[From Stephen Trew] A great review of the tech year by Mosberg. "While other industries struggled, consumer technology seemed to march ahead as always in 2011, with important new products and services continuing to roll out. Sure, some tech companies, like BlackBerry maker Research In Motion, suffered reverses. And some products, like Hewlett-Packard’s TouchPad, flopped. But many shone."
iMAME emulation app hits the App Store, humanity cheers in unison
[From Stephen Trew] A great app has just been launched on the app Store. Let the good old times begin. "No interest in snapping up an iCade? No sweat. Jim VanDeventer has just pushed today's app-to-end-all-apps into Apple's App Store, and while it's only been live for a few hours, iMAME is already on a mission to change the world. Built-in titles include Circus, Crash, Hard Hat, Fire One, Robot Bowl, Side Track, Spectar, Star Fire and Targ, and while it's not officially endorsed by Nicola Salmoria or the MAME Team, you can certainly pretend."
BBC moves towards HTML5 for websites
[From Stephen Trew] Long overdue. "Even the British occasionally have to change with the times. Following a study stating that 80 percent of all web video is now compatible with HTML5, the BBC has formally adopted the standard for videos on the desktop and mobile versions of its website. The full roll-out across BBC.com follows a pilot program in which the broadcaster tested HTML5 on the the Health section of the site."
Estimating Kindle Sales - David Smith
[From Stephen Trew] Interesting analysis of Kindle Sales - the result? Apple is probably still selling twice as many iPads, at up to 1.5 million per week. ""I thought of two other proxies for sales that might help us get closer to a real number. "I looked at the number of customer reviews made for each of the various Kindles since December 1. Assuming that customers of each product are equally likely to write a review this should give a reasonable estimation for relative sales volumes. I did a search on TwitPic for "New Kindle" and went through the recent pictures tallying up the relative counts of the various models."
Amazon Makes the Fire Less Balky
[From Stephen Trew] Good just got better. "David Pogue, on the first over-the-air software update for the Kindle Fire: Sure enough: the home screen “carousel,” a rotating shelf that holds all of your books, magazines and movies, now stops on a dime when you want it to. It takes only one tap to open something instead of several frustrating ones. When you do tap something, it opens faster and more fluidly. Page turns are smoother, especially in magazines. "
Symbian is dead.
[From Hans] Symbian is dead. "Symbian is already on its last legs as a mobile OS, now Nokia is giving it a bit of a kick while its down by ditching the name it grew up with and rebranding the latest version simply Nokia Belle. That's right, the Symbian title we've all come to know and love is being retired by Nokia, and with very little fanfare."
Nuance acquires speech recognition competitor Vlingo
[From Hans] Nuance have announced they acquired Vlingo "Vlingo and Nuance have long shared a similar vision for the power and global proliferation of mobile voice and language understanding. As a result of our complementary research and development efforts, our companies are stronger together than alone. Our combined resources afford us the opportunity to better compete, and offer a powerful proposition to customers, partners and developers."
How to Sync Documents and Other Files to Your iPhone or iPad Without iTunes
[From Hans] Want to sync your documents with your iPhone / iPad and dont have iTunes? Read this. "If you use a word processor, comic book or PDF reader, video player, or other app that requires syncing files through iTunes, you know how slow and awful it can be. Here's a simple, fast alternative. iTunes is a pretty slow program to begin with (especially on Windows), but as soon as you try to drag files to specific apps on an iOS device, it slows down to a crawl, and even hangs for long periods of time."
THROWAWAY: I'm throwing away a iPad 1, 32GB, Wifi
ENDING THIS ON CHRISTMAS EVE. We have a iPad 1, 32GB, WIFI device, it is in perfect condition, I'll even throw in a case and extended battery [it was replaced with an iPad 2]. It's a quick throwaway that I will keep open until Tuesday. It may be good as a quick Christmas present. All you need to do is send me a couple of lines on how you are using your mobile device whether it be for business or pleasure. No emails on why you deserve or need the device. Give your user thought a title that relates to your usage and send it to me. I will choose one reader at random. The throwaway could end at any time so email your user thought, putting WEEKENDER in the subject line and email to sammualjamesmcloughlin@gmail.com. I'll choose a winner at random next week.
