The Full Nokia N8 Review

Strap yourselves in, pilgrims. Nokia's next great handset has resurfaced in London today, and this time we were even allowed to turn it on. There's pretty much no way you could be unaware of the N8 by now -- Nokia's done the viral video thing, the teaser demo thing, the feature walkthrough thing, we've covered it to near-exhaustion. But we've never seen it, you know, doing stuff. You can now consider that omission corrected, as we've finally powered up the 3.5-inch OLED screen, entered the overhauled Symbian^3 wonderland, and come back to tell the tale. In-depth impressions and video after the break

Well, now we know why Nokia didn't let us see this thing working back when we first encountered it a month ago. The software is still extremely fragile and apps seemed to believe crashing randomly was part of their runtime. Maybe it's just a very aggressive power management feature?

All joshing aside, the N8 remains an unfinished product on the OS front and we remain wary of passing final judgment until the bugs and crashes have been cleaned up. What we can say so far is that hardware remains the major attraction here, with highly impressive camera and video functionality, healthy battery life, that svelte anodized aluminum body, and a 640 x 360 3.5-inch OLED screen. The latter comes with the usual disclaimer that OLED displays aren't as useful in direct sunlight

Nokia threw together the a demo video to demonstrate the N8's recording capabilities and HDMI-out playback. It illustrates the phone's stereo mics minimizing wind and traffic noise while emphasizing the birds chirping nearby and the girl's voice. There's no getting around it, this phone is indeed a terrific performer when it comes to video, and a 30-second clip we recorded took no longer than a couple of seconds to process and return us to a position where we were ready to film again. The camera is similarly snappy (we had to do it), with Nokia claiming a half-second delay between shots. Our unscientific experience seemed to corroborate the claim. That says a lot about the processing power encased within the N8, but Nokia also notes that this handset has the biggest sensor that's yet been integrated in a phone. The 1/1.183-inch imager might be the biggest physically, with Nokia echoing Apple's contention that it's all about getting those photons on the biggest possible pixels, but we wonder if output quality wouldn't have been even better served by a less ambitious pixel count. Photos looked pretty spectacular on the N8's own screen, but then most phones manage that pretty well these days -- even stretching them on an HDTV doesn't provide enough of a test as a 1080p display is still nowhere near a dozen megapixels in resolution, so we'll retain our skepticism on quality until we see the N8's pictures in their glorious full size.

What else is there to this phone, you ask? Well, we prodded Nokia on the key advantages of Symbian^3, and they seemed to be threefold: ease of use, speed, and familiarity. Can't say we care much for the latter, but Nokia believes that retaining some themes from earlier versions of the OS will allow long-term users to easily slide into the new touch-centric experience. Speaking of which, the ease of use advocated here revolves around the capacitive touchscreen, its increased sensitivity, and a related minimization of "are you sure you want to do X?" prompts. For our money, aside from getting crash reports and WiFi alerts every other minute, this was certainly true enough. All the long-press edit and submenu options really do make it easy to customize things on the fly, and menus are laid out in a sensible and intuitive manner.

We had some issues with the screen failing to recognize our taps, and although this can be put down to software again, our feeling is that on occasion the OS expects you to be too precise. There are too many instances where we are required to click a sliver of text instead of a boxier and more finger-friendly item as one might find on other touchscreen devices.

You'll already be familiar with the central UI concept of three home screens with up to six widgets per screen, and though that hasn't changed, we found it reassuringly flexible and capable of operating in portrait mode. Earlier demonstrations showed it in landscape, but the widgets rearrange themselves well enough when you flip the phone vertically. An additional menu contains your other apps, but we imagine most people will install their most used utilities -- things like Facebook, the media player, email and the like -- on the home screens and avoid entering the menus for the most part.

Multitasking was another big feature touted by Nokia and it deserves to be. Described as the proper, full fat variety, it's implemented pretty darn well here, with a visual interface showing you both a preview of what's running and a nice big X to kill any apps you no longer require. It's also logically done in terms of how you choose which apps to kill and which to keep running in the background. If you are entirely finished with an app, you can hit the soft Exit button and kill it, or if you want to have it hang around, you just hit the physical home button at bottom and it remains running in the background. Nokia's reps tell us they've had up to a dozen apps running at a time, which indicates it'd be plenty capable for most workloads. What that does to battery longevity, however, remains to be seen. We're just happy to see an instantly accessible and intuitive task manager. Don't freak out, we don't think Nokia blew it at all. We like this stuff.

Two-way sync is available for your email, with filtering on tap by sender, date, email account, etc. You can have a unified inbox or separate them out, depending on what you like, and the whole thing generally looked like a well thought out affair. Notifications for incoming mail and messages find their way onto your home screen by virtue of a widget. Messaging is threaded, though we had a little scare when we saw a 12-button soft keyboard with the phone in portrait mode -- it seems like you'll only get the full QWERTY keypad when in landscape.




This Article Was Originally Posted At Engadget

Best Buy announces official iPhone 4 pre-sale for June 15th

Best Buy's just dropped the official details on its iPhone 4 pre-sale, and there are no surprises here. You'll be able to head over to any Best Buy starting tomorrow (that's June 15th) and pre-order up Apple's latest offering for delivery on June 24th. That's the same date Apple gave us so like we said -- no surprises here -- but you can hit up the full press release below if you're into that sort of thing.

Apple's HTML5 Promotion May Backfire

Given all the hype, it's easy to forget that HTML5 is not yet a finalized Web standard. That hasn't stopped Apple from posting a site featuring demonstrations of various capabilities of HTML5 and its related technologies, including CSS3. The catch? As long as HTML5 and CSS3 remain draft specifications, you'll need Apple's Safari browser to view any of the demos.
The move has angered many in the Web standards community who claim Apple's campaign actually undermines the very thing it claims to support: free and open Web standards. In a heated blog post, Mozilla evangelist Christopher Blizzard blasted Apple for being "not intellectually honest" in its marketing, by making it sound as if only Safari supports HTML5 today.


Apple has stepped up its promotion of HTML5 in recent weeks, offering the forthcoming standard as an alternative to the multimedia capabilities of Adobe's Flash plug-in, which Apple refuses to support on its iPhone and iPad devices. But according to Blizzard, "The most important aspect of HTML5 isn't the new stuff like video and canvas (which Safari and Firefox have both been shipping for years) it's actually the honest-to-God promise of interoperability." By creating HTML5 pages that can only be viewed in one browser, he says, Apple is doing the entire Web standards movement a disservice.

Return to the bad old daysMany of Apple's demos rely on "experimental" CSS3 properties to work. The exact implementation of these properties has yet to be hammered out, so browser vendors must use their best guess to determine how they should be rendered onscreen. Because of the ambiguity this introduces, it is the custom for browser vendors to attach a vendor-specific prefix to the CSS property names. Firefox uses "moz," while Safari uses "webkit," named for the browser's WebKit rendering engine.
This means Web developers who want to use a specific experimental CSS feature must include the vendor-specific properties for each browser they want to support in their style sheets. It's a less than ideal situation, but the actual coding required is trivial. Apple chose not to bother for its HTML5 demo site.
That would be bad enough. But Apple's demos don't work on Google's Chrome browser, either -- and Chrome also uses the "webkit" prefix for its experimental CSS3 properties (because it's also based on the WebKit rendering engine). Rather than detecting browser capabilities and degrading the user experience gracefully where features aren't supported -- as is the accepted best practice on modern browsers -- Apple chose to deliberately screen out any browser that doesn't self-identify as Safari.
That's right: By forcing my browser's user agent string to identify as Safari 5, I was able to view many of the demos just fine in Firefox 3.6 on Windows. Seriously, Apple? I thought we left elaborate browser-detection scripts behind in the bad old days of the 1990s. I can't imagine anyone would want to start up the practice again, let alone one of the leading companies in the development of next-generation Web standards.
Browser vendors knock headsBut then, if Apple chooses to offer its demos only to users of its own products, is that really such a bad thing? Competition seems to have done a lot for the browser market in the last few years. For example, JavaScript performance -- once seen as almost an afterthought -- has improved by leaps and bounds since Google entered the market with Chrome. One could argue that competitive pressures are the very reason HTML5 has come this far, this soon.
Blizzard's criticisms of Apple come not long after Firefox project co-founder Blake Ross publicly worried whether Firefox was falling behind in the new Browser Wars. "I think the Mozilla organization has gradually reverted back to its old ways of being too timid, passive, and consensus-driven to release breakthrough products quickly," he wrote.
That's an accusation that could once have been leveled at Microsoft, whose standards-challenged Internet Explorer 6 has been a thorn in Web developers' sides for years now. But even Microsoft seems to have woken up to the idea that it can no longer rest on its laurels in the browser market.
What's more, not everyone at Mozilla thinks directing users to specific browsers is necessarily a bad thing. When Google released its Chrome Frame plug-in for Internet Explorer, many at Mozilla warned that the plug-in disrupted the browser's delicate security model. "It would be better for the Web if developers who want to use the Chrome Frame snippet simply told users that their site worked better in Chrome and instructed them on how to install it," wrote Mike Shaver, Mozilla's vice president of engineering. In other words, Google and Chrome fans should have done more or less what Apple is doing on its HTML5 demo site now.
Don't jump the gunIt's not surprising to see browser vendors move aggressively to support HTML5, CSS3, and other up-and-coming Web standards. After all, these same companies have been the driving force behind the creation of those standards. Some voices, such as Facebook's Joe Hewitt, even argue that the adoption rate of new browser technologies is still too slow. "Browser makers need to go nuts with non-standard APIs and let the W3C standardize later," Hewitt wrote on Twitter in April. "Waiting for the committee to innovate is suicide."
Equally deadly, however, would be for major vendors to abandon a genuine standardization effort now in the interest of self-promotion or furthering a specific company agenda. Impressive though they may be, Apple's demos should rightly be called "Safari technology demos" or something similar. Right now, they're specifically designed to shut out browsers from other vendors. Not only is that not real HTML5, it's not even in keeping with the spirit of the open Web.

Those who are too eager to see Apple or any other company steer the HTML5 effort in one direction should remember the lesson of XHTML2, HTML5's predecessor at the W3C. That effort stagnated when the committee members couldn't reach consensus and has since been abandoned. XHTML2 stands as a cautionary tale that no matter how badly new Web standards may be needed, they are not inevitable. Standardization is an arduous process, but a critical one for the future of the Web. Apple and other Web vendors should stay the course -- and play nice. It would be a shame if, after all the hype surrounding HTML5, the real winners in this race were Flash and Silverlight

This article, "Apple's HTML5 promotion may backfire," originally appeared atInfoWorld.com.

Financial Times: US antitrust regulators plan to investigate Apple's mobile advertising practices

There's not a lot of details on this at the moment, but the Financial Times is reporting that US antitrust regulators plan to investigate Apple's mobile advertising practices to see whether they unfairly restrict rivals like Google and Microsoft. As you'll recall, Apple recently revised its rules on outside advertisers and, specifically, their ability to collect analytics on ads for the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch, effectively cutting out Google's AdMob in the process -- something the company's CEO has publicly complained about. What's next? That's still not certain -- the Financial Times says that while US regulators have taken an interest, it's still not clear whether the FTC or the Department of Justice will handle the investigation going forward

How-to: check your iPhone 4 upgrade eligibility

AT&T's made it pretty clear how this upgrade sitch is going to go down for existing customers moving to an iPhone 4 on the 24th of the month, but if you want to double-check and make sure you're good to go (we can't blame you), there's an easy way that was briefly mentioned yesterday: dial *639# on your current phone. You'll be returned a text message from AT&T detailing your situation -- either you'll be told you can get a full upgrade price (meaning $199 / $299 for the 16GB and 32GB, respectively) or you'll be eligible at some particular date in the future. Not all's lost in the latter case -- you can still pay $200 more for the phone as an "early upgrade," which is less than the no-commitment price of $599 / $699.

Apple's Worst Security Breach: 114,000 iPad Owners Exposed

Apple has suffered another embarrassment. A security breach has exposed iPad owners including dozens of CEOs, military officials, and top politicians. They—and every other buyer of the cellular-enabled tablet—could be vulnerable to spam marketing and malicious hacking.


The breach, which comes just weeks after an Apple employee lost an iPhone prototype in a bar, exposed the most exclusive email list on the planet, a collection of early-adopter iPad 3G subscribers that includes thousands of A-listers in finance, politics and media, from New York Times Co. CEO Janet Robinson to Diane Sawyer of ABC News to film mogul Harvey Weinstein to Mayor Michael Bloomberg. It even appears that White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel's information was compromised.

The specific information exposed in the breach included subscribers' email addresses, coupled with an associated ID used to authenticate the subscriber on AT&T's network, known as the ICC-ID. ICC-ID stands for integrated circuit card identifier and is used to identify the SIM cards that associate a mobile device with a particular subscriber.

The subscriber data was obtained by a group calling itself Goatse Security. Though the group is steeped in off-the-wall, 4chan-style internet culture—its name is a reference to a famous gross-out Web picture—it has previously highlighted real security vulnerabilities in the Firefox and Safari Web browsers, and attracted media attention for finding what it said were flaws in Amazon's community ratings system.

Goatse Security obtained its data through a script on AT&T's website, accessible to anyone on the internet. When provided with an ICC-ID as part of an HTTP request, the script would return the associated email address, in what was apparently intended to be an AJAX-style response within a Web application. The security researchers were able to guess a large swath of ICC IDs by looking at known iPad 3G ICC IDs, some of which are shown in pictures posted by gadget enthusiasts to Flickr and other internet sites, and which can also be obtained through friendly associates who own iPads and are willing to share their information, available within the iPad "Settings" application.

Some of the Military Accounts that were compromised

Within the tech industry, accounts were compromised at Google, Amazon, Microsoft and AOL, among others. In finance, accounts belonged to companies from Goldman Sachs to JP Morgan to Citigroup to Morgan Stanley, along with dozens of venture capital and private equity firms.

In government, affected accounts included a GMail user who appears to be Rahm Emanuel and staffers in the Senate, House of Representatives, Department of Justice, NASA, Department of Homeland Security, FAA, FCC, and National Institute of Health, among others. Dozens of employees of the federal court system also appeared on the list.

Turns out Apple shouldn't be the first to tout anybody about security issues

Courtesy: Gawker

Apple Magic Trackpad

Of all the surprises we expected to hear about in the WWDC keynote, a multitouch trackpad peripheral didn't exactly pop into our brains. But -- whoomp -- here it is. What we appear to be looking at is a brand new input device that Apple has dreamed up which connects to desktops (and laptops, if you like) via Bluetooth, much like the Apple Keyboard. If you take what you see in the photos at face value, it would seem that the folks in Cupertino are making a play for finger-based input in a big way -- taking the work they've done on Mac laptops and the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad, and translating it to the desktop realm. This weirdly lines up perfectly with rumors from earlier in the year, emanating from both John Gruber (of Daring Fireball fame), and MacRumors -- the former reporting that Apple was set to release a "Mentioned-Nowhere-Else-But-in-This-Very-Headline Multi-Touch Trackpad Gadget for Desktop Macs," and the latter taking notice of an Apple trademark application for the "Magic Trackpad." It certainly all makes sense given that the company has made not-so-subtle moves away from standard input devices to finger-friendly options in many, many of its recent products. Whatever the case may be, we're potentially just hours away from the truth, so feast your eyes on the photos, and get ready for the big reveal.

Update: New images received with a claim that the device supports handwriting recognition in addition to "every feature you can find on a Magic Mouse (and possibly features of a MacBook Pro trackpad)." This, from a person who claims to be personally testing it. Something we hope to do for ourselves before the day is through.

Courtesy: ENGADGET

This Nokia Phone Got Burnt and It Still WORKS !

Funny as it may sound, this NOKIA 1600 mobile phone, got burnt when Eric had a fire in his room by accident, the phone was in a bag that got burnt and it still works. The Nokia 1600 phone as silly as it may sound still makes and receives calls with communications heard loud and clear. Initially, would have thought this was a hoax, but looking at more pictures from where this was found, a critical look shows the phone book button, contacts list and messaging menu in different shots. 

Hit THIS SOURCE LINK for more pictures of the phone and THIS LINK for the story of how the phone got burnt

Motorola Announces Milestone XT720: 8 megapixel cam, 720p video, and Droid heritage

Motorola has just announced a Europe-bound Milestone XT720, a handset intended to grab the attention of camera lovers with an 8 megapixel sensor, 720p / 24fps video and -- a first of it's kind for Android phones -- a xenon flash. The Android version expected on this device will be version 2.1 when it launches later this month. Plans for 2.2 upgrades are, as usual, not yet formalized and not under discussion. Other specs include a 3.7-inch, 480 x 854 screen, a 550MHz ARM Cortex A8 CPU, and a promised 9 hours of talk time and 320 hours of standby time. It looks very much like Moto's selection of Droid-esque handsets that have been prowling the Chinese market, and it seems the company has enjoyed success with the keyboard-less form factor and is pushing it out to Europe. US release plans are also not being discussed -- it might happen and it might not, seems to us like it'll depend on the Euros' reaction. 

Michael Dell Considered Taking Dell Private

Reuters) - Dell Inc's Michael Dell revealed on Thursday he had once considered taking the company he founded private, sending shares in the No. 3 PC maker surging as much as 6.4 percent.

The comment caused the stock to spike a half-hour before the market's close on speculation about a buyout premium, but analysts said many pieces would have to fall in place for such a deal to happen.

Kaufman Bros analyst Shaw Wu said Dell going private was not out of the question, but said it would take plenty of outside financing and would not change the company's structural problems or necessarily improve its ability to compete with the likes of Hewlett-Packard Co and Apple Inc.

"It's possible, but it would require a lot of funding. They would probably need private equity and some other financing," he said.

Steve Jobs' WWDC keynote live on this Monday, 10AM PT / 1PM ET!

It's WWDC 2010 time, and Apple CEO will be delivering his keynote speech on Monday. Wheteher or not Apple is introducing another killer phone, Gizmodo wrapped up a fake or not will be decided when Mr Jobs takes the center stage to deliver his own keynote address. 

Engadget will be covering the event live and you can opt in to the live stream at This Link

The Keynote will start at 10.00 AM PT on Monday 7th June. Till then, i bet you'll wanna keep your fingers crossed

Apple Sells 2 Million iPads

Apple has just trotted out its latest sales milestone for the iPad: two million devices have now been sold since the slate's launch on April 3.That's quite impressive considering the device's lack of Flash support and non-widescreen and high definition support.

Director: Firefox 4 will be 'fast, powerful'

The next version of Firefox will be a faster, more powerful Web experience, the browser's director says.
In a presentation to Firefox developers, Mozilla's Mike Beltzner said that the planned version 3.7 of the browser will now become Firefox 4.0 - a revamp clearly designed to close ground on Microsoft's Internet Explorer and stay ahead of competitors like Google's upstart Chrome.
"Usually software producers don’t present these sorts of plans in public until they’re finalized, but Mozilla is a little different," Beltzner wrote on his blog Monday. "We work in the open, socializing our plans early and often to gather feedback and build excitement in our worldwide community."
In a presentation Beltzner posted on his Slideshare page, he said the new default theme for Firefox will be simpler, with fewer controls needed to navigate and fewer pixels on the page to improve the speed of searches.
Firefox 4 also will let users store their passwords and settings for the websites they visit most, Beltzner said. It also will be possible to install add-ons - a popular developer activity on Mozilla's open-source browser - without having to restart.
Version 4.0 also will be optimized for HTML5 - the emerging language expected to be used for most web coding in the future - and other new technologies. It will have more personalization and developer tools and tighter security settings, according to Beltzner.
He said Mozilla plans to release Firefox 4.0 late this year - likely October or November - but stressed that the timeline is apt to change.
"As with past releases, we use dates to set targets for milestones, and then we work together to track to those targets," he said in the blog. "We always judge each milestone release against our basic criteria of quality, performance, and usability, and we only ship when it’s ready."

Courtesy: CNN

Hitachi Creates 320GB world's Fastest 7mm Hard Disk Drive

Slim beauty: 320GB

Check that out: all that glory with 320 GB. This super slim hard disk drive from Hitachi sports a 320 GB capacity spinning at 7,200 RPM. The 2.5 inch Serial ATA 3Gbps Travelstar Z7K320 features a 1,334Mbps max transfer rate assisted by a 16MB cache. The HDD draws 1.8 watts during read/write operations and 0.8 watts on lower-power idle while humming along at 23dB when idle or 24dB when seeking. This slim beauty's 7mm form factor means it will go places the general 9.5mm hard disks will never dream of.