Market research firm Interpret, LLC issued a report today that examines the public's mindshare of the market's leading smartphones (iPhone 3G, iPhone 3G S, Palm Pre, Android G1, BlackBerry Storm, BlackBerry Curve). In other words, it gauges the public's perception of particular devices and how "popular" they are outside of actual sales figures.

While observing popularity often just serves to reiterate what many people think they already know about a product, Interpret's report propounds that it is no longer enough for smartphones to just perform advanced tasks, but they must also project certain qualities about their owners. The qualities that people most wanted to say about themselves through their phone were: "hip/cool," "smart," and "productive."

Continue reading →

As laptops go, it's nothing out of the ordinary. An average brand -- Compaq -- running an average operating system -- Vista -- used for the ordinary, average sort of things, like Web browsing and messaging. With its 17-inch screen, built-in webcam, and a hard drive with enough capacity to store everything I've ever written, it's the kind of machine that pretty much defines mainstream computing.

The difference is this was my father's machine. And after getting a middle-of-the-night call yesterday from my mom saying he had passed away, just like that, it was the first thing I saw after I got to their house and walked into the living room.

Continue reading →

Through new partnerships with Verizon Wireless, Barnes & Noble, Best Buy, and other major US firms, the European-based Philips spin-off hopes to at least hobble the Amazon giant in North America. Set for release next month, Irex's 8.1-inch touch screen eReader will be better than the Kindle in almost countless ways, officials contended during a press conference today in New York City.

Unlike the Kindle, which is dedicated to sales from Amazon.com, the Irex DR800SG will support Barnes & Noble's eBookstore and ultimately other e-comm sites, magazines, and newspapers, too, said Hans Brons, CEO and founder of Irex. Based in the Netherlands, Irex has been carefully eying the US e-reader marketplace for more than a year now, according to Brons.

Continue reading →

As first reported in the Washington Post this afternoon, and as has been independently verified by two other Washington news sources, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R - Texas) has agreed to withdraw her amendment to an Interior Dept. spending bill that would have cut off funding to any Federal Communications Commission effort to regulate "net neutrality." This as aides to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, as reported by Congressional Quarterly, approached Sen. Hutchison seeking her withdrawal, at least until the Chairman can put forth a complete proposal.

On Monday, Chairman Genachowski made a public policy speech outlining a framework for new FCC regulations that would prohibit service providers from disabling certain Internet services on behalf of customers, as well as more transparently specify for customers what allowed measures they are taking to regulate traffic on their networks. The implication of these "Fifth" and "Sixth Principles," as they're being called, is that the FCC would in turn prohibit ISPs from being able to provide better bandwidth to certain classes of content providers willing to pay a premium.

Continue reading →

While Linux-based operating systems have been well-received for netbook form factors, some of the highest-profile distributions have not yet taken a strong hold there, especially when competing against desktop operating systems like Windows XP. One of those not-yet-a-hits is Moblin, an Intel-endorsed open source platform designed especially for Atom-powered devices.

Today, however, Moblin received a couple of big boosts as a result of the Intel Developer Forum going on this week, helping to grow the project's scope considerably.

Continue reading →

Internet Explorer is in a state of crisis so severe that Microsoft may yet lose most of the browser market territory claimed during the browser wars. Microsoft has no choice but to make a leap of development faith, by abandoning the IE rendering engine and releasing new WebKit-based desktop and mobile browsers. IE is a dead platform. It's long past time for Microsoft to end its "Weekend at Ernie's" behavior.

What a difference a decade makes. Ten years ago, Microsoft won the browser wars with Netscape, only to abandon the territory after Internet Explorer 6 launched. Many end users are still stuck in the IE 6 past, whether it's the browser directly or progeny Internet Explorer 7 or 8. According to Net Applications, IE 6 usage share is higher than either of the newer versions. Perhaps IE's market position would be better had Microsoft not let browser development lay idle until after Mozilla started working on Firefox about six years ago. AOL and Mozilla reignited browser development because of paid search -- that Google box -- as did several other software developers. AOL eventually gave up on Netscape, but Apple, Mozilla and Opera continued developing browsers.

Continue reading →

Yesterday's revelation by Google that its open source Chromium lab developers have been testing deploying the Chrome browser engine as an Internet Explorer add-on called Chrome Frame, and its subsequent opening up of that project to the public, is a surprisingly ballsy move from a company typically known for being cool, plain, and innocent-looking. Quite seriously, the complete engine is being offered as a downloadable add-on, with the promise that developers will be able to retool their sites to let IE users render them using standards accepted by developers rather than those deployed by Microsoft.

But that's not exactly what happens -- and in fact, that last phrase could apply in any number of cases to how the browser-within-a-browser actually works. First, for developers to be able to utilize these standards, they're being invited to include tags in their code that target a specific browser, such as <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="chrome=1">
But as you can plainly see, that browser isn't IE. It's Chrome, which means that Google Frame is actually an incentive to get more developers to target Google's browser specifically.

Continue reading →

Today, Google launched a new project called Sidewiki, which is a browser sidebar that lets users add footnotes to any existing Web page, even if the main site doesn't allow comments. Sidewiki has been added as a feature on Google Toolbar for Firefox and Internet Explorer, and the team today said they're working on an edition for Chrome, too.

Sidewiki appears as a field on the left hand side of the browser, where users can post contextual commentary. If it's a site paraphrasing a piece of literature and a user happens to have a link to the full text, it can be added there. While it can very easily suffer from "FIRST!" syndrome or serve as a spam advertisement platform, posts are not anonymous. And as Sundar Pichai, VP of Google Product Management and Michal Cierniak, Engineering Lead for Google Sidewiki today said the content will be ranked by quality.

Continue reading →

According to a Bloomberg report yesterday, Deutsche Telekom is in early talks with Clearwire and MetroPCS about 4G development.

The report cites unnamed sources who said that a bid to buy Sprint, as had been previously rumored was highly unlikely. Instead, the sources said Clearwire needs a $2 billion investment by the end of the year to complete its WiMAX expansion, and that Deutsche Telekom could provide that funding in exchange for access to the network.

Continue reading →

In the not-too-distant past, professional musicians used dedicated sound modules and sound synthesis hardware to produce realistic representations of full orchestras. We're not so certain what composers used to do before such hardware existed, though they probably all sympathized with Ludwig van Beethoven struggling with his immortal Ninth Symphony while deaf.

As PCs rapidly evolved, their CPUs and everyday sound chips became theoretically more capable of producing and reproducing realistic sound samples than dedicated MIDI sound modules. So software very quickly assumed the role not only of sequencer but of virtual orchestra; and just like in every other field of software, one or two standards-bearers swiftly emerged: Sibelius (named for the composer) and Finale. And a very familiar logic was applied to them: If you were a composer and you didn't produce scores using either or both standards, you were officially declared non-professional.

Continue reading →

You can't fault any service for not being capable of providing 100% uptime; but you also can't help but notice the shockwaves when that one-tenth-of-one-percent comes around. This morning, Google is acknowledging that users throughout yesterday had difficulty accessing its Google News server, although it is not calling the event an outright outage.

News publishers whose promotional models rely upon Google News received notices from Google yesterday afternoon saying that users began having access difficulties at about 12:30 pm PDT (3:30 EDT) yesterday. Betanews is capable of tracking its own readership, along with referral sources, on a minute-to-minute basis; and we could actually see the event as though we were watching a seismometer. Assuming our instrumentation is accurate, our traffic from Google News began plummeting almost three hours earlier than this report, at about 1:00 pm EDT. Referral traffic from Google News began resuming its normal pattern at about 5:30.

Continue reading →

The typical PC hardware introduction is targeted first at the high end of the product's respective market, often referred to as the "enthusiast" or "early adopter." This is the person expected to have more disposable income, willing to pay a premium to be first on the block, and the person I'm most often told by company representatives fits the description "Betanews reader."

But the recent trend that has breathed new energy into the hard disk drive industry -- energy it desperately needed during the worst days of the bad economy -- has to do with consumption, and it affects more than just the high end of the market. Everyday PC users are finding themselves more comfortable with larger hard drives, so much so that average street prices for 1.5 TB HDDs are now approaching $125. It's the mainstream that's driving prices lower, but that's also purchasing more drives especially now that external HDDs -- once considered dead just a few years ago -- have exploded into a commodity market. Now that consumers can simply plug them in and go, they're as ubiquitous as printers.

Continue reading →

Even though it's only got one Android device in its roster so far, wireless network operator Sprint today announced that it is turning over its network and product services to Android developers through the Sprint Developer Web site's new Android section.

With the Android 1.5 "Donut" SDK update, Android developers gained access to the CDMA telephony stack, where previously only the GSM stack was supported. So now that support for Sprint's wireless network protocol is built into Android, a Sprint developer program will help software developers exploit the "Now Network" and its strengths.

Continue reading →

What we were preparing to discover with the Word Web App was something on the level of what we've seen with other attempts at Web or mobile apps that parse Office documents: a warning that certain features were not supported. (Indeed, we actually did see warnings like this with Excel Web App, which we'll tell you about later this week.) Instead, we saw that Microsoft was making an effort to have its Web component handle the more intricate parts of its Word documents with the same ease and lack of constraint as the installed application.

But does that mean Microsoft will let all users edit these elements of the document in the same way? Nothing in the sparse documentation accompanying the Technical Preview suggests that every editing feature offered in Word 2007 or Word 2010 will necessarily be replicated in the Word Web App. Instead, it merely makes reference to a big, prominent Open in Word button, which pushes the document out to the locally installed Word. Ironically, this feature did not work for us, on a system where the Office 2010 Technical Preview was installed.

Continue reading →

The Financial Accounting Standards Board will make a grave mistake if it gives into Apple and other high-tech companies demanding a change to subscription accounting rules. FASB is preparing to vote on a rule change affecting GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) versus non-GAAP accounting. Apple is on record as supporting the change, which would artificially boost the company's quarterly revenue and almost certainly its stock price. Some other companies, including Microsoft, could receive similar benefits.

Under current rules, companies defer subscription revenue. Since they deliver services over time, revenue is accounted for by X percentage every quarter. Microsoft has deferred revenue for years, but the numbers got really big starting in 2002, following the implementation of annuity volume-licensing contracts under Licensing 6. Four times a year, Microsoft states the total unearned revenue, how much deferred revenue it realizes as real revenue and how much more the company gains each quarter.

Continue reading →