GADGET REVIEWS Just another GADGET NEWS

Google’s iPhone app just went from sometimes-handy curiosity to super search-tool. Finally, almost a year after it appeared on the Android version, Google Mobile App has Goggles.

Google Goggles uses the world before you as a search-term. Hold up the iPhone, point the camera at something and Google will tell you what it is. It works for landmarks, books, logos, pretty much anything easily recognizable. What it doesn’t work with, according to the Google Mobile blog, is “animals, plants or food.” This video, featuring a 3D-glasses-wearing Brit, explains it all quite nicely.

The app needs an autofocus camera to work, so it’ll only offer Goggles on the iPhones 3G and 4. I do wonder why it has taken so long for such a useful feature to make it to the iPhone – Goggles launched on Android last December. Perhaps this, like the recent approval of Google Voice apps, has something to do with the relaxing of Apple’s App store rules? The app is available now, and is free.

Google Goggles now available on iPhone in Google Mobile App [Google]

Google Mobile App [iTunes]

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Microsoft is scheduled to announce its first line of Windows Phone 7 products in a New York press conference next week.

Reporters this morning received an invitation to an Oct. 11 event, where Microsoft will announce which carriers and manufacturers will be making and selling handsets based on Microsoft’s next mobile operating system. The company will also preview the first line of Windows Phone 7 hardware.

It’s evident that AT&T is on board as one of the carriers. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and AT&T CEO Ralph de la Vega will be jointly hosting the conference to discuss the latest developments of Windows Phone 7, according to the press invite.

Despite Engadget’s report that T-Mobile will be a highlight of the Microsoft press conference, a Microsoft spokeswoman said T-Mobile is holding a separate press conference on Oct. 11 that is not part of the Microsoft conference. She declined to comment on whether T-Mobile would be among initial carrier partners offering Windows Phone 7.

Windows Phone 7 is Microsoft’s complete do-over of its mobile operating system previously dubbed Windows Mobile. Microsoft established an early lead on mobility with its older mobile operating system, but in recent years the company has suffered substantial losses in market share. Windows Mobile hasn’t been upgraded substantially in several years, and more user-friendly competitors such as Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android OS have taken market share away from Microsoft. As a result, Microsoft scrapped the Windows Mobile project and redid the entire OS into a tile-based interface incorporating elements of the Zune media player and Xbox Live gaming.

Microsoft is also tackling its competitors on the patent front. On Friday, the Redmond company sued Motorola over alleged patent infringement in its Android phones, covering features such as “synchronizing email, calendars and contacts, scheduling meetings, and notifying applications of changes in signal strength and battery power.” And in an interview in the Wall Street Journal Monday, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says that Android sales will generate licensing fees for Microsoft.

Though the company will announce details about Windows Phone 7 at the Oct. 11 conference, multiple reports have claimed that the official shipping date of the first Windows Phone 7 devices is Nov. 8. Wired.com has heard the same date from sources familiar with the project.

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

The green Android mascot is now a walking robot and a recursive one at that–it is powered by the Android operating system.

Two Japanese companies, RT Corporation and Brilliant Service, created a humanoid robot called “RIC” to show Android is not just for smartphones and tablet computers. The robot, which took about 60 days to build, is about 4 -feet tall.

The Android robot made its debut at the Google developer day in Tokyo earlier this week and as you can see in the video above, it is a delightfully cute machine.

The Android Droid uses an Armadillo 500 FX embedded hardware chipset and communicates via Wi-Fi with an Android cellphone or tablet. The robot can swing its arms and move it to the left and right. The top of its head can also be opened to show the brains of the device.

RT Corp created the body of the robot and did the system integration and testing, while Brilliant Service developed the robot controller software and applications necessary to operate the machine, says Robot-Dreams, a site which has posted detailed pictures. There’s no word though on what version of Android the robot is running.

Check out the video below to see a quick snapshot of the building process.

The Android robot is fun and a great way to show the possibilities and potential of the operating system. It’s also a bit of a gimmick since the OS isn’t designed for such machines. Still it’s interesting to see developers find ways to go beyond Google approved devices for Android.

[via Engadget]

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

A stream of new Android smartphones have helped the Google designed operating system gain market share while rivals such as Apple and BlackBerry maker Research In Motion lost points, according to the latest mobile subscriber report from analytics company comScore.

Among smartphone platforms, Android OS grew to 17 percent share between May and July from 12 percent at the end of April. During the same period, RIM and Apple lost about 1.3 percent share.

The good news for RIM, though, is that it continues to lead among smartphone platforms with 39.9 percent market share, while Apple is firmly in the second place with 23.8 percent share. Microsoft’s Windows Mobile accounted for 11.8 percent of smartphone subscribers, while Palm rounded out the top five with 4.9 percent.

Androids growth has been powered by a slew of new handsets that have launched in the last few months. HTC’s EVO 4G debuted on Sprint in June. A few weeks later, Motorola introduced its second generation Droid and Droid X on the Verizon Wireless network. Meanwhile, Samsung launched its Galaxy S range of smartphones. Last month, Samsung said it has shipped more than one million Galaxy S phones in 45 days since the devices hit retail stores in mid-July.

More than 20 Android phones are available in the U.S. currently.

Despite losing share to Google Android, most smartphone platforms continue to gain subscribers as the smartphone market overall continues to grow, says comScore.

Among all mobile handset manufacturers–including both smartphones and feature phones–Samsung ranked at the the top with 23.1 percent market share in the U.S. At the end of July, 234 million Americans used mobile devices. Of these, 53.4 million people have smartphones, up 11 percent from the end of April, says comScore.

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Alternate MS Office icons by talwayseb, via CrystalXP.net

Microsoft is a giant company working in many different fields, but in the consumer market, apart from XBox, it does one thing really well: software. After some high-profile, quickly-aborted misadventures in mobile, that’s what it’s going to focus on from now on.

Microsoft’s Tivanka Ellawala told the WSJ that the company’s done with smartphone hardware (beyond in-house prototypes, presumably): We are in the software business and that is where our business will be focused,” he said. That means no follow-ups to the Kin social media smartphone, definitely; no resuscitation of the Courier e-reader/tablet project, probably; and a new focus on making apps for other platforms, quite possibly.

What kinds of platforms? I don’t know — how about the iPad?

On Wednesday, Microsoft blogger Paul Thurrott confirmed the rumors on Twitter: “Shhh…. It’s true: Microsoft is working on iPad apps.” Makes perfect sense to me:

• Microsoft was never fully behind smartphone/tablet hardware;
• Its mobile OS is battling stiff competition on all sides;
• They’ve always been a multi-platform company;
• And, um, they’ve already got apps on the iPhone. (Bing. For now.)

So besides search, what are we talking about here? Microsoft Office? (Which, remember, includes a LOT of apps, not just Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.) Games? Messenger? Frontend clients for Windows Live? Specialized applications for enterprise clients? Virtual PC, to mix it up with VMWare’s anticipated virtualization apps? No one knows.

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Skyhook SpotRank, from Skyhookwireless.com

It’s well-known that telecoms selling Android devices are disabling built-in services and loading the machines up with carrier-approved bloatware. A new lawsuit alleges that Google itself is doing the same thing with their own software services.

Skyhook Wireless — the company that innovated geolocation services using radio signals from cellphone towers in lieu of GPS — has filed patent-infringement and unfair trade practices complaints against Google, which has its own competing location service bundled within Android OS. According to Skyhook’s complaint:

On information and belief, Google has notified OEMs that they will need to use Google Location Service, either as a condition of the Android OS-OEM contract or as a condition of the Google Apps contract between Google and each OEM. Though Google claims the Android OS is open source, by requiring OEMs to use Google Location Service, an application that is inextricably bundled with the OS level framework, Google is effectively creating a closed system with respect to location positioning. Googles manipulation suggests that the true purpose of Android is, or has become, to ensure that no industry player can restrict or control the innovations of any other, unless it is Google.

In other words, Google is leveraging its OS market share to push its own affiliated products and snuff out competitors — kind of like Microsoft did with Internet Explorer on Windows 15 years ago. Yikes.

PDF: Skyhook-Google Complaint and Jury Demand [Daring Fireball]
Then Welcome to Android [Daring Fireball]

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Tensions seem to rise between Apple and Google every time they launch a phone or acquire a new media company, but the real battle is happening in a wonkier arena: telecom.

That’s what Elia Freedman, CEO of Infinitiy Softworks, argues in his intriguing piece “Fighting the Wrong Fight,” featured in today’s Tweet of the Day.Freedman tweeted: “This is critical. We’ve been distracted by Apple v. Google. But that’s not the real fight, one for the soul of mobile: http://bit.ly/9ZI5LI.”

In his post, Freedman enumerates examples illustrating that the experience you get on your phone ultimately boils down to what carriers such as AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile want you to have. He’s right.

Ever wonder why the iPhone doesn’t have free tethering? Or why some Android devices are shipping with bloatware? These were decisions imposed by carriers, who are fighting to regain control of their industry in the aftermath of the iPhone revolution.

As Wired’s Fred Vogelstein originally reported in his bombshell 2008 piece “How the iPhone blew up the wireless industry,” Steve Jobs transformed the wireless game by convincing AT&T to carry Apple’s phone without even seeing it. That sly move resulted in a phone that Apple was able to design for customers to enjoy rather than for carriers to make boatloads of money. After the iPhone became a blockbuster hit, the rest of the wireless industry was forced to offer competitive products tailored to a rich customer experience.

However, carriers didn’t simply wuss out. As Vogelstein revealed in a followup piece, the relationship between Apple and AT&T has since turned dysfunctional. In one incident, Apple was pushing for AT&T to include tethering as a free service as part of its unlimited data plan, but AT&T wouldn’t allow it without incurring a fee. The two companies were arguing over this matter in late 2008, and only recently did tethering finally become available for iPhone customers for an additional monthly cost, just like AT&T wanted.

And as large and influential as Google may be, the search giant appears to have ceded control to carriers in light of its recent joint proposal with Verizon regarding net neutrality (as Wired.com’s Ryan Singel summarizes poignantly in his piece “Why Google became a carrier-humping, net neutrality surrender monkey“).

Now is indeed a time for concern. While companies like Apple, Google, HTC, Research In Motion and Nokia appear to be the gods delivering our products, it’s the carrier overlords who possess the keys to the broadband fueling our mobile experiences.

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

T-Mobile has announced the G2, the successor to the very first Android phone, the G1. The new handset loses the famous “chin” of the original, adds fast HSPA+ data and integrates Google Voice.

With so many Android handsets either blocking or replacing Google services on the “open” Google-owned operating system, it’s nice to see an Android phone as Googly as this one. In addition to Google Voice, there is Google Goggles, voice control and all the usual Google services like Gmail, maps and YouTube. All this, as you’d expect, runs on Android 2.2 Froyo and the T-Mobile press-release promises an “Adobe FlashPlayer enabled Web browsing experience” (read: stuttering video playback and reduced battery-life).

As for hardware, the CPU is an 800MHz Snapdragon and the phone will offer “4G speeds” via T-Mobile’s new HSPA+ network, if you can get it. A keyboard flips from behind the screen for a full, landscape-oriented QWERTY hardware experience, and the screen is a large 3.7-inch multitouch one.

Finally, there’s a 5MP camera with LED light, and the handset comes with 4GB memory and a microSD slot, in which you will find an 8GB card pre-loaded.

If you want the full, unfettered Googlephone experience, without weird carrier restrictions (apart from the coverage restrictions of T-Mobile, we guess) then this might just be the Android phone to go for. It has a plain and handsome design and while the computer inside isn’t the fastest, it is more than competent.

Availability and pricing have yet to be announced, but existing T-Mobile customers will get first bite “later this month.”

G2 product page [T-Mobile]

G2 press release [T-Mobile]

Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Google unveiled its new Instant search feature, which autoloads search results as you type. I’m skeptical about claims that it will save fifty kajillion man-hours once you add up all the milliseconds saved. Its real use cases are still on the way: local, mobile, and video search.

Part of the inherent silliness of doing a Google Instant search on the wide-open web is the sheer size and heterogeneity of the data sets you’re working with. Google has no idea whether you’re looking for a quote, a movie title, a blog, a government site, or a string of text you remember sticking into a doc file months ago. So it spits out a similarly wild range of results.

Now let’s suppose we narrow that data set. Suppose I’m not looking at every string of text on the web, but for movie or television titles on the new Google TV.

Now, when I begin to enter text, Google will have a much better idea of what I’m looking for. In fact, it might actually be able to give me what I’m looking for even when I don’t know what that is.

The key to the next generation of TV is likely to be search, and the biggest drag on search is going to be text entry. This isn’t your laptop; people are going to be banging out text on remotes and mini-keyboards in bad light. Anything a company can do to minimize the number of keystrokes and make that process as painless as possible is going to be a tremendous usability boon to its customers.

If Google TV is really going to be the “one screen to rule them all,” it has to solve that problem.

Suppose I’m looking for a movie I saw years ago. I can’t remember anything about it except it was an action movie and that I think the word “China” was in the title. IMDB.com might be able to tell me the title and the year, but I’d have to click on each one, then click again to find the plot synopsis, just to discover that it wasn’t the movie I was looking for.

Instead I might type “C-h-i” into a future Google product — let’s call it Instant Movie Search — quickly discard all the variations on “Chicago,” and get to “China.” I know I don’t want “Chinatown” or “The China Syndrome.” In the sidebar, I see that I can narrow it by “Action/Adventure.” Perfect. And there it is: “Big Trouble In Little China.” It shows me a movie poster thumbnail, a short synopsis and a cast list — even before I click on the title! Then I can go ahead and queue it up.

Instead of drilling down and back out through dozens of pages, I’ve typed five characters and clicked one menu link. Not only did I find what I was looking for, I knew that it was what I was looking for with a high degree of confidence before ever clicking on the link — indeed, before I ever glanced at the title. As soon as I saw that poster of Kurt Russell and Kim Cattrall out of the corner of my eye, I knew that was the movie I wanted.

Gmail already does this with contacts, and it’s a big time saver. Now extend that concept to a half-dozen other forms of local search: Google Books, Google Scholar, Froogle, Desktop, News, Reader, Apps. Imagine it in all of Google’s local search sites, popping up thumbnails and textual descriptions.

We already have an analogous mode of search in the analog tech world — flipping through channels on television or scanning the dial on the radio. Simple up-down TV channel flipping, though, can’t make finer distinctions the closer it gets to your target, and analog radio tuners can’t deliver the same precision. Both though, have the virtue that they can present what you’re looking for while you’re in the process of looking for it. Search engines couldn’t do that before. Now they can.

Right now, Google Instant is just a game, the alphanumeric equivalent of the Google buckyball logo from the other day. The real innovations in discovery are still on their way.

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Windows Phone 7 Office Image via Microsoft.

Traditionally, Microsoft has been a software company, leveraging its office suites and operating systems, but selling applications for any compatible hardware and platform. For smartphones in particular, its strategy has been to supply the software and let other companies worry about developing the phones. So why not go all the way and sell its software for every device on every platform?

That’s what Business Insider’s Dan Frommer proposes the company do: “Microsoft should develop Office apps for the iPad, Android, Chrome OS, BlackBerry tablet, and any other computing platform that is likely to become popular over the next 5-10 years,” adding that “if Microsoft wants to keep people tied into its Office suite, it needs to go where the people are going.”

Office is integrated into the forthcoming Windows Phone 7 OS, but would compete on several fronts in smartphone and tablet platforms, including iWork on Apple’s iPad, Google Docs on the mobile web, and Dataviz’s multi-platform Documents To Go, just acquired by Blackberry maker RIM.

Frommer sees RIM’s purchase of Documents To Go as a defense against the possibility of Microsoft introducing an Office app for Blackberry. Ironically, if RIM stops active development of Documents To Go for other platforms, that could create just the multi-platform opening needed to entice Microsoft to swoop in.

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Steve Jobs has attributed the iPod’s and iPhone’s success to Apple’s ability to write better software than the entrenched Asian consumer tech companies. Now that Korean giant Samsung has Google’s Android OS, they don’t have to write better software than Apple to stay successful; they just have to make compelling devices. On the heels of Apple TV and Sony’s partnership role in Google TV, Samsung’s next Android-powered devices may be a line of net-connected, software-driven HDTVs.

At least, that’s what Samsung’s TV head Yoon Boo Keun told Korean press today, Bloomberg reports. Bloomberg also cited analysts predicting that the market for internet-capable TVs will break wide-open in 2012, with as many as 87.6 million internet-capable TVs by 2013, about six times as many as today.

Samsung is in a tough spot here, but one with potentially huge upside. The company is already making 3D televisions with web-browsing capabilities, and has long sought to develop its own operating system for phones and TVs. Google Android gives its Galaxy devices an instant foothold in touchscreen smartphones and tablets to rival Apple’s iOS devices. Samsung’s strength in designing and manufacturing TV sets, when paired with Android’s interface and app marketplace, would seem to offer them a sizable advantage breaking into digital TV. You could get an app- and net-capable TV without any additional boxes.

However, Google doesn’t have Apple’s experience negotiating with media companies — particularly in Asia. That seems to be both the benefit and drawback of any venture where each player contributes and controls its own piece. Apple doesn’t have that problem.

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Apple and Google haven’t been BFFs lately, but the search giant still seems to care about iPhone users. Kind of, sort of. Google this week released an update for its Google Mobile app for iPhone, which introduces push notifications for Google’s calendar and a barely functional push feature for Google mail.

For iPhone users subscribed to Google calendars, the Google Mobile app can now push out an event alert in a box that appears on the home screen, just like you’d receive an SMS message. That’s useful.

But for Google mail, the new push feature is somewhat less useful. The updated app doesn’t push out a box to let you know of a new e-mail. Instead, it just updates the icon of the Google Mobile app, adding a little a red bubble that shows the number of e-mails in your inbox. This “notification” doesn’t cause the iPhone to vibrate or make a sound. The result is that the Gmail notifier is essentially useless, since you can already configure Gmail to “push” into Apple’s built-in Mail app with sounds and vibrations the whole shebang to actually notify you.

Frankly, we’re disappointed that the push feature for Google mail isn’t more functional. Adding the ability to push e-mails in the form of an alert box, just like Google did with calendar, would’ve been far more interesting.

If that’s what you’re looking to get from Google mail, you can download thethird-party iPhone app GPush, which we covered last year.

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Surveys reveal that a substantial chunk of U.S. customers plan to buy a tablet in the next year, and it’s not necessarily going to be an iPad.

Fourteen percent, or 27 million U.S. online consumers, intend to buy some kind of tablet in the next 12 months, says a Forrester research report (.pdf) published Thursday (chart below). Customers interested in purchasing a tablet aren’t primarily Apple customers, and they’re well aware of the crop of upcoming tablets from competitors such as Google and Hewlett-Packard.

Additionally, a similar study by the Magazine Publishers of America found that nearly 60 percent of U.S. consumers expect to purchase an e-reader or tablet within the next three years.

“Even though the iPad is the only widely available tablet PC on the market today, tablets have entered consumer consciousness in a very short time frame,” said Sarah Rotman Epps, a consumer product analyst at Forrester. “Theres interest in the category that goes beyond the iPad.”

Apple’s four-month-old iPad is turning in strong sales with 3.27 million units sold to date just a hair short of Macs, which sold 3.47 million unitsin the same quarter. That’s a huge accomplishment for a device less than a year old, and it delivered a shot of adrenaline to the mostly moribund tablet market. For years, scores of tablets have come and gone from manufacturers such as HP, Acer and even Apple, whose first tablet offering was the Newton. The Newton, like most other tablet devices during its time, was criticized for poor handwriting recognition and priceyness ($700 to $1,000), and was retired by 1998. In the meantime, dozens of PC manufacturers have shipped Windows-based Tablet PCs, but the category never took off outside of niche markets and enthusiasts.

Even though most of the tablet hype today surrounds the iPad, many respondents to Forrester’s survey said they were aware of other offerings on the horizon, such as the unreleased HP Slate, as well as obscure tablets like the Archos and JooJoo.The general widespread interest in the tablet category gives hope to manufacturers preparing to compete with Apple, Forrester said.

Forrester’s study also found that today’s customers tend to live with many connected devices. 69 percent of iPad buyers and 57 percent of tablet buyers also own a latest-generation game console (Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 or Nintendo Wii) compared with 37 percent of all U.S. online consumers.

Notably, iPad fans aren’t necessarily Apple worshippers (chart below): More iPad customers own HP computers than Macs. 39 percent of respondents who said they own or intend to buy an iPad said they own an HP computer, for example. iPad owners are also four times more likely to own a connected TV (9 percent versus 2 percent of non-iPad-owning U.S. online customers).

Apple has a head start on the new tablet market with its iPad, but competitors are just beginning to roll in. Dell recently introduced its 5-inch Streak tablet, which is getting some positive reception. And most recently, the tech sphere has been buzzing with rumors of a Google-powered tablet working on the Verizon network, possibly landing as soon as the holiday season (though we’re skeptical).

Forrester report (.pdf)

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Today’s big rumor, coming from an un-named single source by way of the Download Squad blog, is that a Google Chrome tablet, made by HTC and available on the Verizon network, will go on sale on November 26th this year. That’s Black Friday.

An that is all. The author goes on to speculate about the hardware, but that’s guesswork. What of the actual “facts” of the story, though?

HTC would make sense. After all, the hardware-maker is behind many Android phones, and worked with Google on the original G1 Googlephone. That part lines up. As for Verizon, that too is a pretty credible pairing given the net-neutrality furore of the past couple weeks, which has seen Verizon and Google clubbing together to dismiss the need for an un-tiered internet for mobile devices. That, and the fact that Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam said back in May that Verizon and Google are “working on tablets together.”

And the launch date? Either genius or incredibly dumb. If Google were to make the announcement ahead of time, it would certainly get a lot of headlines due to the sheer ballsiness of launching a product into the morass of hype that is the busiest shopping day of the year. But once those headlines have come and gone, the product actually could get drowned in that morass and just disappear.

I really don’t know which way to call this. The pieces all fit so well together, but the source is a very odd one. Either way, the prospect of an HTC/Verizon/Google tablet is a rather appealing one. What do you all think?

Google launching a Chrome OS tablet on Verizon, goes on sale November 26 [Download Squad]

Image mockup: Glen Murphy

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Don’t type when you can talk, says Google. The search giant has strengthened its existing voice command feature on Android and introduced a new application called Chrome-to-Phone, for syncing with Chrome browsers.

Voice Search, despite its name, now lets you do more than just search: It will let users send texts, compose e-mails, call businesses, navigate, jot notes, and set the alarm on their phone by just speaking into the device.

The voice commands, called “voice actions,” are part of Google’s effort to improve the user interface on Android and let consumers go beyond the traditional keyboard and touchscreen interface on their phones.

The Voice Search application is currently available only for phones running version 2.2 of the Android OS — which means HTC Evo, Droid X and Droid 2 users can get it on their phones immediately.

Google also launched a mobile sync app to link its Chrome browser to Android 2.2 devices. The tool, called Chrome-to-Phone, lets users on Google’s Chrome browser click an icon to send a web page or a map to their phone. The page or map is then almost immediately available on the phone.

“This is a low-latency, super-fast app for pushing data to the phone,” says Dave Burke, engineering manager for Google.

Google debuted its voice search application in the U.S. about two years ago when it introduced Android. Now one out of every four queries, or 25 percent of queries, on devices running Android 2.0 OS and higher comes through the voice interface, says Google.

The earlier version of the voice command allowed users to do just three things: web search, call a specific contact and navigate to an address.

The new voice search app goes beyond that. For instance, you can speak the name of a song or a band into the phone and the app will go online, find the music and show a list of apps such as Pandora and last.fm that can play the music you want.

For more details, check out Google’s list of voice commands available through the app.

But when it comes to the Chrome-to-Phone app, the service is more limited. It is currently available to only Chrome users, though some Firefox users are also using it. The sync feature is also only available for Android devices, though Google says it will work to bring the feature to iPhone users as an app.

Image: Screenshots of Voice Search courtesy Google.

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

No matter how mixed-up it is, the Rubik’s Cube can be solved in 20 moves or less, say a team of researchers who used computer time donated by Google to run complex algorithms to prove it.

That means all the 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 positions of the Cube require no more than 20 steps to get the Cube in shape.

“It took fifteen years after the introduction of the Cube to find the first position that provably requires twenty moves to solve,” says the team on their web page. “It is appropriate that fifteen years after that, we prove that twenty moves suffice for all positions.”

The Rubik’s Cube, a 3-D puzzle, was invented in 1974 by a Hungarian sculptor and professor Erno Rubik. Rubik licensed it to be sold as a toy and since then it has turned into the world’s top selling puzzle. As of January 2009, at least 350 million cubes have sold worldwide.

Solving the Rubik’s cube can take anywhere from seconds to hours. The official championship record for 2008 is 7.08 seconds.

The shortest sequence of moves that the most efficient algorithm takes to solve the Cube is known as ‘God’s number.’ In 1981, it was thought a maximum of 52 moves were required. By August 2008, it had been reduced to 22.

To get their number, the group–comprising math teachers, a Google engineer and a programmer–broke the larger problem of solving the Rubik’s Cube into 2,217,093,120 smaller problems. Each of these smaller problems had 19,508,428,800 different positions.

The subproblems were small enough to fit in the memory of a modern PC. But it would take an Intel four-core, 2.8GHz Nehalem chip-based desktop computer 1.1 billion seconds, or about 35 years, to perform the calculation. So the team turned to the impressive computing power that Google has to solve the problem. (Google won’t disclose exactly what kind of computing resources it offered to the group.)

If you’d like to geek out further on the math of solving the Rubik’s cube efficiently, the Cube 20 site has all the details.

Photo: (Marc Brakels/Flickr)

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Any day now, the Evo 4G is going to get an over-the-air update to Android 2.2 (aka Froyo), complete with marquee features such as the ability to play Flash video and share contact details over Bluetooth. But after spending every day with a Motorola Droid, now running Android 2.1, we can think of plenty of smaller things we wish Google would work on instead.

High on our list, for instance: Make spellcheck work consistently across the platform and sync with business-grade Google Apps calendars. If Flash support won’t even allow you to watch Hulu videos on your phone (Hulu cruelly blocks mobile access), what else can Google do to make Android a more polished, user-friendly platform?

Push for More Consistency

It’s the small things that add up. For us, one of the most annoying things is the fact that if you make a spelling mistake while searching for an app in Android Market, Android doesn’t correct you.

For Andy Castonguay, Director of Mobile Device Research for the Yankee Group, it’s the fact that on certain devices, the accelerometer only works if you tilt the phone to the left. What makes it worse, he says, is that the Android experience is even inconsistent across manufacturers, as each phone maker layers their own interface on top (think HTC Sense and Motorola’s Motoblur) as a way of making their Android phones stand out. And these extra layers, of course, make it especially hard to update a phone to the latest version of Android, creating an even larger disparity between what Android phones can and can’t do.

“The great thing for the manufacturers is they can create that brand affinity with the consumer on the back of Android, instead of having Android be front and center,” Castonguay said. “That results in idiosyncracies and discrepancies.”

Google can’t wean itself off these skins entirely, lest it alienate the very OEMs that have made Android so ubiquitous. But Google can, and will have to, work harder to develop more and better widgets, so that it’s not up to the likes of HTC and Motorola to decide what information you can see at glance, and what you can’t.

“HTC and Motorola have adapted to reflect consumer needs in a very positive way. Android as a platform will need to adopt some of those characteristics,” said Castonguay.

Story continues…

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

HTC’s Evo 4G phone will beat Motorola Droid to become the first device after Google’s Nexus One to get an upgrade to Android 2.2 Froyo, the latest version of the Android operating system.

Sprint will begin pushing out the upgrade to Evo users starting Tuesday, August 3. All Evo users will have Android 2.2 by the middle of the month, says the wireless carrier.

The upgrade will offer features such as voice dialing over Bluetooth, the ability to store apps on the external memory card and browser improvements including a faster JavaScript engine and Flash support.

Sprint launched the Evo in June with version 2.1 of the Android OS. The phone has become a best seller for Sprint and HTC.

Sprint’s move is also likely to put pressure on Motorola and Verizon to get the Droid to Android 2.2 as soon as possible. Earlier reports have suggested that the Droid’s 2.2 upgrade is expected “late summer.”

For Evo users, the upgrade will be pushed over-the-air to the device and automatically installed. Those who cant’ wait, will have the option to manually download it. Customers can access the update through their phone under the Settings Menu > System Updates > HTC Software Update.

Sprint says the change to the firmware will not wipe personal data such as contacts, apps, settings and photos but users should back up their device.

Photo: (Mike Saechang/Flickr)

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Seven months after Google launched its first phone, the HTC-designed Nexus One, it has stopped selling the devices through its online store.

“Sorry, folks…The Nexus One is no longer available for purchase directly from Google,” the company announced.

Google had warned users about this in May, saying it planned to wind down its web store.

Those who still want to buy a Nexus One will now have to go through Vodafone but that’s limited to some parts of Europe. Google promises it will make the device available to “registered developers” through a partner.

The Nexus One launched with what seemed like an innovative idea in the retailing of phones. Instead of being sold through stores, Google would directly sell it through the web to customers –something that worked for other consumer electronics products. However, the strategy didnt resonate with consumers.

Potential customers found they couldnt find a Nexus One in the real-world to play with, unless they knew a friend who already had the device. Google’s customer service support for the device also left many users unhappy.

Google has acknowledged that its retailing model with the Nexus One failed to catch on with consumers.

“While the global adoption of the Android platform has exceeded our expectations, the web store has not,” wrote Andy Rubin, vice-president of engineering and Android czar at Google in a blog post in May. “Its remained a niche channel for early adopters.”

At the same time, Google tried to put the devices into retail stores in U.S. I wireless, a T-mobile affiliate, got Nexus One at its 250 stores mostly in the Midwest. So far, it hasn’t announced any other retail partnerships.

So is the Nexus One dead or is the Nexus One web retail experiment over? The answer to that will depend on whether Google will take the risk to launch a successor to the phone or if it will be content to let other handset makers take Android forward.

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Microsoft on Tuesday announced new features for its upcoming mobile platform Windows Phone 7, including over-the-air Wi-Fi syncing and a feature to track a missing phone. The real message: “Suck it, iTunes and Android.”

When Windows Phone 7 becomes available later this year, customers will be able to download and sync content (such as music, video and photos) wirelessly, using a Wi-Fi connection to Zune software running on their PCs, according to Microsoft’s Aaron Woodman.

Additionally, Microsoft will launch Windows Phone Live, a free website for Windows Phone 7 customers to automatically publish their photos and sync their contacts, OneNote notes and other data.

“[Windows Phone 7] integrates experiences by consolidating common tasks and services around shared hubs that put the focus on what you want to do rather than putting the onus on you to move in and out of various apps,” Woodman wrote in a blog post. “All the stuff youd expect is right where you expect it — and that goes for content and services that live outside the phone.”

The new Windows Phone Live site will also host a Find My Phone service, which will allow people to find and manage a missing phone with the ability to find the phone on a map, make it ring, lock it, and erase its contents, all from their PC. This is comparable to a feature Apple offers through its MobileMe service for an additional fee; Microsoft says it will offer it for no charge.

With these moves, Microsoft is emphasizing Windows Phone 7’s over-the-air “cloud” strategy to compete with other mobile platforms. Many tech companies are offering online services to wirelessly manage content over the web. Google, for example, provides web services services for customers to automatically sync their e-mails, contacts and calendars over the internet to their phones.

However, Microsoft will have to move fast to stay in the smartphone game. Its once dominant Windows Mobile OS currently holds just 13.2 percent of the smartphone market and has been been steadily losing market share to competitors — most notably Google’s Android. The longer Microsoft takes to get Windows Phone 7 out, the more difficult it will be for it to regain the ground it’s lost.

When Microsoft introduced Windows Phone 7 in February, CEO Steve Ballmer said the platform would blend personal media with Xbox Live gaming and third-party apps served through the Zune marketplace.

The company with a relatively weak cloud strategy is Apple. Critics have slammed the iPhone and iPad for still relying on a USB connection to sync content with iTunes. And Apple’s web service MobileMe has received criticism for being expensive ($100 per year) compared to Google’s free web services. Steve Jobs said his company was “working on it” during a recent All Things Digital Conference on-stage interview, suggesting that iTunes might soon receive a reboot with a focus on streaming media.

“You can sum up the most frustrating thing about being an Apple customer in three little words: ‘Connect to iTunes,” said Matt Buchanan, a writer of Gizmodo.

It’s clear the software giant is shooting at the cloud in order to target a major weakness of Apple and a major strength of Google. Microsoft is offering consumer-oriented cloud services that Apple lacks, while providing enterprise features, such as remote wiping or locating a missing phone, that are not built in to Android.

“Microsoft’s activities in the cloud are really key in terms of its competition versus Apple and of course Google,” said Ross Rubin, a consumer technology analyst at NPD Group. “While there’s certainly a lot of overlap with Google in terms of the places where they’re competing head-on photo sharing, e-mail services, etc Microsoft has really integrated part of what Apple has sought to make a premium offering with MobileMe.”

Gadget Lab will soon be receiving a Windows Phone 7 prototype for testing. We’ll keep you posted on our impressions this week. Follow @gadgetlab or @bxchen on Twitter to stay plugged in to the news.

Image courtesy of Microsoft

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

A patent holder on Friday announced it has sued Apple, Google and other major tech companies for allegedly infringing patents on wireless e-mail delivery.

NTP, a business that solely manages patents related to wireless e-mail technologies, said it was suing Apple, Google, HTC Corp, LG Electronics, Microsoft Corporation and Motorola, alleging that they were unfairly using NTP’s intellectual property.

“Use of NTP’s intellectual property without a license is just plain unfair to NTP and its licensees,” said Donald E. Stout, NTP’s co-founder, “Unfortunately, litigation is our only means of ensuring the inventor of the fundamental technology on which wireless email is based, Tom Campana, and NTP shareholders are recognized, and are fairly and reasonably compensated for their innovative work and investment. We took the necessary action to protect our intellectual property.”

NTP is known for taking similar action against Research in Motion over wireless e-mail technology. The two parties in 2006 reached a settlement in which RIM agreed to pay $612 million to NTP.

Though NTP claims it is protecting its intellectual property, it does not itself produce or offer any wireless e-mail software or services, meaning it does not practice its own patents. In addition to RIM, NTP has also fired legal shells at Palm, Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint and AT&T. Some observers have labeled NTP a “patent troll.”

Photo: caribb/Flickr

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Google’s open source Android operating system ranks fourth in terms of market share among smartphone platforms in the U.S. but is growing at a faster pace than its rivals.

About 13 percent of U.S. smartphone subscribers used an Android phone in the quarter that ended May, up 4 percent from the previous quarter, according to comScore’s Mobilens service.

Research In Motion’s BlackBerry remained the number one smartphone platform with 41.7 percent share among consumers.

Apple ranked number two with 24.4 percent share and Microsoft third with 13.2 percent, while Palm rounded out the top five with 4.8 percent.

Android’s growth should come as no surprise to mobile enthusiasts. More than 20 Android phones are available in the U.S. currently. Handset makers such as LG and Samsung that have been slower than rivals Motorola and HTC in adopting Android are now planning to launch new Android devices.

Earlier this week, LG said it will have two Android smartphones and an Android-based tablet available by the end of the year. Samsung has already announced that its first 4G Android phone on Sprint will be available this summer.

This focus on Android has taken its toll on other mobile operating systems. Almost all platforms, with the exception of Android, lost some market share in the quarter. BlackBerry market share was down 0.4 percent, while Apple lost about 1 percent. The data does not include the iPhone 4, which launched in June.

Android’s growth doesn’t mean other smartphone systems are losing ground, says comScore. The number of people who own a smartphone in the U.S. grew 8.1 percent last quarter to 9.1 million people, which indicates that the overall pie is growing.

Photo: (bump/Flickr)

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

LG has been slow to hop on to the Android bandwagon but the company hopes to make up for lost time with the launch of two new phones and a tablet over the next few months.

The devices will be part of a new portfolio called Optimus and are LG’s idea of an “aggressive strategy” to grow market share in the global smartphone business.

The two Android-powered smartphones in the pipeline are called LG Optimus One and LG Optimus Chic. The phones will run Google’s latest version of Android, Android 2.2 or Froyo.

LG will also be introducing its first tablet device running Android later this year, says the company.

“LGs tablet will deliver vastly superior performance than other similar devices currently on the market while still managing to be thinner and lighter than competing devices,” the company said in a statement.

Since Google introduced Android in 2008 as an open source mobile operating system, LG’s rivals such as Motorola and HTC have bet big on the platform. So far, Motorola has launched at least 11 smartphones using Android and the company’s Motorola Droid is the most popular phone among Android users. Meanwhile, HTC has also used Android to churn out new smartphones that have put it at the top of the pack. Last week Samsung introduced its first 4G Android handset called the Samsung Epic on Sprints network.

LG says with new Android phone launches this year, it will catch up. So far, it has not offered any details about specs, pricing or availability for these devices.

Photo: LG Optimus Chic/LG

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

The major new feature of Apple’s latest mobile operating system, iOS 4, is multitasking. What took the company so long? Apple claims it was waiting to get multitasking just right before unleashing the feature for twashe iPhone. Meanwhile, the Android OS and Palm Web OS have supported multitasking just fine for over a year.

However, each platform handles multitasking quite differently. Let’s take a closer look at how each mobile OS’s multitasking works.

Apple iOS 4

How you use it
When you press the Home button twice, Apple’s iOS 4 displays a “drawer” allowing you to switch between apps. The drawer shows your most recently used apps. This is similar to the “alt-tab” functionality we’re accustomed to on traditional PCs.

What’s going on
When you leave an app in iOS 4, it’s not actually closing (unlike previous versions of the OS). Instead, it’s going into frozen, suspended animation, sitting inertly in the background. So when you relaunch an app, it opens instantly to pick up from where it left off before you “closed” it. That behavior allows you to switch between apps very quickly a feature called Fast App Switching, which is the core functionality of Apple’s iOS multitasking. (TidBITS has an excellent in-depth explanation of Fast App Switching.)

Fast App Switching isn’t all iOS 4 multitasking does, as there are a few exceptions for specific types of apps. Apple allows apps that play audio, connect with voice-over-IP or use location detection to run quietly in the background while one thread is still active. So that’s why, for example, you can leave the Pandora app, and the music will still be playing in the background while you check your e-mail. Likewise, you can leave Skype while on a VoIP call, and you won’t hang up on your buddy while you’re browsing Safari, for example. Third, you can leave a mapping app or a fitness tracker like RunKepper and come back to it, and it’ll still have a lock on your location.

It’s up to third-party app developers, of course, to tell their apps to behave this way with the new iOS 4 software development kit.

Another sort of background activity iOS supports is push notifications, which keeps a specific internet port active while the iPhone is in hibernation, so you can receive e-mails, instant messages and alerts even when the screen is off. These alerts pop up on the screen in the same way as an SMS on the iPhone.

Wired: Fast App Switching is indeed fast and stylish, avoids draining battery. All apps are constantly running inertly, so you can quickly switch between them all.

Tired: Only allows a single application thread to continue running; only certain kinds of activities are allowed to run in the background. Push notifications scream for your attention at the center of the screen.

Android OS

How you use it
Hold down the Home button and a tray appears showing the apps running in the background. Switch to another app and it instantly opens.

What’s going on
Android’s multitasking behavior is by far the most complicated to explain.

In Android, when a user switches to another application, the app you switched from doesn’t shut down: Its process is kept around in the background, allowing it to continue working (e.g., for downloading web pages in the background while doing something else), and come immediately to the foreground if the user returns to it. If the smartphone is running low on memory, Android starts killing off unnecessary processes to free up resources.

If a user later returns to an application that’s been killed, Android re-launches it in the same state as it was last seen, by keeping track of the parts of the application the user is aware of, and restarting them in the last state they were seen in. This last state is generated each time the user rotates the screen or leaves the application.

There are two basic components to control what apps can do in the background. Apps with “broadcast receivers” go into the background and wait to go off in an event, such as an alarm going off at a certain time, or if you receive a notification from Google’s server for getting a new message in Gmail. The other background component is called a “service,” which instructs an app to perform a task such as music playback or turn-by-turn navigation for a certain amount of time in the background. It’s up to the third-party app developers to embed these components in their apps to behave these ways in the background.

Wired: Apps can stay fully functional while running in the background. Notification tray makes it easy for apps to give you information without interrupting what you’re doing. Users don’t have to manually quit apps when memory is running low: Android does that for you.

Tired: Getting multitasking to work just right is a lot of work for developers.

HP WebOS

How you use it
The HP (formerly Palm) WebOS displays apps as “cards.” Each card acts similar to a tab in a desktop web browser. You move between activities using gestures (swipe forward, swipe back, hold to readjust the positioning of the cards), and when you’re finished with an activity, you can throw the card off the screen to quit the application.

What’s going on
WebOS allocates resources (memory, processor cycles, network access) to each card based on requests from the cards. The System Manager prioritizes the card in the foreground when allocating resources. Apps in the background are placed in a semi-dormant state, and their access to services is restricted.

If an application that the user isn’t currently interacting with wants to get the user’s attention, the app can display information in the notification area at the bottom of the screen. The information sits in the dashboard until acted on or closed. (Therefore, you can do something in a foreground app while dealing with a notification, whereas on the iPhone a push notification shows up in the center of the screen interrupting your task until you close it or leave your current app.)

Activities in the background do not have access to certain battery-intensive services. For example, apps cannot access accelerometer data and their frequency of network access is reduced. Third-party games are paused in place when moved to the background, reducing both their CPU load and memory consumption.

Wired: The card interface is neat, and it feels very natural to switch between apps. Notifications appear at bottom of the screen, not interrupting your current task.

Tired: After launching a specific number of apps that reach your memory limit, you can’t launch anymore, and you have to manually quit an app before launching another.

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

In a blog post, Google has described how it remotely removed two safe but “practically useless” applications from Android phones. The two free applications billed themselves as being for “security research” but because they “misrepresented their purpose in order to encourage user downloads”, the Android team nuked them from afar using its remote kill-switch, removing them from connected users’ phones.

The post on the Android Developers blog is written by Android Security Lead Rich Cannings. Cannings cites violations of the Android Market Terms of Service as the reasons behind the deletions. Far from being controversial, these terms were clearly stated as far back as October 2008, and only apply to apps from the Android Market itself. Back then I predicted the fuss that would come about if ever the switch was used in public:

If Google gets serious about throwing the kill switch for apps which violate the agreement, there is likely to be a fuss, from the technology blog world at least.

This isn’t the first time Google has wiped apps from users’ phones, although its the first we remember that has an accompanying blog post. While it is reassuring to know that Google is patrolling its App Store, its a little disturbing to know that your favorite, non-malicious app could disappear without your permission. In this case Apple – ironically – wins, for users at least. Remember Netshare, the iPhone data tethering app that briefly made it into the App Store? It was soon pulled by Apple, presumably at AT&T’s request, but those people who downloaded it continue to use it to this day.

Exercising Our Remote Application Removal Feature [Google / Android Developers Blog]

Photo: laihiu/Flickr

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews