FreshPhoneNews.com

Recently hackers got their heads together at a friendly hacking competition that was aimed at highlighting vulnerabilities in OS and software beat up the Safari browser good, but weren’t successful with the smartphones. The Safari barely made it through the first 10 seconds on the MacBook. But when the time came for hacking smartphones, each held its own. All hack attempts from the BlackBerry to the iPhone, to any other ‘smart’ device fell short. And don’t think there wasn’t incentive; every successful hack of a smartphone would get the hacker a nice $10,000. Pretty nice. Only the closes that ay one got to actually hacking a smartphone was a BlackBerry Bold exploit that had reportedly worked in the past on a Storm. There was also an exploit that worked on a Safari on Mac that reportedly could also work on the iPhone, but the iPhone hack was not attempted; the rules of the contest stated that each exploit could be used only once. So who got the 10 grand? No body. But don’t lose hope yet, CanSecWest and ZDI have already stated that smartphones will be included once again in next year’s competition. So you have a solid year to polish your skills and give smartphone manufacturers something to lose sleep over.

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News had been abound that Opera might be getting some carrier love after all, beginning as early as April, but while the news was still in the flow, Opera issued a press release denouncing any such announcement.

“Opera is aware of statements in the media that Opera will announce one or more agreements with US operators in early April.

Opera would like to clarify that it has no plans to announce any US operator agreements to the OSE in early April as mentioned in the media.”

The initial rumor had placed Opera on basic and feature phones to be announced at CITA, which would have been really nice. It would have brought some real decent web service to the average phone not to mention give Opera a bigger user base. Let’s hope Opera doesn’t dump plans of getting the Opera Mini into the good graces of US carriers.

The computer Web Browser wars have been on going for some time with the release of Google Chrome and the Mozilla FireFox, and now the mobile web browsers are getting a fair share of the attention as well. Opera has just launched the beta version of its mobile web browser, the Opera Mini 4.2.

Everyone knows that the Opera Web Browser is one of the fastest Mobile Browsers for the Windows Mobile platform there is. The new Opera Mini is gives users faster web browsing than before to users in the United States and Asia Pacific, giving a more personalized web browsing experience. There is a healthy selection of skins that you can chose from as well as better support for YouTube services. It also supports more devices than before. And hands down the Opera Mini 4.2 beta is far better than the current Opera Mobile 8.65 beta version. So till there is the ever awaited Opera Mobile 9, the Opera Mini is the way to go.

“The number of people using Opera Mini worldwide proves that there is a true revolution going on: People want to access all their favorite Web sites on the mobile phone they have today,” Opera CEO Jon von Tetzchner said in a statement. “We constantly focus on developing a faster and more personal browsing experience. Opera Mini 4.2 Beta is an update that takes mobile Web browsing to the next level.”

Downloads:

You can download the new Opera Mini 4.2 beta to your cell by pointing your mobile browser to mini.opera.com/beta. You may also visit Opera Mini to download the browser to your PC and then install on your cell phone.

The Opera Mini will install next to any stable existing Opera Mini version on your phone and there will be absolutely no data overwrite.