.::REALITYRECALL::.

The Japan nuclear disaster rates between Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania and Chernobyl.

When we launched the new Google Docs last April, one of the big changes was moving comments to the sidebar and letting people reply to comments. Today, we’re updating comments in Google Docs to facilitate rapid and seamless discussions and integrate with email in an intuitive way. Since there are a number of significant improvements, this update is only available for newly created documents for now.

To start, we’ve improved the discussion flow by adding ownership and edit rights to individual comments. Each comment now has a timestamp and profile picture.

Google Docs doesn’t force you to delete comments. Instead, you can resolve comments to remove them from the visible document and view them later by clicking the discussions button at the top of any document. You can even re-open comments from here.

We know you can’t watch all of your important documents all day to see if there are any suggestions, which is why we’ve integrated comments with your inbox to facilitate more rapid and responsive communication. You can now add someone to a discussion with an @mention. For example, typing @eddy@altostrat.com in a discussion will send a notification email to Eddy with the text of your comment.

Eddy gets a message in her inbox with your question or comment.

She can easily click through to open the document itself to respond, or simply reply to the email.

The reply will show up in the document as soon as the email is sent.

To turn off email notifications for a document, just select Mute updates from this comment at the bottom of any email or select Discussion notification settings… from the Discussions drop down.

We’ve been using this next-generation commenting system inside Google for several months and have seen it make the feedback cycle shorter and get more people involved. The combination of added structure and intuitive email integration have really given life to the discussions that surround our documents, and we’re excited for this new feature to do the same for you.

Discussions will be available over the next few days to all users with personal Google Accounts as well as to Google Apps customers on the Rapid Release track. Please note that improved comments are only available in new documents at this time so if you want to try it out make sure to create a new document. The comments you’ve created in existing document won’t be changed.

We’re excited to hear what you think so let us know on in the comments.

Posted by: Nick Cooper, Software Engineer

Sanjay Jha and various leaks already told us as much, but here’s the official word: the WiFi-only Motorola Xoom is launching on March 27th for $599. Retail availability will be truly widespread, with Amazon, Best Buy, Costco, RadioShack, Sam’s Club, Staples and Walmart all offering up the Honeycomb tablet. Other than the omission of the 3G and 4G radios of the original Xoom, you’re basically looking at an identical hardware package. That includes a 1GHz NVIDIA Tegra 2 processor, 1GB of RAM, 32GB of storage, a 5 megapixel autofocus camera, and a 10.1-inch display with 1280 x 800 resolution.

Continue reading Motorola makes WiFi-only Xoom official: $599 on March 27th

Motorola makes WiFi-only Xoom official: $599 on March 27th originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 16 Mar 2011 09:20:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Have you been struggling to stay on top of your mobile bills ? With these Android applications, you can send free sms and monitor your mobile usage, so that you’ll never have to go over your monthly mobile allowance.

To accomplish this, we will use two Android applications:  HeyWire for sending free local and international sms, and Droid Stats to monitor our monthly phone usage. Both of these applications are available for free from the Android market, so head over to the market, and install them when you are ready.

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Developers have accused Apple of pushing them to use the App Store by making web apps appear slower on iOS devices.

According to The Register, web apps launched directly from the home screen are being disadvantaged through the use of an older JavaScript engine. Web apps are created using JavaScript and…

Workers have returned after a temporary evacuation from the Fukushima power plant.

Radiation from Japan following the March 11 earthquake and tsunami is not expected to pose a safety risk to Canadians, Prime Minister Stephen Harper says.

For over a month, we’ve held onto a document — allegedly a Staples tablet guide — that’s been looking increasingly wrong as the days fly by. Tablet release dates were too soon, and prices were far too high, which made us think it was either a forgery or sorely out of date. (Curious? See our copy after the break.) This week, however, Droid-Life published a far more likely looking copy of the very same thing, which appears to be both quite recent and fairly interesting. You’ll see that Samsung’s 8.9-inch Galaxy Tab makes a cameo, as does the 7-inch HP Opal we told you about early this year, and both the BlackBerry PlayBook and Dell Streak 7’s appearances align with recent rumors we’ve seen. The only outlier is an April release date for the Motorola Xoom WiFi, which ads peg for March 27th. The rest is practically a who’s who of upcoming tablets, so we’ll spare you the full churn of the rumor mill. If you want to know what we know about the lot, simply refer to our coverage below.

Update: Oh, and that HTC tablet is listed as a 10-inch one — could it be the EVO View we’ve been waiting for? [Thanks, Morgan]

Read – Dell Streak 10
Read – Acer Iconia Tab
Read – Toshiba’s unnamed Tegra 2 / Honeycomb tablet
Read – HP TouchPad

[Thanks, Billy F.]

Continue reading Staples’ slate of slates leaks out, corroborates Samsung 8.9-incher and the HP Opal?

Staples’ slate of slates leaks out, corroborates Samsung 8.9-incher and the HP Opal? originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 15 Mar 2011 20:23:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Tom’s Hardware got up close and personal with a sweet-looking AMD Eyefinity spread at AMD’s Ontario office. It’s running off one of the new Radeon 6990s, and the 5×1 mode lets you use portrait orientation to minimize horizontal seams. But when are we going to get some of these bezel-less monitors I keep hearing about? I know LG’s working on it, but hurry up, dudes.

Check out the video here. I’d probably get sick playing Dirt like that.

Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO)—the company that runs the Fukushima nuclear plants—says that 70% of the fuel rods have been damaged on the reactor 1 and 33% have been damaged on reactor 2. "The reactors' cores are believed to have partially melted" says the Japanese news agency Kyodo. Sadly, this confirms the judgement of international experts, who criticized Japan for underplaying the crisis. More »

Radiation from Japan following the March 11 earthquake and tsunami is not expected to pose a safety risk to Canadians, Prime Minister Stephen Harper says.

In what appears to be a breakdown of tablet pricing and release dates that a “major US retailer” has provided its employees, the 10-inch HP TouchPad shows up for a refreshingly reasonable $500 (16GB) and $600 (32GB). Why, that’s right on par with iPad 2! About time. More »

The Centro Financiero Confinanzas (a.k.a. “the David Tower,” named after its investor David Brillembourg) stands half-complete in downtown Caracas and is Venezuela’s third largest skyscraper. More »

Announced at BlackBerry’s 2010 Developer Conference last fall, BBM Social Platform has just become available to interested third-party devs in beta form. Of course, you might be hoping that it opens BlackBerry Messenger to other (read: non-BlackBerry) platforms via API… but yeah, that’s not happening quite yet. Instead, the SDK allows folks developing for BlackBerry OS to integrate BBM capabilities into their own apps, and the list of capabilities is pretty extensive: you’ll be able to read and update user profiles, embed BBM chats inside your app, and transfer files, just to name a few of the big ones (with the user’s permission, of course). The current beta works for Java apps, while RIM’s hard at work crafting a new version for release in April that’ll add WebWorks web app compatibility.

RIM’s BBM Social Platform goes to open beta, lets devs bake BBM into BlackBerry apps originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 15 Mar 2011 17:08:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Google now owns a small Irish company called Green Parrot Pictures. Why should you care? Their video compression technology will allow for better looking, less stuttery video, packaged in smaller file sizes on YouTube. Win win. [YouTube] More »

Google now owns a small Irish company called Green Parrot Pictures. Why should you care? Their video compression technology will allow for better looking, less stuttery video, packaged in smaller file sizes on YouTube. Win win. [YouTube] More »

We’ve shared a few ways to boost your cell phone signal before, but technology weblog The Next Web shows us another way: just stick it in a glass. More »

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