Palm's game-changing Pre arrives June 6
Calendars were tentatively marked this week for something from Palm, and today we've found out what it was: the launch date and price of the Pre.
The eagerly anticipated Palm Pre is slated for availability on June 6, and will cost $199 after a $100 mail-in rebate and a two year contract through Sprint stores, Best Buy, Radio Shack, and even Wal-Mart.
Imagine, a 'Firefox 4' without browser tabs
Insofar as Web applications have become a fact of many everyday users' lives and work, the Web browser has come to fulfill the role of a de facto operating system -- which is why browser performance is a more important topic now than ever before. Now, this most important class of application could be at a turning point in its evolution, a point where history appears to repeat itself once again.
During the era between Windows 2.0 and 3.1, a minimized window was an icon that resided in the area we now consider the "Desktop;" and even today, many Windows users' Desktops don't perform the same role as the Mac Desktop that catalyzed Windows' creation. Even Windows 7 has tweaked the concept of what a minimized window does and means; and in the Web browser context, a tab represents a similar type of functionality, giving users access to pages that aren't currently displayed.
Atlanta's Clear WiMAX launch only weeks away
Sprint's and Clearwire's WiMAX joint venture Clear is expected to gain 15 new markets by the end of 2010. Following up on the announcement that the company had aligned with Cisco for infrastructure, Clearwire confirmed the next 4G connected city will be Atlanta.
CEO William T. Morrow said in Clearwire's earnings call, "We remain on track to launch our next two markets this summer. In June, we'll be expanding to Atlanta, adding nearly 3 million people to the Clear coverage footprint in a city that will be our largest market to date. With the network covering upwards of 1,200 square miles, we have validated that we can design and deliver large scale markets with our low cost network architecture, another key differentiator for Clearwire. And as with all of our pre-WiMAX markets, we are utilizing a hybrid approach of microwave rings and dark fiber across approximately 90% of our sites. We believe that this is the lowest cost, most scalable back haul approach to transport the immense 4G data payload from our sales side."
Upgrading from XP to Windows 7: Does Microsoft's method work?
Three months ago, Betanews experimented with a process for converting a Windows XP-based system to Windows 7 even though a direct upgrade process was not officially supported by Microsoft. Our process involved borrowing a Windows Vista installation disc, and going through the upgrade motions twice except for the part where you register and activate Vista. This way, you would only have to register Windows 7. Although our tests involved an earlier build of Win7 than the current public release candidate, we discovered the process, while slow and laborious, was at least workable.
To make certain of this, we installed Office 2007 in our XP-based test system first, then ran Word, Excel, and PowerPoint perfectly well in Windows 7 after the installation was complete. We did have to re-activate Office, but that only took a moment.
ZigBee aims to cut energy costs through IP-based metering
The International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) is a non-profit international board which drafts and publishes standards for a huge range of electric and electronic technologies. Among the hundreds of standards put out by the IEC, some of the most notable include VHS/S-VHS video cassette technology (IEC 60774), digital audio based on compact discs (IEC 60908) and electromagnetic compatibility (IEC 61000).
You may not be familiar with ZigBee just yet, but if the IEC gets its hands on it, that could change. ZigBee is a low-power wireless protocol similar to Bluetooth that fits under the 802.15.4 personal area network standard. Its current largest deployments are in home utility wireless networks and smart meters, and because of its conservative use of electricity, the ZigBee Alliance is attempting to make it the preeminent standard for smart energy metering. Today, the group announced that it will be submitting its ZigBee Smart Energy profile to the IEC for as the basis of a new standard in smart grid technology.
Napster will slash its subscription fees
After nearly six years as a subscription-based service, Napster will make its library of over 7 million tracks available tomorrow for as low as five dollars a month. In addition to unlimited streaming, users get to keep five DRM-free tracks per month, essentially making the streaming service, which formerly cost $12.95 per month, free.
Napster's leaked press release describes streaming as "CD Quality," and most MP3s available for download in the service are encoded at 256 kbps, but there are also tracks currently only available in 128 kbps. The bitrate of each individual track will be listed when purchasing.
Microsoft tries to patent a working 'Magic Wand' for Xbox 360
With this year's Electronic Entertainment Expo (better known as E3) less than two weeks away, speculation has been steadily increasing about the big game companies' announcements. One of the major topics of chatter has been updated controller schemes, and entries for both the PlayStation3 and the Xbox 360 in the Wii-like motion controller category.
The latest application for a patent for such a device to come to light was filed by Microsoft in November 2007. Attributed to Chief Experience Officer James "J" Allard, it covers the architecture of a multi-sensor control environment.
Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1, .NET 4 Beta 1 for general release Wednesday
A Microsoft spokesperson has confirmed to Betanews that today, May 18, will be the release date for Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 as well as .NET Framework 4.0 Beta 1, for MSDN subscribers. The general public will get their first shot at both new technologies on Wednesday.
Though last September's preview edition showed the addition of new tools for application architecture modeling -- moving deep into IBM territory there -- as well as for development team management, it was all being shown under the auspices of the old VS 2008 front end. Soon after the preview edition was released, the company revealed that it was scrapping that more traditional front end in favor of a design based on the Windows Presentation Foundation platform.
Acer increases netbook size with new Aspire One
Acer unveiled its second-generation netbook products today, which include the 11.6" Aspire One 751h, a unit that goes for the bigger overall footprint but with a marginally slimmer profile.
Besides its 11.6" LCD screen (1364 x 768, 16:9), the Acer Aspire One 751h is equipped with a 1.22 GHz Intel Atom Z520, 1 GB SDRAM, and a 160 GB 5400RPM SATA hard drive. Not a lot has changed since the last generation, It comes installed with Windows XP Home SP3, has a multi-card reader, and supports 802.11b/g wireless. The suggested baseline retail price is even the same as the last generation: $349.99, or $379.99 with a six-cell battery.
AT&T re-enters the data services field by way of the cloud
It was literally during the 1960s when engineers first envisioned a realistic concept for remote storage of electronic data. It would be stored and retrieved using a radically redefined telephone network, one which folks might have to wait until 1980 or so to finally witness. And since it required the telephone, the master of the new concept seemed inevitably to be the Bell System -- AT&T.
The reason it didn't happen that way (the breakup of AT&T aside) was because local storage ended up being relatively cheap, and hard drives made sense. But four decades later, in a vastly different global economy, businesses' appetite for storage space is exceeding the ability of even cheap technologies like hard drives to keep providing it. So businesses are once again investigating a telecommunications-based option, and it is amid that backdrop of historical irony that AT&T is re-entering the picture. This morning, the company announced a programmed, systematic entry into the cloud-based data storage market, choosing a few customers at a time for a new on-demand storage service model it's calling Synaptic Storage as a Service.
The technologists' (read: 'geeks') guide to the weekend
There are many bold and beautiful aspects to geekdom, but weekends aren't one of them. Many of us -- most of us -- lay aside our workplace tech tasks and go home to our friends and families and their computer travails. Or we head for movies that send us into paroxysms of fact-checking angst ("As if they'd have given the explosive charges to only Olson and not Kirk or Sulu as well -- worst logistics ever!"). Or we dig into an open-source project or a volunteer effort that looks just like our work taskload. Or we don't take the weekend at all.
And geeks, that's okay. Know who you are and what makes you happy. The secret to geek happiness isn't getting away from it all; it's being able to survey it all from your chosen perch. Which happens to be made of ones and zeros and silicon and DIY and logic and fierce intelligence.
Panasonic's losses quadruple Sony's: down $4.68 billion
This week, major Japanese consumer electronics companies posted their fiscal 2009 revenues, and provided an outlook into the coming year. To say earnings have been disheartening would be a multi-million dollar understatement.
Because of a harsh currency exchange and declining sales, Sony registered a loss of around one billion dollars, NEC's net loss was upwards of $3 billion, Hitachi lost a staggering $8.03 billion, and Sanyo -- which is in the process of merging with Panasonic -- reported a net loss of $970 million.
Verizon Wireless LTE deployment will be ready in 2H 2010, says CEO
Verizon has been an active supporter of LTE since 2007, and anticipated a rollout of the 4G wireless standard in the first half of 2010. Up to this week, judging from what company officials had been saying publicly, the first LTE deployment has been moving along swiftly. CTO Dick Lynch said he expected it would be ready as early as the final months of 2009.
But in an LTE developer's conference on Wednesday, Verizon brought those lofty goals back down to Earth a bit. Instead of the first half of 2010 for commercial deployment, Verizon Wireless CEO Lowell McAdam said the first 20 or 30 LTE markets won't be ready until the second half of the year, and complete US coverage won't be attained for another five years. He did not, however address Lynch's prognosis for an early first rollout. (Verizon Wireless is a joint venture between Verizon and Vodafone.)
HP notebook batteries recalled in response to burn hazard
If you're the owner of an HP Pavilion or Compaq Presario made in the last five years, the odds are in favor of you being involved in a battery recall of some sort. In 2005, some 80,000 Pavilion and Presario batteries were recalled, in 2006 another 4,100 were added. Most recently, the massive recall of more than 10 million Sony batteries affected around 32,000 HP notebooks last October.
This week another 70,000 have been tapped for recall.
Top 10 Windows 7 Features #5: Multitouch
For close to two decades now, the design of applications has changed surprisingly very little. At their core, apps wait for users to generate input, and they respond -- a server/client model of processing on a very local scale. So in a very real way, what applications do has been a function of how they respond -- the whole graphical environment thingie you've read about has really been a sophisticated way to break down signals the user gives into tokens the application can readily process.
The big roadblock that has suspended the evolution of applications from where they are now, to systems that can respond to such things as voice and language -- sophisticated processes that analyze input before responding to it -- is the token-oriented nature of their current fundamental design. At the core of most typical Windows applications, you'll find a kind of switchboard that's constantly looking for the kinds of simple input signals that it already recognizes -- clicking on this button, pulling down this menu command, clicking on the Exit box -- and forwarding the token for that signal to the appropriate routine or method. Grafting natural-language input onto these typical Windows apps would require a very sophisticated parser whose products would be nothing more than substitutes for the mouse, and probably not very sufficient substitutes at that.
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