Hasta La Gadget!

Sony’s top-secret prototype labs must be clocking hours like mad, as Sony Insider reports that the company has two more surprises in store — in addition to a PlayStation tablet, dual-screen clamshell and sliding PC, the skunk works has cooked up a Chrome OS notebook, as well as a “VAIO Hybrid PC” that defies any sort of meaningful explanation in just three words. The Chrome OS device is reportedly modeled after Google’s own Cr-48 reference design with roughly the same dimensions and keyboard but an oh-so-slightly smaller 11.6-inch screen, and NVIDIA’s Tegra 2 running the show alongside 1GB of RAM and 16GB of flash storage. Sony’s also shooting for eight hours of battery life, and a weight of just 2.2 pounds.

All of that pales in comparison to what Sony’s plotting for this “Hybrid PC,” though. The publication says we’re looking at a thin-and-light Core i7 notebook with an incredible 8 to 16.5 hours of battery life, Intel Thunderbolt and an internal SSD, all of which plugs into a dock of some sort that adds a Blu-ray burner and external graphics (by AMD) for gaming and multimedia. We don’t have any pictures or proof at this point, but it sounds like a whopper of a tale, and just the sort of thing that Intel was talking about making possible with the 10Gbps of bandwidth that Thunderbolt brings.

Sony crafting VAIOs with Chrome OS, external GPUs and Thunderbolt tech? originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 19 Mar 2011 19:13:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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A screen shot of part of the page you would see when visiting amazon.com/apps before it was taken down. Photo: androidnews.de

Retail giant Amazon is preparing to launch its own app store on the Android platform on Tuesday, March 22, a trusted source told Wired.com.

First leaked in September, Amazon’s Android app store will be a curated market, meaning Amazon reviewers will determine which apps are allowed inside, similar to Apple’s iTunes App Store. That’s a contrast to Google’s “anything goes” policy for apps that appear in the Android Marketplace.

Amazon has been less than discreet with its imminent app store. Earlier this week, an Android fan discovered that a webpage for the Amazon app store —http://www.amazon.com/apps — went live prematurely, revealing a horizontal sliding menu of about 48 apps and their prices.

Customers will be able to purchase apps through the Amazon.com website or directly through a native Amazon app on their Android devices, said our tipster, who is involved in the launch. Our source asked to remain anonymous due to a non-disclosure agreement.

For apps that have links to purchase and download other apps, those links must go through the Amazon market. They may not contain URLs to apps on the Android market, our source added.

An Amazon app store is possible on Android because, unlike Apple, Google allows third parties to set up their own software shops on the Android platform. Some critics point out that an Amazon app store in addition to an official Android app market may create confusion on the platform.

However, it’s worth noting that Amazon payment systems are deployed in more countries than Google Checkout, so an Amazon app store may pose serious competition to the Android Marketplace, and possibly even iTunes.

TechCrunch has speculated that the Amazon app store may precede an Amazon-made tablet powered by the Android OS, enabling Amazon to more directly compete with Apple and other tablet manufacturers.

Multiple reports claim that Amazon will focus on lower prices for apps to gain a competitive edge. Indeed, tech blog Android News looked through the 48 apps on the leaked webpage and found that prices of a few apps undercut the prices for the same respective apps listed on Google’s Marketplace.

See Also:

• Amazon Android App Store Apps and Prices Get Early Reveal
• Amazon to Launch Android App Store
• Everything We Know So Far About Amazon’s Android App Store …

At a quick glance, without any background information, your eyes might tell you that the HTC Thunderbolt is little more than a Verizon remake of Sprint’s EVO 4G and AT&T’s Inspire 4G. After all — like its contemporaries — the Thunderbolt features a spacious 4.3-inch WVGA display, 8 megapixel camera, and dual-LED flash. In reality, though, the Thunderbolt is something more: from the Inspire, it borrows a better, crisper display with a wider viewing angle and a newer-generation (though still single-core) Qualcomm Snapdragon processor. From the EVO 4G, meanwhile, it borrows a cool integrated kickstand and the addition of a second “4G” radio, making this a spec Frankenstein of sorts — the best of both worlds. Of course, instead of Sprint’s WiMAX for that 4G radio, the Thunderbolt grants you access to Verizon’s LTE network — a network so fresh, it still has that new-network smell. There’s a lot of horsepower here.

In other words, the Thunderbolt has a very real opportunity to be the finest 4.3-inch device HTC has ever made — for the moment, anyway. Let’s see how it fares.

Continue reading HTC Thunderbolt review

HTC Thunderbolt review originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 18 Mar 2011 16:30:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This article was written on January 22, 2007 by CyberNet.

It looks like Google just updated their Feed Reader Module for the Google Personalized Homepage. I’m sure that this is to help compete with Netvibes who offers an amazing built-in feed reader for their customizable homepage. The screenshot above demonstrates how the Feed Reader Module works.

As you can see each of the items can be expanded/contracted so that you can read the feed items without ever leaving the homepage. One thing that I did notice was that the module will display summaries of an article if the feed supplies them, instead of displaying the entire article. We want to give everyone the best experience possible when reading the feed from the Google Personalized Homepage so we have removed these summaries from the feed. This means that after Google erases the cached version of our feed (probably after we post this article) it will start to display the full article when expanding them.

Before you all go rushing to check your homepage for the new feature, it does look like they are rolling it out to the accounts. One of my accounts has it but some of the others don’t, and sometimes if you logout and then log back in you’ll receive it. You can also try switching browsers because the account that I used to take the screenshot above displayed the updated module fine in Firefox, then when I refreshed the page it was gone. I switched over to Internet Explorer and then the feature popped back up. I think it is just temperamental right now, but I’m sure all of the kinks will be worked out soon.

P.S. This is not some separate module I have installed…it is a real update by Google.

Thanks for the tip Eric!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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Today, Adobe Flash 10.2 will hit the Android Market for devices running Froyo, Gingerbread and Honeycomb, and by now you’re probably familiar with what it brings — increased performance for dual-core smartphones running Android 2.2 and Android 2.3, and the promise of seriously sped-up Flash content and better battery life for Android 3.0 tablets (not to mention Flash, period). Well, we’ve already spent a full day with the latest build of Flash 10.2 for Android and quizzed the company thoroughly about the release, and there are a couple surprises in store.

First off, you don’t absolutely need a dual-core phone to take advantage of Flash 10.2 — Adobe VP Danny Winokur told us, and we confirmed in testing, that there are slight performance improvements on earlier devices too. With our trusty Droid 2’s 1Ghz OMAP3 chip, we saw a slight but noticeable boost in framerate when playing a YouTube trailer at 480p, which admittedly only took took that particular video from “unwatchable” to merely “fairly jerky.” With the Tegra 2-toting Motorola Xoom, however, 480p videos ran perfectly smooth, even as the tablet had trouble rendering 720p content as anything but a series of images. However, Adobe says even that will change soon, as this beta release doesn’t take advantage of full hardware acceleration — it’s actually turned off right now. Though the Tegra 2 is natively decoding video, Adobe told us that hardware rendering and compositing will be added in a subsequent release, and when they are it “will bring 720p playback to a really smooth, enjoyable level.” We also noticed that phone temperatures seemed slightly cooler with Flash 10.2, which suggests better battery life. The other work-in-progress is Flash integration into Google’s Honeycomb browser, which presently has trouble detecting finger taps when Flash isn’t played full screen, but which will — Adobe hopes — play exactly the same inside and outside the browser when work on Flash 10.2 is complete. Sounds promising, no? Then why not download it yourself this evening and give it a go?

Flash 10.2 hits Android today, Adobe hopes for viewable 720p playback in a matter of weeks originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 18 Mar 2011 10:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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