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Jun 03

Samsung Galaxy S4 Review: Better, But Not Best (Update: LTE Version)

Since it arrived last year, the Galaxy S III
has been the world’s best-selling smartphone that wasn’t born in Cupertino. An impressive feat, but one that—along with Samsung’s Megatron-sized hype-machine—has made for sky-high expectations for the sequel.

WrapUp: English Wikipedia Hits 3 Million Articles, New Avast Interface, and More

Posted in: Features, Today's Chili, windows 7, WrapUp

This article was written on August 24, 2009 by CyberNet.

Welcome to the WrapUp by CyberNet. This is a collection of news stories, downloads, and tips that we have collected over the last few days, but never got around to writing about. Don’t forget to send in your own tips, or just leave a comment on this page if you think you’ve got something we should include.

–News–

English Wikipedia Surpasses 3 Million Articles
In eight years the English Wikipedia site has managed to amass a whopping 3 million articles. It’s amazing that they’ve been able to pick the collective minds of millions of contributors, and gather the results in one central location. There are apparently 10 million registered users and more than 326 million edits have been made. That is pretty crazy.

Xbox 360 Elite Dropping to $299
Sony unveiled the PS3 Slim at a $299 price point, and Microsoft is following right behind them by lowering the price on their high-end console. According to a Walmart ad the Xbox 360 Elite, which comes with a built-in 120GB hard drive, will also be sold at $299 soon. The console market is getting awfully competitive these days, and in the end it looks like consumers will be the ones who win from it.

Canon Focuses Less on Megapixels, More on Quality
Last week Canon unveiled some new cameras, and the most perplexing thing for a lot of people was that the cameras actually offered a lower number of megapixels than their predecessors. The reasoning? They are trying not to overload the camera sensors as much, and are thereby increasing the quality of the photos. Consumers often look at megapixels as a sole means of measurement for the quality of photos a camera takes, and hopefully this kind of thinking will start to shift.

Google Voice Offers Free Calls to Canada from the U.S.
I found it rather interesting last week when Google announced that their Google Voice service would once again have free calling to Canada. They had offered this before when the service was still known as GrandCentral, but I’m a bit surprised they brought it back. Why? Because Google Voice is a service that’s only available to U.S. residents. So basically people in the U.S. can call Canada for free with Google Voice, but not visa versa. Huh.

Possible Google Chrome OS Screenshots
Mashable has what appears to be some screenshots of the Google Chrome OS… which could also turn out to be fake. I’m sure this is going to be just the beginning of “screenshot” leaks, and if there’s any truth to these Google is heading towards what appears to be a Mac-inspired interface. If these are indeed real I can’t help but feel like we’re stepping back 5-years when it comes to interface design.

–News in Brief–

Lenova & Samsung Holding Back New PC’s for Windows 7 Launch
Some computer manufacturers are waiting until Windows 7 ships before they release a few select products.

Apple & AT&T Respond to FCC Concerns
Apple and AT&T have addressed concerns that the FCC had regarding the Google Voice apps being pulled from the App Store.

Bing Strikes Licensing Deal with Wolfram Alpha
The “smart” search engine known as Wolfram Alpha will be licensing some of its data to Microsoft.

Mint.com Gets Some New Features
Mint, the free personal finance manager, has received some welcomed new features including better budget management and improved reporting.

Microsoft Looking for “Retail Technical Advisors” for Retail Stores
In the next few months Microsoft will be opening up two retail stores, and they are looking for some people who don’t mind helping users troubleshoot problems with their PC’s.

–Tips, Tutorials, and Reviews–

Avast Doesn’t Look Like Crap Anymore
I’ve been a huge fan of Avast Antivirus over the last few years, but one thing I was never fond of was the interface. It was free though, and so I just dealt with it. Avast 5 (currently in Beta) is changing all of that. The design of the application is like night and day compared to the old version. As of right now all of the features aren’t baked-in, but they will be by the time this thing ships. And when that happens I’ll be telling all the people I’ve set up with Avast about the new version… because it will be a worthwhile upgrade (as long as it’s still free of course). Final version is due out in October.

Run Windows 7 for 120 Days without Activation
We had written about this little “hack” back when Vista launched, and it’s still available in Windows 7. If you’re looking for a way to extend the 30-day “trial period” all you’ll need to do is run slmgr -rearm from the command line at the end of each 30-day period. Doing so will give you another 30-days, and this can be repeated up to 3 times. So if you format your machine every 4-months you may never have to buy Windows 7… um, I didn’t say that though.

Google Chrome (Dev Build) Syncs Bookmarks
There were some indications that this was coming soon, and it’s here. With the help of a command-line switch you can be syncing your Chrome bookmarks with PC’s you have located half-way across the world. Is this groundbreaking? No. It will get interesting though once Google starts expanding this beyond syncing only bookmarks. Since your bookmarks sync with your Google Docs account it seems only natural that they will use the browser to also sync files on your machine.

Pidgin 2.6 Supports Google Talk Voice & Video Chat
Pidgin users have been asking for Google Talk voice support for a long time, and not only did the developers deliver that but they also came through on video support. That is impressive on many levels… the main one being that even the official Google Talk client doesn’t support video chatting (pathetic, I know). Now what would really make me a happy camper is if they could get file transfer support in there.

Turn Photos into Artwork
If you’re a Photoshop user there’s no doubt that you’re already familiar with the artistic filters that are available. For those of you who can’t afford Photoshop or don’t want to take the time learning it… there’s still an easy way for you to turn your photos into masterpieces. The free FotoSketcher app will let you choose from a variety of different styles (water color, oil painting, etc…) and apply them to any image. To top it off there’s even a portable version available so that you can try it out without installing a thing.

–Tips in Brief–

24 Killer Apps for Your USB Drive
This is a great list of programs that can (and probably will) come in handy at some point.

Windows 7 vs. Vista: CPU & Memory Usage Comparison
There’s been a lot of talk about Windows 7 being significantly faster than Vista, but the numbers seem to indicate that it may be closer than we thought.

Xmarks has Alpha Add-on that’s Compatible with Chrome
There is now an Alpha version of Xmarks available that also syncs with Google Chrome. That means it can keep your bookmarks in sync across IE, Firefox, Safari, and now Chrome. Impressive.

5 Sites with Free Strategy Guides for Gamers
These are some sites for you to take into consideration the next time you get stuck when trying to save the princess.

Modify New Tab Behavior in Firefox
This Firefox extension will let you choose what you want to happen when you open a new tab, which includes automatically opening a URL you may have copied to the clipboard.

Google Labs Podcast App for Android
Google appears to be stepping into the podcast market with a new app they’re offering for Android devices.

Adobe Keyboard Shortcut Program
This is a free app made with Adobe Air that provides a unified and searchable interface for finding keyboard shortcuts for all your Adobe applications.

Google Chrome Session Saver
There aren’t many Chrome add-ons, but this is a simple one that will let you save your open tabs so that they can be re-opened later on.

Customize Smooth Scrolling in Firefox
This Firefox extension will let you adjust various aspects of scrolling including the speed and step size.

–Downloads–

Related Posts:

Happy Belated Birthday Wikipedia!

Wikipedia Celebrates 10 Million Articles Worldwide

40 Million Users Protected By Avast! Home

Avast! Antivirus Now Available For Windows Vista RC1

The OLPC Laptops Will Come Loaded With Wikipedia Articles

Oct 24

Galaxy Nexus vs. Droid Razr: how the specs compare

Posted in: Android, Google, mobile, motorola, samsung, Today's Chili

If you saw our side-by-side comparison of the Galaxy Nexus with the iPhone 4S, you might have wondered how that other big Android phone that was announced this week, the Droid Razr, stacks up. Perhaps we can compare the Razr to the iPhone later on, but for now, here is our specs comparison of the […]

Oct 20

Test Global Website Performance

Posted in: performance, stats, Today's Chili, Web Sites

This article was written on August 02, 2011 by CyberNet.

Test website performance

For many of us it is difficult to test a website from another country, but there are online tools that try to make this kind of thing more accessible to everyone. One service I tend to gravitate towards the most is the WebPageTest.org site we previously covered. If you are looking to troubleshoot network issues, however, that site may not provide the details you are looking for.

In those cases I recommend using WatchMouse, which will tell you the time it takes to resolve, connect, and download the given page from 10 global locations. You can also expand your tests to pinging and traceroutes from over 30 monitoring stations they have worldwide. When requesting the ping analysis it will actually provide results from all of the locations on one screen to make performance comparisons much easier.

The only downside to this free service is that they only let you do five website checks per day, but ping and traceroute tests are excluded from that limitation. I’m sure they are just trying to prevent people from abusing their free service, which is understandable.

WatchMouse Homepage

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Oct 20

iPhone 4S vs. Galaxy Nexus: how the specs compare

Posted in: Apple, Google, ios, iphone 4s, mobile, samsung, Today's Chili

After all of those months of hearing about “iPhone 5″ and “Nexus Prime” rumors, the actual devices have finally shown their faces to the public. Of course, the phones that we got are called the iPhone 4S and the Galaxy Nexus. Both are showcase devices for the latest versions of their respective platforms’ firmware. If […]

Oct 17

Camera showdown: iPhone 4S vs. iPhone 4, Galaxy S II, Nokia N8 and Amaze 4G (video)

Posted in: Apple, att, camera, cdma, hands-on, hspa, ios 5, Ios5, iPhone, iphone 4s, mobilepostcross, photography, review, Sprint, Today's Chili, verizon, video

Siri’s sweet and all, but for many of us that new eight megapixel sensor and f/2.4 aperture lens are what really makes Apple’s iPhone 4S an appealing upgrade. We spent the weekend shooting around New York City with the iPhone 4S, along with some other top smartphones — the iPhone 4, Samsung Galaxy S II, Nokia N8 and HTC’s Amaze 4G — in order to determine just which phone’s camera reigns supreme. And in order to capture video and stills with consistent framing among all five devices, we secured each smartphone to that homemade quintuple cameraphone mount that you see above — it may be an early prototype, but it got the job done. Jump past the break to see the results, and check out our comprehensive iPhone 4S sample gallery below.

Gallery: Camera showdown: iPhone 4S Sample Images

Continue reading Camera showdown: iPhone 4S vs. iPhone 4, Galaxy S II, Nokia N8 and Amaze 4G (video)

Camera showdown: iPhone 4S vs. iPhone 4, Galaxy S II, Nokia N8 and Amaze 4G (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 17 Oct 2011 18:30:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Oct 15

More Freeware Apps from DonationCoder

Posted in: Features, Freeware, Newly Released, Software, Today's Chili

This article was written on December 05, 2007 by CyberNet.

Click to Enlarge

Finding apps that make you more productive is always something that I look forward to, and DonationCoder is once again on top of that! Just a little while ago they started a Getting Organized Challenge to see what programmers could come up with.

My first thought was that this was going to be a roundup of existing programs, but instead they required that any submitted apps not be released prior to November 1, 2007. There are 10 programs in total, and all of them are offered completely free of charge. How can you beat that?

I think my favorite out of the bunch is Evaluweight (pictured above). It’s helpful when you’re wanting to compare, well, anything. All you have to do is specify the features you want in the left column, and assign an importance/weight to each of them. Then for each of the products you give them a score (out of 10), and the program will automagically calculate the overall score based upon all of the features. You can save all of the data to a file for easy retrieval, but what would have really been nifty is some sort of HTML export tool for people who post comparisons on websites.

Among the other programs are:

Interruptron – Helps monitor how much time you waste because of interruptions.
AnotherOneDone – Keeps track of how many tasks you have to do, and shows a progress bar displaying how many you’ve completed.
HowLong2It – Counts down to a date in the future, or even one in the past. If you specify a past event, such as a wedding anniversary, it will say how many days have passed since the anniversary.
Timer Assist – A timer that is designed to repeat at a specified interval.
Simple Multi-Alarm Utility – Create multiple alarms to alert you of upcoming events/tasks.
PlainTextWiki Toolkit – Lets you have wiki text support in several different text editors.
CFDButton – Provides more filetype filters in the Open file dialog box. You can also set your favorite directories so that they are just a click away.
MyHelp – A program where you can quickly store things that you often forget.
JRHourlyMarker – Adds hourly markers to mirc and xchat.

View all of the apps in DonationCoder’s Getting Organized Challenge

DonationCoder’s 35 Free “New Year” Apps

JottiQ Antivirus Scanner is the Shining Point of NANY 2011

Bulk Create Folders from a Text File

Two Interesting Apps Emerge from DonationCoder Competition

Oct 13

Download Safari 3.1 with Speed Improvements

Posted in: Apple, Freeware, Newly Released, performance, Software, Today's Chili

This article was written on March 18, 2008 by CyberNet.

safari31

I don’t think anyone was really expecting to see a new release of Apple’s Safari browser today, but it has dropped down the tubes for all to enjoy. Apple is once again boasting the performance of the browser when stacked up against the other mainstream alternatives, and according to them Safari comes out well on top in terms of HTML performance and JavaScript performance.

As you may recall we recently put many of the different browser up against Apple’s SunSpider JavaScript test, and Firefox 3 pre-release builds topped the charts. At the time though we didn’t test it against pre-release versions of Safari 3.1, and so we thought that we would do that now. Here are some of our past results intermingled with the newest versions of the browsers (the lower amount of time is better):

Firefox 3 Beta 4: 6972.2ms
Safari 3.1: 7411.8ms
Opera 9.5.9807 Beta: 10824.0ms
Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1: 14302.0ms
Safari 3.0.4 Beta: 18012.6ms
Firefox 2.0.0.12: 29376.4ms
Internet Explorer 7: 72375.0ms

Note: All tests were performed on the same Windows machine.

Apple definitely holds the performance crown when comparing it to other released browsers, but once Firefox 3 makes its way out there will be a new king of the hill. So if you were developing a lengthy diabolical plan as to how you were going to switch from Firefox to Safari you might want to hold off if performance was the sole deciding factor.

As far as the Acid 3 test goes Safari 3.1 scores a 75/100, which isn’t quite as good as the nightly builds demonstrated when we last tested it. It’s still the closest a browser comes to passing the test though.

I haven’t noticed any new features in Safari 3.1, and so if you find something I would love to know about it. I do have to say it does feel pretty snappy though when it comes to loading pages. I might have to whip up some more comparisons between the browsers available.

Download Safari 3.1 (Mac or Windows)

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Oct 11

Windows 7 Release Date in 2010 – Make your Prediction Here!

Posted in: Microsoft, Release Date, Software, Today's Chili, Windows, Windows Vista

This article was written on July 21, 2007 by CyberNet.

MGX 2008 Microsoft announced that if everything goes according to plan (like that ever happens in the world of software) then Windows 7 will be available sometime in 2010. That gives Microsoft more than three years to round up all of their new features, plan them out, develop them, and test them. I would be thoroughly impressed if Microsoft can get another version of Windows out by 2010.

The fact that Microsoft even announced the general timeframe is nothing short of shocking though, especially with how secretive they have been regarding Vista SP1. The announcement of the Windows 7 release date came at the MGX 2008 conference, where Bill Gates gave his last MGX keynote.

The good news is that Windows 7 will ship in both 32-bit and 64-bit flavors, so the upgrade to 64-bit compatible processors isn’t needed quite yet. There was no mention whether there would be another 25 different editions of Windows, but I’m sure that is something we can count on. After all, it wouldn’t be any fun if you didn’t have to look at a huge table to figure out which version of Windows is right for you.

At any rate, Microsoft even confirmed that they have been sharing some information regarding Windows 7, but they made sure to thrown in the "it might not be ready" clause (I put it in bold):

As part of our ongoing outreach to enterprise customers and partners, Microsoft has begun sharing plans for how they will continue to deliver value to businesses in the future, including Software Assurance customers in particular. As part of this, we are sharing some preliminary information on Windows ‘7’ — the internal name for the next version of the Windows Client OS — as well as updates on other future Windows-related releases such as the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack. Microsoft is scoping Windows ‘7’ development to a three-year timeframe, and then the specific release date will ultimately be determined by meeting the quality bar. In the meantime, Microsoft is dedicated to helping customers deploy and get the most business value from their PCs using Windows Vista and related technologies like the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack, and we’re encouraged by the response and adoption of these products so far.

As long as Windows 7 hits the "quality bar," we should be seeing it sometime in 2010. This also led me to think of something else that I thought might be fun. Why not make a game out of this so that we can look back in 3-years to see where we thought we would be. Here’s what we’re gonna do:

–Enter your Prediction–

Magic 8 Ball I’ve got four things below that you can make a prediction on regarding Windows 7:

Name – Go on…take a stab in the dark what you think the next version of Windows is going to be called when it ships.
Release Date – What day (by that I mean day, month, and year) do you think Windows 7 will ship for consumers)?
Number of Versions – How many different versions of Windows do you think will be available? Vista currently has 6 different editions in case you were wondering.
Pricing – What do you think the least expensive and most expensive versions will cost (and I mean the retail cost)?

So that’s all you gotta do! This isn’t any official contest, but maybe in 3-years we’ll turn it into one. So have some fun, and here are my guesses:

Name: Windows Serene
Release Date: February 15, 2011
Number of Versions: 3
Pricing: $125 to $500

Source: All About Microsoft [via Richard in the CyberNet Forum]

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Sep 30

AT&T Samsung Galaxy S II review

Posted in: Android, att, dual-core, galaxy, galaxy s ii, GalaxySIi, gingerbread, Google, mobilepostcross, nfc, review, samsung, Today's Chili, video

Here comes the second episode of a thrilling three-part saga. Not content with simply selling ten million units of the GT-I9100 — its flagship device — in the course of the last five months, Samsung’s ready to flood the good ol’ US of A with a healthy dose of the Galaxy S II, and it has three carriers — Sprint, AT&T and T-Mobile — already signed up on the dotted line. The Epic 4G Touch has already made its way into stores (not to mention the hearts of customers), and Ma Bell’s next in line to appease the masses.

This time, things are a smidge different. Whereas Sprint opted to enlarge the screen and add in a few other select design tweaks, it appears that AT&T wanted to keep its variant — appropriately named the Galaxy S II — as close to the international smash hit as possible, opting for the same display size, squared corners and battery (albeit, with a twist). As it turns out, the tweaks are much more subtle than they were on last year’s Samsung Captivate, which arguably looked almost nothing like the original Galaxy S. So does AT&T’s model fit in with its two close compadres? Was its design choice the right decision for this go-round? Follow us below to get the full scoop.

Gallery: AT&T Samsung Galaxy S II gallery

Continue reading AT&T Samsung Galaxy S II review

AT&T Samsung Galaxy S II review originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 30 Sep 2011 14:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Hasta La Gadget!

Samsung Galaxy S4 Review: Better, But Not Best (Update: LTE Version)