Reality Bites
Windows 8’s new Metro UI is designed for tablets, but you’ll get it on every Windows 8 PC. Five days into using Windows 8 nonstop, I’ve made up my mind: despite Microsoft’s efforts, Metro really isn’t that enjoyable to use with a mouse and a keyboard. Luckily, that’s not going to stop Windows 8 from kicking butt, whether or not it’s finger-friendly. Here’s why. More »
Saskatchewan tried to do an end-run around rules that would prevent the province from tapping into a pot of more than $1 billion to build a new CFL stadium in Regina, new documents indicate.
Security researchers have developed a potential cyber attack that could decrypt secure communications used by online banking and payment sites.
The Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association (CWTA) had their “Technology Showcase” in Ottawa today, I attended and there was some good info. A great deal of the focus was around mobile payments and healthcare. Something that’s always been missing for those interested in the Canadian mobile scene are Canadian-only stats. A small glimmer of hope came a few months ago when marketing research firm comScore released March statistics. RIM was the runaway leader with 42% of the smartphone OS market share in Canada.
Today, Bryan Segal, VP of Sales at comScore, hammered the lunchtime crowd with some very welcomed stats. His presentation was titled “The Canadian Mobile State of the Nation” and it’s based July 2011 data, representing 20,111,000 subscribers. Here’s some takeaways:
Operator Share:
Rogers: 27%
Bell: 25%
TELUS: 25%
Koodo Mobile: 4%
Virgin Mobile: 4%
Fido: 4%
Other: 11%
Apple iPhone dominates in Canada – at least in the top 10 handsets. Installed base and basically every age group. comScore states that the top handset is the iPhone 4 16GB version with 763,320 of them active, followed by RIM’s BlackBerry Bold 9700 with 420,558. In 3rd place is the talk and text LG Rumour 2 with 373,606. Breaking it down, Apple has four of the top 10 and makes up 1,776,697 of installed top 10 devices, while RIM has 1,564,868. As for age group, the iPhone is number 1 in every group.
Probably the most exciting slide is the smartphone OS, which is very telling from their March 2011 stats. Six months later comScore is reporting that Canadians are shifting towards Android… RIM falls 4% to 38% market share, Apple stays the same at 31% but Google’s Android picked up and gained more adopters and now has 19% market share in Canada (up from 12%). What’s even more surprising the leader of Android in Canada – by a huge margin – is HTC with a massive install base of 78%, followed by Sony Ericsson, Motorola, Samsung and LG – personally I thought Samsung would be first, or at least second as they had great success with the Galaxy lineup.
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Yesterday’s Eureka wrapped up the season in spectacular fashion, with a bunch of awesome guest stars, one of the biggest threats ever, a lovely celebration of space exploration, and a truly epic cliffhanger. Eureka doesn’t get much better than this. More »
We started the Google+ project to help make online sharing more like real-world sharing. Of course, in life we increasingly share on the go, so over the past ~90 days we’ve developed Google+ apps for Android, iOS and the mobile web.
During this time we’ve made lots of improvements to the project, and in fact, the team just announced its 100th new feature overall (open signups). But our work is far from done, and today we’re bringing seven additional Google+ features to your mobile device.
Hangouts on your mobile (a.k.a. feature #92)
Seeing someone face-to-face is one of the most important ways you can connect with them. Unfortunately we’re often too busy, too far away, or too unpredictable to make meetups a regular occurrence. That’s why we’re making Hangouts available on phones with Android 2.3+ and front-facing cameras (iOS support coming soon). Just find an active hangout in the Stream, and you can join your friends face-to-face-to-face:
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| Hangouts on your phone: Stream View (left), Green Room (center), Portrait View (right) |
101, 102, 103. You asked for it
We take your feedback very seriously, and we do our best to deliver your most-requested features as quickly as possible. So today we’re launching three more things you’ve been asking for in Google+ mobile:
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| SMS (left), +mentions (center), +1’ing comments (right) |
104, 105, 106. Giving you more choices
The most important part of Google+ is you, so we want to make sure you have meaningful ways to personalize your experience — from selecting just the right people to share with, to switching between the app, the web, and SMS as you see fit. Today we’re excited to bring three new options to mobile users:
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| Edit your profile photo (left), Notification settings (center), Move to USB (right)
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107. So long Huddle, hello Messenger (and hi there, photos)
As we move from limited field trial to open beta, we’re renaming Huddle to Messenger. More importantly, we’re adding new functionality to Messenger that makes group communication even more fun: photo sharing. So now when you’re sitting down for a meal, or kicking back on vacation, you can show your circles what’s happening, right this second:
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Messenger: Homescreen (left), Choosing a Photo (center), Posting a Photo (right)
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We hope you enjoy today’s round of Google+ mobile features. There’s plenty left for us to do, so we’ll keep listening, and working to make your mobile experience that much better. In the meantime, you can try the new app (on Android and the mobile web today, and on iOS soon), and let us know what you think.
Posted by Punit Soni, Google+ Mobile PM
For our international readers, this post is also available in Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish (Latin America, Spain). – Ed.
The Google+ project has been in field trial for just under 90 days, and in that time we’ve made 91 different improvements (many of which are posted here). Google+ is still in its infancy, of course, but we’re more excited than ever to bring the nuance and richness of real-life sharing to software. Today we’re releasing nine more features that get us that much closer.
+Hangouts: more places, more people, more to do
Hangouts uses live video to bring people together, face-to-face-to-face. And from day one, the community has shaped and stretched the feature in amazing ways—from cooking classes to game shows to music concerts. We’re determined to keep this momentum going, and to keep providing new ways to communicate in-person, so we hope you enjoy this week’s round of Hangouts improvements.
92. Hangouts on your phone
In life we connect with others in all sorts of places, at all different times. And the connections you make unexpectedly are often the ones you remember the most. We think Hangouts should keep pace with how you socialize in the real-world, so today we’re launching it on the one device that’s always by your side: your mobile phone. To get started, simply find an active hangout in the Stream, and tap “Join”:
Hangouts currently supports Android 2.3+ devices with front-facing cameras (and iOS support is coming soon). The new mobile app is rolling out to Android Market today, so you can start hanging out at any time, from just about anywhere.
93. Hangouts On Air
Google+ users already use Hangouts to create intimate onscreen experiences—with family members, prayer groups, even people with certain medical conditions. But sometimes you want to speak to a large audience, or alternatively, view as a spectator. In these cases a public broadcast is what’s needed, so today we’re introducing Hangouts On Air.
The setup is simple enough: just start a normal hangout, and you’ll have the option to broadcast and record your session. Once you’re “On Air,” up to nine others can join your hangout (as usual), and anyone can watch your live broadcast:
We’re starting with a limited number of broadcasters, but any member of the Google+ community can tune in. In fact: we’ll be hosting our very first On Air hangout with will.i.am on Wednesday night, September 21. For more information visit will.i.am’s or my profile on Google+.
94, 95, 96, 97. Hangouts with extras
Spending time together goes hand in hand with actually doing things together. Dinner with family can easily turn into movie night at the local theater, for instance. And running into old friends can inspire anything from photo sharing to vacation planning. Hangouts has always included a basic set of in-room actions (like group chat and co-viewing of YouTube videos), but we want to make it easier to do a lot more. That’s why we’re previewing some extras, including:
The extras are still under construction, but we wanted to preview these features and get your feedback sooner versus later. So start a hangout, click “Try Hangouts with extras” in the green room, and let us know what you think.
98. Hangouts APIs
If field trial has taught us anything about Hangouts, it’s that the community is overflowing with creative individuals. So in the wake of last week’s Google+ API launch, we’re also releasing a basic set of Hangouts APIs. If you’re a developer who wants to build new kinds of apps and games (and who-knows-what-else), then you can find more details on the Google+ platform blog.
+Search: find the people and posts you care about
99. Search in Google+
You’ve been asking for it, and we’ve been busy building it, so today we’re bringing Google’s search expertise to Google+. Just type what you’re looking for into the Google+ search box, and we’ll return relevant people and posts, as well as popular content from around the web.
If you’re into photography, for example, then you’ll see other enthusiasts and lots of great pictures. If you care more about cooking, then you’ll see other chefs and food from around the globe. In all cases, Google+ search results include items that only you can see, so family updates are just as easy to find as international news.
With more than 1 billion items shared and received every day, we’re excited to see how search will connect people through their posts on Google+.
+Everyone
100. Anyone can sign up for Google+—no invitation required.
For the past 12 weeks we’ve been in field trial, and during that time we’ve listened and learned a great deal. We’re nowhere near done, but with the improvements we’ve made so far we’re ready to move from field trial to beta, and introduce our 100th feature: open signups. This way anyone can visit google.com/+, join the project and connect with the people they care about.
Over the next day we’ll be rolling out all of these features globally. In the meantime, you can check out what’s next in Google+.
Posted by Vic Gundotra, Senior Vice President of Engineering
We’ve known about Kal-El — the quad-core mobile processor from NVIDIA — for a fair amount of time, but a lot of the finer details have remained a secret as we’ve anxiously awaited its debut in tablets and smartphones. Fortunately, we have some reading material to bide our time as the company published white papers discussing benefits of the new CPU, and for the most part it’s what you’d expect: NVIDIA touts higher performance, better battery life and improved physics-based gaming when more cores are involved and working together.
What came as a surprise to us was the fact that this quad-core CPU actually utilizes five cores: in addition to the standard four main Cortex A9 high-performance cores, Kal-El throws in a fifth Cortex A9 “companion” core specifically designed to handle less demanding tasks in effort to minimize power consumption caused by active standby processes. How is it done? The Companion core’s max operating frequency gets capped at 500MHz, offering higher performance and greater efficiency per watt when running menial tasks such as push email, Twitter / Facebook sync, widgets, background apps and live wallpapers. This leaves the four main cores free to take care of the stuff it does best — games, web browsing, transcoding / editing audio and video, 3D, physics simulations and image processing, to name a few — allowing performance bumps of up to 50 percent when compared to Tegra 2. We can tell that quad-core devices are going to make us very, very happy. If charts and geeky stats brighten up your day like it does ours, head to the source to read the papers in their entirety.
Gallery: NVIDIA Tegra Kal-El
NVIDIA releases Kal-El white papers, announces a fifth ‘Companion’ core for less demanding tasks originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 20 Sep 2011 11:50:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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edit@hollywoodreporter.com (Marisa Guthrie)
The veteran CBS comedy has a massive season premiere as Charlie Sheen’s character is killed off and Ashton Kutcher makes his entrance.
Watch Arturo Castro change his face in real time to Paris Hilton, Fidel Castro, Steve Jobs, Salvador Dalí, Andy Warhol, Brad Pitt and even Chairman Mao. The deformed, creepy versions of them, anyway. More »
A couple of grains of salt could be all that’s needed to help bacteria produce hydrogen from wastewater or organic byproducts.
Logitech isn’t exactly a stranger to universal remotes, and if you’ve been yearning for an Android or iOS aimed solution from the Swiss company, its new $100 Harmony Link should have you covered. The Link is a WiFi-enabled infrared puck and app combo, that allows you to control up to eight devices in your home theater from the comfort of your touchscreen sans pesky dongles or cases. After downloading a free app, pocket-sized iDevices and Android smartphones can act as universal remotes over your home network, while iPad users also get the benefit of personalized TV listings from Rovi. It’s similar in price and function to Peel’s Fruit, but drops the extra wireless dongle and adds a native iPad app. Notably, the Link can interface with multiple iPads at once, and Logitech’s also thrown in a mini IR blaster to make controlling your AV gear that much easier. If another one of your home theater dreams just came true, the Harmony Link is up for pre-order now from Logitech and due out in October. While you’re still here, there’s quick video overview past the break along with the the usual PR spiel.Logitech’s Harmony Link transforms your iOS device or Android phone into a universal remote (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 20 Sep 2011 04:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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HP handed out pink slips to employees in its webOS Global Business Unit on Monday. The computer company wouldn’t say how many workers it was letting go, but rumors suggest over 500 people are now unemployed. [AllThingsD] More »
edit@hollywoodreporter.com (
Kimberly Nordyke)
Ashton Kutcher made his debut on Monday night’s season premiere of the CBS comedy.
Android’s box of sweets has gotten much more diverse since it launched its first dessert-themed operating system update Cupcake in 2009.
The brains of people who are obese may be wired differently for impulse control, such as resisting french fries or a doughnut when their blood sugar levels drop, compared with people who are not obese, a new study suggests.
Texting in Canada is still on the rise. The Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association (CWTA) recently announced that in Q1 Canadians sent 18 billion text messages. March had the highest stats in history with just over 6 billion, or an average of 199 million messages per day.
Today, in response to a report that showed the average American adult sends/receives 41.5 text messages per day, TELUS has stated that Canadian text messaging is on the rise too. TELUS Communications Manager Shawn Hall said that based on their estimations the number of text messages Canadians now send on a monthly basis has skyrocketed to 8 billion, which represents 270 million per day. Currently there are over 24.5 million wireless subscribers in Canada.
Source: Vancouver Sun
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