(Posted By: Eric Rees)

It'd be a stretch to say RIM, Research In Motion the company that owns Blackberry, shocked the world yesterday when they announced their tablet, but it definitely got people talking. 

Announced yesterday at a press conference full of tech geeks, RIM's CEO Mike Lazaridis got onstage and started spilling information of their new hardware. The sleek new tablet will utilize an OS that was recently acquired when RIM bought a company called QNX. The tablet will be 7 inches of touch screen goodness and will support Flash 10.1, a point made to take a stab at Apple, who has yet to jump on the Flash bandwagon. Inside the tablet, a Cortex A9-based dual core 1GHz CPU will be handling all your duties along with 1GB of onboard RAM and a 3 megapixel front facing camera incase you ever have to video conference with someone. There's a 5 megapixel rear facing camera, an HDMI port, micro USB port, Bluetooth 2.1 ready, WiFi ready and weighs less than one pound. 

Sounds like a pretty packed in device that Blackberry is looking to hit a home run with. Considering the consequences of their smartphone market share that I talked about in an earlier post, Blackberry needs this tablet to do well to gain some of their swagger back. Enjoy some of Blackberry's press shots of the new tablet in our photo gallery below.

(Posted By: Eric Rees)

In an attempt to reach stay-at-home soccer moms around the world, Apple is releasing their shiny new "must have" item of the year, the iPad, on Target's shelves as soon as October 3rd. 

Both the WiFi/3G and WiFi only options will be available in the nation-wide retailer on launch day and around October 17th customers who have a Target credit card will even get a percentage off their brand new oversized iPod if they so choose.

Anyone cleared the date of October 3rd for a trip to Target yet? 

(Posted By: Eric Rees)

The road to Android's 2.2 update, more commonly and deliciously known as Froyo, has been a rocky one. Each carrier has to design the update specifically for their phones and it has caused some bumps in the road. Finally the Droid X, one of Verizon's top selling android phones, is getting in on the tasty update.

For those not in the know, Google releases updates for the operating system they run called Android. Each of the updates gets a pet name after some sort of treat, 1.6 was cupcake, 2.1 was eclair, 2.2 was frozen yogurt and 3.0 is planned on being honeycomb when it comes out next year.

This update has been waited on for a while because of internal changes it almost double the browsing speed of the phones that it's installed on and the phone in general runs a lot faster. After seeing the Nexus One, the Droid, the Droid 2, the Evo on Sprint, the Droid Incredible all get their dues, the Droid X is finally getting in on the action. Anyone who has the phone who hasn't gotten the over-the-air update already can pull the update to them by doing:

• Settings -> About Phone -> System Updates 

Enjoy your Froyo DX users!

(Posted By: Eric Rees)

Do you reply to text messages faster than people finish sending them to you? Does your twitter page constantly refresh with information coming in from every corner of the world, just how you like it? Then Google’s announcement yesterday is for you.

Coming from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Google announced that Google Instant Search coming to a computer near you, right now. It’s live already. Which makes a lot of sense considering what they were announcing.

Google’s homepage now tracks what you type and searches the web before you even finish your query. No need to hit enter for you lazy searchers out there, results pop up as you type and change depending on what is typed into the box. Think of a T9 for your search engine if you will, the results are impressive. It's a little bit hard to explain but once seen for one's self, it's a "why didn't we have this before?" moment. The search still feels easy and flowing like how it did before, just now a lot faster.

Google is apparently pretty good at math and say that they will save around 350 million hours, that could be spent towards working or playing, a year with this new system. Hit the link below and see if it’s really all that it’s cracked up to be.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElubRNRIUg4&feature=player_embedded

Google's official Gmail blog announced yesterday that Google's internet browser, Chrome, is getting extensions. I will admit, I am a huge fan of Google and the apps they create. So when I heard about Chrome, I immediately downloaded it and tried it out for a week or so as my main browser. Firefox has been my main browser since I can remember and the thing that I love about it is the extensions. I've downloaded several extensions that I simply can't live without. Especially as a web developer using the web dev toolbar and Firebug.

Firefox extensions are what was keeping me from making the switch to Chrome and now that it supports them I will give it another shot. Right away I noticed that there were some of the same extensions that Firefox has and some of them even have "Fox" in the name. FastestFox is a nice extension that makes browsing through Google image search results and other sites extremely fast. I was pleasantly surprised that Google Chrome can run it and I love that it is still called FastestFox (it looks like they have now changed the name to FastestChrome).

 Obviously Gmail, Google Calendars, Docs, Voice, etc. are going to get special treatment and be extremely powerful in Chrome and even Google Wave has an extension which has an indicator when someone responds to a wave you are following. Finally! Look for Google owned services and sites such as YouTube, Blogger, etc. to have very powerful extensions as well. Popular sites like Facebook and Twitter have Chrome extensions, as do Amazon and Wikipedia. One thing is missing from Chrome that keeps me from making the switch: the Firefox search bar. I have added several extra searches to this bar and it is necessary to my browsing experience. I can quickly search Google Images, Amazon, iStock, YouTube, Twitter, Wikipedia, Ultimate Guitar Tabs, and many others without actually going to the site. It saves one step and if the search is specific, Google images for example, then your search takes you directly to the image results saving you a couple of steps.

The Chrome address bar serves as a Google search bar as well but I've modified the Firefox address bar to be a "I'm feeling lucky!" search. I can type Best Buy Batman Arkham and I go directly Best Buy's Arkham Asylum page saving a few steps. I think I'll give Chrome another shot and perhaps there is a way to get some kind of feature that does the same thing that Firefox's search bar does. If so, I think I might be saying goodbye to Firefox :(

Update: Chrome has the ability to change which search engine the address bar uses. Not a big deal right? You still have to right click change search engine and then type your search. Right? Yes and no. Google has brilliantly added Keywords to the search engines that you can create and edit. For example,  I want to search Wikipedia and all I have to do is add it to my list of search engines and give it a keyword, I used the letter w to make it as short as possible. Now all I have to do to search Wikipedia is type w and the search word i.e. w Beatles and hit enter. For Amazon, I set it up so I have to type amazon [search word] and I'm there. This works brilliantly. 


(Posted by: Carlos Arellano)

I had an older Compaq laptop circa 2004 that had USB 1.0 and I remember trying to add over 100 songs to my iPod through iTunes. It would takeforever. I would rather wait to get home from wherever I was to transfer songs because my PC at home had USB 2.0 and the difference in speed was incredible. Now I'm sometimes transferring 10+ gigs of information from a hard drive to an external hard drive, external to a flash drive, etc. Even though USB 2.0 is fast, I still have to wait several minutes for the transfer to complete. I know, several minutes... We are so spoiled. USB 3.0 is said to be 10 times faster than 2.0 while using a third of the power and it's backward compatible. A new major feature is the SuperSpeed bus, which provides a fourth transfer mode at 4.8 Gbit/s. The raw throughput is 4 Gbit/s, and the specification considers it reasonable to achieve 3.2 Gbit/s (0.4 GByte/s or 400 MByte/s) or more after protocol overhead [1]. If you were lucky enough to go to this year's CES you probably heard about hard drives, motherboards, adapter cards, laptops and devices that are now using 3.0 technology. Expect to see a lot more about on USB 3.0 as more and more devices that support it hit the market this year.

[1] Wikipedia

(posted by Carlos Arellano)

 I love my iPhone. It keeps me organized; yet completely distracted at any moment of the day. So, when all the rumors lately have been tablet oriented in regards to what the hell is going on in Cupertino, I was a bit surprised to see some iPhone rumors surface this week. As any good Apple user will know, the iPhone’s launch calendar generally focuses new releases in the month of June. With this knowledge, we should see even more rumors in the coming months.

First of all, rumors this early, or any rumors for that matter, should be taken lightly. With that said, don’t fire up your torches and come after the messengers if this proves to be wrong.

Gizmodo reported earlier this week on a rumor that had me scratching my head at first. According to this piece of scuttle, the next iPhone will have a touch sensitive casing. If this has you confused, think of it as similar to what MacBook track pads are capable of, multi-touch commands and the like, and the new Magic Mouse.

What this could mean is a brand new way of interacting with the phone.

Obvious uses include multi-touch commands where the phone recognizes how many fingers you are swiping across its smooth shell. I would be most excited for this if it meant I could scroll through documents and web pages one-handed; as doing so now often leads to a cramp in my thumb.

Another prospect to consider is what this would mean for interacting with other applications. Obviously, the fewer fingers you have on the touch screen, the better the view of whatever you’re viewing.

Consider this though, and let me know what you think. It has already been tipped that Apple has been working on a 3-D version of iWork. So, imagine what an interface would be like where you can input commands on more than one surface! Applications could display a whole new depth.

So, give some thought to this. Even if it doesn’t come true, it is still very exciting to consider where touch interfaces are headed.

At CES this week, the largest microchip manufacturer in the world, Intel, announced that they have decided to get in on the app frenzy. They've opened a new app store geared towards netbook computers called Atom. That's right. You know those little pieces of software called applications? Well they're no longer just for your cell phone. Can you imagine the possibilities of running applications on a computer?... Oh wait... that's what you're doing right now...



Anyway, what's really exciting is the amount of companies in other parts of the electronics industry that are also interested in apps. Samsung announced this week that they would be opening their own app store for HDTVs, Blu-Ray players, as well as cell phones. Surprisingly enough, Ford Motor Company even announced some apps that would be available in its vehicles late this year.

I think this is fantastic news and a great step forward for technology in general. As modern tech grows exponentially, the microchips that are used in even the simplest of computers are performing way under their potential. Think about the possibilities of television applications for example. They could interact with certain commercials, tv shows and movies. They could learn what kinds of content you like and tailor a playlist for you.  Or the ability to upgrade firmware to increase the performance of your current hardware. The opportunities are endless for clever companies. Look at all the applications on the iPhone that make you say, "hmm, I never would have thought to use it for that."

The future is bright for technology! I can't wait to see where this leads.