Archive for the ‘Featured’ Category

Preview - In 2010, Billy May released an animation about an imaginary Mozilla Open Web smartphone. Called Seabird, the phone was praised as an evolutionary smartphone that, albeit imaginary, included the vision for a phone that not just copies Apple’s iPhone, but incorporates Mozilla philosophy as well as a vision that is years ahead of the products we are using today. Mozilla’s B2G, a mobile operating system that will be demonstrated at MWC next week, could carry that vision and emerge as the dark horse in the smartphone arena.

So, you are ready to drop somewhere between $40 and $50K on an entertaining sports car. Your eyes are set on a Nissan 370Z, but you wonder whether the Infiniti G37 IPL will deliver an extra portion of fun worth the extra $7K.

The second half of 2011 was, it seems, a recovery period for Mozilla’s Firefox team. After a prolonged Firefox 4 development period that caused Mozilla to miss the most critical evolutionary phase of web browsers since the defeat of Netscape, Firefox has been losing market share and there is doubt whether Firefox can rise again. An updated roadmap is the prescription to keep Firefox competitive.

Chrome for Android was released with about 3 months delay (or more than 3 years, depending on your view) on Tuesday. Google hopes to replicate the runaway success of the desktop version of the browser, but the browser is less appealing and less accessible to the user than Chrome, which makes this mobile browser an inconclusive product that, in addition, lacks compelling features over rivals.

In its first public presentation, AMD’s new leadership explained a new direction of the company to align itself with an evolving CPU and GPU market. In 2013, AMD will be releasing its first SoCs for desktop and tablet computers. Execution will be key for the company to succeed in a highly competitive market that is dominated by ARM vendors and challenged by Intel.

January 2012 has been a remarkable month for the web browser as we know it. Those who closely follow the popularity of web browsers already know that Chrome has, according to StatCounter, surpassed Firefox in market share in November 2011, thus rearranging the rules of the browser game and turning it, for now, into a two-horse race. Now, Chrome is beginning to approach IE in most regions around the globe and has reduced its distance to IE, on one day, to less than four percentage points. If the current trend, which has lasted for more than 3 years, continues, then Google will surpass IE within 3 months.

Intel will try to prove its claims that it can be a powerful manufacturer of processors for smartphones and tablets when its Medfield platform emerges in commercial products in H2 this year. In the same time frame, ARM vendors will release their first notebooks that challenge, conceivably, Intel’s most important and profitable business today. Both Intel and ARM are staging aggressive launches and prepare for a fight that will be much more bloody than the historic processor battles between AMD and Intel. Does Intel have what it takes to dent ARM’s segmentation-driven application processor market? Can ARM deliver processors that are compelling enough to face Intel’s prestigious and performance-driven CPUs?

eBay has never been a huge attraction for me as the idea of entering into auctions on-line just wasn’t something that I was that interested in.  However after hosting me on campus last year, I was convinced that eBay was trying to be more like Amazon in terms of buying experience and they were showcasing an interesting additional step of providing apps that could point you to stores that had products you might want to buy. In other words, they were moving beyond actions and into consumer-focused commerce much more aggressively.

Chrome developer François Beaufort has posted a screenshot that apparently has been taken on Samsung’s upcoming Chrome OS desktop PC. The big news here is that the hardware-accelerated Aura UI that promises a much richer interface for the user while leveraging the horsepower of a graphics chip will be part of Stumpy. The Chromebox will also integrate more hardware horsepower with an Intel Sandy Bridge processor.

Full Review – Buying a 2012 LaCrosse could expose you to what appears to be a trick question: Do you get the 303 hp 6-cylinder or the 182 hp 4-cylinder + 15 hp electric motor – for the same price? The case for the eLaCrosse is not exactly convincing and quite confusing, but it’s something we may have to get used to sooner or later.

Intel unveiled at CES its much anticipated entry in the smartphone battle. Previously code-named Medfield, the Atom Z2460 lacks a snappy name, but it arrives with promising features. Intel has struck a partnership with Motorola as well as Lenovo to get the chip into a commercial devices as early as Q2, but only in China initially. There was also Clover Trail, Intel’s SoC for tablets and hybrids.

We are seeing plenty of new tablets emerge at the CES 2012, which opened earlier today with a record number of more than 3100 exhibitors that have prepared more than 25,000 product announcements that are available to about 150,000 visitors over the next few days. Among those tablets is a particularly noteworthy device that could have a huge impact on the tablet market, if it works as promised.