The popularity of the netbook is undeniable. In just two years it has risen from a product of uncertain necessity to a killer gadget that makes up as much as thirty percent of all notebook sales for its leading manufacturers.

But where is the form factor headed?

Continue reading →

Download Microsoft Bing Maps 3D 4.0 from Fileforum now.

If you've ever used any of the major travel sites like Travelocity or Priceline to plan a business trip, you may have already encountered what I consider to be their principal deficiency thus far: They don't make hotel suggestions based on the hard, raw data about what amenities are in the general vicinity, and what travelers want to see or to have close at hand.

Continue reading →

Two years ago, the Entertainment Software Association decided that its E3 convention was getting too big and too costly to manage. It changed venues, and tightened admission policies to only allow a select group of attendees. Attendance was upwards of 60,000 in 2006, but in 2007 it was limited to 5,000. Unsurprisingly, a number of studios opted to not even go to the next year's E3, as it would only garner a fraction of its former attention.

This year, attendance rules were somewhat slackened to allow 40,000 attendees (including media), and cable video game channel G4 made its coverage of the events available on Justin.tv as live, free (and commercial free) streams. The decision to stream these events for all to see was a wise one, and Justin.tv counted more than five million total impressions for their live streams of the event's opening press conferences.

Continue reading →

This morning in What's Now | What's Next, we reported on the early word from a keynote address to the Computex trade show in Taiwan, from Microsoft Corporate Vice President Steven Guggenheimer. What might have been big news there was already leaked in advance: Windows 7 will be available to the public October 22. The #2 story was supposed to have been the company casting its net wider, making Windows available on a broader range of devices.

Yet in Taiwan, where IT device production is shifting away from PCs and toward smaller, more customized devices, the question is just how broad that new range will be. The industry there (which locals refer to as "ICT" for "information and communications technology") has drawn a borderline around a concept called smartbooks -- devices whose blueprints can be assembled using pre-existing intellectual property that's licensed to vendors, typically using ARM processors. Meanwhile, Microsoft has drawn some borderlines of its own -- again -- by way of announcing that Windows may be addressing new market segments in the near future, extending its reach to new platforms. But now, there's dispute and confusion over whether the ICT industry's boundaries and Microsoft's have any overlap.

Continue reading →

Last year, Pixel Qi appeared at Computex to present its lofty goals of creating a dual-touchscreen notebook for the One Laptop Per Child project that cost as little as $75, including scintillating mockups of its ultimate goal.

One year later, the group has made distinct progress toward...something. At Computex in Taipei this week, Pixel Qi will be showing off its 3Qi display, which is an improvement on the OLPC XO's current screen. They have created a higher efficiency "transflective" screen. This type of screen has a sunlight-readable black and white (reflective) mode that offers an equally high-quality full-color (transmissive) mode.

Continue reading →

Trend Micro today opened the public beta of Housecall 7.0, the latest iteration of the security company's Web-based malware scanner.

The Housecall 7.0 beta offers a different UI from the current stable version (6.6), and does no longer requires a Java or ActiveX plugin, but instead uses a standalone client that taps into the Trend Micro Smart Protection Network, the company's cloud-based reputability and threat database which the company debuted one year ago.

Continue reading →

Adobe today continues to flesh out its broadening portfolio of hosted services. Last week, the company unveiled a Web-based slideshow tool called Presentations, which joined the online word processor Buzzword, ConnectNow Web conferencing tool, Share, CreatePDF, and My Files on Acrobat.com.

This morning, Adobe Labs made BrowserLab available as a free preview. The cloud-based service renders Web pages in Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari as seen in Windows XP and OS X without the need to have those browsers or operating systems installed on the local computer. This testing tool generates real-time screenshots of the user's chosen page for browser comparison. The page can be rendered in two side-by-side panels, for example, or in an "Onion Skin" view. In this view, there is a slider where each extreme represents a browser/OS combination, one side could represent Internet Explorer 7.0 in XP and the other Safari 3.0 in OSX, and so forth. When the slider is moved, it dissolves the image from one browser into the other, highlighting the exact differences by overlaying them on each other.

Continue reading →

Three years ago, there was some talk about whether Microsoft would help define the small, portable device category by making a version of Windows for it. That's when we learned that devices at that level will not -- perhaps ever -- be defined by their operating systems. When Microsoft started marketing a concept called "Origami" by answering consumers' questions with a question, "What Am I?" customers in large numbers resoundingly responded, "We don't care." Now, there's yet another new class of small devices supposedly in the works, and reporters this morning are asking, will it be defined by a new version of Windows? Time once again to wake up and smell the history.

Windows for smartbooks?

Continue reading →

Download Opera 10 for Windows Build 1551 Beta 1 from Fileforum now.

The developers at Opera Software have been publicly working with version 2.2 of the Presto rendering engine for its premier Web browser since last December. Their goal has been to implement Web fonts for Scalable Vector Graphics without sacrificing performance or other standards support. Conceivably, this could allow sites to deploy both TrueType and SVG fonts in user-scalable sizes scaled to fit the current window size, as this recent Opera test pattern demonstrates. (Right now, Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 supports some scalable TrueType, but not to the degree that Opera does.)

Continue reading →

Litigation between TiVo and EchoStar over DVR patents in US courts recently entered its third year. In October 2008, EchoStar was ordered to pay TiVo $104 million plus interest for the "Time Warp" technology used in Dish Network's DVRs during the time it was an EchoStar subsidiary.

A subsequent hearing in February of this year in US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas took EchoStar to task for the "software workaround" it implemented to prevent a permanent injunction on Dish Network DVRs. Now, a court has ruled in TiVo's favor yet again, awarding TiVo a permanent injunction on the infringing Dish boxes, along with a further $103 million plus interest. And on top of it all, EchoStar was found to be in contempt of court.

Continue reading →

Today, Nokia announced that the N97, the newest handset in its flagship N-series, will go on sale in 75 countries this month. The device was first unveiled six months ago complete with its full spec list, and a €550 suggested retail price tag.

The 3.5-inch touchscreen N97 will be the first of Nokia's mobile phones to ship with the Ovi Store app natively installed. Nokia's mobile applications store opened for business last week, but faced harsh criticism for its frequent inaccessibility, and overall lack of captivating content.

Continue reading →

A new smaller PlayStation Portable was intended to be Sony's bombshell E3 announcement, but it was defused prematurely by Sony's own online magazine, Qore, which leaked official shots of the device only a matter of days ago. However, Sony's bag of tricks was not exhausted.

Called the PSP Go!, or as Sony Computer Entertainment's President and CEO Kaz Hirai called it, "The worst kept secret of E3," it is a 50% smaller, 40% lighter version of the PlayStation Portable. Equipped with 16 GB of internal storage expandable with m2 memory, no optical (UMD) drive, and built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity, it bears a staggering resemblance to Sony's Mylo in size and form.

Continue reading →

The news comes in advance of comments being planned for the Computex conference in Taiwan early tomorrow morning, by Microsoft Corporate Vice President for OEMs Steve Guggenheimer. There he is scheduled to officially deliver the news that Windows 7 general availability worldwide will begin on Thursday, October 22.

Microsoft's spokesperson gave Betanews a heads-up to expect comments from Guggenheimer concerning a program being called Windows Upgrade Option. That's precisely the title of an FAQ that was leaked to the public last month by the technology blog TechARP. That FAQ, which appeared to contain language directly from Microsoft, spoke about a low- or no-cost upgrade option for recent purchasers of consumer SKUs of Windows Vista.

Continue reading →

Nintendo's current approach to video gaming isn't in supplying the most powerful hardware or the most massive gaming worlds. It's about thinking outside the box. The company successfully took gaming out of the controller and into the space around the gamer, and started a trend in the gaming industry. With this approach, Nintendo went from being on the trailing edge of gaming technology in the fifth and sixth generation consoles to the pinnacle of innovation in the seventh.

Nintendo President Satoru Iwata continues to inspect the video game industry, looking for new approaches to the same business. At the company's E3 presentation today, Iwata gave the public a look at what could be next for Nintendo, an "entirely different way of thinking about games."

Continue reading →

The way we left things yesterday, we gave Microsoft's newly revamped Bing search engine some moderately tough, everyday search tests, and gave Google the same treatment. After three heats, the score thus far is Bing 2, Google 1, with Bing performing quite admirably in the computer parts shopping department.

Search engines are fairly good for finding something you know you're searching for. In the real world, folks don't often know what or who it is they're searching for, which is why they're searching for him. So suppose someone sends you out on the Internet to find...

Continue reading →