Have you noticed how many anodynes there are laying around on the floor

 Have you noticed how many anodynes there are laying around on the floor


This is claime post :)

Windows Phone 7 debuts: One phone won't rule them all

NEW YORK--If Apple CEO Steve Jobs has spent the past few years pitching the iPhone as the ultimate, universal mobile device, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's answer with his company's Windows Phone 7 OS, is the opposite.

There is, Ballmer subtly implied at today's formal unveiling of Windows Phone 7 here, no such thing as one phone for everyone--but there can be one operating system.

"Everybody should be able to take a look at a Windows Phone and say, 'I can represent me in this device,'" Ballmer explained.

To that end, there are nine Windows Phone 7 devices that will be available in the U.S., from manufacturers Dell, HTC, Samsung, and LG. "You see phones with keyboards," Ballmer said, gesturing to a row of all nine devices in front of him. "You see phones like the LG phones that can play to TV, you'll see super beautiful screens like the beautiful screen on this Samsung...very large screen as you see on this HTC device right here and of course rugged, for-the-hardest-use-type phones like this Dell device."

Five of the phones were previewed to some extent on Monday. For AT&T, there's the business-friendly LG Quantum, the media-heavy HTC Surround (an early fan favorite with its Dolby Surround Sound speakers), and Samsung Focus, all available November 8. For T-Mobile there's the HTC HD7 and Dell Venue Pro, coming later in the season.

With Windows Phone 7, Microsoft aims to offer a middle ground with more flexibility than Apple's dominant iOS and more certainty than the open-ended nature of the Google-built Android open-source software. Or, as Twitter user @DerickP put it while watching live coverage of the event, a "happy medium" between "iDictatorship" and "Androidarchy."

Indeed, ultra-customization and personalization--while maintaining a level of practicality and simplicity--was central to the Windows Phone 7 launch pitch. Ballmer said that the two core key phrases to the development of the operating system were "always delightful and wonderfully mine," an unusual combination of buzzwords that Microsoft hopes will convey that it offers an environment that's highly customizable yet uncluttered and stitched together with a common feel.

Close ties to existing Microsoft products, from Bing search to Bing Maps to Xbox games (including an EA Mobile partnership to bring Xbox Live-enabled games to the phone) and Zune music, were played up too, as was a tight integration with Facebook (in which Microsoft invested three years ago) that pulls photo tags from the social network into the contacts file (or "people hub" as Windows Phone 7 calls it). Microsoft Office was a big item, too, with a slick PowerPoint demo E-mail was touted as functional for both business and personal use, with the audience getting a kick out of the "I'll be late" button attached to Outlook calendar items. Copy-paste is on the way in early 2011, much to the chagrin of some consumers who were hoping it would be available at launch.

"The user experience is consistent and delightful, and we think that's one of the things that we think people are really going to like," Joe Belfiore, corporate vice president in charge of the Windows Phone program, said as he explained that "hundreds of thousands" of developers were working on applications for the OS.

A few third-party applications were showed off, like eBay, IMDB, Netflix, and a smattering of music apps that tie directly into the Zune-powered music "hub," but apps took far more of a back burner than they would at, say, an Android event.

Firefox for Android beta: A good first effort

The first beta of Firefox 4 for Android arrived Thursday, offering users of Google's mobile operating system a browser interface with both smart new features and some weaknesses.


I tried the new beta on HTC's Google Nexus One, and I came away impressed overall--far more satisfied than with unstable and slower nightly builds for developers that I'd tried before. It's not going to be my default phone browser at this stage, but I'm not going to uninstall it, either.


Fennec background
Before we get to my impressions, though, here's the background. Mozilla is trying to reach the fast-growing and increasingly important mobile world with its "Fennec" version of Firefox. Android is the second operating system it supports after Maemo, which comes with Nokia's N900, which is as much a small computer as smartphone. Today, that market is dominated by browsers based on the open-source WebKit project, including those built into iOS, Android, WebOS, and Bada browsers and coming with BlackBerry OS.
Android is critical to Mozilla's mobile effort: with Apple blocking typical browsers for iOS devices, Google's operating system is the best remaining avenue to mainstream mobile relevance.


Unlike most Android applications, Firefox is native software that runs on the underlying Linux operating system and ARM processor rather than Android's higher-level Java-like foundation (now the subject of Oracle's lawsuit against Google). That native nature means Firefox compatibility is a more finicky issue: you'll have to check the supported devices list, which so far includes four tested phones and five untested.


Firefox, which needs Android 2.0 or later, is feature-packed. It uses the same browser engine as regular Firefox and therefore supports cutting-edge Web technologies such as Canvas and Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) for 2D graphics, Web workers for background processing, and HTML5's built-in audio and video. It can run many add-ons, a differentiator in the mobile-browsing world. And it's got the new JaegerMonkey JavaScript engine, which was powerful enough to run the full desktop version of Gmail in my tests.

hree advantages over Android
Three things jumped out at me as superior to Android's built-in browser, which by the way I'm using on a phone with Android 2.2, aka Froyo.

A look at Firefox beta 1 for Android

First, there's Firefox Sync. This lets you keep open tabs, browsing history, passwords, and bookmarks synchronized between whatever computers and mobile devices you have running Firefox. In practice, I'm not sure I want to inflict on my mobile phone the dozens of tabs I have openon my personal computers, but passwords sync in particular is a wonderful way to bypass the mobile-phone difficulties of Web page login pages.


Second, there's the superior window management. The native browser lets you move among windows by clicking Android's menu button and going to a window-selection screen.


I much prefer Firefox's approach. The tabs are in a vertically stacked list that's tucked away to the left of the browser window. You can reach it by sliding the main window off to the right with an easy drag gesture. It's set up nicely so you don't do this inadvertently.

A button on the bottom of the list lets you fire up a new tab. When there are more than seven, on my phone, a second vertical column of tabs forms to the right. Each tab has a thumbnail of the page, which can be a little hard to see given that each browser thumbnail is about two-thirds the size of my actual thumbnail. But I still find it a faster way to switch among tabs, something I didn't realize until Firefox I'd been subconsciously avoiding somewhat on the Android browser.


However, I did have one problem: each tab also has a big "X" to close it, and if you're not careful or have big thumbs, it's easy to close a tab instead of select it.


If you slide the main browser window the other way, you get a nice interface for adding a bookmark, going forward or backward through your browsing history, and configuring Firefox. This is the kind of thing that you might expect to see available through the Android menu, which in my testing led only to a blank screen.




Third, I liked the welcome screen. It shows a nicely formatted list of recently visited Windows that I find far more useful than a blank search box in the Android browser. Sure, I like searching, but I do a lot more.

Imperfections
Now onto the gripe list. It's longer, but bear in mind that this is not just beta software, but the first beta Mozilla has ever produced for Android.


First, Firefox isn't fast, even though performance is a focus of this release. Even if you have a Wi-Fi connection, all mobile browsers in my experience are frustrating compared to those running on desktops and laptop. But I found Firefox just wasn't peppy.


Part of this, I suspect, is that Firefox seems aimed to intercept higher-performance hardware coming after today's phones; Mozilla seems to have aimed for features and utility rather than bare-bones practicality. But some performance attributes are quite nice, notably scrolling and panning, which respond quickly and bring "inertia" so you can flick your view around.


And historically, beta software is usually slower than better-tuned production releases, so don't read too much into this.
I had two crashes, once apparently some user-interface interaction that went haywire and once when I tried to load Gmail with eight other windows already loaded. Firefox ground to a halt and crashed. Other times, though, I was able to use Gmail, even with its new priority in-box, an impressive feat.


Another problem I had was with zooming to read text. Firefox, like the iPhone and Android browsers, will zoom into a column of text on a larger page when you double-tap on it. However, unlike those alternatives, it didn't automatically scale the font size to something readable. I ended up rotating the screen to a horizontal orientation to try to squeeze in a few more pixels per letter, and even then I did a lot of squinting.


The good news is this problem is a known shortcoming. And it's not so much an issue with mobile-optimized sites I tried, such as Flickr and Facebook.

Firefox is big--more than 30MB including the application and data, which is much larger than any other application I have on my phone. The closest is Google Earth at half the size, which I had to delete to make room. Mozilla has said it hopes to pare the size down, though.
Another complaint is with the fonts. I found blocks of text less readable in general than with other mobile browsers.
Last, I had some difficulties with the user interface. For example, while setting up Sync, I couldn't move from the username field to the password field by scrolling the scroll wheel, as is customary on Android. Instead, I had to use the back button to hide the keyboard, manually scroll the page with my finger, then tap the next text input field.
Overall, though, Firefox for Android is a reasonable first effort. That's good, given how important mobile computing has become and Android's ascendance within that domain.

Bing Maps gets public transit directions

Microsoft has begun adding public-transportation directions to its Bing Maps service, with directions available initially in 11 metropolitan areas in North America.

"Transit options are available for bus, subway, light rail, and local rail," Brian Hendricks, an associate product manager for Bing Maps, said in a blog post yesterday.

The areas covered in the initial release are Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New Jersey, New York City, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle, Washington, D.C., and Vancouver.

The addition helps the service match a feature available already in Google Maps, Bing Maps' primary rival. Online mapping is increasing in importance, not just as a way for people to figure out how to get from one place to another, but also as a way for online mapping companies to profit through locally relevant advertising.
And with mobile devices increasing in importance and capability, online maps are becoming useful for navigating while en route, not just in advance.

Android Market expanding around the world

Google's answer to Apple's App Store, the Android Market, is about to open in many more countries around the world.

According to Google, the Android Market is on its way to 18 more countries--including Brazil, India, Mexico, Russia, and Sweden--bringing the total to 32 countries. Google said that developers who have already made their applications available to "All Locations" will not need to change that status for their programs to be available to the new customers.

Android Market users will likely also find more apps in the store, thanks to Google's decision to allow developers in 20 more countries to sell paid apps in the marketplace, raising the figure to 29 nations altogether. The company said developers in Canada, Switzerland, and Taiwan are among those who can now sell apps.

Developers can start selling apps on the Android Market immediately. Customers looking to buy apps in the new countries can start doing so "over the next two weeks," Google said.

Google said that it plans to bring the Android Market to additional countries in the coming months.

Originally posted at The Digital Home

Google's 'goo.gl' URL shortener open to the public

 

Goo.gl is now open to all Web users looking for a way to make a Web link shorter.

 Google's URL shortening service is now open to the world through a new Web site.

In an age of 140-character communication and mobile devices, URL shorteners are a godsend. However, the most popular third-party ones, such as Bit.ly and TinyURL, are run by smaller companies that aren't guaranteed to stick around for the long run: Google's Matt Cutts said today the company needed to develop its own "goo.gl" URL shortener "for its own products where we knew the shortener wouldn't go away."

So last December, Google started making goo.gl URLs available through the Google Toolbar, and it's now making the service available to anyone with a Web browser at goo.gl, Google announced in a blog post. "We don't intend to overload goo.gl with features, but we do want it to be the stablest, most secure, and fastest URL shortener on the Web," Googler's Muthu Muthusrinivasan said in the post.

The other Googly thing about URL shorteners is the data they generate, showing where, when, how often, and from which computers people are clicking on those URLs. Web-based analytics charts will be available to those who shorten URLs through goo.gl, and Google will also be able to track that data to help determine which Web links are popular, authoritative, or unsafe.

Twitter, where shortened URLs are an absolute necessity, also has its own URL shortener using the t.co domain.

-news.cnet.com-