android lost

Here's a bit of good news to soak in over the weekend. After the unveiling of the Xiaomi Phone 2 (aka Mi2) in front of some 3,000 people yesterday, a reliable source informed us that the Chinese startup is already looking to bring its highly affordable phones to Europe next year. Alas, we couldn't get a more specific time frame, but assuming Xiaomi wants to deliver its first quad core device to the Europeans as well, it'd likely be within the first half of next year, well before the next August 16th announcement (the company's managed to stick to the same date so far).

Of course, it all depends on whether Xiaomi can scale its business model for the unknown territories, and it'll certainly need some solid partners to do so -- much like its collaboration with local retail channels China Unicom, China Telecom and Vancl. Luckily, the MIUI developer will be doing a warm up first in Taiwan. As reported by Business Next last month, chairman Lei Jun made a high profile visit to several Taiwanese carriers in the hopes of breaking into their market by the end of this year. If successful, Lei should be able to meet his ambitious sales target of 6 million Xiaomi Phones accumulated -- still some way away from the 3.52 million units sold so far. Judging by the madness at the event this week (see gallery below), it should be no problem.
Source: http://www.engadget.com/2012/08/17/xiaomi-phones-may-enter-europe-next-year-because-china-aint-bi/

If you're an iPhone owner, you may want to use good judgment before responding to any out-of-the-blue text messages in the near future. French jailbreak developer and security researcher pod2g finds that every iPhone firmware revision, even iOS 6 beta 4, is susceptible to a flaw that theoretically lets a ne'er-do-well spoof the reply address of outbound SMS messages. 

As Apple is using the reply-to address of a message's User Data Header to identify the origin rather than the raw source, receiving iPhone owners risk being fooled by a phishing attack (or just a dishonest acquaintance) that poses as a contact or a company. A proof of concept messaging tool is coming to the iPhone soon, but pod2g is pushing for an official solution before the next iOS version is out the door. We've asked Apple for commentary and will get back if there's an update. In the meantime, we wouldn't panic -- if the trickery hasn't been a significant issue since 2007, there isn't likely to be a sudden outbreak today.