Computer Technology News & Tips

It’s official ladies and gentlemen, Google‘s Android platform is stupid popular. We can say that because, according to an engineering VP for the sultan of search, the Android army grows stronger by more than 300,000 smartphone activations every 24 hours. That comes out to 2.1 million activations a week, or more than 109 million a year, assuming the rate of new activations remains stagnant.

News of Android’s success came in the form of a short and sweet tweet (aren’t they all?) posted by Google’s Andy Rubin. That’s all he said, yet he managed to speak volumes about Google’s mobile OS in just his second Twitter post ever.

Need help wrapping your head around the significance here? Consider that Apple claims it activates 270,000 iPhones each day, 30,000 less than Google for each 24 hour period, 210,000 less per week, and more than 10.9 million less per year (again assuming the rate of activations doesn’t change for either company).

Yeah, it’s like that, and we have yet to see what impact Gingerbread (Android 2.3) and Honeycomb will have on these figures.

Source: Hothardware.com

Well, would you look at what showed up on our frigid doorstep this morning? That’s right, we are now the proud owners of Google’s first Chrome OS laptop — the Cr-48. Obviously, we ripped open the box and got right to handling the 12.1-inch, Atom-powered laptop. So, what does the thing feel like? How’s that keyboard? And more importantly, how’s Chrome OS looking? Stand by for our impressions, which we’ll be adding in depth over the day. First impression: this thing is different. Here are some quick bullet points, one of our favorite formats for presenting data in a list:

Hardware

• The entire body is made of a soft, beautiful matte black. It feels very Droid-like, just a little less rubberized.
• Overall, it looks a lot like a black MacBook, including a magnetic latch with a split spot for getting your finger in and lifting the lid, a very similar keyboard, and a similar hinge design.
• There’s on of those large Envy-style clickpads. It has great multitouch scroll, and great general mousing feel (better than most Windows laptops), but it also has some of that Envy trouble of disliking a finger floating on the lower part of the pad. Basically, you have to click or mouse, you can’t be doing both at once.
• The matte screen overwhelms us with gratitude. Thank you, Google. Thank you.
• There’s ultra-wide ctrl and alt buttons on the left side, thanks to the lack of a Windows Key.

Software

• It starts up instantly, and it’s actually really hard to tell if we’ve put it into standby or not because there are no drive noises, and we haven’t hit upon any fan noise yet either.
  
• We’re having trouble installing Photoshop.
• Our apps haven’t synced over from our desktop’s copy of Chrome, which must be a still-forthcoming feature.
• You need an internet connection for the very first setup and login, but you can login to an existing user while the device is offline, and access anything that’s cached or HTML5-stored on the device — like some of those new Chrome Web Apps.
• While wake from standby takes less than a second, a cold boot takes around 15 seconds to get to the login screen, and another 6 or 7 seconds to login after you’ve entered your password.
• The remainder of our impressions will be about Poppit!.
• Flash is really bad, both with general applications and particularly with video. Adobe hasn’t built Flash acceleration yet for Linux, and there’s not a hardware acceleration chip, either. Hulu is like a slideshow, YouTube works, but not great.

The most important thing to remember is that this product is in no way designed for the mass market, and it’s up to Samsung, Acer, and other forthcoming third parties to actually build the hardware we’ll end up buying in the long run. Still, there seems to be a lot here that laptop manufacturers of all sorts could take note of, and generic-ified or not, the Cr-48 is pretty striking.

Source: Engadget

If it works as smooth as it looks in this preview video, Google TV could provide the kind of seamless web-on-TV experience many have been looking for: Dedicated apps, a Chrome web browser, easy picture and music viewing, and more.

Google TV was announced in May, but the only evidence of how it could work was provided in a simple stage demonstration, and a cartoon-styled video. It seemed like a really web-savvy DVR, perhaps, or maybe a set-top box that had a little more Google juice.

Now Google’s had some time to line up its partners: Turner (TBS, TNT, CNN, Cartoon Network), CNBC, HBO, and the NBA, along with the usual Netflix and Amazon Video on Demand support you’d expect. It’s also got a real look at the Android-powered apps you’ll be able to launch from Google TV, including a Gallery of pictures, streaming music services, and, of course, YouTube. What catches our eyes, though, is Google’s claim that its “bringing Google Chrome and access to the entire Internet” into Google TV. If Google can make launching web sites on a TV screen from across the room easier than what the laptop-plugging crowd is used to, that would be something.

Here comes Google TV [Official Google Blog]

Source: Lifehacker.com