Nintendo announced its new 3DS handheld to deliver 3D games without the geeky glasses required to watch 3D movies and television.

The announcement was expected, but Nintendo also announced a wave of support for the new handheld device from throughout the video game industry.

The 3DS looks like an ordinary DS handheld, but it comes with a special screen that can be used to view images in three dimensions. It comes with a 3D slider to adjust the screen so that your eyes can see the images properly, even if you don’t have stereoscopic glasses to align the view of 3D images.

It also has a touch panel and much better graphics than the traditional Nintendo DS handheld, which has sold more than 100 million units since 2004. It has a motion sensor and a gyroscope. Those features are nods to the popularity of the iPhone, which has similar tools.

It is compatible with the Nintendo DSi and has two cameras on the outside of the case. You can thus take photos and videos in three dimensions. Nintendo didn’t try to show the 3DS imagery on stage, but it did have lots of models on display (with the pretty real-life models pictured below) for the press to view. 

“It’s a mass-market device that can let you try and take 3D pictures,” said Satoru Iwata, (pictured), chief executive of Nintendo.

Nintendo will make its own games for the 3DS, but it will also have its biggest third-party support ever, Iwata said. Nintendo is working on a 3D version of Nintendogs, dubbed Nintendogs + Cats. Supporters of the 3DS include Activision Blizzard, which is working on DJ Hero in 3D, Square Enix, THQ, Electronic Arts, Capcom, WB Games, Ubisoft, Namco Bandai, and Konami. The latter drew cheers because it will do a Metal Gear Solid game for the 3DS.

It can also play 3D movies from the likes of Disney, Warner Bros. and DreamWorks. A few years ago, Nintendo’s Project Sora was established to create games for the Nintendo 3DS. That game is called Kid Icarus Uprising.

Iwata said that 3D viewing will improve the ability to navigate through terrain. In sleep mode, the 3DS can link to other nearby Wi-Fi connected 3DS devices. It can communicate without interrupting a game.

 

It’s been some time since we received any new details on Chrome OS, Google’s web-focused operating system for netbooks. But that’s about to change in a couple weeks. The computer manufacturer Acer will launch Chrome OS devices at the Computex Taipei show, which will be held from June 1 to June 5.

We don’t yet know what devices Acer will be launching. Chrome OS is designed for netbooks, but Google has also mentioned the possibility of bringing it to other device types like smartbooks and tablets running ARM processors. Smartbooks look like netbooks but run processors like those from ARM which are designed for mobile devices. Recently, there’s been talk of Samsung developing ARM-based smartbooks running Chrome OS, as well as support for nVidia Tegra 2 devices.

It’s still unclear how Chrome OS-equipped netbooks will coexist with those running Google’s Android mobile operating system. We’ve known since early 2009 that Android netbooks would begin popping up this year, and even Acer announced its intention to sell them.

Google will probably settle on Android for tablets eventually — it’s already built for multitouch support, and its analogous to Apple bringing the iPhone OS to the iPad. Android’s small footprint also makes it easy to use in integrated devices, like Google’s upcoming “Dragonpoint”  TV project with Sony and Intel. Chrome OS, which is clearly better suited for devices with keyboards and trackpads, will find itself on more netbooks and smartbooks. Last year, Google CEO Eric Schmidt mentioned that the two projects will merge over time (see Google’s graphic below), so eventually the differences might not matter.

Google initially planned to release Chrome OS sometime in the second half of this year. Acer’s Chrome OS device launch in early June fits into that schedule, although we’re not sure when those devices will be available for purchase.

Apple wants the fastest chip for its mobile devices and has bought another chip maker to gain an edge over its competitors.

Apple has acquired a small Austin, Tex., company called Intrinsity, known for making zippy versions of a computer chip often found in mobile devices. The deal, which closed late last month and was confirmed by Apple on Tuesday, shows the company continuing to try to gain an edge in the mobile device market by purchasing technology and chip experts.

It is the second time in two years that Apple has purchased a small chip company to gain critical technology for making a faster processor that uses less energy.

“This adds another arrow to their quiver,” said Tom R. Halfhill, a well-known chip analyst for Microprocessor Report. Mr. Halfhill said his industry contacts put Apple’s acquisition price for Intrinsity at $121 million. Steve Dowling, an Apple spokesman, declined to comment on that figure.

“The purchase price is like pocket change to Apple, and they get a lot of benefit,” said Mr. Halfhill. Apple’s products should handle tough jobs like playing video better than competing gear while devouring less battery life, analysts said.

Ever since Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, unveiled the iPad in February, analysts in the technology industry have been obsessed with its innards. Chip analysts, in particular, zeroed in on the A4 chip that Apple credited with giving the iPad better battery life and more speed than similar devices.

The widespread speculation has been that the A4 chip relied on technology from Intrinsity to get its added processing power.

The speed of mobile device chips are typically measured in megahertz, and one of the more popular chips on the market usually runs at about 650 megahertz. Intrinsity’s engineers found a way to crank that speed up to 1000 megahertz, which happens to be the same speed as the A4 in the iPad.

Intrinsity has been working with a division of Samsung that manufactures chips on this speedy product. The same division of Samsung built the A4 chip for Apple, according to Chipworks, a firm that reverse-engineers and analyzes technology products.

By acquiring Intrinsity, Apple would be able to keep that 350 megahertz edge to itself.

Word of the acquisition began to leak out after technology trade publications noticed earlier this month that a number of Intrinsity employees had started to list Apple as their employer on the social networking Web site LinkedIn. Neither company, however, would discuss their relationship.

The people familiar with Apple’s situation say that efforts to create a new chip for mobile devices from the ground up are stalling. In 2008, Apple purchased another chip maker, called PA Semi, for $278 million. That start-up also specialized in making fast, low-power chips.

But a number of the PA Semi employees have left Apple — many of them disgruntled about their compensation, according to people with knowledge of the situation who were not authorized to speak publicly. Google, in fact, bought a start-up called Agnilux earlier this month filled with PA Semi engineers.

The Intrinsity purchase was seen as a way to help Apple maintain a lead over other device makers while it deals with these issues.

Mr. Halfhill said Apple appeared to be building its own version of the ARM chip favored by makers of mobile devices. Other chip companies like Nvidia, Qualcomm and Marvell have made their own versions of ARM, in some cases spending hundreds of millions of dollars in the process.

Apple’s strategy of creating a custom chip for mobile devices runs counter to its approach in computers in which it purchases chips from Intel.

True to our nature, just 5 hours after the launch of the new `like` button by Mark Zuckerberg in the f8 conference, we are rolling the `like` button on all product pages. During the next couple of days, we will also be introducing it on the auction pages and blog pages.

 

We will also be implementing other Facebook changes announced.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It's finally official: Microsoft Pink -- the product of Redmond's acquisition of Danger -- has just been unveiled as a pair of handsets sourced from Sharp (which made most of Danger's Sidekicks) known as the Kin One and Kin Two. The devices are being marketed as Windows Phones, and while they're ultimately based on most of the same underpinnings of Windows Phone 7, it's a distinctly and totally different experience -- the entire user interface is custom to Kin with a heavy social media slant, a custom browser (we're told it's based on the Zune's browser), and surprisingly, zero support for third-party apps. The displays are capacitive with support for multitouch (yes, you can pinch and zoom in the browser), but there's no support for in-browser Flash or Silverlight.

Kin One -- the phone we'd seen rumored as "Turtle" -- is basically a curved square slider with a QVGA display, 4GB of internal storage, 5 megapixel camera with LED flash, and a full QWERTY keyboard. Kin Two, meanwhile, is the phone leaked as the "Pure," upping the ante with a HVGA display and a more traditional landscape QWERTY slide form factor. It also moves up to an 8 megapixel cam and 8GB of internal storage, but otherwise, the experience is roughly the same as what you get on the One; both phones have WiFi and Bluetooth in addition to their 3G cellular radios. For what it's worth, Microsoft is emphasizing that internal storage really isn't a big deal with the Kin phones, because your entire photo and video collection that you capture using the onboard camera is synced seamlessly with your bottomless online storage; you can access the entire collection from your phone at any time by browsing thumbnails, and if you want the full content, you can download it. Kin comes bundled with a desktop web experience that's entirely based on Silverlight for viewing and sorting just about all of the major stuff that you can see on your phone -- contacts, social network status updates, images, and so on -- and we've got to admit, it looks pretty slick. 

A big focus for Microsoft with Kin is the totally new, different, crazy UI, which is based on blocky, simple text, monochromatic elements, and zoomed-in, stylized pictures. The big two features unique to Kin are being called "Spot" and "Loop." Loop is sort of the Kin's home screen, aggregating social content from your friends (Twitter, Facebook, and so on) roughly based on order of priority by how you sort your contents, so you don't have to see as many updates from people you don't follow too closely. Spot, meanwhile, is an ever-present green dot at the bottom of the screen where you can drag content -- just about any content, be it maps, images, status updates, videos -- and share it with contacts. Think of it as an "Attach" button in your messaging client, but on steroids.

Both phones have full support for the Zune music and video experience (but not Zune gaming), and it looks like the Zune HD UI we're accustomed to, just as it does on Windows Phone 7. To loop in the Mac community, Microsoft will be offering a Mac-compatible music side-loader -- in other words, it won't be a true, native Zune client and you won't be able to use it to shop for music, but it'll happily connect to iTunes and sync your non-DRM collection. Both phones also support over-the-air firmware updates, so there'll be no need to tether just for that. Speaking of tethering, data tethering isn't supported.

Every iteration of the iPhone's mockups showed the time as 9:42. The iPad showed it as 9:41. It's slightly peculiar--the times are grouped tightly enough to be intentional, but why those numbers? Why not 9:00?

Turns out Apple's keynote organizers think about this stuff right down to the tiniest detail--and this is certainly one of the tinier details. They rehearse the presentation with Steve Jobs, Phil Schiller, and whoever else will be speaking, and time it so the big announcement comes 40 minutes in. They add a couple minutes to be on the safe side.

That means that when Apple puts that most important slide up, the one introducing the new hardware, the time on the static image of the device will be damned close to the time the packed room of journalists sees it for the first time. It's just one more example of how carefully Apple prepares everything--that's a detail we didn't know about until a couple days ago, and they've been doing it for years, with no fanfare. Very cool, right?

Just a bit more than a year after we first laid eyes on iPhone OS 3.0, Apple is back with the latest big revision of the OS that powers the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad. iPhone OS 4 is shipping this summer (iPad in the fall), and the developer preview will be out today. iPhone 3GS and new-gen iPod touch will get all the features, but some features won't make it to the iPhone 3G, original iPhone, and older iPod touches. The biggest new feature is multitasking, which Apple says is going to be the "best" implementation in the smartphone space, though it's obviously not the first. App switching is activated by double tapping the home button, which pulls up a "dock" of currently running apps, and Apple claims it can do this without hurting battery life or performance for the front app. Unfortunately, this multitasking won't be available for devices older than the 3GS and new iPod touch. Multitasking is just one of seven different new "tentpole" features, including Game Center, enhanced Mail, and more...

Notable new features for users ("tentpoles" are in bold):

Multitasking.

Spell check (like on the iPad).

Bluetooth keyboard support (again, on the iPad).

User-defined wallpaper (a jailbreak favorite).

Tap to focus when recording video, just like with photos, and a 5x digital zoom for the camera.

Playlist creation and nested playlists.

App folders for sorting apps! You can even put an app folder in the dock.

Enhanced Mail! You can have a merged inbox view, switch between inboxes quickly, and sync to more than one Exchange account. There's also threaded messaging (at last!) and in-app attachment viewing.

iBooks, just like on iPad, only smaller. You can wirelessly sync books between platforms, a la Kindle. Enterprise features, including remote device management and wireless app distribution.

Game Center. It's like Xbox Live, but for iPhone games. Includes achievements, leaderboards, and match making. It will be available as a "developer preview," and out for consumers later this year. 

The chip core war continues to heat up. Today Advanced Micro Devices is announcing the release of new server microprocessors with 8 or 12 processors on a single chip. The announcement comes less than two weeks after Intel introduced its first 6-core chips and a day before another major Intel server chip announcement. These announcements are timed so close together it’s like watching a pro tennis match. But AMD argues that its new chips, based on its Magny-Cours code-named design, will beat Intel’s in processing performance and energy efficiency, as well as cost per computing power.

The new chips have 119 percent better performance than AMD’s earlier generation of server chips and use the same amount of power. The chips are officially named the AMD Opteron 6000 series (aimed at the high-end) and the 4000 series (aimed at low-end, energy efficient). The chips will be housed on AMD’s Maranello platform with AMD server chip sets, which are secondary traffic cops in a computer. These Operton chips will be used in high-volume servers, which have two or four chips each. The chips are twice as fast as AMD’s previous line of six-core processors introduced about a year ago.

Gina Longoria, director of product management in AMD’s server and workstation division, said in an interview that AMD’s Magny-Cours chips are designed to be easily integrated into a platform and make much more efficient use of a cheaper form of memory. While Intel tends to change a lot of platform elements with its new chip introductions, AMD tries to keep the platform housing the chips consistent, leading to lower overall costs. AMD is also introducing its Direct Connect Architecture 2.0, which allows a microprocessor to communicate with four other microprocessors simultaneously, instead of the previous three. The DCA 2.0 supports as many as 16 cores together.

An estimated 25 server platforms will be introduced over time. Starting today, new models will be announced from Hewlett-Packard, Acer, Cray, SGI and Dell. Software support is available from Microsoft and VMware. These new chips mean that customers will be able to replace many aging servers with a single Magny-Cours server and get by with better performance, lower power, and lower maintenance costs. The race will continue through next year. By then, the code-named Interlagos chips from AMD will be launched with 12 and 16 cores, while the low-end Valencia will debut with 6 and 8 cores.

Nintendo jumped on the 3-D bandwagon Tuesday, saying the next generation of its DS handheld video game console would come with a 3-D display and go on sale within a year.

Unlike the recent flurry of three dimensional films and TV technologies, the new machine, tentatively called the Nintendo 3-DS, will not require users to wear special glasses to view images in 3-D, the company said. The new device will be on display at the E3 video game trade show in June, Nintendo said in a press release.

The popularity of 3-D films like “Avatar” from Twentieth Century Fox and “Alice in Wonderland” from Walt Disney Pictures — which required wearing polarized glasses for images to appear in 3-D — has helped propel the popularity of the technology after several false starts in the past.

Now, manufacturers like Samsung, Panasonic and Sony are racing to bring 3-D technology into the living room. The 3-D LCD televisions come with more advanced “active shutter” glasses, which darken and lighten in sync with the TV to help create the illusion of three dimensions. Sony has also said that games for its PlayStation 3 consoles will be available in 3-D.

Samsung of South Korea started selling 3-D-enabled televisions last month, with prices starting at about $1700. The Japanese electronics makers Panasonic and Sony have promised their own versions this year.

Hitachi, another Japanese manufacturer, released a cellphone last year that has a 3-D display that does not require glasses. Hitachi, together with Sharp, supplies LCD screens to Nintendo.

Nintendo would not say what kind of technology its new 3-D handheld employs or how much it would cost. The new console will be compatible with games for Nintendo’s older DS and DSi handheld models, the company said.

The Nintendo 3-DS will go on sale in the company’s next fiscal year, which runs from April 1, 2010, to March 31, 2011.

“We wanted to give the gaming industry a head’s up about what to expect from Nintendo at E3,” said Ken Toyoda, chief spokesman at Nintendo. “We’ll invite people to play with the new device then.”

The DS console from Nintendo — the company behind Super Mario and Pokemon games — has been a hit, selling 125 million units since it was introduced in 2004. The DS has outsold a rival handheld game machine from Sony, the PlayStation Portable, by a factor of two to one.

Nintendo has also scored successes, especially among casual game players, with its Wii video game machine. The Wii comes with a wandlike, motion-detecting remote controller that mimics motions in games, like a golf swing or boxing punch. The company has sold 67.5 million units of the Wii since it went on sale in 2006.

But the emergence of unlikely rivals in the mobile game market — the iPhone and iPod Touch, both by Apple — have raised the pressure for Nintendo to launch a new game system.

Apple’s multifunction phone and music players run games that can be downloaded from its online iTunes store, and have helped the company build a fan base among less hard-core game players.

 

What do you get if you rip out the guts of an Acer Aspire Timeline 1810 laptop and replace the CULV processor with a newer, faster, Core i5 chip? Apparently what you get is the Acer Aspire TimelineX 1830T.

It will reprotedly have an 11.6 inch, 1366 x 768 pixel display and an Intel Core i5-520UM processor with a clock speed that ranges from 1.06GHz to 1.86Hz depending on use. The graphics core has a clock speed of 166MHz to 500MHz and should be able to handle HD video playback, although it may not be powerful enough for some games with 3D graphics.

The rest of the specs are pretty much the same as you’d find from Acer’s existing thin and light notebooks: 802.11b/gn WiFi, HDMI, SPDIF, 3 USB ports, and optional Bluetooth and 3G modems. The battery should be good for about 8 hours.

The only thing that we don’t know yet is the price. Acer will make an official announcement in late March. If Acer can manage to upgrade the processor without dramatically boosting the price of the Aspire Timeline 1810 series, this will be a real winner. 

A senior Samsung executive has confirmed that the company will release a ‘slate’ PC in the second half of this year.

While remaining coy on the platform the slate would use, the director of Samsung Australia’s IT division, Philip Newton, told APC that PC-grade processing power and connectivity would be cornerstones of the device.

“The problems I see with the iPad are its processing power and (lack of) connectivity to a certain extent” Newton said during a panel discussion at the Samsung Forum in Singapore.

“I do feel that that slate-type platform has legs but I think the legs need to be far more powerful, for example an Atom-based product which has far greater flexibility, not to mention inputs and outputs. This has more potential than an iPad.”

This hints that it could run on Intel’s Atom processor, and perhaps even the forthcoming ‘Moorestown’ platform, rather than the ARM chip favoured by Apple’s iPad.

Emmanuele Silanesu, national product and marketing manager for Samsung Australia’s IT division, told APC that Samsung would release its slate “in the second half of the year”  and the device would have a clear focus on the consumer market – unlike its Q1 UMPC device (shown below), which was a posterchild for Microsoft’s failed UMPC (ultra-mobile PC) push in 2006.    


“The Q1 was a very niche product for a vertical market, it wasn’t a consumer product” Silanesu explains. “It was limited (in functionality), the price was relatively high, and it wasn’t an attractive device for consumers.”

Silanesu told APC that while he sees a role for both ARM-based and x86-based devices “the smartphone will become a secondary device, like a smartphone now is and like the PDA was.”

“But there is the ability for a slate-based product to become a primary device in terms of its processing power and IO. That’s where I think we could get critical mass in having a product which could become your primary device – one you could take to university and do a PowerPoint presentation on it, for example, or a device that could be taken home or to the office and docked.”

Samsung’s pre-slate strategy includes using its family of ebook readers to pave the way for broad consumer acceptance of a slate. “The ebook is the beginning of a very long story which goes all the way into high-end slate-like products”, Newton says.

Starting next month, the more than 400 million Facebook users could begin seeing a new kind of status update flow through their news feed: the current locations of their friends.

Facebook plans to take the wraps off a new location-based feature in late April at f8, the company’s yearly developer conference, according to several people briefed on the project, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss unannounced services.

In preparation for the launch, Facebook updated its privacy policy last November. The new policy states: “When you share your location with others or add a location to something you post, we treat that like any other content you post.”

At that time, the company also offered some foreshadowing of the new feature: “If we offer a service that supports this type of location sharing we will present you with an opt-in choice of whether you want to participate.”

Facebook has been working on a location-based tool for close to a year, but decided to wait until the product was completely ready for mainstream adoption before announcing it, said the people familiar with the project.

Meredith Chin, a Facebook spokeswoman, said Tuesday that the company wasn’t ready to discuss any possible location-based features. “We’re constantly experimenting with new things around here, but we don’t have any details to share right now,” she said in an e-mail.

The new location feature will have two aspects, according to the people familiar with Facebook’s plans. One will be a service offered directly by Facebook that will allow users to share their location information with friends.

The other will be a set of software tools, known as A.P.I.’s, that outside developers can use to offer their own location-based services to Facebook users.

In the past, the company has relied heavily on its strong developer community to create innovative content around new tools and features. This community has also been instrumental in spreading Facebook Connect, which allows smaller Web sites to give their customers the option of signing in using Facebook and tapping their existing social networks.

Of Facebook’s more than 400 million users, about 50% log in to the site at least once a day, and 100 million people access the service from mobile devices. That makes the location feature an area of strong focus for the company.

The staggering number of users on the site has also brought a heightened level of internal scrutiny to the project, according to the people familiar with it. Facebook has been trying to figure out how to add location data to its service without raising potential privacy concerns or negative feedback from its users, as it has in the past with new features and redesigns.

One of the people familiar with the project said that the company is not trying to beat the smaller location-based social networks, such as Loopt, Foursquare and Gowalla.

Instead, Facebook wants to go head-to-head with Google in the fight for small-business advertising. Facebook redesigned its business pages last year, with the hope of offering more features for small-business owners. According to Facebook, the Web site currently hosts more than 1.5 million local businesses from around the world.

In 2009, Google launched Google Latitude with the pitch to let users “See where your friends are right now.”

Twitter, another Facebook competitor, has also added an option to include location data with tweets.

 

The Daily Telegraph reports that a new Apple patent has surfaced which could potentially allow the iPhone, or another Apple portable, to act as a sort of electronic key. The potential applications are as limitless as the number of things locked by old-school metal keys. It could be used for cars, offices, homes, or lockers. Basically, anything that could have an electronic receiver mounted to it in place of a metal tumbler-style lock could then use an iPhone as a key.

While Ars Technica notes that "the patent application itself merely describes a unique way of using motion detection to generate an input, such as turning a virtual combination lock-style dial," the patent itself, as reported by the Telegraph, says that the device could be "any suitable electronic device such as a portable media player, personal data assistant or electronic lock" that could open up any number of physical lock types just by communicating wirelessly.

The following series of stories detail some of what happened in 2003 and 2004 after then Harvard-sophomore Mark Zuckerberg launched a site called theFacebook.com.  This site, of course, quickly grew into the dominant global site known as Facebook, which is now used by some 400 million people a month.

• At Last -- The Full Story Of How Facebook Was Founded
• How Mark Zuckerberg Hacked Into Rival ConnectU In 2004
• How Mark Zuckerberg Hacked The Harvard Crimson Using Data From TheFacebook.com

The stories are based on a long investigation into the origins of Facebook that included interviews with more than a dozen sources familiar with aspects of what happened, as well as what we believe to be relevant IMs and emails from the period.  Much of the information has never been reported.

The stories detail some troubling behavior by Facebook's then 19-year old founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg.  A source close to the company suggests that the fallout from this behavior has played a profound role in shaping Facebook's current privacy policies and Mark's current attitudes and conduct as a now 25-year old CEO.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It's astounding that until this moment, three years after the iPhone, the biggest software company in the world basically didn't compete in mobile. Windows Phone 7Series is more than the Microsoft smartphone we've been waiting for. Everything's different now.

Today, at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Microsoft is publicly previewing Windows Phone 7 for the first time. The brand new, totally fresh operating system will appear in phones this year, but not until the holidays. All of the major wireless carriers and every likely hardware maker are backing it, and they'd be stupid not to. It's awesome. We've got a serious hands on for you to check out, but here is everything that you need to know:

The name—Windows Phone 7 Series—is a mouthful, and unfortunately, the epitome of Microsoft's worst naming instincts, belying the simple fact that it's the most groundbreaking phone since the iPhone. It's the phone Microsoft should've made three years ago. In the same way that the Windows 7 desktop OS was nearly everything people hoped it would be, Windows Phone 7 is almost everything anyone could've dreamed of in a phone, let alone a Microsoft phone. It changes everything. Why? Now that Microsoft has filled in its gaping chasm of suck with a meaningful phone effort, the three most significant companies in desktop computing—Apple, Google and Microsoft—now stand to occupy the same positions in mobile. Phones are officially computers that happen to fit in your pocket.

Windows Phone 7 is also something completely new for Microsoft: A total break from the past. Windows Mobile isn't just dead, the body's been dumped, buried and paved over by a rainbow brick road.

 

 

The Interface

It's different. The face of Windows Phone 7 is not a rectangular grid of thumbnail-sized glossy-looking icons, arranged in a pattern of 4x4 or so, like basically every other phone. No, instead, an oversized set of bright, superflat squares fill the screen. The pop of the primary colors and exaggerated flatness produces a kind of cutting-edge crispness that feels both incredibly modern and playful. Text is big, and beautiful. The result is a feat no phone has performed before: Making the iPhone's interface feel staid.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you want to know what it feels like, the Zune HD provides a taste: Interface elements that run off the screen; beautiful, oversized text and graphics; flipping, panning, scrolling, zooming from screen to screen; broken hearts. Some people might think it's gratuitous, but I think it feels natural and just…fun. There's an incredible sense of joie de vivre that's just not in any other phone. It makes you wish that this was aesthetic direction all of Microsoft was going in. Another, sorta similar interface, in terms of data presentation, is this Android Slidescreen app, which gives you a bunch of info up top.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Windows Phone 7 is connected in the same sense as Palm's webOS and Android, with live, real-time data seamlessly integrated, though it's even smoother and more natural. Live tiles on the Start screen, which you can totally customize, are updated dynamically with fresh content, like weather, or if you've pinned a person to your Start screen, their latest status updates and photos.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The meat of the phone is organized around a set of hubs: People, Pictures, Games, Music + Video, Marketplace, and Office. They're kind of like uber-applications, in a sense. Massive panoramas with multiple screens that are each kind of like individual apps. People, for instance, isn't just your contacts, but it's also where social networking happens, with a real-time stream of updates pulled in from like Facebook and Windows Live. (No Twitter support announced yet, it appears—a kind of serious deficiency, but one we're sure will be remedied by ship date.)

As another example, Music + Video is essentially the entirety of Zune HD's software, tucked inside of Windows Phone 7.

A piece of interface that's shockingly not there: A desktop syncing app. If anyone would be expected to tie their phone to a desktop, you'd think it'd be Microsoft, but they're actually moving forward here. All of your contacts and info sync over the air. The only thing you'll be syncing through your computer is music and videos, which is mercifully done via the Zune desktop client.

Hello, Connected World

The People hub might be the best social networking implementation yet on a phone: It's a single place to see all of your friends' status updates from multiple services in a single stream, and to update your own Facebook and Windows Live status. Needs. Twitter support. Badly. But you have neat things going on, like the aforementioned Live tiles—if you really like someone or want to stalk them hardcore, you can make them a tile on your Start screen, which will update in realtime with whatever they're posting, and pull down their photos from whatever service. There's also your very own profile page, where you can scan your current social state and post updates to multiple services simultaneously.

All of your contacts are synced and backed up over-the-air, Android and webOS style, and can be pulled from multiple sources, like Windows Live, Exchange, etc. Makes certain other phones seem a little antiquated with their out-of-the-box Contacts situation.

Holy Crap! The Zune Phone!

Microsoft's vision of Zune is finally clear with Windows Phone 7. It's an app, just like iPod is on the iPhone, though the Zune Marketplace is integrated with it into the music + video hub, not separated into its own little application. It's just like the Zune HD, so you can check out our review of that to see what it's like. But you get third-party stuff like Pandora, too, built-in here. Oh, and worth mentioning, there will be an FM radio in every phone (more on that in a bit).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pictures is a little different though, and gets its very own hub. That's because it's intensely connected—you can share photos and video with social networks straight from the hub, and via the cloud, they're kept in sync with your PC and web galleries. The latest photos your friends post also show up here. Of course, you get around with multitouch zoom and zip-zip scrolling stuff.

Xbox, on a Phone

I'll admit, I very nearly needed to change my pants when I saw the Xbox tile on the phone for the first time. Obviously, you're not going to be playing Halo 3 on your smartphone (at least not this year), but yes, Xbox Live on a phone! It's tied to your Live profile, and there are achievements and gamer points for the games you can play on your phone, which will be tied to games back on your Xbox 360.

If Microsoft's got an ace-in-hole with Windows Phone 7, it's Xbox Live. Gamers have talked about a portable Xbox for years—this is the most logical way to do it. The N-Gage was ahead of its time. (Okay, and it sucked.) The DS and PSP are the past. The iPhone showed us that the future of mobile gaming was going to be on your phone, and now that just got a lot more interesting. The potential's there, and hopefully the games will be plentiful and awesome enough to meet it.

Browser and Email

Yes, the browser is Internet Exploder. And yes, the rumor's true: It won't be as fast as Mobile Safari. Not to start. But it's not bad! Hey, least it's got multitouch powers right out of the box. Naturally, you've got multiple browser windows, and you can pin web pages to the Start screen, like any other decent mobile browser.

The Outlook email app makes me question how people read email on a BlackBerry. It is stunning. I never thought I'd call a mail app "stunning," but, well, it kind of is. It's the best looking mobile mail app around. Text is huge. Gorgeous. Ultrareadable. Of course, it's got Exchange support too.

Apps, Office and Marketplace

Remember what I said earlier about Windows Mobile being dead? So are all the apps. They won't work on WP7. Sorry Windows Mobile developers, it's for the best. Deep down, we all knew a clean break was the only way Windows Phone wasn't going to suck total balls.

Apps will have some standardized interface elements, like the app bar on the bottom for common commands. But here's a question: Will they multitask? Um, that depends on your definition of multitasking! When we asked Joe Belfiore, the guy running Windows Phone, he alluded to live tiles and feeds as some ofthe ways that third-parties will be able to "bring value to the user, even when their apps aren't running." Which sounds to us like a big ol' "shnope," but we'll see more next month at Microsoft's developer event MIX.

The Marketplace is where you'll buy apps. Since we've got like 6 months 'til Windows Phone 7 launches and people should be excited to develop for it, hopefully there'll be plenty of stuff to buy there on day one.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Naturally, Bing and Bing Maps are built into the phone as the default search and maps services. They're nice, smartly contextual, and very location-oriented. Bing's also used for universal search on the phone, via a dedicated Bing button. (There is no search but Bing search, BTW.) Bing Maps is multitouchable, with pinch-to-zoom. It's rich, with built-in listings with reviews and clever ways of searching for stuff. And yeah, Office! It's connected to that cloud thing, for OTA syncing and such. Business people should be happy.

Hardware and Partnahs

Another way the old Windows Mobile is dead is how Microsoft's handling partners and hardware situation. With Windows Mobile, a phonemaker handed Microsoft their monies, and Microsoft tossed them a software kit, and that was that. Which is why a lot of Windows Mobile phones felt and ran like crap. And why it took HTC like two years to produce the HD2, the most genuinely usable rendition of Windows Mobile ever.

Microsoft's not building their own phones, but they're going to be picky, to say the least, with Windows Phone 7. Ballmer phrases it as "taking more accountability" for people's experiences. There's a strict set of minimum hardware requirements: a capacitive, multitouchable screen with at least four points of touch; accelerometer; 5-megapixel camera; FM radio; and the like. There are serious benchmarks that have to be met. And only chosen OEMs get to build the phones now, not like before, when anybody with $20 could get a license. The OEMs that Microsoft's announcing they're working with at launch are: Qualcomm, LG, Samsung, Garmin Asus, HTC, HP, Dell, Sony Ericsson, and Toshiba. AT&T's their "premiere partner" in the US (dammit). (Take note people! Premiere does not mean exclusive!)

Every phone will have a Bing (search) button and a Start button. Custom skins, like the minor miracles HTC worked, are now banned. The message to hardware makers is clear: It's a Windows Phone, you're just putting it together. Basically, phonemakers get to decide the shape of the phone, and whether or not there's a keyboard.

One other word on hardware, in a manner of speaking. Hardware it won't work with? Macs. Which is kind of stupid to us—a lot of the people Microsoft wants to use Windows Phone 7, like college students, have been going Mac in droves. You wanna lure them back Microsoft? Let them use your phone with any OS.

 

 

The Big Picture

Windows Phone 7 Series is, from what we've seen, exactly what Microsoft's phone should be. It's actually good. It brings together a bunch of different Microsoft services—Zune, Xbox, Bing—in a way that actually makes sense and just works. But there's a real, lingering question: Are they too late? The first Windows Phone 7 Series…phone—goddamn that is a stupid name—won't hit until the end of this year. That's more than three years after the iPhone, two years after Android, hell, even a year after Palm, the industry's sickly but persistent dwarf.

History is on Microsoft's side here—we know what happened the last time Apple had a massive head start. Microsoft is, if nothing else, incredibly patient. Remember the first Xbox? Back when it was crazy that Microsoft was getting into videogames? It's cost them about a billion dollars and taken nearly 10 years, but now, with Xbox Live, Project Natal and their massive software ecosystem, they arguably have the most impressive gaming console you can buy. That was a pet project. Now, mobile is the future of computing. What do you think Microsoft will sink into that?

The mobile picture is now officially a three-way dance: Apple, Google, and Microsoft. The same people who dominate desktop computing. Everybody else is screwed. Former Palm CEO Ed Colligan famously said a few years ago: "PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They're not going to just walk in." That's preciselywhat's just happened. Phones are the new PCs. PC guys are the new phone guys.

 

 

Similarly to what happened last year, Acer is putting up quite a strong performance at MWC 2010. The company has showcased four new cell phones, including two brand new beTouch family members based on Android versions 1.5 and 2.1. The Acer beTouch E110 is being introduced as an affordable smartphone that comes with 2.8-inch QVGA display, 3.2-megapixel camera and 3G support, but without Wi-Fi. Finally, it appears to integrate a weakling processor, the ST Ericsson PNX6715 running at 416MHz. The beTouch E400 is more of a mainstream device that packs 3.2-inch HVGA display, 3.2-megapixel camera, 600MHz processor and Wi-Fi. Both cell phones will bring rich software functionality via a number of additional applications, similarly to the Acer Liquid A1. The Acer beTouch E110 is due this March, while the beTouch E400 is expected in April.

The Acer beTouch E110 and E400

The other two handsets run Windows Mobile 6.5.3 and belong to the neoTouch series – meet the P300 and P400. They are models that do not shine with any spectacular extra features – the Acer neoTouch P300 integrates 3.2-inch screen with WQVGA resolution, 3.2-megapixel camera and hardware QWERTY keyboard, while the neoTouch P400 is equipped with 3.2-inch display as well (but with HVGA resolution), 3.2-megapixel camera and lacks QWERTY. Both devices will come with the standard pack of features typical of cell phones in the same price category, including 3G, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. The market launch of the Acer neoTouch P300 is scheduled for March, but the neoTouch P400 will get delayed until May.

There is still no information on the retail prices that Acer's new models will be released at. 

The Acer neoTouch P300 and P400

Google is rolling out two more privacy tweaks for Google Buzz in response to a post by an outraged blogger who claimed that Google Buzz had given her abusive ex-husband and his friends access to personal information.

 

Google told Harriet that her report helped it "discover one bug and one product issue". The company says it is now working on the following:

1) People you block in Buzz still appear as following you in Reader.The spokesperson says, "This is a bug, and we're working to fix it. Provided that your shared items are protected, only the people you've explicitly allowed to see them can do so -- regardless of who appears to be following you in Reader."

2) No ability to block people from Reader. The spokesperson says, "Until now, there has not been functionality to block people from following you in Google Reader. We're adding this to the Reader interface."

Two further security concerns from her post were found to be simple misunderstandings. Harriet had worried that people -- including her ex-husband -- had been given access to her protected Google Reader shares. According to Google, while these people were able to nominally start following her on Reader, they wouldn't be able to see any of her shares as she had made them all private.

Her further concern that she couldn't alter privacy settings without creating a profile -- which she was uncomfortable doing -- was addressed by the changes made last night.

With these fixes, the situation will be much better. But Google has not announced any plans to fix the deeper problem -- that this is an opt-out service, rather than the opt-in service it should be.

Update: Google gave an official statement, basically repeating what they said in the email to Harriet. Here's the statement:

We reached out to blogger in question this morning and addressed her concerns with Google Buzz and Google Reader. Some of the concerns were due to confusion the product experience created. Her report also helped us discover one bug and one product issue in Google Reader:

1) If you block people in Buzz, they still show up as following you in Reader. This is a bug, and we're working to fix it. Provided that your Google Reader shared items are protected, only the people you've explicitly allowed to see them can do so -- regardless of who appears to be following you in Reader.

2) Until now, there has not been functionality to block people from following you in Google Reader. We're adding this to the Reader interface.

We are making these two changes as fast as possible and we'll get them live in the next few days.

 

Noted security researcher Ross Anderson and colleagues have published a paper showing how "Chip-and-PIN" (the European system for verifying credit- and debit-card transactions) has been thoroughly broken and cannot be considered secure any longer. We remember hearing rumbles that this attack was possible even as Chip-and-PIN was being rolled out across Europe, but that didn't stop the banks from pushing ahead with it, spending a fortune in the process.

The flaw is that when you put a card into a terminal, a negotiation takes place about how the cardholder should be authenticated: using a PIN, using a signature or not at all. This particular subprotocol is not authenticated, so you can trick the card into thinking it's doing a chip-and-signature transaction while the terminal thinks it's chip-and-PIN. The upshot is that you can buy stuff using a stolen card and a PIN of 0000 (or anything you want). This was tried, on camera, using various journalists' cards. The transactions went through fine and the receipts say "Verified by PIN".

It's no surprise to us or bankers that this attack works offline (when the merchant cannot contact the bank)..

But the real shocker is that it works online too: even when the bank authorisation system has all the transaction data sent back to it for verification. The reason why it works can be quite subtle and convoluted: bank authorisation systems are complex beasts, including cryptographic checks, account checks, database checks, and interfaces with fraud detection systems which might apply a points-scoring system to the output of all the above. In theory all the data you need to spot the wedge attack will be present, but in practice? And most of all, how can you spot it if you're not even looking? The banks didn't even realise they needed to check. 

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Google plans to take another stab at capturing some of the momentum surrounding social networking companies like Facebook and Twitter by leveraging Gmail, its popular e-mail service.

Later this week, Google will unveil add-ons to Gmail that let people post and view messages about their day-to-day activities, according to a person at Google briefed on its plans. This simple tweak to Gmail will let Google mimic the status updates that have driven much of Facebook and Twitter’s success, as people return to the services again and again to check out what their friends and co-workers are doing.

To date, Google has let people post only a brief message about their status through its Chat system, which is linked to Gmail. The new features would allow a more vibrant back-and-forth among Gmail users.

It is not clear whether Google will link the new Gmail features to rival social-networking services.

The Gmail move signals that Google remains serious about becoming a social media force at a time when some of Silicon Valley’s younger start-ups have stolen some of its thunder.

“It might look like a minor feature advance, but this is another blow in the war against Facebook,” said Jeremiah Owyang, a partner at Altimeter Group, a technology consulting company.

Google has a full-blown social networking service called Orkut which has proved especially popular in Brazil. In addition, the company has a Web browser add-on called Sidewiki that lets people jot down and share information about a Web site, and a Profile service where people can post information about themselves.

These efforts have done little to put Google on center stage when it comes to social networking. Google, in fact, finds itself in a similar position to Microsoft, as a company struggling to figure out how to stretch its traditional strongholds and brand into new areas.

Microsoft, a rival to Google in several areas, has invested in Facebook.

“You can see the factions starting to line up,” Mr. Owyang said.

Analysts remain skeptical as to whether a new twist on Gmail will do much to elevate Google’s position in the social networking realm. That said, the market remains relatively nascent, meaning there is room for companies to challenge the likes of Facebook, they said.

Google is also expected to create strong ties between Gmail and its YouTube video site and Picasa photo gallery service. It plans to unveil the changes to Gmail this week.

Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8 has finally become the world's most-used browser, according to Net Applications' figures based on monitoring website usage. IE8 has taken over from IE6, which has been hit by the decline in the use of Windows XP.

In January 2010, NetApps reckons IE8 had 22.31% of the market, with IE6 on 20.07%. Firefox 3.5 took third place with 17.01%, ahead of IE7 (14.58%), Firefox 3.0 (5.29%), Google Chrome (3.92%) and Apple Safari (3.55%). Actually, IE8's lead is even larger if its 3% market share in "compatibility mode" is counted.

IE6 has maintained its user base because it shipped with what has been by far the world's most popular operating system, Windows XP. However, XP is now in decline. According to NetApps, XP's market share fell from 75.02% in March 2009 to 66.31% in January 2010. IE6's decline is very similar to XP's decline. It appears that the most effective strategy for those who want to be rid of IE6 would be to encourage Windows XP users to upgrade to Windows 7.

Windows XP, launched in 2001, still had two-thirds of the market in January 2010, ahead of Windows Vista (17.39%), Windows 7 (7.51%), Mac OS X 10.5 (2.36%), Mac OS X 10.6 (1.79%) and Linux (1/02%).