Hasta La Gadget!

We’re unabashed spec junkies here at Engadget, and can you blame us? There are mountains of new devices every year, and it helps to have bullet points and numerical differentiators to cut through the fluff. That’s why we’re happy to say we got the chance to run the Quadrant benchmark on Motorola’s Tegra 2-powered Xoom, and have a number with which to compare it against the many competitors sure to breech Android’s bow soon. 1823 is the magic number — which doesn’t quite compare to the LG Optimus 2X — but that’s with a non-optimized smartphone version of Quadrant running the app on the tablet’s sizable 1280 x 800 display, no less. What’s more, Quadrant cleared up some of the codename confusion we’ve seen out of Moto as of late, as it turns out the Xoom also identifies itself as both Trygon and Stingray. Good to know!

Motorola Xoom first benchmark: 1823 in Quadrant originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 02 Feb 2011 15:17:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Hard to believe that the infamous “fragmentation” term is now being bandied about in the web browser world, but sure enough, it’s Microsoft using the term today to describe the brave new realm we’re living in. If you’ll recall, Google defended its decision to not include H.264 support natively in Chrome, but maintained that WebM plug-ins were coming to Safari and Internet Explorer 9. Today, Microsoft’s kinda-sorta returning the favor. Following the outfit’s release of a Firefox add-on to bring full H.264 support to Windows machines, the outfit is releasing a plug-in for Chrome (only the Windows version for now) that provides support for H.264. Furthermore, it’s committed to supporting third-party WebM video plug-ins; to quote, users “will be able to play WebM video in IE9.” It’s fairly obvious that Microsoft’s taking this golden opportunity to push its browser as one that supports everything (rather than just its own preferred format), but regardless of the motives, we’re just happy to see differences put aside and compatibility finding priority.

Microsoft releases H.264 plug-in for Google Chrome, vows to support WebM video in IE9 originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 02 Feb 2011 14:12:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Here’s the Android 3.0 Honeycomb homescreen for tablets. It’s slightly different from Android’s phone-interface to take advantage of the larger tablet-sized screen, which means there’s even better multitasking and widgets. Plus, even cooler stuff. Updating. More »

We’re holed up in Building 43 of the Googleplex here in lovely Mountain View, California for today’s event promising an “in-depth look at Honeycomb, Android ecosystem news, and hands-on demos” — and if you ask us, that sounds like a trifecta of potential awesome. We’ll be liveblogging all of the action and hopefully following up with some hands-ons, so keep it locked right here for all the little green robots (and — just maybe — large black tablets) that you can handle.

Continue reading Live from Google’s Android event!

Live from Google’s Android event! originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 02 Feb 2011 12:52:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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There’s a lot to be said for civility, sure, but any semblance of that phenomenon seems to have largely gone out the window when it comes to tech companies. From Steve Jobs’s Android hate to Larry Ellison’s HP smack talk, today’s tech firms don’t really seem to give a damn when it comes to civility.

Take this recent Google/Microsoft kerfuffle. Google rushed to tell the world that it caught Microsoft stealing search results for Bing. Google didn’t actually say what it was going to do about the perceived theft–in fact, it’s not really certain whether the company has any kind of recourse–it just wanted everyone to know that Microsoft is a dirty stinkin’ thief.

And now Microsoft is calling Google out on its decision to dump the MS-supported H.264 format. “Our point of view is totally clear,” An IE exec wrote in a recent blog post.

Now it’s not certain that Microsoft is calling out Google as payback for the Bing thing, but the timing is certainly curious. After all, Google’s decision to drop support for the format came way back in mid-July.

You know, where I come from there’s a world for this kind of in-public fighting. We call it “hiybbprqag.”