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Hey there, here are your top news stories from eWEEK. Today’s topics include analysts’ reactions to Apple’s new iPhone X and iPhone 8; Google’s continued battle to remove malware from its Android app store; Microsoft gearing up to release “Project Honolulu” GUI tools for Windows Server; and Oracle’s second-quarter 2018 earnings surpassing projections.
After Apple unveiled its new iPhone X, iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus smartphone models last week, eWEEK reached out to a number of industry analysts, and their initial reaction was that Apple has another generation of popular devices on its hands.
The new handsets boast Apple’s latest, most powerful A11 Bionic processors; updated displays; improved cameras; and other specification boosts, which the analysts say should be enough to inspire plenty of users to upgrade.
The analysts were particularly impressed with the 10th anniversary edition iPhone X, which Patrick Moorhead, president and principal analyst of Moor Insights & Strategy, called “truly an engineering marvel.” “Apple did it their way by perfecting the experience. Even at a $999 opening price point, customers will wait in very long lines to get one,” he said.
Google’s efforts to keep its mobile app store free of malware-laden applications appear to be very much a work in progress. Last week two security vendors issued separate advisories warning of malware-infested applications on Google Play.
Check Point Software said it discovered at least 50 Android applications on the mobile app store tainted with malware dubbed ExpensiveWall, and that the malware had been downloaded between 1.2 million and 4 million times. Although Google promptly removed this batch of infected applications, Check Point said users who downloaded the apps are still at risk and need to uninstall the software.
The second advisory was from Trend Micro, which found four apps on Google Play that were infected with new versions of BankBot, a malware for stealing user credentials to online bank accounts. The malware has since been removed but not before one of the apps was downloaded between 5,000 and 10,000, the security vendor reported.
Microsoft is getting ready to release a preview of Project Honolulu, a graphical management tool set for the upcoming 1709 version of Windows Server and other editions of the operating system software. The preview will officially kick off at the Microsoft Ignite conference next week in Orlando, Fla.
Project Honolulu is a set of graphical user interface tools that bridge the gap between existing GUI tools like the Microsoft Management Console and the PowerShell command line interface and scripting language, according to Samuel Li, principal program manager lead of Windows Server at Microsoft.
Project Honolulu appears as a modern dashboard, displaying vital statistics like CPU and memory usage, disk performance and networking speeds.
Oracle’s corporate move from on-premises hardware and software to the cloud is getting more intense as the company tries to wean itself off maintaining legacy systems that are fast becoming obsolete.
The world’s largest enterprise database maker said Sept. 14 in its second-quarter 2018 earnings report that it brought in revenue of $9.2 billion, which was up 7 percent over Q1 and easily outflanks Thomson Reuters analysts’ projection of $9.02 billion.
Cloud revenue for the three-month period was up a substantial 51 percent year over year, according to the balance sheet distributed by the company. Last quarter, Oracle said it expected cloud revenue to be up 48 percent to 52 percent, so its guidance in this sector was right on the mark.