Hasta La Gadget!

Virgin Mobile is offering the iPhone to its prepaid customers as of today. The Sprint-owned subsidiary is using the event to kickstart a new retail strategy that will see the company open branded retail stores in Chicago — with a nationwide rollout dependent upon its success. Since all carriers have to make a minimum commitment to Apple in order to receive the handset, it’s interesting to see that Virgin’s allocation forms part of Sprint’s $15.5 billion gamble on the handset that’s still yet to pay off. The handset will set users back $650 for a 16GB iPhone 4S, while plans begin at $30 for 300 voice minutes, unlimited messages and data, but only if they commit to automatic monthly payments.

Continue reading Virgin Mobile to carry iPhone from today, Sir Richard does his best Fonz impression

Virgin Mobile to carry iPhone from today, Sir Richard does his best Fonz impression originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 29 Jun 2012 07:39:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Following the official debut of the Google Chrome browser in the iOS platform today, it appears that the app is now hitting the charts by becoming the number one free app in the App Store. This is interesting considering the fact that the app has just been officially released in iOS a few hours ago. At the Google I/O developer conference today,  Vice President of Chrome Brian Rakowski demonstrated Chrome using an iPhone and a MacBook.

Chrome is currently available for iOS 4.3 or higher devices and it supports Chrome sync, a nifty feature that lets users synchronize tabs, bookmarks and log-in credentials across multiple devices. In December last year, we reported that Chrome is already the most popular browser in the world. Our report was based from a research data gathered by the web analytics firm StatCounter.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Chrome blamed for MacBook crashes, Google confirms issue, Google introduces Chrome browser for the iPhone and iPad,

Today’s Google I/O keynote was, as expected, all about the Chrome. Easily one of the biggest among the company’s laundry list of announcements surrounding the browser-turned-operating-system has to be its arrival on iOS, bringing the functionality that an ever-growing number of users have come to know and love to the iPhone and iPad. The list includes, perhaps most notably, its cross-device syncing, ensuring that you can pick up where you left off on the desktop version of the program, taking your pages and tabs with you on the go. So, is Google’s fancy mobile browser enough to get us off mobile Safari altogether? Check out some impressions of the iPhone version of the app after the break.

Continue reading Google Chrome for iPhone hands-on

Google Chrome for iPhone hands-on originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 28 Jun 2012 17:29:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Chrome for iOS, announced at Google IO just a few hours ago, has already begun to hit the App Store, though there’s a sting if you’re expecting the full Google browser experience. The new browser is the latest iteration of Chrome, bringing features like tab sync to iPhone and iPad; however, it’s not built on the speedy underlying engine of Chrome on other platforms, such as Android.

In fact, it’s more like a reskin of what Apple is already offering in iOS, dressing up the existing WebKit engine with a shiny new Chrome UI. One of Apple’s limits for iOS apps is that they’re unable to change those underlying components:

“It’s not the Chrome rendering or JavaScript engines — the App Store rules forbid that. It’s the iOS system version of WebKit wrapped in Google’s own browser UI. The pressure for Apple to allow users to specify a third-party app as their default browser is going to increase significantly after this. (As I type this, it’s not yet in the App Store.)” John Gruber

There’s also no support for setting anything other than Mobile Safari on the iPhone or iPad as the default browser. That means every time you click a link in an email or app, Safari will leap up to load it rather than Chrome for iOS.

It’s unclear whether the inevitable increase of pressure on Apple to change its policies will have any impact in the long run. The company has proved reluctant to allow other browsers to occupy the space that Safari currently does, rightly assuming that controlling the web experience is an important aspect of the “walled garden” ecosystem.

You can download Chrome for iOS here [iTunes link].

Chrome for iOS hits US App Store is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
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Windows, Mac and Android users are no longer alone in their access to Google Drive’s online repository. Now iOS and Chrome OS users can install a client and pull down their data and docs (though, the promised Linux client was nowhere to be seen at IO). The iOS app has all the features that make Drive drive great on Android, including OCR and picture recognition. As part of the demo, Clay Bavor, Director of Product Management for Google Apps, showed off the apps ability to decipher and index text from receipts he had taken a picture of. Perhaps more impressive though, was his ability to simply type “pyramids” and have his vacation snapshots pop up. There was no metadata attached to the images identifying them as the pyramids in Egypt, Google was able to recognize the landmarks by analyzing the photos.

Obviously, Drive and seamless integration with it is key to Chrome OS’s success. Now the browser-based OS finally has a native Drive client allowing you to quickly sync and access your data on the lightweight Linux machines. The ability to sync files with Chrome OS is great, but more importantly, an update to the web service has now made offline editing available — perhaps the most requested feature. Now with offline access ironed out and all the major desktop and mobile OSes under it’s belt Drive may actually be ready to challenge peripheral competitors like Dropbox.

Check out our full coverage of Google I/O 2012’s developer conference at our event hub!

Google Drive client comes to Chrome OS and iOS, available today originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 28 Jun 2012 13:33:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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