flash, too, has some 3D support, and it’s widely installed. “It would be great if they [Adobe] were to implement WebGL in AIR or Flash,” Vukicevic said. That could help spread the technology to Internet Explorer users, he said. The biggest competitor, though, is doing 3D in a regular operating system. There, programming tools are more mature, hardware support is more consistent, performance is better–and the industry has hardly stopped advancing.

For WebGL to truly meet its potential, browser makers will have to convince programmers to adopt a new way of working. The Web has plenty of advantages in usage and ubiquity, but it has a way to go before it can match many native operating system abilities.

How to try it?

The Khronos WebGL demo page offers several pages to kick the WebGL tires. But first you’ll have to get WebGL working. First, you’ll need to install the test versions of the browsers that become Safari, Chrome, and Firefox. Follow the links to download the nightly build of Safari’s precursor, WebKit or the nightly “Minefield” build for Firefox. For those who want to use Chrome’s precursor, Chromium comes in flavors for Windows, Mac OS X, 64-bit Linux and 32-bit Linux.

Rotating a cube with cute puppy images can give a dual-core PC a workout.

Once you’ve got one of these browsers installed – and be warned that these works in progress aren’t fully tested or supported–you’ll have some tweaking to do, because in none of them is WebGL enabled by default. I found it easiest to install it on Minefield, the only one of the three with a point-and-click-friendly method. In the address bar, type “about:config” and click through the “I’ll be careful” warning that you’re meddling with the browser’s innards. In the “Filter” box, enter “WebGL” and search for an item named “enabled_for_all_sites.” By default, its value is false right now; double-click it to make switch it to true.

For Safari on Mac OS X, open the Terminal application (it’s in the Applications/Utilities folder) to get yourself a command line. Type this: “defaults write com.apple.Safari WebKitWebGLEnabled -bool YES” then hit return and restart WebKit. (Note that it’s got the same icon as Safari, but with a gold rim around the compass.)

For Chromium, you’ll have to use a command-line switch, too. On Windows, first locate the Chromium icon in the Start Menu and right-click on it. In the “target” field you should see the full location of the file; it’s “C:\Documents and Settings\stephens\Local Settings\Application Data\Chromium\Application\chrome.exe” in my case. Add “–no-sandbox –enable-webgl” to the end of the address, outside the quotation marks. Save the change, then launch the browser.

For Chromium on the Mac, open Terminal to launch Chromium with the switches. After some trial and error I found this did the trick: /Applications/Chromium.app/Contents/MacOS/Chromium –no-sandbox –enable-webgl

To run WebGL in Chromium, you have to bypass the sandbox mechanism that makes attacks harder by confining processes to regions called sandboxes. That’s got risks, so it’s best to drop back into the normal mode without the “–no-sandbox” switch when you’re done. Google is addressing this issue, though.

“We are working to make WebGL work in Chrome without the user having to disable the sandbox. It’s a lot of work, but we’re making fast progress on it,” said Matthew Papakipos, a Google engineering director.

One you’re done, start trying the demonstrations. Be warned, though, that not all the demos work on all the browsers. And perhaps because the specification as well as the browsers are a work in progress, some other WebGL demos wouldn’t work for me on any browser.

Europeans Shy Google Android Phones

Operators pushed market share of cellphones running Google’s (GOOG.O) software a little higher in September quarter in Western Europe, but consumers showed little interest towards them, research firm IDC said on Saturday.

Android has won attention in the mobile industry lately, with Motorola (MOT.N) and Sony Ericsson (6758.T) (ERICb.ST) choosing it for their new top models.

Market share of smartphones running Google’s Android operating system (OS) rose to 5.4 percent from 4.2 percent in July-September in Western Europe, a key area for the smartphone market.

“Consumers steer clear of Google’s OS and sell-out is below everyone’s expectations. Consumers recognise the Google brand, but still do not understand what Android is,” IDC analyst Francisco Jeronimo said in a statement.

“The lack of devices available didn’t help to raise awareness, though this is expected to change, with more handsets from LG, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, and other vendors hitting the market soon,” Jeronimo said.

Last month Gameloft (GLFT.PA), one of the largest cellphone game makers, also bashed Android saying it and other software developers were cutting back investment in developing games and other applications for the platform. [ID:nLK608013]

Global market leader Symbian — used extensively by Nokia (NOK1V.HE) — continued to be the leading operating system also in Western Europe, controlling 48 percent of the market.

SAMSUNG CATCHING NOKIA

Samsung Electronics’ (005930.KS) share of the total market increased to 30.5 percent in the quarter, boosted by strong sales of mid-range phones, while market leader Nokia saw its share dipping to 35.3 percent.

“The gap between these two has been narrowing, and Nokia is facing a significant threat of being overtaken by Samsung in Western Europe in 2010,” Jeronimo said.

The West European home market has been the key for Finnish Nokia to build its global success, and investors are looking closely at Nokia’s market share development on the market.

Total cellphone sales in Western Europe rose 5 percent from a year ago to 46.8 million phones in the September quarter, increasing for the first time after five straight quarters of declines, IDC said.

Sales of smartphone rose 2 percent from the previous quarter, boosted by growing sales of Apple’s (AAPL.O) iPhone and Research in Motion’s (RIM.TO)(RIMM.O) Blackberrys.