Author: Terren

Sometimes, the expressions on a person’s face can mean much more than what they say. To help you stay in touch with your friends and family, we’re launching Google Talk with video and voice chat for Android phones.

You can now video or voice chat with your friends, family and colleagues right from your Android phone, whether they’re on their compatible Android tablet or phone, or using Gmail with Google Talk on their computer. You can make calls over a 3G or 4G data network (if your carrier supports it) or over Wi-Fi.

  

In your Google Talk friends list, a video or voice chat button will appear next to your contacts and you can simply touch the button to connect with them. Any text chats from the person you’re talking with will be overlaid on your phone’s screen so you can read them without having to leave the video. And, if you need to check something else, the video pauses automatically so you can go back to your phone’s home screen or another app. The audio will keep going even though the video has paused. Check out how this works:

Google Talk with video and voice chat will gradually roll out to Nexus S devices in the next few weeks as part of the Android 2.3.4 over-the-air update and will launch on other Android 2.3+ devices in the future. To learn more about using video and voice chat, check out our Help Center.

Post content Posted by Colin Gibbs, Product Manager and Wei Huang, Tech Lead

Continue reading Microsoft announces record Q3 earnings: $16.43 billion revenue, $5.23 billion net income

Microsoft announces record Q3 earnings: $16.43 billion revenue, $5.23 billion net income originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 28 Apr 2011 16:25:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |   | Email this | Comments

Ready for some Android goodness? Regional carrier SaskTel will be releasing the HTC Wildfire S. According to the internal doc we received it shows this Android 2.3 powered device will be available sometime this June. No word yet on the price but it will certainly be affordable. Specs of this little beast have it loaded […]

Related posts:

1. SaskTel to release the HTC Incredible S
2. SaskTel to release the Incredible S “sometime in April”, along with the Samsung Galaxy 550
3. SaskTel investing $52 million this year to continue building out their “4G” network

Plowing through bug reports is a reliable way to dig up juicy morsels of info, and thanks to that timeless tactic we’ve got some specs on a pair of unannounced Chrome OS devices. First up is a netbook from Acer codenamed ZGB which, according to a recently filed report, will have a 1366 x 768 panel, presumably in the 10 to 12 inch range. We also know that you can hook up an external display to it via an HDMI port powered by an encoder chip from Chrontel. Since AMD’s Fusion netbook platform supports HDMI natively, we can also safely assume that the ZGB will be running the web-only OS on an Atom processor. That’s where the details end for now but, hey, it’s better than nothing.

The other device, Seaboard, has been floating around the Chrome OS flaw depot for some time, but reports are finally starting to reveal some tantalizing details. We now know that it is powered by a Tegra 2 and sports a touchscreen — the perfect place to test out those finger-friendly tweaks we’ve heard so much about. There are also mentions of a “lid switch” and a physical keyboard, indicating it may be a convertible or something in the vein of the Eee Pad Slider rather than a pure slate. The hybrid form factor would make perfect sense since it will house a pair of USB ports and an HDMI jack, which could make for a rather chunky tablet. Obviously, neither of these devices are confirmed yet (and Seaboard is most likely being used for internal testing only) but at least we’ve got a better idea of what to expect when the browser-based OS comes to consumers later this year.

Chrome OS machines leaked in bug reports: Acer netbook and touch-friendly Seaboard originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 28 Apr 2011 13:48:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink CrunchGear  |  Macles, Chrome Story  | Email this | Comments

Everyone knows the cops have tools to get inside your phone. But what do they do? They suck your iPhone’s entire soul in 15 minutes. With one single click. This is what it looks like. More »

Watch as a spider quickly subdues an ant in its web…and then something unexpected happens.

This is the Sixth Sense of spider nature videos.

Tags: video

(Cross-posted to the Google Enterprise Blog)

We’re excited to announce that you can now upload images to Google spreadsheets. From the Insert menu, select Image… Then, choose an image file to upload into your spreadsheet.

With this feature, you can upload an image already stored on your computer, search for an image online, or add personal photos directly from one of your Picasa Web Albums.

Let us know what you think in the Google spreadsheets forum!

Posted by: Nick Santos, Staff Software Engineer

There’s a new fad sweeping the nation, and, sadly, it’s not women going topless. Nope — it’s monkeytail beards. Monkeytail beards (NOT BEARS) start at one ear and then wrap around your chin and mouth to make it look like you just finished picking the ticks off a monkey’s nuts with your teeth. Personally, I’m more of a sloth man. “HEEEEEY YOOOOOOU GUYS!” Not him, he still gives me nightmares. You don’t actually have to stripe your beard like this Dapper Dan did to achieve a monkeytail, it just scores some extra ‘girls talking to you at the bar’ points if you do. Unfortunately, any girl who does talk to you will NOT being accompanying you home at the end of the night. “Why not?!” And the answer to that, my friend, lies in the mirror.

“Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the handsomest of them all?”
“You must be out of your f***ing mind! Just break me already.”

Hit the jump for a pictorial field-guide, including one guy trying to candidly include his gramma in the picture, another doing his best Bushicmi eyes, and another taken on the can. Classy bunch.

Android: PCAutoWaker is an app that instantly wakes your computer as soon as (or even before) you walk in the door, once it connects to your wi-fi network. The app’s Wake-on-LAN feature can actually wake up to 5 PCs on your network. More »

Microsoft is on fire with Windows 8, and the leaks are pouring out all over the place. We’ve seen new features surface, and even found registry keys referencing Windows 8 cloud features, as well as a “roaming profile” interface, but are yet to see them in action.

Now, for the…

Apple has a tablet. So does RIM. HP Palm too, soon enough. And Android tablets, particularly those running Honeycomb… they’re everywhere — hell, even Sony has a few on the way. That leaves Nokia as the glaring anomaly conspicuously absent from the tablet wars. Understandable, we guess, given the company’s urgent need to transition its smartphone strategy to Windows Phone. That doesn’t mean the company is standing still though. According to an interview with YLE television in Finland, Nokia CEO Stephen Elop is taking a very calculated approach to tablets, saying, “We could take advantage of Microsoft technology and software, and build a Windows-oriented tablet, or we could do things with some of the other software assets that we have. Our team right now is assessing what’s the right tablet strategy for Nokia.” In other words, Nokia is investigating tablets running Windows 7 (doubtful), MeeGo (doubtful), and Windows Next, aka that tablet-friendly Windows 8 OS (likely). But here’s the most illuminating exchange from the well-mannered Canadian:

There are now over 200 different tablets on the marketplace, only one of them is doing really well. And, my challenge to the team is I don’t wanna be the 201st tablet on the market that you can’t tell from all of the others. We have to take a uniquely Nokia prospective and so the teams are working very hard on something that would be differentiating relative to everything else that’s going on in the market.

Q. So you’re not in a hurry?

We’re always in a hurry to do the right things, but we’re mostly in a hurry to do the right thing.

Makes sense to us and echoes what we’ve heard about Sony’s relatively delayed entry into consumer tablets. Why should Nokia build another me-too tablet when it can tap into the combined Microsoft / Nokia ecosystem and make a grab at some real market share and profit? The entire 20 minute interview is interesting as Elop discusses layoffs, the first Nokia Windows Phone, Symbian, and competing against Apple and Google. Hit the source link for the full deal — the tablet discussion begins at 10 minutes and 32 seconds.

[Thanks, Pauli N.]

Stephen Elop: Nokia won’t build just another tablet originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 28 Apr 2011 05:21:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  YLE [Finnish]  | Email this | Comments

No matter how you slice it, 17,000 is a big number, especially when its seventeen thousand humans looking for jobs. The layoffs represent a four-percent reduction of Panasonic’s 380,000 global workforce due to restructuring efforts, according to Nikkei. They are expected to begin this year and will mainly impact employees outside of Japan.

Update: Post updated to reflect the actual number of job cuts, not the 40,000 originally quoted by Nikkei or the 35,000 quoted by the AFP. The cuts will come over two years. The news comes as Panasonic reported a ¥40.7 billion ($499 million) loss for quarter, largely on account of a ¥61 billion ($748 million) restructuring cost. Panny says that its bottom line was also affected by a strong Yen, stiff competition in television sales, and the recent earthquake and tsunami.

Panasonic will layoff 17,000 workers globally (updated) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 28 Apr 2011 03:36:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  Nikkei [Japanese]  | Email this | Comments