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ronaldterblanche | bascially i blog about anything…

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‪Everyday I'm Shufflin - LMFAO‬‏ - YouTube

Check it out !!!

‪Everyday I'm Shufflin - LMFAO‬‏ - YouTube

‪Everyday I'm Shufflin - LMFAO‬‏ - YouTube

Check it out !!!

‪Everyday I'm Shufflin - LMFAO‬‏ - YouTube

Everyday I'm Shufflin

First e-reader to come with Google eBooks connectivity to hit the US shelves this Sunday

This Sunday the US citizens will witness the birth of yet another eBook ecosystem. The iriver Story HD is the first e-reader integrating direct Wi-Fi access to Google’s eBooks open platform and it’s bound for a Sunday release over at Target stores all over the country.

The iriver Story HD, will retail for $139.99 and will offer over-the-air (Wi-Fi) access to hundreds of thousands of Google eBooks for sale and more than 3 million for free. As long as you are hooked up to a Wi-Fi network you will be able to browse, buy and read Google eBooks without the need for a computer for uploading them to the device.

A really cool feature lets you store your personal ebooks library in the cloud – picking up where you left off in any ebook you’re reading as you move from laptop to smartphone to e-reader to tablet – something Amazon Kindle has been offering for a while via their proprietary Whispersync tech.

According to Google, its eBooks platform was designed to be open to all publishers, retailers and manufacturers. This means that there is a good chance many will follow iriver in releasing a Google-powered e-reader.

Specs-wise, the iriver Story HD is on par with the pricing of the competing basic e-readers on the US market – the Kindle, the Kobo, and the Nook and even bests Sony. But we are yet to see what its specs will turn out (not published yet) and whether the slow page refresh rates have received a boost since the original iriver Story. The addition of touchscreen functionality wouldn’t hurt either.

Source

Microsoft demands royalties for every Samsung droid made

Microsoft is demanding Samsung to cash in $15 for every Android phone sold to date on the base of using several of Microsoft's patents in these devices. HTC as the first company to give in to Microsoft claims and Samsung is now next.

We bet you’re wondering what is actually infringing Microsoft patents in the Android OS and why Microsoft is not trying to get that money from Google.

Well, Microsoft believes the Linux-based operating systems are infringing its intellectual property in some way and Android OS is a Linux-based one. We are sure Microsoft has a well prepared case about what the Linux kernel infringement is, but we are not going to dig in there.

But why not sue Google then? The question perhaps has a very simple answer - Google is not makin any money from the distribution of the Android OS - it's the device manufacturers that make a profit out of it.

HTC obviously didn't have objection to these claims and were happy to sign a deal and pay $5 for each of their Android-based phones.

According to industry officials, Samsung is going to try negotiating a lower $10 fee in exchange for some kind of alliance between the two giants.

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Project Rimino concept pushes the boundaries of mobile user interface design as we know it [VIDEO]

You don’t offten see a mobile concept as elaborate as this one. The Rimini UI/device combo is a refreshing breeze in the current attrition warefare led by the major mobile OS’s. Though the concept will hardly see daylight in a real product, it is evident a lot of thought has went into creating this interface system that’s unlike any other. Meet the Project Rimino.

Created by designer Amid Moradganjeh as part of his Master’s Thesis, the Project Rimino describes a minimalist mobile device that reacts to human interaction more intuitively than anything I’ve seen before.

Rimino escapes the application-driven structure and instead represents a task or goal oriented system that presents the most relevant tasks and options to the user based on the content captured with the device or the user input. Speaking of which, the Project Rimino imaginary device presents a wealth of new input approaches and methods such as:

• writing on the screen, writing with the device itself, scribbling next to the device
• blowing
• scratching
• shadowing the device with a hand
• twisting
• pulling and stretching
• knocking, poking and kissing
• gestures in front of the screen

Those are further aided by the interactive “lively pad” on the back of the device, which will make the phone feel as alive by regulating its own temperature, texture, force feedback, moisture, creating air flow, and even smell.

Several of the Rimino devices can be stacked together to form a bigger screen and these devices will be more than happy to connect to your other computers in a natural way via simple gestures, turning the device into a remote or a pointer or simply helping your phone text input with the computer keyboard.

You should really watch the video below to get the idea.

The Project Rimino has created a phone that’s smarter than most smartphones of today are. I doubt that we will be seeing many of those implemented anytime soon, but as the author concludes, the Future of computing is mobile… I totally agree on that part and thinking out of the box is the way to go.

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Britney Spears Femme Fatale

Britney Spears is pop music's stealth avant-gardist. For years, critics have dismissed her as a cipher with a wisp of a voice. But from the minute she burst on the scene — heralded by the keyboard power chords of ". . . Baby One More Time" — her music has steered bubblegum into weirder, woollier territory. "Toxic" was a mélange of Bollywood and spy-movie guitar; "Piece of Me" was an essay on 21st-century tabloid infamy crooned over 22nd-century club rhythms. Then there's this year's "Hold It Against Me," which dissolves into a furious dubstep breakdown — easily the most assaultive beat on the Hot 100 right now.

Femme Fatale may be Britney's best album; certainly it's her strangest. Conceptually it's straightforward: a party record packed with sex and sadness. Max Martin and Dr. Luke, the world's two biggest hitmakers, are responsible for seven of 12 songs: big melodies and bigger Eurodisco thumps. But other producers go nuts, tossing the kitchen sink at Britney. The Bloodshy-helmed "How I Roll" is sputtering, oddly beautiful techno. In "Big Fat Bass," Will.i.am turns Britney into a cyborg obsessed with low-end. ("The bass is getting bigger!" she exults.) On nearly every track, Britney's voice is twisted, shredded, processed, roboticized. Maybe this is because she doesn't have much of a voice; it's certainly because she, more than almost any other pop diva, is simply game. Femme fatale? Not so much. But say this for Britney: She's an adventuress.

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Nokia Beta Labs introduces the Nokia 3D World Gaze augmented reality app for Symbian

Symbian users with a thing for augmented reality apps should definitely check this out. The developers from Nokia Beta Labs have just announced the public availability of the 3D World Glaze app.

The Symbian app gives you a new kind of viewpoint to the world, allowing you to see through the surface (and insides) of the planet all the way to the other side. In addition to geographical features such as continents in their real physical locations, Nokia 3D World Gaze allows you to see geotagged media, day and night regions, current location of the Sun, and other content from locations around the world.

Check it out on video:

If you are sold, you can follow this link to download the application and take it for a spin. Creating an account (if you don’t already have one) is required though. Also, the app is still in beta so some bugs and instability are to be expected.

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Windows Phone 7 Foursquare app re-leased...

Bummed about the myriad issues surrounding the original Foursquare app for Windows Phone 7? The troublesome program was pulled due to lacking features and a rather sub-par user experience, leaving mayors everywhere unable to verify their credentials for hard-earned discounts. Well fret no more, friends. A new version of the mobile check-in application has been released, showing off a retooled interface that takes full advantage of Microsoft's panoramic UI. Among other features are live tile, tap-and-hold check-in, and a map that shows friends' check-ins alongside nearby specials. Version 2.0, as it's being called, is now available in the Windows Phone Marketplace -- your Twitter followers have probably missed all of your Taco Bell Fourthmeal check-ins anyway.

Galaxy S II breaks Samsung's records, sells 3 million in 55 days

Unless you were hanging out with the sherpas in the Himalayas you probably must have heard a lot about the Samsung Galaxy S II. To say it was well-received would be an understatement as almost everyone we knew had already got one or was planning on getting one. But now we have the official figures from Samsung and we know just how well they did. Unsurprisingly, they did very well.

The Galaxy S II went on to break Samsung’s own record and sold over three million units in the 55 days since launch. That’s approximately 50,000 phones a day. According to Samsung, most of these phones were consumed within the European markets.
If you think these figures aren’t all that impressive, you should know that the Galaxy S II is yet to go on sale in the US. Had it been an international launch, the figures would have been much higher. But even at the rate at which it is currently going, it won’t take long for it to break the 10 million record set by Galaxy S.

Opera 11.5 is out now, few novelties but still a great looker. Opera users are now 200 million.

The Opera browser has received yet another update – version 11.5. Bringing performance updates, widgets for the Speed Dial (like weather), as well as improvements to the Opera Link sync service.

The new “live” Speed Dial means that widgets can be placed where only webpages used to be. So now you can, for example, place a weather widget on a Speed Dial window and it will display weather information for a city of your choice with hourly updates.

The user interface of the new Opera 11.5 browser is even more minimalistic than before. The UI keeps out of the way to give users the comfort of a larger screen canvas to enjoy pages on.

Now Opera 11.5 detects the missing plug-ins you might need and installs them without the need to restart the browser.

“Opera 11.50 features a faster browser engine with thousands of stability fixes, a faster software graphics engine and more of the latest and greatest in web technologies. New improvements include support for HTML5 properties such as the element, Session History and Navigation, the W3C File API, classList and more.”

Finally Opera has put up an interesting statistic that all in all 200 million users are using Opera in some way – Opera, Opera mini and Opera mobile.

Here’s a promo video detailing the new features of Opera 11.5.

You can get the latest Opera here.

Android crosses 500,000 daily activations, poised to reach 1 million by October

You may remember back in December Andy Rubin, Senior VP of Mobile at Google, tweeted that over 300,000 Android phones are getting activated everyday. That was over six months ago and over two years from the launch of Android. But in those six months, the figures have almost doubled and according to his latest tweet, over 500,000 Android phones are getting activated everyday.

There are now over 500,000 Android devices activated every day, and it's growing at 4.4% w/w

about 19 hours ago via web

@Arubin

Andy Rubin

That’s not all. The activations are growing at a rate of 4.4% per week, which means by the end of October, three years after the launch of the first Android phone, the number of Android devices getting activated will be just over 1 million. Whichever way you slice it, that’s a lot of phones being activated everyday.
Just in case you are wondering, a device is considered “activated” when you sign into your Google account for the first time on an Android phone. So there could be a lot more Android devices out there that haven’t been activated yet.
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'Harry Potter' thrills as JK Rowling unveils Pottermore site - Showbiz News - Digital Spy

'Harry Potter' thrills as JK Rowling unveils Pottermore site - Showbiz News - Digital Spy

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Nokia talks about the N9 browser, shares some scores too

The N9 continues to top the worldwide charts for most interesting handset of the month and that’s the way Nokia made it. We waited for the first MeeGo device for nearly two years and now that it’s finally official we can’t keep off it. It’s made to blend in top notch design and innovative build quality with a “fresh out the oven” OS with Nokia’s knowhow of craftsmanship and technology all into one device. A powerful combo indeed.

Now the official Nokia blog – Conversations, is dedicating an article to the new browser of the N9, detailing how it works, how it feels, how it scores and what were the ideas behind it. Nokia-appointed “browser guru” Christian Sejersen shares that the N9′s Meego browser was designed with the idea not to annoy its users and keep out of the way while they are browsing. So the UI is quite minimalistic – much like on an Android powered smartphone.

Nokia N9 browser Top sites options and UI

It all starts with the Top sites screen, which saves your most visited webpages for quicker access at a later point.

Zooming in on pages is done by either double-tapping or pinch-zooming with two fingers. There’s also an option to enlarge text, which only affects the text and not the other stuff on the page. It’s a way to highlight what you’re reading and keep all distractions safely aside.

Nokia Conversations was also keen to brag about the Nokia N9 HTML5 support. The smartphone scored an impressive 283 points on the standard HTML5 compatibility test. For comparison, a standard Firefox desktop browser has about 270-280 on the same test and Nokia claims that it’s a very competitive results that will hardly be matched by any competitors. There’s also a quite long stats page for the test, featuring many other devices and OSes and indeed the Meego-representing N9 has the highest score, even topping the HTML5-capable iPhone 4 with iOS 4.3. The only mobile browser to beat the N9 is the iOS 5 Safari, which got 303 while still being in beta.

HTML5 test page scores: N9 and iPhone 4

Keep in mind that the N9 is a prototype pre-release device too and its results will likely improve as well.

Next Nokia listed the supported technologies by the Nokia N9 browser.

CSS 3
DOM Level 3
HTML over TCP/IP
HTML5
Javascript 1.8
Webkit 2 based
XHTML
XML

The N9 also doesn’t feature Flash support at this stage and it may very well end up without it on the shelves. This is so Apple but still has some logic by its side. Whether you like it or not, agree or not – Flash will probably be replaced at some point by HTML5. Still it would be more convenient to have Flash and be given the option to turn it off rather than to erase it from the equation all together.

Sadly Nokia doesn’t see MeeGo in its future plans and the N9 could very well fall victim to limited developer support (meaning no apps), software updates shortage and just general neglect.

Source

Android Market gets a facelift, lets you buy apps in 99 new countries - GSMArena.com news

Android Market gets a facelift, lets you buy apps in 99 new countries - GSMArena.com news

Google launches Music cloud service and Movie rentals from the Android Market

Boy, was this first hour of the Google IO packed with news. We already told you about the major Honeycomb and Android Ice Cream Sandwich updates, so now let’s talk about the new Movie Rental and Google Music services that the company launched today.

Google Music

The company also announced the highly anticipated Music by Google service. It’s going to be in beta for the next couple of months and it’ll be rolled out initially in the US only. The service is going to be free for the time that it’s in beta, with subscription plans coming later in the year when it gets a final release. So if you are based in the US, check out the Google Music websiteand get your invitation.

Google Music lets you store your music collection on the cloud and sync it with every device seamlessly via a program called Music Manager. It’s available for both PC and the Mac and allows you to rate, comment and add details to your songs. The alterations you make are automatically going to synchronize across all of your devices.

The Music cloud service doesn’t take up any space from your phone or tablet. You can listen to your music collection on the Web as well. And what if you go offline you ask? Google has come up with offline caching and all you need to do is select the songs or artists you want to have available and then the app takes care of the rest.

The Music manager has a few little tricks up its sleeve. It literally listens to the tunes you play and scans the content. Then, after a while, you have the option to make it search for new music based on the sound or beat that you like or even build an instant mix of similar songs. Add that to the new Music player look, cool 3D carousel animations and the Google Music service gets up to the task of competing successfully against Pandora and Amazon’s Cloud Music. All we need now for a complete bundle is Apple’s cloud music service.

Google Movie Rental

Along with the Music cloud service, Google has launched a Movie Rental service as well. It’s part of the Android Market and doesn’t offer anything we haven’t seen before, but gives you the freedom to watch the movie you’ve rented on any device from anywhere. Although all movies on the Market have a rental period of 30 days, once you rent a certain movie, it’ll be available for playback for 24 hours. In this timeframe you can access it from the Web on a PC, tablet or a phone.

In addition to watching, Google also let’s you “pin” the streaming video and download it for offline viewing. The Google Movie Rental service comes with its own app for Android. Movies are offered in HD you can also jump through the movie if you want to watch a certain scene again. The service is currently working and you can rent a movie for as low as $1.99.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 trailer is out, promises some epic stuff

This is going to be epic!

Watch the latest Transformers 3 trailer here [VIDEO]

A new Transformers 3 trailer is out and it looks very cool. There’s some heavy bashing, robots flying around and splitting buildings in half, American soldiers running hopelessly and a new hot babe replacing Megan Fox.

Rosie Huntington-Whiteley is the new hottie in this one and the events of latest part of the Transformers trilogy: Dark of the moon see a backlash between the Autobots and Decepticons, which strarts with the finding of a Cybertronian spacecraft, buried on the Moon.

Here’s the video itself. Enjoy!

Nokia Q1 results are in, Microsoft deal finally detailed

Nokia announced their Q1 financial results today and marked an increase in net sales and units shipped year over year. Operating profit however took a hit but the Microsoft/Nokia agreement was signed, making the deal official.

First, let’s look at Nokia’s financial performance. Nokia’s Devices and Services department reported €7,087 million in net sales (a 6% increase year over year), but operating profit went down 14% year over year, to €694 million (was €804 million in Q1 of 2010).

Nokia shipped 108.5 million units in total, a slight uptick from the year-ago quarter. Feature phones accounted for 84.3 million of that, while smartphones took 24.2 million. That puts smartphone numbers at nearly a third more than what they were in Q1 of 2010.

The gross margin for the first quarter was 29.1%, down from 32.4% in the year-ago quarter. The Average Selling Price went up €65 compared to last year’s first quarter, but down compared to Q4 of 2010 (€69).

Predictions put net sales between €6,100-6,600 million for Q2, which Stephen Elop, Nokia’s newly appointed CEO, says will be “more challenging”.

NAVTEQ’s sales and profits improved in Q1 and are bound to improve even more with the Microsoft/Nokia deal in place.

Speaking of the deal, here’s what it entails in short:

• Nokia will deliver mapping, navigation and location based services to the Windows Phone 7 eco system. It doesn’t say if non-Nokia phones will get free navigation or not.
• Nokia will provide imaging and hardware design expertise, carrier billing connections and receive payments for its intellectual properties.
• Nokia will be paying royalties to Microsoft for each Windows Phone 7 device they make, but they’ll receive payments “in the billions” from Microsoft.
• A Nokia-branded app store will be built on the Windows Marketplace infrastructure.

Microsoft and Nokia aim to secure “volume device shipments” in 2012.

You can find more financial info here (PDF) or read more on the Microsoft/Nokia agreement here.

Samsung readies a 2GHz dual-core smartphone for 2012

Isn't smartphone evolution just wonderful? We've only just arrived at the dual-core stages of the mobile evolution and we are just about to witness another huge leap forward. Samsung has just revealed what their plans for the future hold and there's plenty to get excited about.

A high-ranking Samsung official, who has unfortunately remained unnamed, went on record saying that his company is planning to release a 2GHz dual core CPU-equipped smartphone by next year.

Said official then mentioned that it would have been easier for the company to manufacture a 4GHz single-core CPU than a dual-core one of half the frequency, but given the battery life limitations they found multi-core CPUs to be the better option.

Samsung is also considering selling those CPUs to other manufacturers under their own Exynos-brand. Considering the performance of that first Exynos chip there might just be quite a lot of interest. Whether it'll be worth threatening the sales of their own smartphones is a whole other story of course, but it will be told another day.

One thing's for sure - these are some exciting times for smartphone lovers to live in.

Android will rule the smartphones, WP7 will be second

According to the analysts over at Gartner, Android will be the most popular mobile OS in the next four years reaching almost 50% market share. Meanwhile Windows Phone will catch up and overtake the second place from iOS by 2015 with 20% market share.

This is what the latest Gartner's report predicts. Quite expectedly the Symbian market share is shrinking rapidly, while those of Android's and Windows Phone will go up.

 

Apple's iOS will have the second place by the end of 2012, but Microsoft will overtake it by 2015. It seems both Android and iOS will lose some users in favor of Windows Phone. It's predicted that when this happens Apple will change its pricing policy in order to maintain its share.

RIM will also have a user withdrawal when its migration from BlackBerry OS to QNX, the OS behind the Playbook, starts in 2012 (we're not sure we've heard of those plans before) .

It seems there will be two major changes in the next four years - Android will be the king of the mobiles (eating the Symbian pie), while the Microsoft-Nokia cooperation will push the Windows Phone up to the second place. It seems logical, but we'll wait and see how things will turn up.

We already saw quite similar predictions in the IDC report a week ago. There are a few minor differences into the distribution of shares (a bit smaller Android share and a bigger Windows Phone one in 2015), but both reach to the same conclusion – Android will be the biggest player in 2015 and Windows Phone will beat iOS for the second place.

Another thing that is worth mentioning is we could expect doubled smartphones sales in 2012 (compared to 2010).

It seems Gartner also didn’t foresee any major players entering the smartphone market. Just like the IDC report, the Gartner’s one also doesn’t see Bada OS as a major player in the next four years. Another think that pops in mind is they think Apple will sit back and stay calm when it’s losing market share. What we are trying to say is there are just too many variables and not all of them were taken in consideration. So these predictions might apply in some version of our world, but can’t be a reliable source in our dynamic life.