Author: Terren

It hasn’t been that long since we first saw Google’s web store — mid-May, to be exact. An updated version is currently being showcased on stage at the Chrome event. The UI looks much more refined, and those who are itching to try some out yourself, it seems some of the web apps are already available, at least partially: NPR, The New York Times, Amazon Windowshop. If you ask us, they feel a lot like iPad apps for browsers and mice / keyboard. Audio can run in the background even if you move to another tab. There’s offline mode, too. App purchases are tied to your Google account, naturally. There’s some gaming, but from what we’ve seen so far (“you pop it!“), it's nothing you're gonna be focusing a lot of time on. Interesting note from the Q&A is that the apps, since they're built with "standard web technologies," will work with all compatible browsers. We've been trying to access the web store (via the Chrome browser, naturally), but it's currently hiding behind a "coming soon" redirect — it's rolling out later today, though, at least for the US, so keep an eye out.

Update: Try that link one more time, the Chrome Web Store should now be live.

Google demos Chrome Web Store, rolling out later today to US (update: now live) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 07 Dec 2010 13:53:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Don’t put too much stock in this rumor–the news that comes from these third-party parts manufacturers is spotty at best. That said, we have seen some of these come to fruition in the past, and let’s face it, if there’s one thing we do seemingly no for sure, it’s that Steve Jobs is going to show off a new iPad next year.

And if Apple goes according to its prior scheduling for the device (the company is often a creature of habit when it comes to updating products), we’re going to see that iPad 2 early next year, seeing as how the first model was unveiled in January of this year.

Apple supplier Foxconn Electronics has reportedly been told to ship 400,000-600,000 iPad 2 units in the next 100 days, according to Digitimes‘ “sources from Taiwan-based component makers.”

Here’s what those sources had to say,

[T]he iPad 2 will ship as soon as the end of February in 2011. Apple originally planned to start mass production in January, but because the device’s firmware is currently still in testing, Apple has been postponing the schedule. Since Foxconn’s new plants in Chengdu are still in pilot production, iPad 2 will be mainly supplied by its Shenzhen plants, while the company’s upstream component partners have all been notified of the shipments schedule.

Foxconn naturally declined DigiTimes’ request for comment. My guess is that the site didn’t even attempt to contact Apple…

Our supply checks say that 10 out of 10 analysts are insanely bullish about tablets — despite the fact that there are only 2.5 competitive products on the market, and one of them only came out a month ago. So, naturally, it isn’t difficult to scrounge up sales predictions that show the tablet rocketing into the stratosphere, cutting into PC market share, while also expanding the market outright to accommodate its post-PC ways. Gartner‘s guess is 55 million tablets next year, while IDC has a more conservative estimate of 42 million, but both predict a sharp, exponential rise in the following years, and IDC takes it one step further: 18 months from now, combined smartphone and tablet sales will eclipse the PC, it claims, with both categories hovering in the mid-400 million range.

Now, that number is mostly smartphones, which isn’t an unprecedented shift in and of itself — the PC took a major hit in popularity in Japan once the kids got ahold of these newfangled phone things — but overall it represents a shift from the open-ended, flexible, and powerful PC to the narrow, task-specific, app-driven nature of the iOS and Android kind. Or you could spin it the completely opposite way: people need phones, so they buy a nice phone. No PC death knell in that behavior, and the tablet is still a very niche product with some good PR. Either way, we’ll be much more impressed with this sort of market battle when it’s the tablet (perhaps with a little help from the smartbook or netbook-lite category) going up against the Windows and Mac PC head-on, without smartphones shouldering most of the load.

Combined sales of smartphones and tablets to surpass the humble PC in 18 months, says IDC originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 07 Dec 2010 12:44:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Google’s planning to host your printer drivers in its cloud to make the Chrome OS (debuting today) a viable option. Now there’s a landing page where you can test Google’s web-based printing, if you’re using the latest Chrome dev release on Windows. More »

You know that untitled Spider-man project that’s set to revitalize the franchise at some point in 2012? Yeah, that’s being shot in 3D (not news) using 3ality rigs and RED EPIC cameras (superhotawesome news). Peter Jackson already scooped up 30 EPICs to help him shoot his next big venture, The Hobbit, in 3D, but he’s been beaten to the digital cinematography punch by the producers of the next Spidey flick, who have cornered a quartet of the cameras and actually started shooting with them on set yesterday. John Schwartzman, the dude responsible for filming the whole thing, has been extolling the virtues of using such fancy gear over on the RED forums, which is also where he promises his crew will be making further comments detailing the user experience. In slightly less thrilling RED news, the Scarlet S35 is being renamed to the EPIC Lite and will suffer the upheaval of having its features and price changed — hit the links below for more.

[Thanks, Anthony]

Spider-Man reboot is being shot in RED EPIC 3D, has John Schwartzman all kinds of excited originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 07 Dec 2010 07:06:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Google is showing off an early build of their Android 3.0 software, which appears to be heavily optimized for tablets (including the Motorola prototype it’s running on) and has been given a cloudy release window of “next year.” More »

Sure, Google might have just dropped Android 2.3 Gingerbread on the Nexus S just today, but that’s old news — Andy Rubin just took the stage at D: Dive Into Mobile and announced that Honeycomb is due “next year” with support for tablets. Andy demoed the new version of the OS on a Motorola prototype tablet, and it was very different, and highly customized — although there were still grids of icons, the apps were more “desktop” in flavor, and the traditional Android buttons weren’t present. We’re waiting for more details, we’ll let you know what’s up.

Android Honeycomb coming ‘next year,’ adds tablet support originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 06 Dec 2010 22:50:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Anna Torv – a name we'd heard hide nor hair of in the States just three short years ago.  While yet to still become

Today is the first page in a new chapter of our mission to improve access to the cultural and educational treasures we know as books. Google eBooks will be available in the U.S. from a new Google eBookstore. You can browse and search through the largest ebooks collection in the world with more than three million titles including hundreds of thousands for sale. Find the latest bestsellers like James Patterson’s Cross Fire and Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, dig into popular reads like Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken and catch up on the classics like Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities and Gulliver’s Travels.

We designed Google eBooks to be open. Many devices are compatible with Google eBooks—everything from laptops to netbooks to tablets to smartphones to e-readers. With the new Google eBooks Web Reader, you can buy, store and read Google eBooks in the cloud. That means you can access your ebooks like you would messages in Gmail or photos in Picasa—using a free, password-protected Google account with unlimited ebooks storage.

In addition to a full-featured web reader, free apps for Android and Apple devices will make it possible to shop and read on the go. For many books you can select which font, font size, day/night reading mode and line spacing suits you—and pick up on the page where you left off when switching devices.

You can discover and buy new ebooks from the Google eBookstore or get them from one of our independent bookseller partners: Powell’s, Alibris and participating members of the American Booksellers Association. You can choose where to buy your ebooks like you choose where to buy your print books, and keep them all on the same bookshelf regardless of where you got them.

When Google Books first launched in 2004, we set out to make the information stored in the world’s books accessible and useful online. Since then, we’ve digitized more than 15 million books from more than 35,000 publishers, more than 40 libraries, and more than 100 countries in more than 400 languages. This deep repository of knowledge and culture will continue to be searchable through Google Books search in the research section alongside the ebookstore.

Launching Google eBooks is an initial step toward giving you greater access to the vast variety of information and entertainment found in books. Our journey has just begun. We welcome your feedback as we read on to the next chapter.

If you’ve installed quite a few extensions and don’t quite need all the toolbar buttons those add-ons placed to the right of your address bar, you can now stash them away with a right-click in the latest Chrome dev release. More »

This Internet finding is an irate letter from the thin-skinned litigation enthusiasts at Cash4Gold to a “Mr Haberny” who apparently made a habit of sending gold-painted rocks to the firm, along with colorful missives describing the circumstances through which he came to posses them, which included a Tibetan pilgrimage with a legless hooker from Singapore. Mr Haberny sought many interesting forms of compensation for his “gold,” including a birthday party at McDonald’s, and an unspecified activity in the company of Ed McMahon.

(via JWZ)

South Korea is conducting naval firing drills just one day after North Korea warned such exercises would aggravate already high tensions between the rival neighbours.

On Sunday, Facebook announced big changes for Profile pages, hours before Mark Zuckerberg’s ’60 Minutes’ interview. The biggest change is the emphasis on photos: from the summary at the top of the page to photos of your relationships, images dominate the new design. You’ll also notice that Facebook has done away with the old tabbed interface that separated your wall, info, photos and events into different pages. These viewing options have largely been pushed into the left rail below your primary profile photo.

Instead of hiding most of your personal information behind the ‘Info’ tab, the new design features an introduction at the top of your profile page that summarizes your job, relationship status, hometown, birthday and more. Beneath your summary is a row of the most recently tagged photos of you. Because these are highlighted so prominently on your profile, you’ll probably need to be even more vigilant than before in making sure bad party pics or embarrassing high school candids are removed. Fortunately, you can hide any of the photos in your new Profile summary by clicking the ‘x’ that appears when you hover over each one.

Continue reading Facebook Unveils New Profile Pages

Facebook Unveils New Profile Pages originally appeared on Switched on Sun, 05 Dec 2010 17:37:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Remember that “Related” / “Similar” tab we spotted in Google’s own Gingerbread video? Looks as if you won’t have to wait for Android 2.3 to enjoy the spoils of having El Goog sort out what similar apps you may like after you download one. This morning, waves of Android loyalists are finding a new tab in their Market, with a Droid 2 and Nexus One both seeing the update here at Engadget HQ. Naturally, it works just like the App Store’s equivalent, but it remains to be seen just how accurate the advice is. When looking at ‘Related’ for the (also recently updated) Engadget app, we’re finding items we’d prefer to be listed first about a page or so down, but we’re sure the mix-and-match engineers in Mountain View are already fine tuning things as we speak. You know, during the brief moments they aren’t preparing for Tuesday’s big Chrome reveal.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Android Market update brings long-awaited ‘Related’ tab, similar app suggestions originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 04 Dec 2010 13:43:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Adobe just released a beta of the newest Flash player, complete with lower CPU usage and full screen dual-monitor playback. Chrome, though still uses its built-in, stable version of Flash. Here’s how to get the beta goodies in Chrome. More »