Some 37 million Apple iPhones shipped worldwide in the fourth quarter, besting Samsung's 33 million shipments and reducing Android's share to 47 percent, says ABI Research, echoed by Kantar Worldpanel ComTech and Good Technology. Meanwhile, Android tablets surged to 39 percent share worldwide in Q4 2011, but still trail Apple's 58 percent iPad share, says Strategy Analytics.

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E-con Systems has announced a five megapixel camera add-on designed to work with the Texas Instruments (TI) OMAP3530 or DM3730 evaluation modules (EVMs). The e-CAM52_35x snaps onto the EVM boards and connects to the high-speed CMOS sensor interface on TI's DM37xx or Sitara AM37xx processors, providing five megapixel video capture as well as stills, the company says.

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The KDE community announced version 4.8 of its desktop environment and software bundle for Linux, featuring improved, adaptive power management and new windowing functions. KDE 4.8 is faster and more stable, and offers new features like Qt Quick-based Plasma widgets and the KDE Telepathy real-time communication and collaboration framework, says the community.

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Canonical unveiled a search-oriented Head-Up Display (HUD) interface that will debut in April's Ubuntu 12.04 (“Precise Pangolin”). Aiming to reduce dependence on menus and eventually replace them with the help of gesture and voice interactions, HUD could find its way into future versions of Ubuntu designed for smartphones and tablets, as well as the recently announced Ubuntu TV platform.

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PocketBook International announced a seven-inch tablet that runs Android 2.3.7 on a 1GHz TI OMAP3621 processor. The PocketBook A 7″ is equipped with 512MB of RAM, 2GB of accessible onboard storage, a seven-inch, 1024 x 600 touchscreen, a two-megapixel camera, and Android Market access, according to the company.

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Verizon is now offering Motorola's Droid Razr Maxx for $300, with a claimed battery life of up to 21 hours. With a dual-core, 1.2GHz processor, 4.3-inch screen, and an eight megapixel camera, the device is otherwise similar to the previously released Droid Razr, but it's thicker by approximately 2mm.

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Chromebooks from Samsung and Acer running Google's Chrome OS may not be catching on with consumers, but hundreds of schools across the country have adopted the web-oriented notebooks, the search giant claims. Earlier this month at CES, Samsung showed off a sleeker new version of the Chromebook that switches to a faster Intel Celeron processor, also promising it would release a “Chromebox” mini-PC.

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HP announced a roadmap for its Linux-based WebOS operating system, which will be released under an open source Apache 2.0 license in September. HP also released an Apache-licensed version 2.0 of its Enyo Javascript development framework for WebOS, adding cross-platform app development across Android, iOS, and desktop browsers.

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Xi3 Corporation announced a 4-inch, “eco-friendly” server it claims will be readily upgradeable, thanks to the use of one board containing the processor and memory and two separate boards containing I/O ports. The “microServ3r” apparently offers a choice of AMD processors, SSD (solid state disk) storage, two gigabit Ethernet ports, two eSATA ports, and a Fibre Channel port.

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Axiomtek announced a half-size, PICMG 1.3-compliant CPU card that supports “Sandy Bridge” Core i3, i5, or i7 processors. The SHB213 offers up to 8GB of RAM, two SATA ports with RAID support, as many as eight USB 2.0 ports, PCI Express expansion, and a CFast expansion slot, according to the company.

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Coverity is readying an evaluation edition of a security analysis package pre-configured for Wind River Workbench and Wind River Linux. Coverity Static Analysis for Wind River Workbench integrates security within the embedded development process, identifying vulnerabilities as code is written, according to Wind River.

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Texas Instruments announced a Linux-based evaluation module featuring the digital light processing technology from its DLP Pico Projectors. The DLP LightCrafter combines an ARM9-based, 300MHz DaVinci TMS320DM365 processor, a 20-lumen RGB LED light engine and projector, as well as TI's 0.3-inch, WVGA DLP chipset, enabling up to 4000 binary patterns per second, says TI.

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[Updated: Jan. 25] — Red Hat, Canonical, and Arch Linux have released patches for a vulnerability in Linux kernels 2.6.39 and above that enables attackers to gain root access on a system. Proof-of-concept exploit code was posted last week after “CVE-2012-0056” was exposed — thanks to Linus Torvalds announcing a kernel patch before Linux distro projects had had time to apply it.

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Ibase announced a modularized panel PC that features a 15-inch touchscreen and a 2.13GHz Intel Atom D2700 processor. The IPPC-1500 includes up to 4GB of RAM, 2MB of battery-backed static RAM for system restoration, a 2.5-inch drive bay, a PCI expansion slot, and a front bezel that meets IP65 standards, according to the company.

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The Linux Mint team announced the first “fully stable” version of its new GNOME 2.x-like “Cinnamon” fork of the GNOME 3.x desktop environment. Available for several major Linux distros, Cinnamon 1.2 is more customizable than GNOME 3.x, restores much of the GNOME 2.x interface, and adds features such as new desktop effects and layouts, a configuration tool, and five new “applets.”

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