December, 2010 | Daily Technology News

iPad Skyfire’s Mobile Browser 2011

Dec 182010

iPad Skyfire’s Mobile Browser 2011

free_mobile_browser_skyfire

Apple fans with an iPad will soon have some more options when it comes to browser choice as it looks like the mobile browser Skyfire will be made available on the tablet.

You can see some of its features in the hands on video below. Like the other iOS version, the iPad version maintains all of the same core functionality such as the ability to transcode Flash video into the more acceptable Apple media format HTML5, thereby allowing users to watch Flash videos which would otherwise not be available on iOS.

Aside from this though, the iPad edition lets you see your Twitter, Facebook and Google Reader feeds. Seeing as there are dedicated apps for this already, I guess this is for those that can’t be bothered to use them. We should see the Skyfire browser available in the next week or so as a company spokesperson expects the browser to be available before Christmas for $5.

Eye Storm Faceless Watch 2011-2012

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Dec 182010

Eye Storm Faceless Watch 2011-2012

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Mobile phones and all of the other portable gadgets that we carry with us has reduced our dependence on the simple wristwatch. However, this minimalistic watch may just entice some of you to strap one of these on, if not just for its uniqueness.

Called the Eye Of The Storm, this watch was created by Yiran Qian and the most obvious feature or lack of it is the absence of the watch face. You may be curious as to just how you tell time with this watch and the answer lies in that you only need to know where the hands of the watch are pointing.

In this case, there are two lights that light up when you press a button on the side of the watch. The thicker of the two lights that appears corresponds to the hours hand while the thinner one represents the minutes. The reason why Qian called his creation the Eye Of The Storm is because just like a hurricane, the perimeter of the storm is where all the chaos and mayhem is while the center of the storm or the eye is relatively calm.

If you’ve ever seen a TokyoFlash Watch and seen just how much complexity the folks at that company tries to include in their creations, the Eye Of The Storm watch manages to create the same uniqueness but with a very simple design.

New Word Lens iPhone app available on iTunes 2011

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Dec 182010

New Word Lens iPhone app available on iTunes 2011

Word-Lens-Real-Time-Word-Translation

If you’ve ever been to a foreign country where your native language is not the national language, you’ve probably faced a situation where you’re looking at a sign and having no idea what the words mean. At that point, you may pull out a foreign language dictionary to manually translate the words, but now there’s an easier way for iPhone owners.

A new iPhone app became available on iTunes last night called Word Lens. This app is from QuestVisual and is the result of 2.5 years of work on the part of its developers, John DeWeese and Otavio Good. It’s a paid app that offers translation from Spanish to English and also the reverse, from English to Spanish. The app utilizes OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology to provide “word to word translation”, which could be useful if you want to get an overall understanding of something such as a road sign or a menu at a restaurant.

The app sells for $4.99 and according to Good, the next objective for the app is to include support for more languages, especially the more prominent European languages. Some languages that Good is considering include French, Italian and Portuguese.

Good is the first to admit that “translation isn’t perfect”, but it does an effective job in delivering the meaning of a sentence.

Latest New PlayStation App For Mobile Devices 2011-2012

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Dec 182010

Latest New PlayStation App For Mobile Devices 2011-2012

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Earlier today on PlayStation’s European blog came the announcement of an official PlayStation app that has been created for the Android OS as well as the iPod Touch and iPhone.

The app will provide gamers the chance to look at their PlayStation Network tropies and stay updated in regards to their friend’s online status and game status. Keeping with the social networking component of this app, the PlayStation app will allow gamers to share information through e-mail, Facebook and Twitter.

Sony has not advised if gamers will be able to play their favorite games through the app or when we can expect it to be made available, so keep your eyes open. Version one of the app will launch first in France, Spain, Britain, Italy, Germany and the Netherlands and the most important thing is that there is no money coming out of your pocket because this will be a free app.

Heroku 2011 Salesforce Buys, Gets Ruby On Rails

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Dec 092010

Heroku 2011 Salesforce Buys, Gets Ruby On Rails

At the Dreamforce 2010 conference that is taking place in San Francisco, California, Salesforce confirmed that they have purchased Heroku for the sum total of $212 million. This move is in keeping with their Cloud 2 suite of Cloud based applications.

Heroku may not be a familiar household name, but this is the company that both develops and releases web based applications that utilize Ruby On Rails, a popular and easy to learn programming language. Heroku is in the business of helping developers improve their Ruby on Rails web apps. When a developer believes that his software app has been completed, he can upload it to Heroku which performs an analysis to adjust both computing capacity and storage as required.

Its a strong community that consists of more then 1 million developers and there are about 105,000 applications. Heroku got its start in 2007 and its sale just 3 years later goes to show the importance of cloud computing as well as the changing strategy of Salesforce who is now putting more emphasis on developers.

Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) Has New Anti-Tracking Tool

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Dec 092010

Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) Has New Anti-Tracking Tool

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Internet Explorer 9 (IE9), will soon have a new anti-tracking tool integrated within the browser which will prevent websites from accessing or learning from your browsing history.

The new feature will be implemented at the beginning of 2011 and will function in a manner similar to “Do Not Call” lists which prevent telemarketers from performing cold calls. Essentially, the feature will restrict the number of data requests that can be performed by third party websites, thereby preventing your personal information from being shared with them.

The amount of information sharing that takes place between a web browser and different websites can be quite a bit and many users may be unaware of the extent of this information transfer.

As Microsoft puts it, “consumers share information with more websites than the ones they see in the address bar in their browser. This is inherent in the design of the web and simply how the web works, and it has potentially unintended consequences.”

This new anti-tracking tool that Microsoft is rolling out comes after a recent report by the US Federal trade Commission which highlighted the lack of consumer protection when it comes to data that is collected about them. The IE9 feature can be customized so that you can set up a white list of sites that you would be OK in sharing information with.

2011 Windows Tablet With Sliding Keyboard – Samsung Gloria

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Dec 092010

2011 Windows Tablet With Sliding Keyboard – Samsung Gloria

gloria

Samsung may have a highly popular Android tablet on their hands in the Galaxy Tab, but now they’re looking to recreate the same magic with a Windows Tablet, at least that’s the rumor that’s going around.

If correct, a new 10-inch Samsung Gloria tablet which will be powered by Windows 7 will go on sale in March or April of 2011. There’s nothing really unusual with the release of another Windows tablet, there are in fact quite a number of these devices that come with a touchscreen display. Gloria however, goes one step further by emulating a feature that we commonly see on slider type smartphones and that’s by including a sliding keyboard.

There isn’t much else to go on right now, we don’t have a price or specifications but there is a good degree of plausibility behind this rumor seeing as the source is Blogeee.net. One more point to make is the image that you see at the start of this post is not an official picture, but instead, is an artists rendering of what the device would could look like.

New Nokia X7 mobile phone getting 2011

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Dec 092010

New Nokia X7 mobile phone getting 2011

nokia-x7

With the Nokia X7 mobile phone getting an apparent leak onto the internet just a few wees ago, it seemed that it was inevitable that Eldar Murtazin would somehow manage to get his hands one of of these devices for a preview.

We’ve seen Murtazin give these types of previews before, most notably the last time being the preview of the Nokia N8, a handset that crashed and burned in his eyes. With this Nokia X7, he doesn’t reveal to many details, but the machine translation of one of his comments does seem to clearly convey his feelings about this smartphone: “I do not like this device.” Seems pretty clear, nothing lost in the translation.

Aside from his opinion, you can see the AT&T branding on the top surface of the phone and from what we’ve heard, there are a total of four speakers that are positioned in the corners of the device, of which only two were functional. It is important to note that this is a test unit.

Gingerbread Won’t Need 1GHz CPU Dan Morrill

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Dec 092010

Gingerbread Won’t Need 1GHz CPU Dan Morrill

danmorrill

We can all breath a little easier after confirmation from Dan Morrill, the Android Open Source and Compatibility Tech Lead that Android 2.3 which is also known as Gingerbread will not need a minimum 1GHz processor to operate normally.

The information was made available through a Tweet and in response to an LG rep Facebook post which had the incorrect processor requirements for Android. It can’t get any clearer then what Morrill said on Twitter:

Random note: there’s no hard minimum processor requirement for Gingerbread. Trust me, if there were I’d know

This was further followed by comments by another Android engineer, Brian Swetland who said:

Any device that runs well with Froyo should run even better with Gingerbread. The base hardware requirements have not changed. Of course OEM updates do depend on individual OEM efforts, and I can’t speak for the OEMs, but there’s no technical reason devices able to run Froyo shouldn’t be upgradeable. I think the Froyo->Gingerbread migration should be less painful for device developers than Cupcake->Donut or Eclair->Froyo.

It therefore looks like Android 2.3 will be compatible with most Android phones that are running Android 2.2 and even phones like the Samsung Galaxy S which is slated to receive Android 2.2.

There are no confirmed release dates for Gingerbread except for the Nexus S which should receive it on December 16th. However, if past history is any indication, the Nexus One received Android 2.2 in a few weeks. The HTC EVO needed 6 weeks for a complete rollout while the Motorola Droid was done within a few days after HTC. The Samsung Galaxy S required six months to completion and the L Ally, well, we’re still counting on this one.

The point here is that the top Android phones seem to receive the software updates faster then less popular models which means if you have a top 10 phone, you should be in good shape to get the update sooner rather then later.

Latest Apple iPad 2 Arrives 2011

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Dec 082010

Latest Apple iPad 2 Arrives 2011

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The Digitimes is reporting that the next generation iPad, the iPad 2, will be available early next year and quite possibly by the end of February 2011. This of course is speculation and should be taken with a pinch of salt, but perhaps there is some merit to this, based on the habits of Apple Inc.

The Cupertino company is a creature of habit that follows product life cycles very closely. The month of June is usually when we see new iPhone announcements and September is the time of the year for the new iPod models to be rolled out. It was January of last year when the announcement for the iPad was made, but the Apple tablet was only available to customers a few months down the road.

Could it be that a January 2011 keynote will confirm the iPad 2 and this will be followed by a February release date? The Digitimes believes that we will see the iPad within 100 days and the initial number of units to be created will be somewhere between 400,000 and 500,000 devices. Sources also indicate that the Foxconn plan in Shenzhen is the location where the tablets are being manufactured. When the iPad 2 does launch, it will very likely do so with a retina display and a front-facing camera so that there is support for FaceTime calls.

Undoubtedly, it will be a must have for Apple Fanboys and we’ll most likely see the long lineups as we did last year.

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