Download Google Chrome 3.0.182.2 Beta for Windows from Fileforum now.

It has been hard to tell, since Google pulled the "beta" flag from its Chrome browser back in December, where we are in that software's development process. So, clarifying for all the good folks in Fileforum: Welcome to 3.0.182.2, the current version of the browser not to be found in the stable download channel. Remember that Google is the first to say they "don't give to much weight to version numbers," and enjoy the latest rev for what it is: A few fixes, a few tweaks, and a lot of anticipation for Extensions, coming soon to a How-Did-I-Live-Without-This? near you.

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Sony Ericsson today officially announced Satio, its new 12 megapixel camera-equipped flagship mobile device that was formerly known as Idou.

All the details of the S60-based device have been revealed. Formerly, it was simply known as a 3.5" 16x9 touchscreen device with the aforementioned high pixel density camera and associated xenon flash that dropped Sony Ericsson's customary M2 memory card in favor of MicroSD.

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If you've been testing the final Windows 7 Release Candidate on your own physical platforms, and you wonder what's giving you that feeling that it's just a bit peppier, a tad zippier, it's not an illusion. Betanews tests all this week, concluding today, comparing all the major stable release and development Windows-based Web browsers, running on exactly the same physical computer with fresh Windows Vista SP2 and Windows 7 RC partitions, confirmed what our eyes and gut feelings were telling us: On average, most browsers ran 11.9% faster in Windows 7 than on the same machine running Vista SP2, with most speed gains falling right around that mark.

Internet Explorer 8, for example, runs 15% faster in Windows 7 than in Vista SP2, in multiple tests whose results were within one another by a hundredth of a point. Using our performance index as a guide, if you consider the relatively slow Internet Explorer 7 in Vista SP2 as a 1.00, then in a fresh test of IE8 on the same platform, the newer browser in Vista SP2 scored a 2.03 -- performing generally better than double its predecessor. But in Windows 7, the score for IE8 rises to a 2.27.

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Since March 2009, our Windows Web browser performance test suite has utilized four components which score different aspects of the browser engine: the HowToCreate.uk CSS rendering test, the Celtic Kane basic speed comparison, the Web Standards Project's Acid3 standards compliance test, and the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark. We've received approximately equivalent numbers of praises and complaints for our having chosen all four of these independent analyses for our suite, though we see no reason at present to discredit any of them.

We did have to modify the HowToCreate.uk test internally, because the way it typically accounts for its own speed does not take into account how the onLoad event fires differently with various browsers' JavaScript interpreters. Our modifications account for the discrepancy, and we applied those modifications to all the browsers we test, not just those (Google Chrome, Apple Safari) which fire differently.

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Poor Windows 7. Months before its official launch, it's already fighting to live down the reputation of its older siblings. It's bad enough it has to fight perceptions of insecurity (I'm looking at you, XP) and bloated incompatibility (Vista, anyone?). But like the poor kid entering a high school after his older brothers have spent years being serially suspended for misbehaviour and general hooliganism, Windows 7 has an uphill battle ahead of it. Whether the perceptions are earned or not is irrelevant. Undoing them is a monumental process either way, and it all rests on the shoulders of a kid whose only mistake seems to lie in carrying the family name.

But undo these perceptions it must. Windows 7 promises to be Microsoft's most crucial launch ever because the company's very future has never been in as much question as it is now. Its two cash cow franchises, Windows and Office, are mooing a little less deeply these days thanks to a seismic shift away from the traditional PC model. While Vista's problems are more perception than anything else, there's no escaping the cruel reality that the age of Windows-everywhere-by-default is over. As conventional desktop and laptop PCs give way to all sorts of new form factors running all sorts of new operating systems and connecting to the outside world in all sorts of unconventional ways, Microsoft can't afford another lukewarm Windows launch.

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Today, Microsoft officially unleashed Bing upon the world. It's a brand that will be associated with intelligent search, and is hence classified as a "Decision Engine," rather than a search engine. Rollout of the new service (to be located at www.bing.com) begins over the next few days and will be completed in under a week, with the target deployment date of June third.

Click the Bing logo for slideshow.

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Microsoft on Thursday took the wraps off its new Google competitor, a revamped Live Search dubbed "Bing." The site focuses on answering queries without requiring the user to leave the search page. But will it be enough to enable Microsoft to start taking back some search share from Google? Bing officially launches June 3, but we've put together a slideshow to give you a taste of what's to come.

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During the keynote at Google I/O yesterday, Android Interface Toolkit Engineer Romain Guy provided a first look at three big developments in Google's open source mobile OS which will be part of the 2.0 update, codenamed "Donut."

The first new feature Guy showed off was "Android Search," a universal search tool that allows contact information, applications, songs, and more in-phone content to be located in addition to content on the Web. It's not unlike the "Spotlight" feature that is included in the iPhone 3.0 update. The most recent and most-frequently searched terms come in a pre-populated list when Search is launched.

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It's time to stop with all the "I told you so's" and the gloating and the self-congratulation, on the part of everyone (myself included) who never saw synergies between the former America Online and Time Warner, who are just as capable of reading the big, fluorescent handwriting on the wall as anyone else. We knew it wouldn't work. End of part one.

The task before Tim Armstrong -- minted as CEO of AOL in March -- and his team is to define the company. It has some very old parts and some very big assets, but other than that, it's a startup. If you "Google" Tim Armstrong (a number of ironies latent in that phrase), you discover almost instantly the type of independent CEO he will be. He helped build Google into the advertising sales giant it is today (its merger with DoubleClick notwithstanding), and he takes the knowledge of that blueprint with him to AOL. He is an ad man, and AOL will be an advertising platform.

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Download Eeebuntu Base Edition 3.0 from Fileforum now.

Eeebuntu is a custom Ubuntu distro optimized for use on Asus' Eee PC line of netbooks. By incorporating Ubuntu with the Array Kernel and EeeConfigure, Eeebuntu eliminates much of the massaging Ubuntu would require to fully work on Asus' popular netbook.

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It's a term first popularized by R. Buckminster Fuller just after World War II: synergy. I could present his own definition here, but you wouldn't have time to read it. But it's essentially the idea that, at least in nature, all living, breathing entities were designed to exist in a kind of interdependent harmony (his "Synergetics" was the study of how that worked). That term was leveraged by Steve Case's AOL and Jerry Levin's Time Warner repeatedly, to discuss the reason for their little get-together. This morning, that term is finally proven to have been a misappropriation of the highest degree.

Time Warner minus AOL

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Acrobat.com Presentations offers way to create simple Flash-based slideshow presentations online which can be worked on by numerous Adobe.com members simultaneously and then be presented from their online location or exported as .PDF files for offline use.

The app's interface is similar to Adobe's Web-based Photoshop Express, and provides a comparable level of functionality: basic, but elegant and aesthetically pleasing. While the same Adobe user ID can be used to access both Presentations and Photoshop Express, the two applications are actually separate branches of Adobe's growing arsenal of Web-based services.

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It isn't Psystar's legal tangle with Apple Inc. that led to its Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing in a Florida federal court last Thursday. Rather, seven of the independent PC maker's top 10 creditors were credit card processing services, making up about 44% of its outstanding debt to those top 10 creditors. The IRS accounted for less than 5% of that debt. This according to court documents obtained by Betanews from the US Bankruptcy Court for Southern Florida.

Although Psystar also didn't blame Apple in its petition for an emergency relief hearing the following day, it did mention the company as the developer of the operating system on which its Open-brand PCs are based. Instead, the story Psystar told is one that could apply to a thousand independent PC makers across the country, except for one important element: It's almost impossible for an OEM of Psystar's size to compete in the PC market on price alone, while still maintaining profitability.

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It has been one year almost to the day that AT&T completed its initial HSPA rollout, adding 800 Kbps HSUPA. As was promised on the operator's roadmap, the company announced its next network upgrade will begin later this year.

This upgrade will increase HSPA's maximum downlink speed from 3.6 Mbps to 7.2 Mbps, which will pull AT&T up into the majority bracket of HSPA operators (or those whose speeds max out at 7.2 Mbps or higher), and consequently increase the global average speed due to the company's ballooning subscriber base of more than 78 million.

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I swear I don't mean for Lockdown to turn into the "What The Hell Are They Thinking?" weekly security rant, but as that legendary site used to say, a fish, a barrel, and a smoking gun. This week, we travel to Yakima, Washington, which on further reflection may turn out to have been our first mistake.

Yakima isn't Seattle, or even Tacoma -- it's about two hours away from either of those cities, and in either case its 81,214 residents live on the other side of a rather large mountain range that separates lovely Western Washington from the flatlands of the central area. The point is that while they're not entirely in the sticks out there, the local options for medical care in Yakima are a bit more limited than those to which you might be accustomed. Keep that in mind, if you would. There will be a quiz.

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