Hasta La Gadget!

Entelligence is a column by technology strategist and author Michael Gartenberg, a man whose desire for a delicious cup of coffee and a quality New York bagel is dwarfed only by his passion for tech. In these articles, he’ll explore where our industry is and where it’s going — on both micro and macro levels — with the unique wit and insight only he can provide.

It’s an unfortunately familiar phenomena — PC vendors suffering from razor thin margins load their devices with more stickers than a stock car and install gigabytes of useless applications that serve only to take up space and use system resources. Sony was perhaps the most egregious in 2008, offering to remove the offending bloatware for a $50 fee. It’s as if Tony Soprano went into tech — “Pay us and we won’t mess up your computer.”

It’s deja vu all over again for mobile phones. More and more devices I look at are coming installed with applications I don’t want, often popping up messages to try and upsell me on services I have no interest in. Even worse, unlike PCs where offensive applications can be removed or the OS reinstalled cleanly, there’s often nothing that can be done to get rid of unwanted mobile software without arduous work. It’s not limited to Android devices, but it seems that increasingly Android more than other platforms is shipping with the worst mobile bloatware. It’s a bad trend that’s going to lead to consumer backlash and it’s destroying the credibility of Google’s Android vision.

Continue reading Entelligence: Will carriers destroy the Android vision?

Entelligence: Will carriers destroy the Android vision? originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 12 Sep 2010 20:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This article was written on January 15, 2007 by CyberNet.

This is one thing that I really hope makes it into Firefox 3: a new method for browsing your website history. The screenshot above shows a mockup that Alex Faaborg, a User Experience Designer working on Firefox 3, came up with. I have to say that I’m thoroughly impressed with the amount of usability this would offer:

In this design, browsing history is chunked into segments by time, and specific events (like typing a search, or opening a new tab and entering a URL) will automatically create a new segment. Each browsing segment is grouped under the action that initiated the series of viewed web pages. These segments could be collapsed by default to reduce the amount of information initially presented.

The small thumbnails next to page titles are generated from the top half of the page. While my point about users remembering the visual appearance of sites probably sounded like I was heading towards full sized thumbnails, I believe all of the same visual cues that larger thumbnails would provide can be effectively packed into a smaller space.

As it stands right now I’m not a big fan of trudging the search history that Firefox currently offers (other browsers aren’t much better). They do break it up by day and have a nice find-as-you-type feature, but it can still be hard to dig up exactly what you’re looking for.

Actually, the thing that I find most useful is the Google Search History. Some people would argue that using this tool is a bad thing because Google has permission to store all of your searches, but I use it so much that I am willing to give that info to Google. The Google Search History, for those of you not familiar with it, stores your searches so that you can always go back and find that one particular website that you spent hours searching for. It breaks the results up by each day and will list the query that you made along with the search results that you clicked on. Of course, this is Google that we’re talking about so you can also search your Search History, duh!

The Google Search History is not only useful, but it can also be fun. In a few clicks you can pull up trends for when you search for information the most. I’ve been using the Google Search History since April 21, 2005 and have done 19,614 searches since that time. Here is how the trends breaks it down for me:

Looking at the hourly search activity you can obviously see when I’m at my computer the most.

So how does this tie into the Firefox History? I just wanted to point out that keeping track of websites a user visits can be really useful if it is done right. I use the Google Search History on a daily basis to find sites that I’ve forgotten to bookmark or ones that I never thought I would use again. If Mozilla goes about redesigning the history in a way that makes it easier to navigate I think more people would be willing to use it. Judging from the mockup I would say that they are definitely on the right track…I just hope that it will be ready in time for Firefox 3.

Thanks to “Jack of all Trades” for the tip!

Copyright © 2010 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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You might remember that a huge roadmap document leaked out of HTC late last year; though many of the devices in it never materialized, the fact that the Legend, Bravo, and Photon turned out to be legit (as the Legend, Desire, and HD Mini, respectively) lends credence to the belief that all of the phones in that slide deck were at least on HTC’s drawing board at one time or another. One of the more interesting MIA handsets — the so-called Trophy with WinMo 6.5 and a portrait QWERTY keyboard — looks like it may have been repurposed as a Windows Phone 7 model thanks to some new shots out of Vodafone Germany’s inventory system, which is pretty awesome considering how difficult portrait QWERTY devices are to come by, generally (though it would’ve had to get a redesign with a higher-res display and faster processor to meet Microsoft’s spec guidelines). Along the same lines, LG’s well-leaked E900 has recently gotten its blessing from the Global Certification Forum where it’s listed with 900 / 2100MHz 3G (HSPA, we’re sure) alongside quadband GSM. Certainly going to be an interesting fall, isn’t it?

[Thanks to everyone who sent these in]

Windows Phone 7 device roundup: LG E900 earns GCF certification, HTC Trophy meets Vodafone originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 12 Sep 2010 17:44:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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UC Berkeley engineers have developed a low-power e-skin of touch-sensitive nanowire mesh that may help robots manipulate fragile objects.

There’s a quiet war going on for the thin-and-light laptop space between ARM and x86 architectures. Intel and AMD are winning handily right now, thanks to their ability to run Windows, but there’s still that small hope within the industry that a Good Enough Linux build will come along one day and rescue these power-sipping ARM platforms from obscurity. Well, CUPP Computing would like you to have it both ways. The company’s Hybrid PC, which is in a early prototype stage right now (a rather ugly stage, unfortunately, as seen above), runs an ARM A8 OMAP 3430 processor with 512MB of RAM right up next to a Core 2 Duo processor with 4GB of RAM, with both platforms sharing the 320GB HDD, 16-inch LCD, keyboard, touchpad, HDMI out, and USB plugs. A simple alt+tab command switches between the systems on the fly. It’s pretty flashy, although the real use case for a device like this would more likely be to use the ARM setup as a low powered mode and then boot into Windows when necessary. Of course, Dell does exactly that at “Latitude ON” in its Latitude Z and Latitude E series, but we won’t begrudge CUPP having a go at its own spin on the concept — although if they try and push this “Computicator” classification on us it might come to blows. Check out a few video demos after the break.

Continue reading CUPP Hybrid PC makes dynamic duo out of ARM and x86, dubious new ‘Computicator’ class of device

CUPP Hybrid PC makes dynamic duo out of ARM and x86, dubious new ‘Computicator’ class of device originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 12 Sep 2010 11:47:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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