Tech QQ

Jon Stewart has a few thoughts about the Apple - Gizmodo affair in The Daily Show.
Funny stuff, check it out below!

It seems the turbulent Palm saga is coming to an end as HP and Palm today announced that Palm is being bought by HP. The price will be $5.70 a share, or approximately $1.2 billion.

As written in the press release

The combination of HP's global scale and financial strength with Palm's unparalleled webOS platform will enhance HP's ability to participate more aggressively in the fast-growing, highly profitable smartphone and connected mobile device markets. Palm's unique webOS will allow HP to take advantage of features such as true multitasking and always up-to-date information sharing across applications.

As HP and Dell been competitors for ages, maybe this is the reaction to the leak that made it clear that Dell would be throwing themselves in to the smartphone market.

Personally I am looking forward more to the Dell Lightning than anything I can conceive HP-Palm to come up with.

The mobile ad company AdMob continually gathers data about the usage of their ads. They serve billions of adds all over the world each month. The info gathered is of course not 100% statistically correct, but adds insight into the current trends of mobile usage.

In the March report some interesting reading is to be found. This month marked the first month when Android surpassed iPhone in traffic in the US. With iPhone backing up 5% and Android increasing by 4% compared to the previous month. Also interesting to not is that per AdMob's definition, 50% of the traffic in the US came from smartphones.
Looking at the entire world iPhone still got the lead with 46% over Android with 25%, followed by Symbian at 21%. Compared to the previous month that's a decrease of 4% for iPhone, a 1% increase for Android and a 3% increase for Symbian.

For the full AdMob report, go here.

On another Android note, in an interview for New York Post, Google's Andy Rubin says that Froyo (Android v2.2) will have full support for Flash. So rejoice, all who likes the Flash.
In the interview he also manages to mention North Korea while discussing Apple and open vs closed systems. Subtle, very subtle :)

Microsoft has now released version 2 of Windows Home Server, named "Vail". It's now based on Windows Server 2008 R2.

Some of the new or improved features are:

• Media streaming outside the home
• Enhanced development and customizations tools
• Improved multi-PC backup

To see a review of how it handles, you can go here.
If you want to download it directly you can go here.

Some vids of the Office integration on Windows Phone 7 have been released, and it looks really promising. The e-mail and document editing functionality looks really smooth, and so does the handling of OneNote as well. Check the vids below for some long awaited Windows Phone 7 Office action.

The guys over at Engadget managed to hit the mother-load of leaks from Dell the other night it seems. They came over a large amount of documents specifying new smartphones being released by Dell.

The most interesting in my mind was the modell named Lightning. It's a Windows Phone 7 device set for release in Q4 and it looks pretty slick on the rendered pictures.


The specs for it look really good too:

• 4.1 inch AMOLED screen
• 1GHz Snapdragon
• Portrait slider
  
• 5 Megapixel camera
• 1GB of flash, 512MB ram and 8GB storage on a micro SD card
• GPS
• Accelerometer
• Compass
  
• FM Radio
• Full Flash support

However, Charlie Kindell has previously stated that Windows Phone 7 won't support Flash at release, so we'll see if there is any thing behind Dell's statement of full Flash support at release.

Except for the Lightning there is also info on a few Android devices that look good, named Flash, Thunder and Smoke. For a full report check out Engadget.

Today I attended Microsoft's Visual Studio 2010 - The Ultimate Tour, as they call it. This is the promotional tour from Microsoft, detailing what's new in Visual Studio 2010 and the .Net 4.0 framework.

My general impression is that not a lot have happened with C# and VB.Net languages this iteration.
For C#, Optional and Named parameters seems to be good for eliminating a lot of overloads. Also the new type Dynamic was brought up, it works like var pretty much, only the binding isn't done at compile time. Also the new data type, Tuple, that's being brought in from F# was mentioned.

More of interest was the Task Parallel Library(TPL), containing API's and data types to support easier implementation of parallelism. Introducing things like Parallel.For and Parallel.ForEach loops. Also some constructs for parallelism combined with LINQ seem pretty good.

Then there were a lot of discussion about the improvements to the Studio itself, then about WFF, WCF, ASP.NET and finally Team Foundation Server. A lot of that stuff I find less interesting. But I must say I was impressed by the test recording and then being able to connect the recordings to bugs in Team Foundation Server, this looks very good for helping the communications between testers and coders. The tester-coder blame game get's so tedious after a while.
Other than that, I think I was most pleased by the addition of Multi monitor support in the Studio itself. Maybe this is incentive enough to get a new Radeon graphics card with Eyefinity for three screens of delicious code!

I hadn't looked at the agenda before I went to the show, so I got a bit surprised when there was not a single word mentioned about developing for Windows Phone 7. I had been hoping for a fair bit of info, since it's one of the things that interest me the most now days. But looking at the American agenda for the tour, it seems the one we got here in Sweden was a shortened version. And while the American one indeed contained a segment about Windows Phone Developer Tools, that segment had been removed here in Sweden. Such a pity :(

At the end we all got a memory stick with the presentations on it, so tomorrow it's time to test out ReadyBoost on Windows Vista!

But overall it was a good presentation and a good effort from the guys from Microsoft. Thanks for the info and the cookie!

If you got an old Windows Mobile phone with resistive screen and enviously glare at the people that have multitouch on their new phones with capacitive screens, there is now hope!

Adel Al Zubeir figured out a way to calculate different gestures form the input you get from dualtouch on the screen, and can figure out if you pinch to zoom or rotate among other things. Check the vid below for a look at how it handles rotation.

If you are a developer and want to use this in your apps there is an SDK for it made available on windowsphoneme.com and you can get it here.

Today a lot of buzz has been around a device allegedly found in a bar.

People are saying it's nothing less miraculous than an actual iPhone 4G that has been found. Check the short clip below form Gizmodo to see what it looks like.

For a more comprehensive read with lot's of pics and video you can check the following links on Engadget and Gizmodo.

Are you using Visual Studio 2010 together with Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP(WPDT CTP) to hack those Apps?

Thinking of upgrading to Visual Studio 2010 RTM that was released the 12:th of March?

If so you need to know that the RTM now released is not working with the Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP!

Microsoft is working on an update and estimate this will be done in a few weeks they say. If you want to get a notice when it's ready you can visit register here.

So after looking at the promotional videos for Kin, you are starting to think Microsoft has gone all cool and started to promote sexting with their new youth oriented phones. (If you haven't seen the clip, check the following vid at around 0:33 for some awesome Asian boob)

But apparently it was just a slip, Microsoft tweets and says it's apologetic and takes sexting very seriously.

So, how long will it take before we see software with motive recognition in our phones to remove all inappropriate pictures? (Not that I have any, but I know you do!)

In just a day Opera Mini took the spot as most downloaded App on all App Stores but one.


Seems like people actually like having a choice Steve, who would have thought?

Rejoice all iPhone users! Against all odds (seriously, who would have believed?) the Opera Mini browser has passed the rigorous scrutiny of Apples App Store and is now available for download.
The Opera Mini differs form other browsers by actually compressing the information about web pages on Opera servers before sending it to your phone, thus increasing speed as well as reducing the amount of traffic.

Available for download from iTunes today so go get it!

Microsoft's press event revealed the Project Pink dubbed phones. Apparently the name Turtle had been scrapped and the two phones on the previously leaked screen shots are called Kin one and Kin two. The hardware is being produced by Sharp, and the providers are Verizon and Vodaphone.

The Kin series are for the young and the restless. Facebook, MySpace and Twitter are all integrated in a way to make sharing of content easy. There are also a "Kin studio" being released, that enables you to reach all your content online, from any computer.

The Kin website is up and alive, go check it out if you don't belong to the category that is in danger of a seizure when blinking, flipping, swooshing pictures and color hits your retinas in to fast a pace.

Seems Google CEO Eric Schmidt has been chatting to a few unreliable friends about an upcoming GPad. His friends leaked to New York Times that wrote an article about it.

Apparently Google have been looking to creating a slate and compete a bit with the iPad. The slate is supposed to be running Android and it's delicious openness will be the opposite of the Steve's closed iPad.

Reportedly Microsoft is sitting on their hands wondering what to do with the Courier, and yet again seems to be missing the hype train with a few months margin...

On Friday the Steve held a press conference about the new iPhone OS version beeing released next. With over 100 new functions on the list, one of those that stood out the most was multitasking.

The sad part of the news was that there would be no support for multitasking for those with the older iPhone 3G. But now the developer Will Strafach is saying on Twitter that he found a way to actually enable multitasking on the old 3G models.

wow looks like multitasking can be enabled on the 3G if you just set multitasking=TRUE on the capabilities plist in SB (N82AP.plist)

No need to go out and get that new iPhone 3GS after all!

Feeling like the home office is getting a bit boring or loosing it's pizazz?
For a cool €255 you can have the sweetest 405*270 wall in the neighborhood!


Or if you think Luke is a bit of a pansy, get Darth Maul!


Check out PhotoWall for alot more motives.

If the wait for a Windows Phone 7 device in your hand feels long and you want to experience the Metro UI now, there is a few skins that you might want to try out.

For Windows 7 there is a beautiful skin (see picture below) created for Rainmeter. You can download it here.


If you have a device running Windows Mobile 6.x you can get a skin for that here. A sample oh the home screen shown below.


If you feel like changing the look of your Firefox, you can try a Metro inspired theme found here.

Happy modding!

Apparently Microsoft is inviting a selection of press people to a surprise press release on April the 12:th. Accompanying the invite is the text "Time to share".

People are speculating as to what it might be, and rumors are leaning towards a release of the "Project Pink" phones that we have seen pictures of floating about.

The word is that the Pink phones is aiming for a younger crowd, relying heavy on messenger and incorporating keyboards for easier text input. It will be fun to see how and if this ties in with Windows Phone 7. And will there be a way for us to create apps for the Pink series as well?

We'll all have to wait until the 12:th to see if the Turtle crawls out of it's shell.

Mix 10 has been held and a lot of new info about Windows Phone 7 has been released.

For developers we now know that Silverlight or XNA is the choice for developing code. There is a new emulator released, a new XNA CTP (v4.0) and a Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone CTP released, all available for download here.

A short list of things further revealed was:

• Copy and paste will not be implemented from release
• There won't be support for real multitasking, although functionality for notifiers being shown while users are using other apps will be supported
  
• The only way to get apps for the devices will be through the Windows Phone Marketplace
• For developers releasing apps via the marketplace Microsoft will take 30% of the profit
• Developers can define "Trial parameters" for apps, letting consumers test the app for free until a predefined time has lapsed, or until a point of "progress" has been reached

As for hardware three prototype phones have been shown from LG, Samsung and Asus. LG stating since early on that they will release their phone around September. So far HTC haven't shown any prototype but have stated they will release one eventually. Sadly it was said during MIX that the mighty HTC HD2 won't be able to upgrade because it was incompatible with WP7. Microsoft has specified a distinct set of features that all eligible hardware must have, the HD2 has a few of the but apparently lacked a few others.

The list of hardware requirements is as follows:

• Capacitive multi-touch with support for four contact points
• Screen size of 800*480 (to start out with, later on smaller 480*320 devices will appear)
• A Qualcomm Snapdragon CPU
• 256MB or more RAM, 8GB or more flash storage
• Accelerometer
• Wifi
• GPS
• Minimum 5 mega-pixel camera
• Five specific buttons: Power, Camera, Start, Back and Search (these are mandatory, but some devices will have more, the first LG device even sporting a keyboard)

And for you that wondered why I wrote "Windows Phone 7" instead of "Windows Phone 7 Series" on the first line of this post, it turns out that Microsoft has listened to every one saying that the name was too long and cumbersome. So now "Series" has been dropped and only Windows Phone 7 remains.