Technology Spot

A recent report from Onavo, which has developed an app for tracking data usage on iOS devices, indicates that simply looking for and downloading apps from Apple's iOS App Store can chew up about 13 percent of all data consumed in a monthly data plan.

The company analyzed 8 terabytes of data it has gathered anonymously from iPhone and iPad users who have downloaded its app. While it comes as little surprise that the No. 1 data hog on the iPhone and iPad is streaming data and audio, usage of Apple's iOS App Store came in third place right behind Web browsing.

According to the report, the App Store accounts for more than 13 percent of all iPhone data usage in the U.S. each month. Three quarters of that data comes from downloads, while 24 percent is attributed to searches within the App Store.

Watching movies and listening to streaming music services, such as Pandora, accounted for about 35.3 percent of data consumed. And Web surfing ate up about 17.1 percent of usage.

Another surprising tidbit is that Facebook, which many people might assume consumes a good chunk of a monthly data plan, wasn't even in the top five apps that consumed data. After video and audio streaming, Web surfing, and Apple's iOS App Store, Google Maps consumed 8.3 percent of data, while e-mail consumed about 4.0 percent of total data. Facebook ate up only 2.8 percent of the total data for the month.

Onavo's report is interesting because it sheds some light on how real wireless subscribers are using their data plans. Understanding which applications are used most often and consume the most data is very important for consumers as wireless operators eliminate unlimited plans in lieu of usage-based data plans.

"Most people are blissfully unaware the App Store is hoovering up their data plan," Guy Rosen, co-founder and CEO of Onavo said in a statement. "iPhone users should be much more careful when downloading their Angry Birds--it's something best done at home, within the safety of Wi-Fi."

An Apple spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Onavo's report.

AT&T, which had the exclusive contract to sell the iPhone in the U.S. until February this year, was the first major wireless operator in the U.S. to move to a tiered offering for its smartphone customers. Verizon Wireless, which began selling the iPhone in February, discontinued its unlimited data service for new smartphone subscribers in July.

T-Mobile USA still offers an "unlimited" data plan, but it has begun limiting how much data its subscribers can use by slowing down service after customers hit a monthly usage threshold. AT&T has adopted this same plan for smartphone subscribers grandfathered into its unlimited data plan. And as Sprint is rumored to be getting the iPhone 5 when it's launched next month, there are some who speculate the carrier may ditch its unlimited data plan to ensure it can handle the anticipated traffic load associated with the iPhone.

Wireless operators that have put these data caps in place say that only a small percentage of their users actually exceed the defined limits. And data from companies, such as Validas, which tracks smartphone subscribers' data usage, backs up these assertions. In fact, most wireless subscribers are over-paying for data. And wireless operators say usage-based data plans are necessary to ensure that a small minority of customers don't consume more than their fair share of resources.

But one thing is clear, usage is increasing. Validas issued a report this summer that said Verizon Wireless customers have increased their usage by 150 percent over the past year. AT&T subscribers have increased usage by about 116 percent. What may be unclear and confusing to smartphone wireless subscribers, however, is what applications are actually eating up that data. Onavo executives say that is a key question that they can help consumers answer.

"Data addiction has taken hold across America, with U.S. smartphone users spending $55 billion a year," Rosen said. "Our monthly reports shine a light on where this money is going, so people can make informed choices about their data usage and save money."

Onavo has developed apps for the iOS devices as well as for the Google Android operating system. Primarily, these apps track and record how much data individual users are consuming. And they provide subscribers with the data in easy to read formats. The iPhone app also compresses certain types of data to help wireless subscribers conserve their data plans.

The app is available for iOS and Google Android devices. But the iPhone and iPad apps, which were developed before the Android app, also compress certain data to help subscribers' conserve bandwidth.

Based on the data from its first report, which included only usage from iOS users, Onavo came up with five tips to help consumers cut their mobile data bills.

European physicists have measured tiny particles called neutrinos moving just faster than the speed of light--only a smidgen faster, but enough to raise a serious possibility that Einstein's physics need a major overhaul.

The scientists sent a beam of neutrinos from CERN, on the Swiss-French border near Geneva, to the INFN (Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare) Gran Sasso Laboratory in central Italy, 730 kilometers (454 miles) away, in a research project called OPERA. The physicists had planned to study a rare event, the transformation of the muon variety of neutrinos into the tau variety. Instead, they found the extraordinary result that the neutrinos appeared to travel faster than the speed of light.

Under Einsteinian physics, nothing can exceed the speed of light, and so far, nothing has challenged that conclusion. At particle accelerators over the decades, subatomic particles are pushed to ever-higher speeds, but it takes ever more energy to attain each new fractional step toward the speed of light. Instead of going faster when driven with higher-energy accelerators, the particles get heavier. That phenomenon is described by Einstein's famous equation linking energy (E), mass (m), and the square of the speed of light (c): E=mc².

But over the last three years, the OPERA experiment has gathered high-precision data on exactly how long it took for the neutrinos to make a journey that should last about 2.4 thousandths of a second. The neutrinos, though, arrived about 61 billionths of a second sooner than would light traveling in a vacuum, where its speed is at a maximum.

That's about 2 thousandths of a percent faster than the speed of light--not much, but more than enough to throw a major wrench into the workings of physics if the result is validated.

The dry language of a paper, written by 174 authors, describes the result this way: "We cannot explain the observed effect in terms of presently known systematic uncertainties," referring to factors within the equipment that generates and detects the neutrinos. "Therefore, the measurement indicates an early arrival time of...muon neutrinos with respect to the one computed assuming the speed of light in vacuum."

'A complete surprise'
In the official announcement comes the more human reaction from a profession for whom the speed of light's unbreakability has been a core belief for generations.

"This result comes as a complete surprise," said Antonio Ereditato, spokesman for OPERA and a professor a the University of Bern, in a statement.

But he didn't dwell on the research's implications: "The potential impact on science is too large to draw immediate conclusions or attempt physics interpretations."

No doubt plenty of speculation will begin. But first things first: it's time for other physicists to try to figure out if the measurements could have been wrong and to see if they can be reproduced.

If the results hold up, it won't be the first time scientific beliefs have been upended. But Einstein's work has held up superbly under decades of verification and challenge.

The researchers will detail their results today at CERN, and they've published the results in a paper at Arxiv, a site for research that's not yet passed the peer-review scrutiny required for publication in academic journals.

"After many months of studies and cross checks we have not found any instrumental effect that could explain the result of the measurement. While OPERA researchers will continue their studies, we are also looking forward to independent measurements to fully assess the nature of this observation," Ereditato said.

Neutrino behavior
It's another surprise from neutrinos, particles that lack any electrical charge and that interact only rarely with anything else. For decades, physicists thought neutrinos had no mass, but in the 1990s, research showed they actually are very light.

Neutrinos constantly stream through the earth, only rarely fazed by what they encounter. The sun produces them, but people also have figured out ways; CERN does so by smashing protons into a graphite target.

The rarity of neutrino interactions makes it hard to perform scientific experiments involving them. The physicists, though, measured 16,111 neutrino interactions over three years--enough to narrow the error bars that show the statistical uncertainties that plague smaller data sets.

Much of the paper, naturally, dwells on just exactly how the scientists measured the neutrinos' time of flight. To do so, they used very precise GPS measurements and atomic clocks to sychronize timing between the two facilities. Ultimately, the distance from the neutrino source to their detection was measured with an accuracy of 20cm.

Combining it all, the researchers concluded they had enough precision in their measurements. The ultimate finding was that the neutrinos arrived in 60.7 nanoseconds, with a statistical uncertainty of only plus or minus 6.9 nanoseconds and measurement uncertainty of plus or minus 7.4 nanoseconds.

The researchers know their work isn't done when it comes to convincing the world that a supposedly unbreakable law has been broken.

"Despite the large significance of the measurement reported here and the stability of the analysis, the potentially great impact of the result motivates the continuation of our studies in order to investigate possible still unknown systematic effects that could explain the observed anomaly," the paper concludes. "We deliberately do not attempt any theoretical or phenomenological interpretation of the results."

About a year ago I wrote about Facebook's growing dominance of the social Web casting a huge shadow over the Internet of people. At that time the service had 500 million users. In his F8 keynote yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg said that as many as 500 million people used Facebook in a single day, with the total Facebook tribe approaching 800 million.

According to Experian Hitwise, Facebook had a 10 percent share of Internet visits in the U.S. for the week ending Sept. 17, followed by Google at 7 percent. Among social networks, Facebook garnered more than 65 percent share of visits, compared with YouTube at 19.5 percent for the same time period.

With the new features announced yesterday at F8, Facebook is poised to cast a bigger shadow over the Internet of people and things

this is the site that you should see and follow it.

Chandhok, meanwhile, knows a thing or two when it comes to where mobile trends are headed. As part of his responsibilities, he runs Qualcomm's innovation center. The Internet services division originally delivered data services to feature phones but has since transitioned to focus on services designed for sophisticated smartphones.

In regard to HTML5, Chandhok said it's just easier to build apps using that standard. It takes a lot of work to update and tweak an app, which also requires the consumer to download a new version. Because it's browser based and works like a Web site, the HTML5 app could be changed on the fly.

"It's economically important for people to do," Chandhok said.

With the PC moving to browser-based programs and services, Chandhok said he sees a similar migration on the wireless side. Despite running on a browser, it feels like an app, he said.

One obstacle for HTML5 right now is the inability for such programs to take advantage of a phone's different features, including the camera, global positioning system, or accelerometer. A native application has access to the phone's software development kit, allowing it to work with the hardware to provide different services such as augmented reality or directions to a shop.

Other people are just getting up to speed on HTML5 and figuring out what they can do with the code.

"You'll see a smoothing out of the experience," he said.

While HTML5 will become more popular, Chandhok said he doesn't see native applications going away. Instead, he expects there to be a mix of native and Web-based apps.

Which, thankfully, means plenty more fodder for this column.

The mass adoption of HTML5 as a way to create applications may be coming sooner than you think.

At least, that's what Rob Chandhok, president of Qualcomm's Internet services division, thinks. He recently sat down with CNET to talk about where apps are headed. And the direction solidly points to HTML5.

"We see HTML5 and Web-based mobile applications as the way it will end up," Chandhok said.

Companies such as Pandora and LinkedIn already use HTML 5 as the basis for their applications. He said in the next 18 to 24 months, the standard will reach mass adoption among developers.

HTML5, unlike other codes used for the development of apps, is a Web-based standard, so sophisticated programs can be run using a browser, rather than as a native program on the phone. The major advantage is that, in theory, a developer can build one HTML5 app and have it run on any phone with a good browser. That also means the app isn't stuck in just one platform such as iOS or Android.

Apple's Steve Jobs once touted HTML5 as the next big Web standard, when he opted to keep Adobe Flash out of iOS. But now developers are using HTML5 to create programs that can get around iOS's requirement to distribute apps through its App Store, which also means getting out of paying Apple a cut of the app revenue.

Following the launch of games on Google+ last month, Adobe Flash streaming app iSwifter today is adding compatibility to work with those games, giving iPad users a way to play them on Apple's tablet.

The functionality is being added to iSwifter's existing application (iTunes) as a free update today, and will join iSwifter's catalog of games on Facebook.

The first thing you're probably wondering is if this means you can play Google+'s social version of Angry Birds. The short answer to that is no. It's one of the only titles I couldn't get working in a pre-release version of the software, something that's due to that version of Angry Birds being written in HTML5. iSwifter founder Rajat Gupta told me the software's back-end technology is not yet set up to run HTML5, but will eventually. In the meantime, the iPad's built-in Safari browser simply redirects users to download the native version of Angry Birds in app form when trying to access the Google+ game page.

iSwifter runs Flash games and applications on the company's servers, then streams them to the iPad, cutting out the need to have Adobe's Flash player installed--something Apple does not allow. Products like Skyfire and Photon have approached the limitation with similar solutions for Web browsing.

iSwifter launched as a paid app last September, and has since converted to a free app with in-app purchase that gets rid of a nag window and adds additional features. That change has helped fuel adoption of the app, which now pulls in some 750,000 active users, up from the 500,000 the company reported in July.

Gupta said the company is still at work on building a version of iSwifter to the Mac through Apple's App Store, but did not provide any additional details on when that would be. In late July the company told CNET it was taking aim at the Mac to compete with Adobe's own Flash Player plug-in, which does not ship with Apple's computers.

REDWOOD CITY, Calif.--Two men pleaded not guilty to misdemeanor theft charges in a case involving an iPhone 4 prototype the pair are accused of selling to gadget blog Gizmodo last year.

At an arraignment here this morning, lawyers for Brian Hogan, the man who allegedly found the prototype in a bar after it was left there by an Apple engineer, and Robert Sage Wallower, who is accused of that charge as well as possessing stolen property, entered their pleas before Superior Court Judge Jonathan Karesh.

Karesh scheduled a pretrial conference for October 11 and a trial date of November 28. He said that neither defendant would be required to post bail and the men could be released on their own recognizance, which is common in non-felony cases.

Jeff Bornstein, a criminal defense lawyer at K&L Gates in San Francisco who is representing Hogan, told CNET after the arraignment that he welcomed the district attorney's decision to file the charges as misdemeanors rather than felonies. That shows prosecutors are "sensitive to the facts and circumstances" of the case, he said.

The iPhone prototype in Hogan and Wallower's case shouldn't be confused with an investigation involving another unreleased iPhone. CNET reported yesterday that an employee lost control of the device at Cava22, a Mexican-themed establishment in the city's Mission District, and Apple security tracked it to a nearby home but did not find it.

Wallower, a former Navy cryptologic technician who was scheduled to graduate from University of California at Berkeley in 2010, told CNET last year in an in-person interview at his home: "I didn't see it or touch it in any manner. But I know who found it."

In early August, San Mateo County prosecutors filed misdemeanor criminal charges against the two men. They allegedly obtained the prototype iPhone 4 after Robert Gray Powell, an Apple computer engineer who was 28 years old at the time, left it in a German beer garden in Redwood City, Calif.

Prosecutors obtained a warrant to search the home of Gizmodo editor Jason Chen, and indicated they might prosecute Gizmodo, but eventually decided not to file charges.

Under a California law dating back to 1872, any person who finds lost property and knows who the owner is likely to be--but "appropriates such property to his own use"--is guilty of theft. In addition, a second state law says any person who knowingly receives property that has been obtained illegally can be imprisoned for up to one year.

Apple has begun production on an incremental upgrade for the iPad 2, presenting the possibility of the first instance of mainstream and high-end iPad models, according to an analyst.

"Apple is...expected to roll out a premium version of iPad 2--a higher resolution screen, front-/rear- facing HD cameras--in the current quarter," Ashok Kumar, an analyst at Rodman & Renshaw, wrote in a research note today. This follows similar reports about a high-end iPad in the works.

"It looks like Hon Hai is going into production with this new SKU," he said in a phone interview, citing supply chain sources.

Because Apple won't "sunset" the current iPad 2, just announced in March, it will be a model that "probably appeals to the publishing vertical and some other select segments," he said.

Wayne Lam, an analyst at IHS-iSuppli, said in an interview today it's "definitely within the realm of possibility. The true third-generation iPad would be on a yearly [timetable]. That said, I wouldn't preclude anything they could do incrementally."

Lam continued. "Anything modular that's in the device can be easily upgradeable. For example, the 3G module. Potentially they can upgrade to a 4G module. And the display. If it contains the same footprint, size, power requirements and if the OS supports higher resolution, [it's possible]," he said. iOS 5, due this fall, would need to support the upgrades, he said.