Chat app Trillian 1.0 is in the works for BlackBerry. Right now it’s a limited beta, but we give you a peek of what’s inside. pOriginally posted at a href=”http://download.cnet.com/8301-2007_4-20004359-12.html” class=”origPostedBlog”The Download Blog/a/p
According to a new study’s findings, a transition is already in progress. pOriginally posted at a href=”http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-31747_7-20004369-243.html” class=”origPostedBlog”iPad Atlas/a/p
Got a hankering for smaller, faster, more capacious magnetic storage? Compellent says you’ll get it soon, at long as you’re buying for the IT market. According to The Register, the enterprise storage provider listed 900GB, 10,000RPM 2.5-inch hard drives on its product roadmap, as well as 300GB models that spin at 15,000RPM. Sure, we’ve seen smallish drives with those speeds or that capacity before, and you can get a 600GB, 10,000RPM Velociraptor even in the consumer marketplace, but it seems like the puzzle pieces are all coming together. Quick disclaimer: Compellent doesn’t actually make hard drives, but it most certainly sells them, so we’d expect a company in their position to know what’s what. That, or they could be making stuff up. Perhaps platter density makes those sizes and capacities inevitable, but we can’t pretend that we’re not jazzed about the possibilities.
Distributor roadmap shows super speedy 900GB, 2.5-inch HDD originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 06 May 2010 15:19:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
This article was written on March 12, 2008 by CyberNet.
I was beginning to think that there was no real purpose to the Caps Lock key other than to annoy you when it’s accidentally turned on. Then Ghacks comes through and digs up an application called Capster (Windows only) that can really save you oodles of time with a concept that is so incredibly simple.
What you have to do is download the application and put it in a cozy spot on your computer. There’s no installation so the next thing you’ll need to do is fire it up. You should then see a window similar to the one pictured above where you can browse for the application that you want to start with Windows. In this example I chose Firefox, and I set it to only start if the Caps Lock key is on.
Then you’ll click the Create Shortcut button to have it place a shortcut on your computer. What you need to do now is put that shortcut in the Startup folder located in the Start Menu, and after that Capster will take care of the rest. The next time you start your computer it will try to run each application, but it will first check to see if the Caps Lock is on or off and proceed accordingly.
One of the reasons that I really love this application is that it is designed to have a minimal performance impact on your computer. Capster doesn’t have to stay running in the background thanks to the clever shortcut creator, and that’s something I really applaud the developer for. I highly recommend checking out this app if you’ve been yearning for a quick on/off switch for your startup applications.
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This ain’t the first rodeo for Visa and DeviceFidelity, and if we had to guess, we suspect it won’t be the last. Just a few short months after teaming up to bring contactless payments to any mobile with a microSD slot, the two are at it again — this time aiming for the oh-so-tantalizing iPhone market. Reportedly, the tandem is toiling away in an effort to concoct a protective iPhone shell with a secure memory card that hosts Vista’s contactless payment app, payWave. As it stands, the product would only function on the iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS, leaving upcoming iPhone 4G / HD / Barhopper buyers out in the cold. As with any other payWave-enabled handset, this would allow users to simply tap and go when checking out, a process that our pals over in Japan have had down for centuries now. If all goes well, market trials of the payment-enabled iPhone are set to begin this summer, or approximately six months too late for anyone to seriously care.
Continue reading Visa and DeviceFidelity working to bring mobile payment functionality to iPhone
Visa and DeviceFidelity working to bring mobile payment functionality to iPhone originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 06 May 2010 14:56:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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The iPad isn’t considered a netbook, but Apple’s month-old tablet is already pounding on the budget computing category, according to market numbers.
Research conducted by Morgan Stanley analyst Katy Huberty shows that netbook sales have slowed down dramatically since January — when the iPad was announced, and shrunk even more in April when the iPad shipped. Fortune’s Philip Elmer-DeWitt concludes that Apple’s tablet is gobbling up netbook sales.
“As her chart (above) shows, sales growth of these low-cost, low-powered computing devices peaked last summer at an astonishing 641 percent year-over-year growth rate,” Elmer-DeWitt said. “It fell off a cliff in January and shrank again in April — collateral damage, according to Huberty, from the January introduction and April launch of the iPad.”
Of course, looking at the graph you’ll notice a general decline in netbook sales over the course of 2009, so it’s possible that the downward trend simply carried over to 2010. However, corroborating the correlation between the introduction of the iPad and shrinkage in netbook sales, Huberty also cited a survey conducted by Morgan Stanley in March, which found that 44 percent of U.S. consumers who were planning to buy an iPad said they were buying it instead of a netbook or notebook computer.
Netbooks — lightweight, 10-inch notebooks costing between $300 and $600 — were a sizzling product category in 2008. That year, manufacturers shipped over 10 million netbooks, and the mini notes continued to sell well in 2009. ABI Research forecasted that manufacturers will ship 200 million ultra-portable devices by 2013, which is about the same anticipated size as the current laptop market worldwide. The ultra-portable device category includes both netbooks and tablets, and at this rate, the iPad just might dominate the mobile PC market.
This is exactly what Steve Jobs had planned all along. Apple resisted producing a netbook, calling the miniature computers $500 pieces of “junk.” And when Jobs introduced the iPad, he highlighted its strengths — web browsing, e-mail, watching movies and other tasks — while noting that netbooks “aren’t good at anything.”
So far, it looks like Jobs’ sales pitch is working. Apple sold 1 million iPads in just one month.
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Photo: Brian Derballa/Wired.com; charts courtesy of Morgan Stanley
Between Dipdive and the in-built BlackBerry Messenger app, Black Eyed Peas front man Will.i.am feels he has found the perfect way to communicate directly with fans.
Targus recalls half a million laptop power adapters due to burn hazard originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 06 May 2010 14:25:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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It’s appropriate that the Apple logo on the iPad is black. The Cupertino, California, company’s image is taking on some awfully sinister tones lately.
For a company that made its name fighting for the little guy, it’s a surprising reversal. In the past, Apple touted itself as the computer company for nonconformists who “Think Different.” Now the company is making moves that make it look like the Big Brother it once mocked.
First Apple tightened its iron grip on the already-stringent iPhone developer policy, requiring apps to be made with Apple-approved languages, which disturbed some coders and even children. A short while later, Apple rejected some high-profile apps based on their editorial content, raising journalists’ questions about press freedoms in the App Store. Then, police kicked down a Gizmodo editor’s door to investigate a lost iPhone prototype that Apple had reported as stolen. Even Ellen DeGeneres and Jon Stewart have mocked Apple’s heavy-handed moves.
Plenty of us love our shiny iPads, iPods, iPhones and MacBooks — state-of-the-art gadgets with undeniable allure. But it’s tough to imagine customers will stay loyal to a company whose image and actions are increasingly nefarious. We want to like the corporation we give money to, don’t we?
Here are five things Apple should do to redeem its fast-fading public image.
As I’ve argued before, the App Store’s biggest problem is not that there are rules, but that app creators don’t know what the rules are. As a result, people eager to participate in the App Store censor themselves, and that hurts innovation and encourages conformity. The least Apple can do is publish a list of guidelines about what types of content are allowed in the App Store. After all, Apple has had nearly two years and almost 200,000 apps to figure out what it wants in the App Store. Tell people what the rules are so they know what they’re getting into, and so they can innovate as much as possible. That would also tell us customers what we’re not getting on our iPhone OS devices.
Publishers are hypnotized by imaginary dollar signs when they look at the iPad as a platform that could reinvent publishing and reverse declining revenues. But after recent editorial-related app rejections, journalists are slowly waking up to our forewarning that Apple could control the press because news and magazine apps on the iPad are at the mercy of the notoriously temperamental App Store reviewers. If Apple wants to look a little less like the Chinese government, it should work with publishers to ink formal agreements regarding content to guarantee editorial freedom to respected brands.
Apple’s stated purpose of its revised iPhone developer policy is to block out meta platforms to ensure a high level of quality in the App Store. Also, from a business perspective, there is no lock-in advantage if you can get the same apps on the iPhone as you can on other competing smartphones. Fair enough, but Apple would be silly to think it can keep the mobile market all to itself, and its developer agreement comes off as a piece of literature holding developers hostage.
It’s hard to create new rules, but it’s easy to abolish existing ones. Apple should loosen up its iPhone developer agreement by snipping out a part of section 7.2, which states that any applications developed using Apple’s SDK may only be publicly distributed through the App Store. That implies that if you originally create an app with the Apple SDK, you’re not allowed to even modify it with different languages and sell it through another app store like Google’s Android market. In other words, iPhone apps belong to Apple. This rule is basically unenforceable to begin with, and Apple should just remove it, along with other similar policies.
Reasonable people can disagree over whether it was ethical for Gizmodo to purchase the lost iPhone prototype, but the police action — kicking down Jason Chen’s door to seize his computers — was overboard. It was self-evidently a clumsy move: After damaging Chen’s property, the police paused the investigation to study whether the journalists’ Shield Law protected Chen. The proper action would have been to issue a subpoena to get Chen to talk about the device first. Apple, which instigated the police action by filing a stolen property complaint, should publicly apologize to Chen (no relation to the author of this post) and reimburse him for the damages.
When Apple accidentally leaked its PowerMac G5 a couple of years ago, Apple’s legal team forced MacRumors’ Arnold Kim to pull down his post containing the information. But a humbled Steve Jobs joked about the slip during his WWDC 2003 keynote, calling it a case of “Premature specification.” (See the video below.)
He should do a similar thing when he officially unveils Apple’s next phone, by having Gray Powell — the engineer who misplaced the next-generation iPhone prototype — make a stage appearance. Powell could walk out and hand Jobs the phone, saying “Hey Steve, I found your lost phone,” or something similar. Some comedic relief, provided by the engineer who lost the iPhone prototype in a bar, can remind us that Apple is still a company guided by a man with a sense of humor.
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Portable-multimedia-gadget maker Archos today announced the Archos 7 Home Tablet: It’s “the first large-screen Android-based tablet,” according to the company, offering “always-on access to the Web, e-mail, photo, video and a dedicated library of Android Apps enabling users to customise the device to their lifestyle.”
The very portable Archos 7 features a 7-inch high-res touchscreen (800 by 480), weighs a mere .8 pounds, and is just .47 of a inch thick. It comes with 8GB of Flash memory and has built-in Wi-Fi connectivity; it also can connect to your PC or other devices via USB.
The Archos 7 is rated for 7 hours of video or 44 hours of audio playback. Selected apps are preinstalled, including the book-reading app Aldiko, eBuddy for IM, and DailyPaper. Other apps developed expressly for the device will be available to download. The table will play MP3 files and you’ll also have access to Deezer, a the free music-streaming service.
If you’re comparing this tablet in your mind to that tablet from Apple, here’s one big differentiator: The price will be $199.99 list. You can pre-order at Amazon and get your Archos 7 early, in mid-May; it will hit other retailers in June. Look for a full review soon on PCMag.com.
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.
