Hasta La Gadget!

It’s almost time to eat turkey and then jet out to Best Buy to be trampled by mad shoppers. Oh yes, the holiday season is just about here, which according to a few posts we’ve written in the last year means that the Chrome OS netbooks should be as well. Well, it turns out that the Google OS-powered laptops aren’t going to arrive this year, or at least not in the way we thought they would. That doesn’t mean Chrome OS isn’t going to see a bit of an unveil this year, but major manufacturers, including Acer and HP, won’t have its own Chromebooks ready before 2011. How do we know? Acer’s Jim Wong told us during the company’s global press conference that Acer will be launching its netbook based on the browser operating system during the “consumer launch” of the OS next year, while Google has its own agenda and will be doing something “in December.” We didn’t get to ask if that Acer netbook is in fact the “ZGA” netbook we’ve seen popping up in bug reports, but our guess is that it will be something quite similar.

So, what does Google have brewing? You remember the Google-branded Chrome OS netbook that we heard about? Well, according to a few of our very own sources, that’s exactly what’s going to happen. We don’t have exact timing details, but we have been told by a few that Google will launch its own Chrome-book a la the Nexus One for “friends and family.” As the operating system is still in a beta or preview form, the netbook would be aimed at the development / early adopter community. Specs-wise we don’t know all that much, but we’ve heard that it will be powered by an Intel Atom Pine Trail processor and, just as Digitimes reported, that 75,000 units are being manufactured by Taiwan ODM Inventec. We should mention that the aforementioned Acer “ZGA” was said to be used internally as a “dogfood device” at Google, but we believe this Google-branded device to be entirely different. Inventec, Intel, and Google wouldn’t comment on the hardware rumor, but Google did tell us that it would “have more details to share later this year.” By our count, that leaves ’em with just about 37 days to spill the beans!

Note: The picture above is just our creative interpretation of what a Chromebook may look like — don’t come crying to us when the actual device looks a lot prettier.

Chrome OS consumer launch pushed to 2011, Google-branded Chromebook could still arrive this year originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 24 Nov 2010 12:10:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We like the Google TV, we really do, we just think it needs another few months in the oven before it’s really going to rock anyone’s world. It won’t just be Google that makes or breaks it, though, and innovative uses like GameString Adrenalin are certainly going to help. That site offers what it calls “Personal Cloud Gaming,” letting you stream the output from seemingly any game on your PC to a browser, where it can be played on a number of devices. Chrome within the Google TV is just one of them, but given how something like a Revue comes with a keyboard and is usually attached to a big display it seems like a good choice. We can’t be sure what the lag is like when playing in this way, but the video embedded below does make it look pretty snappy — though hopefully the service doesn’t force you to listen to the same classic Prodigy that trailer does. Right now the service is in free beta, so have at it at the source link.

Continue reading GameString Adrenalin turns your Google TV into a game streamer, will WoW your couch (video)

GameString Adrenalin turns your Google TV into a game streamer, will WoW your couch (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 31 Oct 2010 17:15:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Google’s taking a big leap with Google TV — unlike its competitors, who’ve all focused on delivering curated video content with inexpensive streaming devices, Google’s new platform brings Android, Chrome, and Flash directly to your TV in a variety of hardware configurations from Sony and Logitech. But whether you’re adding Google TV to your existing rig with a Logitech Revue or starting from scratch with a Sony Internet TV, the basic experience of using each product is the same — it’s the web on your TV, in all its chaotic and beautiful glory. Is this the future of television? Can Google do what no company has ever managed to do in the past and put a little PC in your TV? Read on to find out!

Continue reading Google TV review

Google TV review originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 29 Oct 2010 12:30:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Oh, IE, it pains us to do this to you. You who once so mightily won in the battle against Netscape Navigator now seem to be losing your war against a battalion of upstarts, relatively fresh faces like Firefox and Chrome. According to StatCounter, IE’s global usage stats have fallen to 49.87 percent, a fraction of a tick beneath half. Firefox makes up the lion share of the rest, at 31.5 percent, while Chrome usage tripled since last year, up to 11.54 percent. Two years ago IE had two thirds of the global market locked down, and even if Internet Explorer 9 is the best thing since ActiveX, well, we just don’t see the tide of this battle turning without MS calling in some serious reinforcements.

Update: If you needed more proof of Chrome’s increasing popularity, we got a tip on this report from Softpedia confirming that Chrome is the fastest growing browser of the moment. Firefox is more or less flat and, well, you know all about how IE is faring.

Continue reading Internet Explorer falls below 50 percent global marketshare, Chrome usage triples

Internet Explorer falls below 50 percent global marketshare, Chrome usage triples originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 05 Oct 2010 07:19:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Digg
If you’re anything like us, as soon as you get a new PC there’s a laundry list of things you do: uninstall every piece of crapware, change the desktop wallpaper, and fire up Internet Explorer 8 to download a new browser like Firefox or Chrome. Without fail, we’ve repeated that last step on every Windows laptop we’ve reviewed in the last year. Why is it that we almost instantly replace IE with another option? There are lots of reasons, but to name a few… the browser usually comes plastered with toolbars, which makes it painfully slow to load even just a simple news site. And even when those are uninstalled it feels sluggish in comparison to Firefox and Chrome. Also, it’s just not as attractive or intuitive as the others. Oh, and then there are the smaller items, like the fact that it lacks a download manager or uses more RAM than the competition.

That’s no short list of complaints, but you can’t say Microsoft hasn’t been listening. It’s been saying for months that Internet Explorer 9 — which is now available for download as a public beta — will mend all those issues and then some. A lot of the improvements come in speed — Redmond’s been talking about hardware acceleration since November of last year — but there are some other interesting features such as “Pinned Sites” and “One Box” that Microsoft’s been less vocal about. So, does IE9 live up to the hype and will it finally give us a preloaded browser that’s fast enough to run with the others? Should you run along and download it right now? We’ve spent the last week using it as our primary browser on a number of different laptops to find out. We’ll meet again in our full review after the break.

Continue reading Internet Explorer 9 Beta review

Internet Explorer 9 Beta review originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 15 Sep 2010 12:31:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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