Microsoft: WP7 Mango Update due in Fall

The much rumoured update for Windows Phone 7 dubbed Mango would be released this fall. Joe Belfiore, Director of Windows Phone Program, in the keynote demonstrated the different features and enhancements to be included in Mango update at the on-going Microsoft event MIX 11 in Las Vegas. Belfiore also explained the issues that lead to the delay in the latest NoDo update for several Windows Phone 7 Devices. Apparently, it's the same update we reportedabout earlier this month.

Microsoft's Mango update for Windows Phone 7 will bring some of the heavily demanded features like multi-tasking, deeper integration of apps with phone, camera access and access to the motion sensor library. Apart from that, Belfiore also stated that Windows Phone 7 Mango update will bring new apps like Skype, Spotify and IMDb (with better integration) for the platform. 

Beginning with the demonstration, Belfiore showed the new slick multi-tasking user-interface and it surely looks promising in the video. Apart from that, Belfiore stated that IE9 web browser for desktop has been ported directly to the Windows Phone 7 platform. Basically, it's the same - Microsoft boasts of greater "native" HTML5 capabilities including hardware acceleration for Windows Phone 7 devices. 

Belfiore demonstrated HTML5 capabilities in form of a "read test" where IE9 on a Windows Phone 7 loaded HTC prototype was tested with iPhone 4 with iOS 4.2 and Google Nexus S with Android 2.3 Gingebread. Test resulted giving Windows Phone 7 device highest in-browser FPS rate compared to other two devices. 

Apart from that, the update will open up several other APIs for the developers to take more advantage of and developer compelling Apps for Windows Phone 7 devices. During the presentation, Belfiore also briefly mentioned that IE9 will also bring Silverlight 4.0 support to Windows Phone 7 in the browser finally. 

Check out the Windows Phone 7 Mango update demonstration below:

Apple's white Iphone 4 is finally on the way

MAKER OF BLACK IPHONES Apple will start shipping a white version of the Iphone 4 within the next few weeks, ending a long series of delays for the pale incarnation of the iconic smartphone.

Bloomberg cited three anonymous sources who are aware of the company's plans. They revealed that AT&T and Verizon Wireless will be selling the device by the end of April and explained that the delay was partly due to the white paint peeling under heat and a bug with one of the sensors.

The Iphone 3GS and Ipad 2 are both available in white, which makes the Iphone 4 issues seem somewhat puzzling. We would have imagined that the same techniques that worked for them would be carried over to the latest Iphone, but somehow things kept going wrong along the way.

It is also believed that the next Iphone will not be announced in June, the traditional announcement period, but in September instead. It is not clear if this is a delay or an intentional move to make the most out of sales of the white Iphone.

Reuters also reported that Foxconn, a major supplier of components for Apple products, will assemble the white version of the Iphone 4. We expect this to involve more than slapping a layer of white acrylic over old Iphones.

The ivory Iphone was unveiled in June of last year, but consistent problems have led to a delay of nearly 10 months. The string of delay announcements over the past year led to it being dubbed by The INQUIRER "the Duke Nukem of mobile phones". µ

YouTube to invest $100M in 'channels' with original programming: report

The Wall Street Journal has reported that YouTube will open a series of "channels" with originaly programming, spending about $100 million in the process. YouTube, a subsidiary of Google, has continued to struggle in monetizing its service since Google acquired it in 2006.

According to the WSJ, YouTube will modify its homepage, and spotlight channels based on different topics. Reportedly, about 20 of those channels will feature "several hours of professionally produced original programming a week," some of these people said. Additional channels would be use content already on the site.

Most of YouTube's content comes from amateurs, and far more than "several hours" (x 20). That figure would amount to say, about 150 - 200 hours of original programming a week.

The idea, the anonymous sources told the WSJ, is for YouTube to tap into the Internet-powered TVs that are coming out, as well as other devices such as the iPad, Motorola Xoom and other tablets, and computers and smartphones, as well.

Google has been, so far, unwilling to pay licensing fees for original programming "on the same scale as Netflix and others," the report said. Thus, it is seeking a middle ground, by investing in its own programming instead of spending large sums of money to license content.

The sources added that the changes are expected to be phased in over time, beginning before the end of 2011. YouTube is currently in the midst of hiring people to help with these initiatives, the sources added.

Here we go again, with content providers wanting end users to use more bandwidth. Meanwhile, ISPs want us to use less, and continue to issue caps on usage, which means that some (such as Netflix) have to manage quality to ensure users don't go over their data tiers.

Via: WSJ

Grooveshark booted from Android Market; how to sideload it

Google has booted the music app Grooveshark from the Android Market. While it's still unclear as to the exact reason that the app was kicked out, the theory is that it was booted because of pressure over possible copyright violations.

>Grooveshark is a service that allows free music streaming via files that its users have posted to the site.

While the app is not in the Android Market any longer, and isn't in the Amazon Appstore either, you can still install it via sideloading. Unlike iOS, Android apps can be installed from other app repositories as long as the end user sets the appropriate setting in the Android OS.

From Settings, go to Applications and check the box next to Unknown Sources. Unfortunately, just as with the Amazon Appstore, which is based on sideloading as well, there's no easy way for AT&T users to do this as that carrier has seen fit to remove that setting. AT&T users can use the Sideload Wonder Machine (SWM) but it's not for the non-techie.

Grooveshark for Android, the app, is free, but in order to use it, you have to have a Grooveshark for Anywhere account that costs $9 / month. Therefore, downloading this APK (Android Application) file is not piracy.

You can download the file here. It's version 2.0.8; we're unclear if that is the latest version, but the file itself was discovered by BI, so we believe it to be legitimate. Hopefully, the company itself will post the APK on its own site.

Amazon Appstore's free app of the day, 4/7/2011: Wolfram Alpha

Amazon.com has promised a free app every day in the Amazon Appstore, and today's app is Wolfram Alpha, the computational knowledge engine.

>Wolfram Alpha is $1.99 in the Android Market, and normally is priced at $1.99 also in the Amazon Appstore (as noted previously, the two marketplaces sometimes have differing prices).

Wolfram Alpha's is mobile app that give access to the Wolfram Alpha computational knowledge engine. Not a search engine per se, it's also available online. Rather than giving a simple list of links to a search query, it attempts to compute answers to questions. It's described on Wikipedia as:

an answer engine developed by Wolfram Research. It is an online service that answers factual queries directly by computing the answer from structured data, rather than providing a list of documents or web pages that might contain the answer as a search engine would.

The app is described as follows:

Whoever you are and whatever you do, Wolfram|Alpha delivers insight and understanding into any facet of your life. It's a revolutionary knowledge-querying computational engine.

Wolfram|Alpha doesn't search the web; it calculates answers based on dynamic computations.

Access Expert Knowledge Wherever You Are

"It's the first step toward a real artificial intelligence." - Gregory Chaitin, IBM emeritus computer scientist

Find out how much vitamin C is in a bowl of ice cream. Learn what European country has the fourth largest population of children. Compute solutions to difficult trig and calculus problems. Balance complex chemical equations. Discover what is overhead as you gaze up at the stars. Finally crack that crossword puzzle.

Get Answers With Wolfram|Alpha:

• Sunset Orlando two months from today
• Skychart at 8:00pm
• Words containing letters mpg
• Weather in Honolulu when Obama was born
• 4th largest child population in Europe
• Distance to moon / length AAA battery
• MSFT vs GM vs Citi
• Integrate x sin x log x
• y'' + sin y = cos x
• Pentane + O2 -> CO2 + water
• Young's modulus AISI 1080 steel

Unlike search engines, which suggest page links, Wolfram|Alpha answers inquiries by computing structured data. Voted the Best of What's New Grand Winner by Popular Science in 2009, it is considered a monumental leap forward in knowledge extraction. Wolfram|Alpha's goal is aimed at bringing instantly accessible systematic knowledge to the broadest range of people; regardless of profession or education level.

Wolfram Alpha is a little hard to get used to for those thinking of a typical search engine. However, it has a 4.5 star rating in the Android Market. In the nascent Amazon Appstore, it has a 4-star rating as well with 42 reviews.

The Amazon Appstore requires sideloading, which means that for now AT&T devices can't use it. As we noted before, however, there is a way to at least "reserve" these free apps for installation later, when AT&T corrects the issue, as it has promised.

Amazon opened up the Appstore despite a lawsuit by Apple, which has previously trademarked the term "App Store." Microsoft has filed an appeal against that trademark, saying the term is too generic.

Commodore 64 set to re-launch, same exterior with modern innards

The Commodore 64 was, for quite some time, a big hit. However, the company made some mistakes, and eventually fell by the wayside in the face of competition from the IBM PC and Apple. Now, it's about to return.

It was already known that the Commodore 64 (C64) would return in the "late spring," but it's now known that the C64 will return at the end of April. Barry Altman is president and CEO of Commodore USA, and he purchased the Commodore trademark in September of 2010 with the intention of reviving the company and brand.

Although there are plenty of laptops and all-in-one PCs around, desktop PCs still predominate, and those consist of a box for the motherboard, video cards, etc., while the keyboard and display are separate.  Altman hopes the C64 can make inroads with a retro-look and state of the art technology.

The C64 will look the same as it did before. It will have the keyboard, RAM, CPU, GPU, and other components internal to the same taupe brown/beige color colored rectangular box as before. Other colors will follow, but the internals of the device are significantly upgraded.

The C64 will sport a mini-ITX PC motherboard featuring a dual-core 525 Atom CPU and an NVIDIA Ion2 graphics chipset. That not the most powerful combination, but it's way better than the original C64, which was introduced in 1982.

The original C64 sold for $595 had a Commodore KERNAL Operating system, with Commodore BASIC 2.0, and a MOS Technology 6510 CPU which ran at 1.023 MHz (NTSC version) or 0.985 MHz (PAL version). Compare that to today's CPUs which run at GHz speeds.

The RAM was 64KB (that's kilobytes, as opposed to the gigabytes of today with a 20KB ROM. Graphics were a VIC-II with 320 x 200 pixel resolution (something exceeded by today's smartphones), 16 colors (not 16 million), sprites, and raster interrupt.

It was primitive, but it was also well-loved. During the C64's lifetime (the company went out of business in 1994), sales totaled somewhere between 12.5 and 17 million units (there are no exact figures), which makes it the best-selling single personal computer model of all time.

The new version will not come with Windows pre-installed, but an end user can be add it. The system will come with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS on CD, ready to install, and Commodore OS 1.0, along with emulation functionality and a classic game package, will be mailed to purchasers when available.

Pricing ranges all the way from $250 (for a pretty much empty chassis) to $895. Storage ranges as high as a 1TB hard drive, with RAM starting at 2GB (4GB is an option). The C64 can have either a slot-load DVD, tray-load DVD, or Blu-ray.

You can watch a cross-promotional video about the Blu-ray release of TRON: Legacy and the C64, below.

Feds begin investigating smartphone apps that share users' info with third parties

Pandora Media Inc. said on Monday that it has been subpoenaed as part of a federal grand-jury probe into the methods smartphone software handles personal data. Pandora disclosed the subpoena in a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing, but emphasized that it is "not a specific target of the investigation." The company said:

“We were served with a subpoena to produce documents in connection with a federal grand jury, which we believe was convened to investigate the information sharing processes of certain popular applications that run on the Apple and Android mobile platforms.”

Last year several reports (1, 2, 3) noted that both iOS and Android applications were sending information about the devices, their users and the locations of said uses to third parties, most notably advertising networks.

Pandora was one of the apps that was cited as sharing information with third parties. The app is cross-platform, and exists on Android, iOS, Windows Mobile, Palm webOS, and BlackBerry OS. The December reports focused on Android and iOS, however.

The WSJ report said:

Legal experts said the probe was significant because it involved potentially criminal charges that could be applicable to numerous companies. Federal criminal probes of companies for online privacy violations are rare.

Federal laws prohibit unauthorized access to information. "This is a big hammer if the government chooses to use it," said Orin S. Kerr, a law professor at George Washington University.

Legal experts cautioned that companies rarely end up being charged with a crime in general and that the current probe could morph into a civil one, for possible violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

Federal prosecutors can charge individuals or companies with violating the computer-fraud law either as a felony or misdemeanor and can also pursue civil charges. But legal experts said it's rare for a corporation to be end up being charged criminally in any kind of probe. More often, companies in the federal government's cross hairs reach non-prosecution or deferred-prosecution agreements that allow the targets to avoid being criminally charged in exchange for agreeing to concessions, including monetary payments or promising not to engage in future wrongdoing, among other things.

Makers of apps could also face complaints of fair and deceptive trade practices from the Federal Trade Commission. Such complaints can be aimed at companies that fail to tell customers how they're collecting information or are violating their own terms of service.

Given the large number of smartphone users, the companies could also face huge class-action lawsuits if facts emerge to support any government charges.

Many of the apps in both the Android Market and Apple's App Store are free, and ad-supported. Thus, some say, it's not that surprising that not only are the apps ad-supported, but that they are sending back such data. Nothing is free, and that part of the "deal" would appear to be part of the monetization process.

Whether or not consumers truly understand that, and if that then constitutes fraud, will be determined by this investigation.

Via: WSJ, BW