FocuSoft Tech Blog |
- AT&T expects to sell Palm Pre when Sprint’s exclusivity ends
- Android 2.0 “Donut” features demoed at Google I/O
- Review: Finis SwiMP3 - designed for swimmers!
- mCubed’s RipNAS Statement now available in Europe
- CrunchDeals: Bionic Commando: Rearmed is half off on XBLA
- Giz Explains: What’s So Great About LED-Backlit LCDs [Giz Explains]
- Google Kicks Off Android Developer Challenge Part Deux
- Bartz Wants To Buy Social And Video Startups; Would Sell Yahoo For “Boatloads Of Money;”
- The Rendezvous Project Laptop Cover
- Free As In Android
| AT&T expects to sell Palm Pre when Sprint’s exclusivity ends Posted: 27 May 2009 01:10 PM PDT
We’ve heard in the past that the Palm Pre would be available at other carriers “next year” sometime after Sprint’s exclusivity period is up, and now we have a vague verbal confirmation from AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson that he “sees” AT&T grabbing hold of the Pre once it’s available. The remarks were made today at the D7 conference. If this pans out, it fits with rumblings we’ve heard of the Eos being AT&T’s low-end, Centro-style webOS device, with the Pre snapping up the higher end. [Via Phone Scoop; image courtesy of PreCentral.net] Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds AT&T expects to sell Palm Pre when Sprint’s exclusivity ends originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 27 May 2009 15:10:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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| Android 2.0 “Donut” features demoed at Google I/O Posted: 27 May 2009 12:41 PM PDT
We’re still trying to get used to the overwhelming joy of having Cupcake installed on our G1s, but it’s full steam ahead over at Google where engineers are already slaving away on the Donut branch that’ll eventually come to be known as Android 2.0. Demoed today at the first I/O keynote were Donut’s universal search (known simply as “Android Search”), which will let you search both online and locally on the phone through contacts, calendars, music, and any app with the proper code, and a text-to-speech API, which should allow developers to integrate Google Voice Search-style awesomeness into the apps of their choice. We also got a brief glimpse of handwriting gestures used for searching through list — the live example was drawing the letter ‘e’ and going to that specific point in a list of songs. Nothing wildly different interface-wise — yet — but we know from the initial 1.0 release that the UI’s very much subject to change, not to mention the fact that HTC and others look poised to do some serious customization of their own. Check out the gallery for shots live from the I/O keynote! Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds Android 2.0 “Donut” features demoed at Google I/O originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 27 May 2009 14:41:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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| Review: Finis SwiMP3 - designed for swimmers! Posted: 27 May 2009 12:40 PM PDT
Memorial Day has come and gone, which means that aside from an abundance of family cookouts, many swimming pools have officially opened their doors for the summer swimming season. I love swimming, and I enjoy swimming laps for exercise. Unfortunately, it's mind numbingly boring to swim back and forth. I've long wanted a waterproof MP3 player to liven up my swimming. Enter the Finis SwiMP3. The short version: this waterproof bone conduction MP3 player does what it claims to do: plays audio while you're swimming! There's no fuss loading media on the unit, and the self-contained system makes for a mostly simple user experience. The long version: I'd never experienced bone conduction audio before, so I was a bit skeptical that these things would work. Most of my concerns were pretty quickly alleviated, though. The headphones — for lack of a better word — are well built. They clip onto your goggles or mask, and rest comfortably on your cheekbones. They were neither too big nor too small for my face. The USB connector is on a small dongle on the cable that connects the headphones together. It sports a snug plastic cap to protect the connector from water while you're swimming. The SwiMP3 comes with its own media manager software, but you don't need to use it: when connected to a computer the SwiMP3 shows up as any other removable hard drive. Just copy MP3 files to it, and you're done! The internal battery will charge while the SwiMP3 is connected to your USB port. It'll take about 3 hours to get a full charge, which should provide about 8 hours of playback. If you're swimming for more than 8 hours, you may have other things to worry about than these things running out of charge. When you turn the SwiMP3 on, you don't hear much. You can put the headphones next to your ear and you'll hear that it's playing sound, but it'll be too quiet and tinny to really enjoy. Placing the headphones on your cheekbones when you're out of the water doesn't do anything. But put your head into some water, and you can immediately hear your songs. My first test of the SwiMP3 was to stick my head into a full bathtub, just to see whether they worked. I was simultaneously pleased by the fact that I didn't short out an expensive electronic gadget, and impressed that I was hearing music under water. The audio quality was perfectly acceptable to me; but if you're a real audiophile you might feel differently. I next took the SwiMP3 to a real pool, and did a few laps. I was somewhat disappointed, as I felt that the music volume was lower than I would have liked. I'm pretty sure I had the volume up all the way, but the splashing from my freestyle strokes was enough to overpower the audio. My gasping for breath as I swam didn't help much, either. I could probably listen to music while swimming, but the volume was sufficiently low as to rule out listening to any kind of audio book or podcast. The headphones stayed on, and perfectly in place, throughout my swim. I had worried that they'd bounce or jiggle during a vigorous swim, but no such problems occurred! I let Marty, my SCUBA instructor try the SwiMP3 and he was absolutely delighted with them. He tried them with freestyle, breast, and butterfly strokes and was equally satisfied with the product in all three tests. He found the volume to be perfectly acceptable. Maybe I'm just deaf. He also commented on how comfortable the headphones were, and how well they stayed in place. Marty and I shared one complaint about the SwiMP3, though: the buttons are damned small:  Small buttons! They're not unusably small, but they do take some real getting used to. It's unlikely that you'll be able to quickly change songs in the middle of a lap. More likely you'll need to pause your swim so you can press the buttons, at least until you get really really comfortable using the SwiMP3. Marty said that the buttons were sufficiently small as to keep him from using the SwiMP3 during a SCUBA dive: it would take too much time, effort, and concentration to fiddle with the buttons that he wouldn't feel comfortable using it on a dive. The bottom line: If you're a dedicated swimmer, the SwiMP3 may be the waterproof media player you've been looking for! If you can, try before you buy to make sure the volume is suitable for your needs. Read more here:
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| mCubed’s RipNAS Statement now available in Europe Posted: 27 May 2009 12:21 PM PDT
mCubed’s RipNAS Statement may be unique, but it isn’t apt to be widely adopted — at least not with price points like this. Hailed as the first SSD-based CD ripping NAS device, the product is also available in a traditional HDD form, though both handle automatic ripping, NAS duties and media streaming. Within, you’ll find a dual-core Atom CPU, gigabit Ethernet, a TEAC DVD drive, four USB 2.0 sockets and a fanless design. The pain? €1,795 ($2,500) for the 3TB HDD version, or €3,295 ($4,590) for the 500GB SSD model. If you’re unfazed by sticker shock, you can pick yours up right now over in Europe. Filed under: Home Entertainment, Storage mCubed’s RipNAS Statement now available in Europe originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 27 May 2009 14:21:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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| CrunchDeals: Bionic Commando: Rearmed is half off on XBLA Posted: 27 May 2009 12:20 PM PDT
Ahoy hoy, Bionic Commando fans. Capcom just passed this along to us and we wanted to let you know that starting today you can download Bionic Commando: Rearmed for half price on XBLA. It's now 400MS points and the deal runs until June 3rd, so you'd better hurry. See more here:
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| Giz Explains: What’s So Great About LED-Backlit LCDs [Giz Explains] Posted: 27 May 2009 12:20 PM PDT
LED-backlit LCDs are where TV’s future and present meet—they’re the best LCDs you’ve ever seen, but they’re not as stunning as OLED displays, which will one day dominate all. They’re not cheap, but they’re not ludicrous either. Most importantly, they’re actually here. I’ll CC You in the FL The typical old-school LCD backlighting tech is CCFL—a cold cathode fluorescent lamp—which is an array of the same kind of lights that make people’s lives miserable in offices around the world. The reason they aren’t the greatest as backlights for TV watching is that they light up the whole damn display. Because LCD is just a massive screen of tiny doors that open and close, light inevitably leaks through the closed doors, when they’re trying to show black, resulting in more of a glowy charcoal. Check out this shot from Home Theater mag to see what I mean:
LEDs (light emitting diodes) are different from say, an old school incandescent bulb, which heats up a filament to generate light, in that they’re electroluminescent—electricity passes through a semiconductor and the movement of the electrons just lights it up. Instead of having one lightbulb in the bottom of the screen, shining up through all of the LCD pixels, you can have arrays of LEDs that shine through smaller portions of the LCD screen, leaving other portions in the dark, so to speak. OLED—”organic light emitting diode”—is slightly different. Since the electroluminescent component is organic and not a chip, each point of light can be much tinier. That’s why an LED TV still needs the LCD screen in front: there’s no way to have a single LED per pixel unless the screen is huge, and mounted to the side of a building in Times Square. OLEDs don’t: HD OLED displays are made up of red, green and blue dots, no LCD panel required. LED Is As LED Does
There are two major kinds of LED backlighting: Edge-lit and local dimming. Edge-lit displays are what they sound like—the LEDs are arranged in strips running along all four edges of the TV, like you can see in this gut shot from Cnet above. A light guide directs the glowyness toward the center of the screen. The advantage of edge-lit displays is that they can get incredibly thin, are 40 percent more power-efficient than regular LCDs and are a bit cheaper than local-dimming TVs. But because they’re still shooting light indiscriminately across the LCD panel, they can’t pull off the black levels that a local dimming backlight setup can. LED backlighting of the local dimming variety is “>how you build the best LCD TV in the world. It’s called local dimming, as you probably guessed, because there are a bunch of LED bulbs—hundreds in the Sony XBR8—arranged in a grid behind the screen. They can all be dark or brightly lit, or they can turn off individually or in clusters, making for the actual Dark Knight, rather than the Grayish Knight you’d see on many cheaper CCFL LCDs. Sets with local dimming are pricier than edge-lit—the Samsung’s local-dimming 46-incher started at $3,500, versus $2800 for one of their edge-lit models. They are thicker too. What Color Is Your LED? LED displays are getting cheaper, more quickly than originally expected, so we could see them go mainstream sooner. You already see the lower-end edge-lit LED tech used in mainstream stuff—MacBook Pro and Dell’s Mini 9 to name a couple. Which is a good thing, since the prophesied ascendancy of OLED in 2009 completely failed to happen. So we’ll have to make do with LED in the meantime. Just be sure to find out what kind when you’re buying. Originally posted here:
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| Google Kicks Off Android Developer Challenge Part Deux Posted: 27 May 2009 12:13 PM PDT
Google will begin accepting submissions from developers in August. In an interesting twist, Google is going to let anyone with an Android handset participate in the process, allowing them to vote using a special application available on the Android Marketplace. The voting application will randomly download applications from the pool of competitors, and users will be asked to rate them. These votes will determine the top 20 apps in 10 different categories (for a total of 200 apps), which will then move on to the next round. Users will be able to vote in the second round as well, but votes from Google judges will make up 55% of the final score. So what are the developers competing for? Here's how Google is breaking down the awards this time around:
All together, it sounds like Google is setting aside around $2 million for the winners. For more details, check out the official guidelines here. Google's last challenge kicked off in November 2007, with the final winners announced the following August. Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it's time for you to find a new Job2.0 Here is the original:
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| Bartz Wants To Buy Social And Video Startups; Would Sell Yahoo For “Boatloads Of Money;” Posted: 27 May 2009 12:04 PM PDT
A search deal with Microsoft remains a more likely transaction. She explained: "There are two parties in all of this. The other party has all the money, we have the data." Both are valuable. More immediate deals might come from Yahoo doing some acquiring itslef. "We are very interested in social, and in video technology," said Bartz. She was particularly bullish on Web video: "This is just the beginning. The whole video area is so exciting. Video advertising growing four times by 2011." In terms of what she needs to do to get Yahoo back on track, her main focus remains streamlining management and decision-making at the company. Bartz related the following story of Jerry Yang inviting her over to his house when he was trying to recruit her for the CEO job, which she didn't want initially:
So what does she think needs to do fix Yahoo? She didn't get into specifics, but acknowledged that Yahoo needs to be updated and do a better job of what it already does well:
Bartz distanced her strategy from chasing any particular hot trend, whether it is search or social networking. "Everybody doesn't just go to Facebook," she noted. "People visit 85 sites a month, but spend most of their time on one or two. They can start on Facebook, but it doesn't give them their news, their stock quotes, it doesn't give them a of of things." Them's fightin' words. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it's time for you to find a new Job2.0 View post:
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| The Rendezvous Project Laptop Cover Posted: 27 May 2009 12:03 PM PDT
When you picture a laptop case, I imagine this was nowhere near the visual you would conjure in your head. This looks about like the more expensive equivalent of just scotch taping bubble wrap around your precious laptop. This cover protects your laptop at all times and can stay on even when it's in use. So you won't have to worry about it being hurt while it's outside of a case. The case has a built-in carrying handle, so you don't have to carry a laptop bag all of the time. It's also slim enough that it could still fit within a laptop bag. All of the materials are environmentally friendly too, which is always a nice bonus. The manual is tragically in Japanese, but somehow I doubt that you'll need a whole lot of directions in order to figure out the case. You can choose between two different sizes, the 13 inch and 11 inch. It'll cost you $38 from the Japan Trend Shop. Source: GeekyGadgets Cool Gift Idea: Digital Picture Frames, check out our reviews. [ The Rendezvous Project Laptop Cover copyright by Coolest Gadgets ] See more here:
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| Posted: 27 May 2009 12:03 PM PDT
Google’s HTML 5 pitch got a whole lot more interesting when developers realized the company was moving into the kind of viral marketing Apple seemed to own until recently. The App Store has created an always-on version of the developer evangelism connection, and we’ll see how effective Google is in building on the momentum created by the phone toolkit. The iPhone 3.0 release continues to keep Apple ahead in lining developer pockets with money through increased monetization scenarios. Now the differentiator will come on the media side of the equation. See more here:
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![ecdd2772a3ghting Giz Explains: Whats So Great About LED Backlit LCDs [Giz Explains]](http://www.focusoft.biz/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/ecdd2772a3ghting.jpg "Giz Explains: Whats So Great About LED Backlit LCDs [Giz Explains]")
![9f08197783hhting Giz Explains: Whats So Great About LED Backlit LCDs [Giz Explains]](http://www.focusoft.biz/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/9f08197783hhting.jpg "Giz Explains: Whats So Great About LED Backlit LCDs [Giz Explains]")
![cfb1070026dgelit Giz Explains: Whats So Great About LED Backlit LCDs [Giz Explains]](http://www.focusoft.biz/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/cfb1070026dgelit.jpg "Giz Explains: Whats So Great About LED Backlit LCDs [Giz Explains]")
In an effort to continue fostering the Android development community, Google has announced the second round of its 
Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz reiterated today that Yahoo is still talking with Microsoft "a little bit" about a possible search deal, but said that it would require a "boatload of money" along with the right data-sharing arrangement (because the search data is key to Yahoo revenues, ad relevance, and user experience). Pressed onstage at the AllThingsD conference whether she would reconsider selling the entire company to Microsoft, she replied: " Oh, they'd have to have big boatloads of money." While she still seems resistant to the idea,the fact that she would now consider it at the right price is a softening of her public stance. This doesn't mean an outright sale is back on the table (that original 
Not since Apple stunned a developer/media crowd by giving away free iSight video cameras has a company gone to the heart of what Jonathan Schwartz calls the tendency of not just software but hardware to trend to free. Google’s giveaway of 4,000 Android phones and 30 days of 3G answers the musical question: is that an Android phone in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?| You are subscribed to email updates from FocuSoft Tech Blog To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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