The Apple-Adobe Flash War

I've been finding it surprising why and how two technology giants would be battling so hard with each other over standards and products.

Apple might be a bit right to say that Flash is not good enough for the Mobile sector yet. But come to think of it, more than 75% of online video is in Flash, so what the heck is Apple's problem

British Scientist Trying To Get Self Infected With Computer Virus

Sure, a cybernetic-filled, dystopian future may sound nice and cheery, but what happens when all your snazzy implants get infected with a computer virus? That's what one brave researcher at the University of Reading is attempting to find out, and he's now actually gone so far as to willingly "infect" himself in the name of science. As you might expect, however, this is all this very much a proof of concept, but Dr. Mark Gasson says that the infected RFID chip in his hand was indeed able to pass on the virus to an external control device in his trials, and he warns that the eventual real world implications could be far more dire. Gasson is particularly concerned when it comes to medical implants, which he says could potentially become infected by other implants in the body, and even pass on the "infection" to other people

courtesy: BBC

Nokia N8's First Official Carrier: Vodafone

Nokia's long awaited and long expected device the N8 is probably soon going to be out and those who are so keen on getting the device now know where to look at, at least, Vodafone might as well be the first carrier with the device. Vodafone's informative coming soon page was updated today flaunting the device's features.

So come August, you know where to look

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480M: 'world's fastest' mobile GPU now official, landing in June

NVIDIA has just announced that the GTX 480M, the mobile re-spin of its extravagantly overpoweredFermi desktop parts, will be arriving in the middle of next month. Touted as the world's fastest mobile graphics processor, this chip will bring 352 CUDA cores and a 256-bit memory interface to up to 2GB of GDDR5 RAM. These are clear and convincing advances over the incumbent Green Team leader, the360M, but things start to look a little worrying when we check the 480M's clock speeds. The processor speed is nearly halved from the desktop GTX 480, at 850MHz, the memory does only 1,200MHz, and the graphics run at 425MHz -- we didn't know anything worthwhile even operated below 500MHz these days. Either way, you're getting a computing powerhouse, with the 480M's 897 gigaflops comfortably dwarfing its predecessor's 413 and promising almighty tessellation performance

Dell Streak official: exclusive to O2 UK in early June

Let's all feign surprise now, as Dell has just gone official with its worst kept, though perhaps sexiest, secret ever. The former Mini 5 has been christened the Streak and is launching at the beginning of next month. The UK will be getting the first bite at this cherry, with the rest of Europe following soon thereafter and the US a disappointingly distant third with a launch "later this summer." If you've been living under a (Round) Rock, this is Dell's big foray into the smartphone market: a 5-inch supersized Android handset, housing a 1GHz Snapdragon, a 5 megapixel cam, 16GB of built-in memory (expandable to 48GB via MicroSD) and a customized UI. Curiously, Dell's opting to market the Streak as "the ultimate portable tablet pc" and would prefer that this device, albeit fully equipped to carry out cellular calls like a phone, not be called a smartphone.

 Just like the prototype unit the device on hand was running Android 1.6 and Dell's skinning team hadn't yet laid on the goodies that we've been promised. The battery is the same 1,530mAh cell as before, and we even managed to get the browser to crash in the exact same fashion that our own Streak exhibits on occasion. Now that's consistency. We're not being told the specific Android version that the Streak will ship with, but a couple of flavors are being mulled over right now. Till we get more info, we suggest sitting back, relaxing, and perusing the gallery below for the roaring red number that's currently on show. It won't be available at launch -- you can have any color so long as it's black -- but "a range of colors and designs" will swiftly follow to sate any aesthetic concerns.

Dell Streak Official Pictures

Seagate pairs 7200RPM HDD with 4GB of NAND in 2.5-inch Momentus XT hybrid drive

So that Vu Plus we'd tipped for a June 6 release has just gone official, and needless to say, it's not your daddy's Vu. The most notable change is the addition of a landscape slider QWERTY keyboard, but one of the Vu's hallmark's -- support for AT&T's FLO-based Mobile TV service -- carries over for $9.99 a month with a free 7-day trial subscription. It's got a 3-inch capacitive touchscreen, 7.2Mbps HSDPA, a 3 megapixel autofocus cam with video recording, AT&T Video Share compatibility, and microSD expansion if the phone's internal 50MB just aren't cutting it. Look for it to hit shelves for $149.99 after a $50 mail-in rebate

This table shows the specifications of the hard drives based on the space types

Originally Posted by Engadget

Google's Playable Pac-Mac Logo Lives On

In celebration of Pac-Man's 30th anniversary, Google on Friday converted its doodle to a playable version of the arcade classic. But you knew that already. It was all anyone could talk (or tweet) about for several hours.

Due to its overwhelming popularity, Google is keeping the doodle online forever. Google.com has reverted to the standard multi-colored Google logo, but a visit to Google.com/Pacman will reveal a recreation of Friday's homepage. Click "Insert Coin" to fire up the game. Click it twice to bring up a two-player version of the game, complete with a playable Ms. Pac-Man.

"Thanks to [Pac-Man maker] NAMCO for helping to make this wonderful collaboration happen," Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience, wrote in a blog post.

This post originally appeared on AppScout.

LG Vu Plus coming to AT&T on June 6 for $150

So that Vu Plus we'd tipped for a June 6 release has just gone official, and needless to say, it's not your daddy's Vu. The most notable change is the addition of a landscape slider QWERTY keyboard, but one of the Vu's hallmark's -- support for AT&T's FLO-based Mobile TV service -- carries over for $9.99 a month with a free 7-day trial subscription. It's got a 3-inch capacitive touchscreen, 7.2Mbps HSDPA, a 3 megapixel autofocus cam with video recording, AT&T Video Share compatibility, and microSD expansion if the phone's internal 50MB just aren't cutting it. Look for it to hit shelves for $149.99 after a $50 mail-in rebate


Originally Posted by Engadget

Intel officially outs Core i3, i5 and i7 ULV processors for those ultra-thin laptops

We can't say this one is much of a surprise, but it sure is good to get the official details on Intel's latest ultra-low voltage Core i3, i5 and i7 processors. Just as we had heard, the new dual-core CPUs will be landing this June, and though they won't be replacing the current Celeron and Pentium ULVs on the market, they'll certainly provide a more powerful option for the "ultra-thin" category. All the new 32-nanometer Nehalam chips are said to provide 32 percent better performance than previous ULVs, but a 20 percent power reduction than standard-voltage Core 2010 CPUs. And just like those regular Core 2010 processors, these get the same Turbo Boost and Hyper-threading performance advantages. All the processors have TDPs of 17 watts which is what is enabling the 50 percent improvement in thermal performance. That's all the technical details Intel shared this morning, but it shouldn't be long before we up and testing the performance and battery life of these new chips in slim laptops from MSI, Lenovo andAcer

Google To Stop Street View cars from Sniffing Wireless Networks

Google has decided to stop its Street View cars from sniffing wireless networking data after an embarrassing privacy gaffe.

The company revealed Friday that Street View vehicles had been sniffing the content of users' Internet communications on open wireless networks, despite the company's earlier statements to the contrary.

Google has since discovered that it has been mistakenly collecting the content of communications from non-password-protected Wi-Fi networks, the company said in a statement posted to its blog Friday afternoon.

Google Street View cars are best known for driving around cities and logging snapshots of the area, which are then posted online and integrated with Google Maps. Google cars had been sniffing some network data -- SSID (Service Set Identifier) information and MAC (Media Access Control) addresses -- that was then used to help the company get a better fix on the locations of things in order to improve its Web products. Google had said that it wasn't sniffing other data sent over the networks, but it turned out that this wasn't true.

Google says it was all a mistake.

"In 2006 an engineer working on an experimental Wi-Fi project wrote a piece of code that sampled all categories of publicly broadcast Wi-Fi data," Google said, "A year later, when our mobile team started a project to collect basic Wi-Fi network data like SSID information and MAC addresses using Google's Street View cars, they included that code in their software -- although the project leaders did not want, and had no intention of using, payload data."

Google discovered its error after auditing its Street View Wi-Fi data at the request of the Hamburg, Germany, data protection authority.

The company will now hire a third party to audit the software that Street View used and ensure that all potentially sensitive data was deleted.

"In addition, given the concerns raised, we have decided that it's best to stop our Street View cars collecting Wi-Fi network data entirely," Google added.

Because the Street View cars are usually in motion, they probably would have recorded only snippets of information from open networks, but they could have picked up sensitive data from unencrypted Web sites, including Google's own Gmail service, which only recently started requiring encrypted (HTTPS) Web connections.

"Next week we will start offering an encrypted version of Google Search," Google said.

Google's sniffing is only a problem for people who used open, unencrypted networks. Google wouldn't have been able to log any comprehensible data from networks that used encryption technologies such as WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) or WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access).

"The engineering team at Google works hard to earn your trust," Google said. "And we are acutely aware that we failed badly here."

Apps Data Surpasses Voice Data on Mobile Networks

This was bound to happen at some point.

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Although almost 90 percent of U.S. households now have a cell phone, the amount of voice minutes consumed has stayed relatively flat. But for the first time, wireless industry association CTIA reports that the amount of data in text, e-mail messages, streaming video, music, and other apps on mobile devices in 2009 surpassed the amount of voice data in calls, according to the The New York Times.

"Originally, talking was the only cellphone application," said Dan Hesse, chief executive of Sprint Nextel, in the article. "But now it's less than half of the traffic on mobile networks." He added that within the next few years, it's possible cell phone users will pay primarily for the data they use instead of by voice minutes.

Originally posted by PCMag

Google To Stop Selling Nexus One Online

In what seems like an apparent shutdown and of its Nexus One program, Google has announced that it will stop selling the powerful android device online. Apparently, this might be a confirmation that Google isn't too good with hardware and should probably just stick with making world class software
Read more at this link

Android 2.1 upgrade for Sprint's HTC Hero leaks out

Okay, so the Moment's Android 2.1 upgrade is official -- great. But what about the Sense-powered Hero? There's no firsthand word just yet other than the promise of a Q2 release, but there is a firsthand ROM (seemingly) floating around that gives us hope we'll here something from Hesse and crew any day now. Oh, yeah, and there is the cool part about being able to just grab the binary now and get your upgrade on without waiting, if you're as brave and impatient as we tend to be around here. Let us know how it goes, folks.

Courtesy : Engadget

Windows 7 SP1 Means End of XP Downgrade rights

Last year, Microsoft Said customers who bought Windows 7 pre installed computers could downgrade to Windows XP, but only for a limited period of time. That limited period of time was either 18 months after Windows 7's release i.e April 2011 or when Windows 7 Service Pack 1 was released: whichever came first.
Last month, Microsoft announced it was working on 7 SP 1, which implies that the end is near for downgrade rights

Google Editions Bookstore to Launch This Summer

Google this week shed a bit more light on its long-rumored plans to launch its own digital book store.

The company's manager for strategic-partner development, Chris Palma, told a crowd in New York that the store was set to launch in June or July of this year. The launch of such a store would put the company in direct competition with Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and, most recently, Apple, over the emerging e-book market.

Google is set to tie the service to its book-search engine, which has been the subject of much criticism from book publishers. According to Palma, books purchased through the service will be viewable through Web browsers. The feature would make the books more or less device agnostic--Kindle, Nook, iPad, whatever.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Google has yet to decide whether it will let publishers set their own prices for the store--a source of contention between publishers and Amazon in its own e-book store.

Microsoft Releases Second IE9 Platform Preview

Last March at its MIX10 web developer conference, Microsoft unveiled Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview, a bare-bones app that showed off the company's next browser engine's improved speed using hardware acceleration and support for emerging HTML 5, CSS3, and SVG (scalable vector graphics) markup.

At the time, the company committed to releasing updates every eight weeks. On Wednesday, Microsoft has surpassed that target by one week.

The second version of Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview goes live today at ietestdrive.com, where interested testers can download its installer and take the browser out for a spin. There's still no real interface with the conveniences and security features we've come to expect in full-fledged browsers; it's really just meant for testers and developers. But according to a Microsoft spokesperson, there have been over a million downloads of Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview. Also don't expect it to work on an operating system older than Vista; because of its use of DirectX hardware acceleration, it only runs on Vista or Windows 7.The first platform preview did indeed show some impressive speed improvements, as demonstrated by code samples on ietestdrive.comand on independent benchmarks like WebKit's Sunspider JavaScript test. Wednesday's release improves on that and the site adds a few more tests and site samples.

"At PDC (Microsoft's Professional Developer Conference last November), we talked about performance, hardware acceleration, and same markup," Dean Hachamovitch, Microsoft's general manager of Internet Explorer, said in a call with PCMag.com on Tuesday. "And everyone talked about performance. At MIX (the company's Web developer conference last March), we talked about performance, hardware acceleration, and same markup, and everyone talked about hardware acceleration. This time, we're talking about performance, hardware acceleration, and same markup, and I really want same markup to come through clearly this time."

"Same markup" was clearly the mantra for this release. The premise is that Web developers should only have to write one version of their site code and expect it to run on any Web browser, particularly when it comes to CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), which is used to determine how page elements will be laid out. Past versions of IE, particularly IE6, have notoriously forced Web developers jump through hoops to get their sites to look and work as they do in other browsers, especially Firefox.

"In a nutshell," said Hachamovitch, "same markup is this crucial lynchpin for HTML 5 and for the Web to get better. Same markup means that developers can spend more of their time making the web great, and less of their time doing something special for this browser or that browser."

Hachamovitch backs up this intention, noting that as of Wednesday, Microsoft has submitted a total of 7,000 new tests to the W3C since the platform preview's release. The W3C is the official web standards body, and Microsoft has submitted thousands of tests case to the organization over the years. And Microsoft's Paul Cotton is a co-chair of the organization's HTML working group. (One question will be whether developers will find themselves needing to recode their existing Web sites with the new, universal markup.)

IE9's performance on the Acid3 test, a measure of support for browser capabilities that some developers would like to use but haven't necessarily been ratified by the W3C, has also improved. This second preview improves IE9's score to 68 out of 100, up from 55 in the first platform preview and up from a score of 20 in IE8. Acid3 was recently changed to reflect a privacy issue, with the result that the new IE9 platform preview result page looks uglier than before.

In performance, according to test numbers from Microsoft, IE9 Platform Preview 2 improves the browser's SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark performance by nearly 20 percent, from a test time of 590ms to 473ms (lower numbers are better). This still trails the performance of Opera (294ms), Chrome (371ms), and Safari (412ms), but bests Firefox 3.6 and 3.7 alpha, which comes in at 645ms. And it's far better than IE8's 3746ms.

On the HTML 5 front, Hachamovitch has made news by posting a blog entry stating that IE9 would only support H.264 as the codec for browser-based, non-plugin-requiring video. This came in the midst of the Apple-Adobe war over Flash versus HTML 5 video. The first IE9 preview did not implement this capability, and neither does today's release, but I did get Hachamovitch to confirm that this feature would be implemented in the next version of the platform preview, due in another eight weeks.

Today's release comes with a dozen or so new sample tests that show speed and standards support. CSS Media Queries are now supported as are more SVG capabilities. To try out the browser engine for yourself, download it from ietestdrive.com, and if you're a developer, look forward to a world of "same markup."

Courtesy: PC Mag

Apple Sells 1,000,000 iPads within First Month of Release

Apple Inc. today announced the sale of over 1 million units of the iPad. When it was announced, Apple C.E.O Steve Jobs claimed the product was revolutionary and it has found a way to actually establish itself as a revolutionary product.
What took the iPod 74 days to accomplish has been succesfully accomplished by the tablet PC in 28 days.
In this time frame, 1.5 million ebooks have been downloaded, 12 million apps have been sold and the company claims it's running short of supplies in some cases.
Wow, wow, woww. Big plus there from the revolutionary "Steve Jobs"

Windows 7 Enterprise 90 day Trial Available for Download

Microsoft has announced that a 90 day trial version of Windows 7 Enterprise is available for download. The trial version which is available for IT professionals who are currently managing corporate networks is strictly for evaluation and testing.
The technical sheet and download links are available at this link

Google Acquires BumpTop

Google has acquired Bump Technologies on Sunday. An announcement on Bump Top's website disclosed this.
Bump Technologies made the desktop application that gave Microsoft and Apple Computers a cool different feel and outlook.
This acquisition means the product will no longer be available for sale to Windows and Mac OS users but will be available for download throughout this week.

Microsoft Kin One and Kin Two to Go up for Preorder on May 6.

Remember those Microsoft phones targeted at the social networking tweens, the Kin One and Kin Two? We've gathered quite reliably that they are going going for preorder by May 6th (This's my birthday so you can actually get one for me) and shipping on May 13th.
Anyway, keep your fingers crossed, we'll keep you updated

Free Android Phones for Adobe Employees

Anyone following recent technology news will know about the serious rift between Apple and Adobe. So it should come as no surprise to anybody that the smartphone of choice at Adobe is not the iPhone

In what looks like a response to Steve Jobs' thoughts about Flash, Adobe is planning a full fledged demonstration of its Flash technology on Google's Android operating system at Google's I/O conference in May. Devices running this implementation are to be given out for free to some Adobe employees. Who and who gets these phones are still details we are not too sure about.
But truthfully, how would you rather demonstrate your competence than boastfully using what you claim. Thumbs up Adobe