Hasta La Gadget!

Apps, apps, apps! Everywhere you look, more apps. Both Android and Windows Phone 7 have reportedly crossed a couple of round number milestones recently, giving us a decent idea of the maturity gap between the two. Microsoft’s brand new OS with an old OS’ name has rounded the 5,000 available apps corner — that’s according to two sources keeping track of what’s on offer in the Marketplace — while AndroLib’s latest data indicates Android’s crossed the 200,000 threshold when it comes to apps and games taken together. We’re cautious on taking either of these numbers as hard truth, particularly since AndroLib was reporting 100,000 Android apps when there were only 70,000 — but they do provide rough estimates as to where each platform is in terms of quantity, if not quality. Now, where do you think each will be this time in 2011?

Continue reading App store milestones: Windows Phone 7 hits 5,000 as Android passes 200,000 available apps

App store milestones: Windows Phone 7 hits 5,000 as Android passes 200,000 available apps originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 28 Dec 2010 15:04:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Google Voice Actions was the first step towards our Star Trek dreams of lassoing the world with naught but vocal cords, and today Google’s taken a second hop towards that inevitable future by letting Android devices record our every utterance. Yes, if you’ve got a handset running Froyo or better, you can download an update for Google Voice Search right now, which will let your phone dynamically personalize its speech-to-text engine to better recognize your voice most every time you use it. Of course, by so doing you’re giving Google permission to record your sentences — anonymously, of course — to use in future products, but whether that’s a problem or just a happy coincidence depends on whether you take Google at its word. We hit the “yes” button, in case you’re curious. Find it on Android Market, or just use the handy-dandy QR code below.

Continue reading Google Voice Search update helps you personalize your results, helps Google build another database to take over the world

Google Voice Search update helps you personalize your results, helps Google build another database to take over the world originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 14 Dec 2010 23:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Let this be a warning for John and Jane Q. Public (always a cute couple, those two) to always wipe sensitive / secret data from your hard drives before selling a computer. Or better yet, take out the drive entirely and physically destroy it. That’s what we’d expect from our government entities, but an internal investigation found that a number of PCs and components from NASA‘s shuttles had been sold from four different centers — Kennedy and Johnson Space Centers, and Ames and Langley Research Centers — that “failed sanitization verification testing,” or weren’t even tested at all. In Langley’s case, while hard drives were being destroyed, “personnel did not properly account for or track the removed hard drives during the destruction process.” Meanwhile at Kennedy, computers were found being prepped for sale that still had “Internet Protocol information [that] was prominently displayed.” Helluva way to start a shuttle launch retirement, eh?

NASA’s shuttle PCs sold with sensitive data intact, insert WikiLeaks joke here originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 08 Dec 2010 12:32:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Whether we like, loathe, or never even considered the idea of it, quantitative literary analysis seems ready for its moment in the spotlight. Dan Cohen and Fred Gibbs, a pair of historians of science over at George Mason University, have been playing around with the titles of some nearly 1.7 million books — accounting for all the known volumes published in Britain during the 19th century — in a search for enlightenment about the Victorian era’s cultural trends and developments. By looking at how often certain words appear in text titles over time, they can find corroboration or perhaps even refutation for the commonly held theories about that time — although they themselves warn that correlation isn’t always indicative of causation. Their research has been made possible by Google’s Books venture, which is busily digitizing just about every instance of the written word ever, and the next stage will be to try and mine the actual texts themselves for further clues about what our older selves thought about the world. Any bets on when the word “fail” was first used as a noun?

Continue reading Google helps scholars mine 1.7 million Victorian era book titles for clues to our historical attitudes

Google helps scholars mine 1.7 million Victorian era book titles for clues to our historical attitudes originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 06 Dec 2010 05:52:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’re not totally sure that Android 2.1 users will be happy to be bundled in with 2.2 consumers — after all, there’s plenty in Froyo that’s not available on Eclair — but the fact remains that a cool 83 percent of actively used Android phones right now run one of the two latest iterations. A reminder is merited to say that by “active” we mean those that accessed the Android Market over the foregoing two weeks — which might have a slight bias toward over-representing the newer phones with folks either abandoning their Cupcake and Donut handsets or simply not searching for new apps for them. Either way, we reckon it’s good to see such nice big slices taken up by Android’s most advanced versions, it seems almost a shame that Gingerbread’s arrival will soon disrupt things all over again. For now, we’re off to our delicatessen, all this food talk’s given us the munchies.

[Thanks, Dan]

Android 2.x now accounts for 83 percent of all active Googlephones originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 02 Dec 2010 02:41:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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