A solar-powered airplane finished crossing the United States on Saturday, landing in New York City after flying over the Statue of Liberty during its historic bid to circle the globe, the project team said. The spindly, single-seat experimental aircraft, dubbed Solar Impulse 2, arrived at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport at about 4 a.m. local time after it took off about five hours beforehand at Lehigh Valley International Airport in Pennsylvania, the team reported on the airplane's website. Such a pleasure to land in New York! For the 14th time we celebrate sustainability," said the project's co-founder Andre Borschberg on Twitter after flying over the city and the Statue of Liberty during the 14th leg of the trip around the globe. The Swiss team flying the aircraft in a campaign to build support for clean energy technologies hopes eventually to complete its circumnavigation in Abu Dhabi, where the journey began in March 2015. The solar cr...
The company said it wanted to focus development "on the mobile platforms the vast majority of people use". Facebook-owned WhatsApp, which is used by a billion people worldwide, will stop working on the named operating systems by December 2016. But it will still work on Blackberry's latest smartphone which runs Android.Most of the operating systems that WhatsApp is dropping support for are legacy operating systems, which are no longer updated or installed on new devices. The exception is Blackberry 10, which was launched in January 2013 and is still being developed by Blackberry.
However, the operating system has failed to gain traction with smartphone users and now accounts for less than 1% of the market. There had been speculation that the handset-maker would wind down support for Blackberry 10 after it released a smartphone running Android, and closed its "Built for Blackberry" programme for app developers. But the company told the BBC: "BlackBerry is committed to our BlackBerry 10 operating system, and we work closely with developers to create and deploy solutions to bring apps to our consumer and enterprise fans. "While the app landscape continues to evolve, our commitment to BlackBerry 10 and our developers is unwavering. "We are actively exploring alternatives for BlackBerry users once support of WhatsApp Messenger for BBOS and BlackBerry 10 ends in late 2016."
The full list of operating systems WhatsApp will stop supporting is:
- Android 2.1 and Android 2.2
- Blackberry OS 7 and earlier
- Blackberry 10
- Nokia S40
- Nokia Symbian S60
- Windows Phone 7.1
"While these mobile devices have been an important part of our story, they don't offer the kind of capabilities we need to expand our app's features in the future,"WhatsApp said in a blogpost.
"When we started WhatsApp in 2009... about 70 percent of smartphones sold at the time had operating systems offered by BlackBerry and Nokia."
The firm said mobile operating systems offered by Google, Apple and Microsoft accounted for 99.5% of sales today.
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