Vishal Arya

Adobe has big plans in mind for all our mobile smartphones and computers. The company announced today its Flash Player 10.1 which is going to be available soon to most smartphones, smartbooks, netbooks and PCs out there. In other words, as long as your mobile gadget has access to Adobe Flash content, Flash Player 10.1 will let you view it. There will be support for most mobile operating systems: BlackBerry, Android, Windows Mobile, Palm and Symbian phones. Naturally Adobe will offer support for computers too whether they are running Windows, Mac OS or Linux.

Don’t start jumping up and down with joy as not everything is available at once! In fact, the public developer beta will be available to BlackBerry Windows Mobile and webOS handsets and to Windows, Macintosh and Linux computers by the end of the year. If you happen to own an Android or Symbian device then you have to wait some more until early 2010 to enjoy Flash content on your favorite smartphone.

Is this Flash good for me? Do I really want it? Won’t it use even more resources and especially battery life when it comes to viewing Flash content on smartphones? Yes folks, you definitely have to give it a try since almost everyone is using it. You might be using Flash right now without really noticing. And Adobe has produced another fine software solution. Or at least, so they say! The new Flash player is supposed to conserve both battery life and system resources so it looks like you don’t have any good reasons to miss out on Flash experience at all. The player will support any kind of interface you wish to utilize to control your device. There is support for multitouch, gestures, mobile input models, accelerometer and screen orientation.

Adobe will bring more video games, interactive web content and high-quality media to your computers and especially your phones. That’s why at this point, Flash support for mobile phones is definitely a lot more interesting. After all we don’t carry our computers everywhere we go, but we certainly happen to take our smartphones with us at all times. We’ll be keeping tabs on Adobe to see what they can come up with next as they are working apparently with 50 industry leaders in the Open Screen Project and with 19 out of the top 20 handset manufacturers in the world. These are impressive numbers and we definitely hope Flash Player 10.1 is going to be at least as impressive!
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Integrates dozens of new features and improvements to take user experience to next level

LONDON, October 26, 2009: Canonical announced today the upcoming release of Ubuntu 9.10 Desktop Edition, the latest version of the popular Linux desktop distribution. Ubuntu 9.10 will be available for free download on Thursday 29 October. Ubuntu 9.10 brings changes small and large that all have a common purpose – to make Ubuntu the most user-friendly operating system available. Ubuntu 9.10 features a redesigned, faster boot and login experience, a revamped audio framework, and improved 3G broadband connectivity, all of which contribute to a first-class user experience.

Furthermore, the innovative ‘100 Paper Cuts’ initiative organised with the Ubuntu Community allowed users to nominate minor annoyances that impacted their enjoyment of the platform. So far over 50 fixes have been committed, removing minor irritants such as inconsistent naming or poorly organised application choices. Larger scale user experience improvements include a refreshed Ubuntu Software Center, giving users better and more easily understood information about the software they have available – bringing the world of open source applications closer to the user. These improvements, in combination, have a transformative effect on the user experience.

Ubuntu 9.10 also includes the integration of ‘Ubuntu One’ as a standard component of the desktop. Ubuntu One is an umbrella name for an exciting suite of online services, which were released in beta in May 2009. Ubuntu One provides an enhanced desktop experience, simplifies backup, synchronisation, and sharing of files with an expanded set of features including Tomboy Notes and contacts synchronisation.

Ubuntu 9.10 also welcomes a host of features that make it the best platform for developers, whether professional or casual. Developers interested in writing applications that run on Ubuntu now have a simplified toolset called ‘Quickly’ which makes it fun and easy by automating many of the mundane tasks involved in programming. Quickly also helps users ‘package’ the code and distribute it through the Ubuntu software repositories. Ubuntu developers will now find all code hosted in the Bazaar version control system, which is part of the fully open source Launchpad collaboration website. It’s never been easier to develop on or for Ubuntu.

Netbook and smartbook users will be delighted by improvements to the Ubuntu 9.10 Netbook Remix (UNR) interface which continues to raise the bar in delivering the easiest, most discoverable and most useful user experience on small form machines. Common with Ubuntu 9.10 for desktops, UNR will integrate the Empathy instant messaging program for text, voice, video, and file transfers which will make communication more enjoyable then ever.

“Ubuntu 9.10 gives users more reasons than ever to seriously consider Linux at a time when many are thinking again about their operating system options. We are delivering a platform for users interested in an easy-to-use, great-looking, web-friendly operating system,” says Jane Silber, COO at Canonical. “A faster, more beautiful boot and login sequence, file and contact synchronisation through online services and great experiences on the most popular notebook, desktop and netbook models continue to drive Ubuntu into the mainstream of computing choices.”

More Ubuntu 9.10 Desktop Edition release highlights:

• Faster, simplified, better-looking boot experience for most users
• Audio revamp allowing improved sound control across multiple applications
• Firefox 3.5: latest, fastest, most secure web browser yet from Mozilla

The Chromium Developer Channel has .deb packages for Debian and its Ubuntu derivative. Users of other systems are fairly much on their own, although Google assures them that unpacking the .deb files by hand “may work” and the final version should — like Google Earth — be available for countless other Linux flavors. The 64-bit version seems to be just a repackaged 32-bit version and first accounts give it a somewhat less than stellar review.

Google warns that installing the .deb packages adds the Google repository so as to extract updates automatically. To avoid this, use sudo touch /etc/defaults/google-chrome to create a dummy file before installing. The German sister publication <link href=”http://www.linux-community.de”>Linux Community</link> has put the 32-bit version through a quick test under Ubuntu 9.04.

Chrome, like its Chromium community version, is not yet feature complete. Supports for plugins such as Java and Flash, print functions and Google Gears are missing. Many dialog windows still have “TODO” content or are altogether empty, such as the Element Inspector. Google is clear about its “developer preview channel” status (“where ideas get tested and sometimes fail”), clearly not meant for Linux end-users.

What really works pretty well is page rendering. We loaded various pages with considerable AJAX dynamic content and they rendered just as well as those with complex stylesheets. The speed was already impressive: Chrome felt noticeably faster than a cutting-edge Firefox on the same computer.

Even though Google mentions that the immature Chrome “may still crash frequently” and to send in crash reports, we couldn’t manage to disquiet it in any way.

source : linuxpromagazine.com

Look up there, folks. That’s the future of Sony’s hopes and dreams in the handheld gaming sector. With just hours to go before the company’s official E3 2009 press event, it looks like the pieces are all coming together. First a UMD-less game release, then a highly credible mole giving the PSP Go a name, and now — live action shots. The images here were sourced from an obviously slipped June 2009 Qore video, and aside from giving us a look at the slider-based system (which, let’s be honest, looks a ton like the questionably successful mylo), we’re also told that it’ll tout 16GB of internal memory, built-in Bluetooth and an undisclosed memory slot. If all goes well, it’ll ship this Fall for a price to be determined, and it’s actually not slated to replace the PSP-3000, as both of ‘em will attempt to live on store shelves harmoniously… at least for awhile. Oh, and don’t worry — we’ll be on hand in LA to bring you all the impressions we can muster early next week

Check out the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rC_MQzIUTYU

• 3.8-inch display (resolution is undisclosed)
• 43 percent lighter than the PSP-3000
• 16GB of Flash storage
• Bluetooth built-in; supports handset tethering and BT headsets
• No UMD drive
  
• Memory Stick Micro slot
• New Gran Turismo, Little Big Planet and new Metal Gear Solid (!) on the way
• Full PlayStation Network support (movie and TV rentals / purchases)
• Integration with PlayStation 3 (works the same as the PSP-3000 does)
• Sony views each of its products as “10-year lifecycle products,” so the PSP “needs to live on.”

Sony’s PSP Go Gallery : Here

Microsoft Corp. today unveiled Bing, a new Decision Engine and consumer brand, providing customers with a first step in moving beyond search to help make faster, more informed decisions. Bing is specifically designed to build on the benefits of today’s search engines but begins to move beyond this experience with a new approach to user experience and intuitive tools to help customers make better decisions, focusing initially on four key vertical areas: making a purchase decision, planning a trip, researching a health condition or finding a local business. The result of this new approach is an important beginning for a new and more powerful kind of search service, which Microsoft is calling a Decision Engine, designed to empower people to gain insight and knowledge from the Web, moving more quickly to important decisions. The new service, located at http://www.Bing.com, will begin to roll out over the coming days and will be fully deployed worldwide on Wednesday, June 3.

The explosive growth of online content has continued unabated, and Bing was developed as a tool to help people more easily navigate through the information overload that has come to characterize many of today’s search experiences. Results from a custom comScore Inc. study across core search engines show that as many as 30 percent of searches are abandoned without a satisfactory result. The data also showed that approximately two-thirds of the remaining searches required a refinement or requery on the search results page.

“Today, search engines do a decent job of helping people navigate the Web and find information, but they don’t do a very good job of enabling people to use the information they find,” said Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO. “When we set out to build Bing, we grounded ourselves in a deep understanding of how people really want to use the Web. Bing is an important first step forward in our long-term effort to deliver innovations in search that enable people to find information quickly and use the information they’ve found to accomplish tasks and make smart decisions.”

A New Approach to Internet Search

Based on the customer insight that 66 percent of people are using Internet search more frequently to make complex decisions,* Microsoft identified three design goals to guide the development of Bing: deliver great results; deliver a more organized experience; and simplify tasks and provide insight, leading to faster, more confident decisions. The new service, built to go beyond today’s search experience, includes deep innovation on core search areas including entity extraction and expansion, query intent recognition and document summarization technology as well as a new user experience model that dynamically adapts to the type of query to provide relevant and intuitive decision-making tools.

* Great search results. Relevant search results are still a top priority for people, yet Microsoft studies show that only one in four search queries deliver a satisfactory result. Bing helps identify relevant search results through features such as Best Match, where the best answer is surfaced and called out; Deep Links, allowing more insight into what resources a particular site has to offer; and Quick Preview, a hover-over window that expands over a search result caption to provide a better sense of the related site’s relevancy. Bing also includes one-click access to information through Instant Answers, designed to provide the sought-after information within the body of the search results page, minimizing the need for additional clicks.
* Organized search experience. More and more customers are regularly spending time with search engines, engaging in complex, multi-query and multi-session searches. Respondents also said an organized search experience would be twice as useful in helping find information and accomplishing tasks faster. Bing includes a number of features that organize search results, including Explore Pane, a dynamically relevant set of navigation and search tools on the left side of the page; Web Groups, which groups results in intuitive ways both on the Explore Pane and in the actual results; and Related Searches and Quick Tabs, which is essentially a table of contents for different categories of search results. Collectively, these and other features in Bing help people navigate their search results, cut through the clutter of search overload and get right down to making important decisions.
* Simplify tasks and provide insight. Microsoft’s research identified shopping, travel, local business and information, and health-related research as areas in which people wanted more assistance in making key decisions. The current state of Internet search isn’t optimized for these tasks, but the Bing Decision Engine is optimized for these key customer scenarios. For example, while a consumer is using Bing to shop online, the Sentiment Extraction feature scours the Internet for user opinions and expert reviews to help leverage the community of customers as well as product experts in trying to make a buying decision. In Bing Travel, the Rate Key compares the location, price and amenities of multiple hotels and provides a color-coded key of the best values, and the Price Predictor actually helps consumers decide when to buy an airline ticket in order to get the lowest prices.

The new brand portfolio will include the following changes to existing Microsoft programs:
* Microsoft’s mapping platform, Virtual Earth, will now be branded as Bing Maps for Enterprise.
* Technology from Microsoft’s April 2008 acquisition of Farecast is now a central part of Bing Travel.
* Microsoft’s popular cashback program, now dubbed Bing cashback, with more than 850 merchants and more than 17 million products available, will be fully integrated into the Bing Shopping experience.

source : iclarified

Leading telecom operator Bharti Airtel, which has about 2.7 million Internet subscribers, Friday launched its Net PC initiative that provides Internet connectivity to users without the need to invest in personal computers (PC).

With Net PC, users can also work on basic computer functions like word documents and presentations through centrally-placed software and hardware.

Airtel has partnered with Indian hardware manufacturer Nivio and global software giant Microsoft for the service.

Available for Rs.7,999, the no-frills PC will offer customers the choice of three Internet plans in a monthly price band of Rs.699-Rs.1,199, which would include Microsoft’s Office Suite software.

“Net PC is part of our strategic intent to remain focused on enhancing the broadband experience for our customers by offering innovative and collaborative products,” said Bharti Airtel’s telemedia services joint president K. Srinivas.

Till now, only the state-owned telecom operators Mahanagar Telecom Nigam and Bharat Sanchar Nigam offered similar products in collaboration with hardware maker Novatium