Fashionably late to the e-book handheld party, Borders and Kobo announced today a partnership that includes plans to develop and release both an e-reader and e-book service. Mum’s the official word on hardware, but The New York Times Bits blog is claiming there’ll be “more than one version” released, all with wireless connectivity and all sold at Borders retail locations, naturally. Unfortunately, there’s no release date or window mentioned on that front. As for the service, the duo are taking a page from Barnes & Noble’s playbook and claiming device neutrality, meaning they’d like to see their ePub-focused platform available to any and all devices possible, form mobile to desktop and everything in between. Sounds great, but what we’re really keen to hear about is this new e-reader — let’s hope they’ve been taking notes on the successes and failures of their mostimmediatecompetitors.
Frankly, we’re surprised it took this long, but lo and behold, here we are with the first video of the Nexus One we’ve seen. It’s just the all-too-brief and familiar boot animation, but thenexusone.com promises this is just one of many videos to come, and with any luck, a nicer video camera can be found in the interim. Also on hand is a few snapshots of the casing it came with — don’t read too much into that, however, as even the developer-only Google Ion had fancy packaging. Video after the break.
Update: Video of the animated background now available over the break as is a first pic of the onscreen keyboard
Via Twitter, a contributor to Verizon’s policy blog links to a story about ATT users’ plans to take down ATT’s network via “Operation Chokehold.” Is he encouraging participation by linking to it?
Future, meet your past. The fine lads at xda-developers forums have ported the Android 2.1 ROM — you know, the updated OS from Nexus One that everyone’s been talking about lately — all the way to the original G1. Right now it’s being dubbed version 0.9999 since it’s still lacking A2SD, CompCache, and SWAP… and if you’re feeling confused by the terminology, it might be best to not try this at home just yet. Creator Teh Dust has also removed a few things for the sake of making it more lightweight, including Car Home, Live Boot, and high resolution wallpapers / apps that don’t jive with the G1 anyway. Willing, curious, and wanting to impress your Droid-carrying friends? File’s hiding in plain sight, waiting for you.
Update: Quoth the raven, ’twas a hoax and nothing more.
Mini debuts a new concept at the 2010 Detroit auto show. pOriginally posted at a href=”http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13746_7-10416245-48.html” class=”origPostedBlog”The Car Tech blog/a/p
Nothing beats finding just the right application to fill a common need, fix a problem, or boost your productivity. Give yourself an early present this holiday season with 15 of the most popular Mac downloads of 2009.
Like last year’s most popular Mac downloads, this list is based on the popularity of apps we’ve covered in 2009, regardless of the original release date of the app. Many were brand new this year, while others were solid updates to popular software. If you took a look at yesterday’s Most Popular Free Windows Downloads of 2009, a few of the cross-platform favorites may look familiar. (I’ve rounded up the most popular cross-platform downloads at the bottom of the post.)
Snow Leopard: The Feisty Kitty That Could (and No, It’s Not Quite Free, Either)
The release of Snow Leopard didn’t do all that much to change Leopard’s spots, but Magnifique certainly does. This free skinning app is full of user-generated Leopard-customizing goodies. Note: Magnifique does not support Snow Leopard, so you’ll want to steer clear of it if you’ve upgraded. Unfortunately the Magnifique development seems to be at a standstill at the moment.
People fed up with iTunes’ restrictive stance on non-Apple devices (see Apple and Palms’ dance, for example) were very interested in doubleTwist, a universal media manager that automatically converts files to the appropriate formats and seamlessly syncs them to your PSP, Android device, BlackBerry, and more.
A lot of people were disappointed to learn about Quicksilver’s grim future a while back, but many of you were heartened to learn that Quicksilver’s creator had released a similar tool working with Google called Quick Search Box. Then again, it appears Quicksilver’s not entirely dead just yet (see below).
For all the access to track metadata contained in the iTunes store, iTunes is a slouch at cleaning and tagging mislabeled or poorly labeled tunes. Pollux was an absolutely killer iTunes supplement that grabbed song, artist, album, and other metadata names, along with lyrics and album art, quickly and accurately. The problem? Shortly after we highlighted it, Pollux was shut down because the APIs it accessed stopped letting it access them for free. We liked Pollux better, but if you’re looking for something similar, check out TuneUp (free and pay versions available).
After years of Windows-only support, Google released the first Mac version of Picasa at the beginning of the year, and it didn’t take long before the majority of our Mac readers preferred it to iPhoto. You go, Google.
Just when we thought Quicksilver was no more, it turns out that several contributors are continuing occasional development over at social coding web site GitHub. Their latest release brought on some solid performance improvements, and it worked well (for us at least) with Snow Leopard.
Free Safari plug-in Glims adds a handful of new features to Safari, giving it the kind of features one might expect from a more, ahem, customizable browser—for those of you who still prefer Safari to its more feature-rich counterparts.
Google very recently announced a free DNS service they boasted as fast, but rather than take their word for it, we pointed you toward namebench (and several readers also pointed toward the excellent DNS Name Server Benchmark). It tests various popular DNS servers to find what’s really going to be the fastest choice for your system.
We’re sort of junkies for maps and 3D, so when Google Earth 5 was released, we were pleased as punch. The update featured historical imagery, ocean maps, and improved world touring capabilities. Maybe we just like saving ourselves some dough in these tough economic times with a little Google Earth sightseeing.
And Then There Was Firefox
The notorious Firefox memory slow-downs may have some of us down on the reliable old ‘fox, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t all still eager to grab the latest and greatest releases and stick with it as our default browser—whether it’s the big Firefox 3.5 release or the Firefox 3.6 beta (1, 2, 3, or 4). We’re looking forward to more great Firefox’ing in 2010.
Sure it was two years since Thunderbird‘s 2.0 release, but at least they didn’t disappoint. Thunderbird 3.0 comes with solid new search and filtering tools, better looks, and a great new tabbed interface.
Free, open-source DVD ripping and encoding tool HandBrake released a pretty saucy update last month with a ton of fixes and improvements. It’s no coincidence that it’s always been our readers’ favorite video encoder, and this year’s big-ish (but still not 1.0) update should only help keep it there—even though several users aren’t thrilled that the HandBrake devs have dropped AVI/XviD.
Now, because we like a good polling:
Got a favorite Mac download from 2009 that you’d add to your list of favorites? Let’s hear about it in the comments. If you’re craving still more popular Mac downloads, you can also take a look back at the most popular free Mac downloads of 2008.
BMW shows off a tweaked version of its Z4 roadster at the 2010 Detroit auto show. pOriginally posted at a href=”http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13746_7-10416188-48.html” class=”origPostedBlog”The Car Tech blog/a/p
Big screen touch panels aren’t anything new (or fancy), but a 21.5-inch capacitive touch panel is definitely pushing “drool-worthy” territory. In a presumably dingy corner of some overseas show floor, it looks as if Chunghwa Picture Tubes (or CPT, as the cool kids call it) has one of those very displays out for public viewing. Reportedly, the 21.5-incher has yet to reach mass production, but it’s currently shipping 10.1-inch versions to an undisclosed amount of customers. As of now, the big boy is being “validated by clients,” which means it’ll probably be ready for mass consumption between next year and next century.
This week, Donald will just not_shut_up already, so Jasmine tries to impose a word cap on his ramblings (it fails). Items that are babbled upon include the overly bass-heavy Dr. Dre Beats Solo headphones, a potential Zii war between Nintendo and Creative, an itty-bitty $9 MP3 player, and a potential HD video player from Cowon. Also, Donald shoots Jasmine with lasers, and we drool over an ultraquiet vacuum with a built in iPod speaker.
Cherrypal surprised most of the technology industry on Tuesday by announcing the CherryPal Africa, a $99 computer.
Cherrypal has begun taking orders for the device on its Web site, where the small computer is described as “small, slow, sufficient”.
“At Cherrypal, we’re extremely conscious of the so-called ‘digital divide’,” said Max Seybold, the company’s founder,” in a statement. “We’re constantly looking for ways to bridge that gap, and the Cherrypal Africa is a huge step in the right direction. Plus, everyone who has tried it has absolutely loved it!”
The Africa uses either Windows CE or Linux. It’s also small, with just a 7-inch, 800-by-600 display; in total, the Africa measures 213.5 mm by 141.8 mm by 30.8 mm, and weighs 1.2 kilograms or 2.64 pounds.
Cherrypal also said that the Africa is designed to consume as little power as possible, and to do so, runs a 400-MHz processor paired with just 256 Mbytes of memory and 2 Gbytes of NAND flash. Connectivity is supplied by 802.11b/g and 10/100 Ethernet. One odd weakness: the Africa only contains two USB 1.1 ports and a single USB 2.0 port. SD card slots and what appears to be an unpopulated hard drive slot are also included. The Africa includes an 86-key keyboard, with a “built-in touch panel” that I assume to be a trackpad. A pair of speakers and a microphone are also included.
Cherrypal also said that it had redesigned its “Bing” netbook (no relation to the Microsoft search engine). Specs include a 13.3-inch widescreen, a 1.6-GHz Intel N280-processor, 1 GB of DDR-3 memory, a 160-Gbyte hard drive, and a 1.3-Mpixel Webcam, all for $389.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
Fashionably late to the e-book handheld party, Borders and Kobo announced today a partnership that includes plans to develop and release both an e-reader and e-book service. Mum’s the official word on hardware, but The New York Times Bits blog is claiming there’ll be “more than one version” released, all with wireless connectivity and all sold at Borders retail locations, naturally. Unfortunately, there’s no release date or window mentioned on that front. As for the service, the duo are taking a page from Barnes & Noble’s playbook and claiming device neutrality, meaning they’d like to see their ePub-focused platform available to any and all devices possible, form mobile to desktop and everything in between. Sounds great, but what we’re really keen to hear about is this new e-reader — let’s hope they’ve been taking notes on the successes and failures of their most immediate competitors.
Nothing beats finding just the right application to fill a common need, fix a problem, or boost your productivity. Give yourself an early present this holiday season with 15 of the most popular Mac downloads of 2009.
The release of Snow Leopard was nearly 
The iPhone hardware may be getting better and better, but Apple still 
People fed up with iTunes’ restrictive stance on non-Apple devices (see Apple and Palms’ 
A lot of people were disappointed to learn about 
For all the access to track metadata contained in the iTunes store, iTunes is a slouch at cleaning and tagging mislabeled or poorly labeled tunes. 
Just when we thought 
Free Safari plug-in 
Google very recently 
We’re sort of junkies for maps and 3D, so when 
The notorious 
Sure it was two years since 
Free, open-source DVD ripping and encoding tool 
