Kaspersky Lab has officially launched its mobile security solutions in India that, apart from protecting your smartphones from malware and network attacks, enables you to locate your lost phone, protect data as well as block unwanted calls and SMSs.

The Kaspersky Mobile Security 9.0 is available in Android and BlackBerry platforms alongside Symbian and Windows Mobile.

Smartphones like Blackberry and Android phones are gaining more and more popularity in the Indian market. According to a research, Indian consumers are expected to buy 12 million smartphones in 2011. This growth definitely is a precursor to the number of trojans and malware that may be aimed at the smartphones.

With KMS 9.0, you just need to push one button to hide selected contacts and their contact data, including call histories, contact list entries and SMSs, and mute their calls. Contacts can also be hidden automatically after a preset idle period or remotely by sending a predefined SMS. You can also filter out unwanted calls and SMSs by creating a white list and a black list of contacts.

The solution allows you to wipe confidential files or block them remotely by sending a special SMS; locate your lost device with the help of the GPS Find tool; or block your phone and be notified of its new number if the SIM card is replaced.

Mobile users running Symbian or Windows Mobile operating systems can Password protect and encrypt their files with a strong Encryption algorithm. The GPS Find feature will help you pinpoint your smartphone’s current location, and if Kaspersky Mobile Security 9 is installed on your child’s device, you can always locate them quickly and easily.

The Parental Control module in Kaspersky Mobile Security 9 lets you restrict which numbers your children and other vulnerable individuals can call, such as premium-rate numbers, and allows you to control who calls them.

KMS 9 is available for Rs 599. More detailed information about KMS 9 is available at www.kaspersky.co.in

No other smartphone, or even tablet, has seen so much buzz in the market as have Apple’s iPhone and iPad. The long queues outside Apple stores during the launch of each version of these devices are testimony to this fact.

A question that arises here is how Apple manages to keep people’s curiosity alive each time it launches a product. Most analysts and media commentators attribute this to Apple’s marketing strategy.

But no product can be sold in hordes on the basis of hype or a positive media image alone. More often than not, Apple’s products are ahead of their time and they satiate the interest created by the hype. Products from Apple do have their share of problems but in spite of that they have a long list or ardent followers.

There are other companies that manage to create hype around their products but fail to back it up with a great product.

The hype, especially on the internet, is often incoherent. Speculative commentators and bloggers just add to the incoherence.

But in terms of marketing, all this chatter on the web ends up building just the right amount of interest around Apple products.

Apple’s strategy of maintaining secrecy also creates an element of surprise around its products, thus fostering constant discussion about them in the market.

The upcoming version of Windows Phone 7 operating system will be called as the Windows Phone 7.5, Microsoft has said.

Popularly known as the Mango update, it is set to be released in the later part of 2011.
The number of the version of the operating system would not be mentioned after this update, and it would simply be called as Windows Phone.

It will introduce some new features, including multitasking capability, a hardware-accelerated mobile version of Internet Explorer 9, Twitter in the People hub, better support for Office documents in SkyDrive (Microsoft’s free cloud-based storage service), and more.

The motion sensor library will also be accessible to the developers, so the users can expect better augmented reality apps (those apps which use real world elements and improve them with phone tools) in future.

The upgrade would support music players natively irrespective of whether they are being played from apps or browser, which means music would play in the background even as users choose to do other things on their phone.