Élyse Betters

An HTC Golf press image surfaced this afternoon and reaffirms the smartphone-maker has yet to finish dabbling in the low-end spectrum. 

HTC has been struggling since the second-half of last year and disappointing Q4 2011 earnings (PDF) even inspired a new handset strategy. The manufacturer previously announced it would no longer clutter the smartphone market with a sea of generic Android devices and would instead focus on the One line of high-end Android smartphones.

PocketNow dug up today’s press leak, however, which seems to contradict HTC’s claims. The website also spilled the goods as to what the upcoming Ice Cream Sandwich-powered device is packing, but keep in mind that it is currently codenamed and might end up as the “Wildfire C.”

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The trendy photo-sharing app “Instagram” for Android debuted in the Google Play Store nearly two weeks ago and has since increased the service’s user base by 25 percent.

It took Instagram 19 months to reach 30 million iOS users, but it quickly garnered 10 million Android users in less than 10 days.

Gramfeed, a third-party user tracking website, dug into Instagram’s API to determine Mr. Valentino Elbuti (valentinoelbuti) as the 40 millionth user. He recently signed-up and already has four filtered-images posted to his account.

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YouTube announced it is live-streaming “Coachella 2012” all weekend long on its video-sharing platform.

“Since 2001, the the Coachella Music and Arts festival has brought thousands of fans to southern California to kick off the music festival season in style.  For the second year, YouTube will be live streaming the action, with a three day broadcast of the festival, presented by State Farm,” explained Google’s Music Marketing Manager Tim Partridge on the Official YouTube Blog. 

Over 60 artists will stream during the event—from Gotye to The Black Keys. The show begins at 6:50 p.m. EST tonight on the Coachella YouTube channel.
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Google’s rumored alternative to Dropbox just got a name confirmation while suggesting third-party integration.

The Verge reported that online computing graphic tool Lucidchart implemented a link for integrating Google Drive to its control panel for automatic synchronizing to the cloud. The link quickly disappeared, but the leaked screen capture above seems to verify Google Drive’s name and a taste of what it can do.

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Sprint goofed big-time today on the front of its main website.

The carrier placed a large front-page ad for a device that debuted over a year ago with an image of a different highly anticipated smartphone. Of course, the Nexus S 4G does not look like the Galaxy Nexus pictured above, which is edging on its April 22 launch and has everyone waiting for more details.

It appears marketing and web designers at Sprint do not have a very clear line of communication, or this mixup is just a clever—albiet confusing—promotion attempt. Go to Sprint.com now, and then select “Not a current customer” to see the blunder while it is still live.

Update: Now Sprint uploaded a video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=pjF6FBVpEws

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The popular “Dolphin Browser HD” for Android app just got a new look.

Version 8.0 showcases re-designed Dolphin Sonar and Gesture features. They are now equipped with a new interface, design, and improved access to the Help menu. The Gesture button also transformed into a Dolphin button with direct access to Dolphin Sonar for voice navigation.

Meanwhile, the Menu bar, which is physically akin to Android’s Action bar, flaunts a new design. It runs along the bottom of the browser and offers easier access to commands without exiting the home screen, but it requires a press on the Menu button for direct use.

A screenshot gallery is available below.

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Google Currents just launched worldwide with 44 languages and a host of new improvements.

Version 1.1 is available and spotlights automatic translation by Google Translate in 38 languages for publishers and local users who add content through Google Currents Producer. The latest update also showcases a dramatic performance boost with seven times more speed, instant online syncing for opening the latest edition of content, offline reading with images, and a slew of unnamed bug fixes.

According to the Official Google Mobile Blog, the app previously launched in the United States with over 400 publisher editions and 14,000 self-produced editions. It delivers free magazine-like editions to tablets and smartphones for high speed and offline reading from a variety of publishers, such as Forbes and PBS, with in-depth features that often highlight videos, photography, slideshows, live-maps, social streams, blogs, and feeds.

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YouTube Live Publishing Flow + Analytics

YouTube Live added new features to its live-streaming video platform today to celebrate its first birthday, but the most notable update it the ability to monetize live events.

“You can now monetize your live events with advertising or paid options. A live event can be claimed in the new video manager like any other video and monetized with instream ads or paid options where you can set price by country,” explained YouTube Partner Product Manager Varun Talwar on the official YouTube Creator Blog.

Other improvements to the service include Wirecast for YouTube Live and a new publishing flow with real-time analytics.

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A new Chrome Beta update now makes open tab information available on multiple devices in different locations.

In Chrome Beta, when users are logged into Chrome, the tabs open on one device are now accessible on all their devices under the “Other devices” menu on the New Tab page.

“Imagine you’ve looked up directions to a cool new restaurant on your home computer. Later, when you’re leaving work, you realize you can’t quite remember how to get there. If only you could quickly pull up the same directions on your office computer with one click,” explained Software Engineers Nicolas Zea and Patrick Dubroy on the official Google Chrome blog.

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Samsung’s Galaxy S III will feature a home button under the display.

South Korea newspaper Korean Digital Daily (translated) added to the rumor machine today with sources that claim the upcoming smartphone will sport Samsung’s accustomed home button, despite much speculation claiming otherwise.

The Galaxy S III will even boast a five-column icon layout showcased in the Samsung Galaxy Note. This would help the device standout from other Android handsets, and the iPhone, which has maintained a four-column icon layout since its initial 2007 launch.

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The Chrome OS appeared as simply a full screen Chrome web browser in Chromebooks about a year ago, and now an announcement on the developer channel shows the operating system received its largest visual upgrade yet, which seems to blur the line between OS X and Windows.

Google’s shipped an undisclosed number of Chromebooks that have not exactly created an insatiable buzz, so the Internet giant was due to make the OS more mainstream while still keeping a web-based focus.

The Chrome Releases Blog debuted “Aura” as the new Chrome OS window manager. It gives the platform an actual desktop look, rather than just a web browser, and it adds support for wallpapers, stacked windows, an app launcher akin to Launchpad, and a task manager.

According to Chrome’s engineers, Aura is a cross-platform window manager aimed to provide “a flexible windowing system and shell for Chrome and Chrome OS on a variety of form factors.” The build also features many security and stability improvements.

A screenshot gallery is available below.

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Google is presenting the first-ever Google TV Hackathon Weekend for television-loving Android geeks later this month.

The Internet giant announced today that it is collaborating with the Silicon Valley Android Developers Group and the London Android Group to host two simultaneous TV Hackathons with the goal of creating new experiences for Google TV.

The SVAndroid Hackathon is taking place at Google TV headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., and tickets are $20, but purchasing options end April 17.

Team ideas will be announced April 20, and the following day is “devoted to building, with breaks for demo sessions, Q&As, and a hangout with Google TV developers,” according to the Official Google TV Blog. The teams will present ideas to judges April 22 for the chance to win tickets to Google I/O and other prizes.

The Londroid Hackathon is occurring at the Google Campus in London, United Kingdom. It will run concurrent with the Mountain View event to gather Android devs throughout Europe.

“We will kick things off bright and early on Saturday, April 21, with introductions and background information on developing for Google TV. Teams will power on through Saturday night so that we can do a round of presentations and prizes at lunchtime on Sunday,” explained Google TV Senior Developer Advocate Paul Carff on the Official Google TV Blog.

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Leaked slides from a confidential deck show Google+ may soon feature Google Analytics integration.

Dutch website Dutchcowboys found the entire deck with screens showcasing the combined services. According to the slides, users will soon have access to total number of visits with percentage of new visits, page views, average time spent on the site, and the bounce rate for their Google+ pages.

Google+ is a social network operated by Google Inc., and Google Analytics is a free service that generates detailed statistics about the visitors to a website. There is currently no way to measure or view Google+ activity other than self-analyzing +1 social engagement.

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Google is attending this year’s annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, but the movie-making industry is anything but excited about the Internet giant’s presence.

According to The New York Times’ blog, the dinner is a large Hollywood affair equipped with buffets, banquets, and after-parties, where entertainment stars, media moguls, and famed celebrities alike gather to party the night away and mingle with the country’s most powerful politicians.

Google’s Eric Schmidt is a fresh face on this year’s guest list, but many show business executives, still scorned by the defeated antipiracy legislation earlier this year, are perturbed that the executive chairman plans to appear.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based Company’s role in conquering the hotly-debated legislation, coupled with Schmidt’s co-hosted pre-event party with The Hollywood Reporter in Washington on April 27, is just salt on the wound for many media executives.

The Los Angeles Times even noted the party does not “go unnoticed in the community.”

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HTC released unaudited Q1 2012 sales figures today, and the painful results show the Taiwanese manufacturer is floundering due to heavy competition.

First-quarter revenues pulled $2.3 billion USD, which is a 35-percent drop year-over-year (PDF), while net profit plummeted 70 percent to roughly $148 million USD.

HTC Chief Financial Officer Winston Yung predicted the rough quarter due to increased competition from Samsung and Apple, but he also blamed HTC for the sudden down spiral.

“We simply dropped the ball on products in the fourth quarter,” said Yung said during the Feb. 6 conference call, while noting the Rezound and Vivid handsets did not meet the company’s expectations.

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Gmail updated its people widget to include three photos from recent emails for a showcased person (example to the right).

“The next time you look at the people widget, you might see up to 3 photos from recent emails from that person. Not only does this remind you of photos they’ve sent to you, but it also gives you one click access to the emails with those photos,” announced Gmail on Google+.

The Gmail people widget is located on the right-hand side of messages and displays users’ contextual information about people their interacting with in the email service.

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OpenStreetMap on "Wikipedia for Android" app

Wikipedia updated its Android and iOS apps today, but the noteworthy feature is that the online encyclopedia-like website dumped Google Maps for OpenStreetMap, which marks a growing trend for technology firms preferring an alternative mapping solution.

The company just announced its Android counterpart witnessed 2.25 million installs in less than two months since its birth, while netting over 23 million Wikipedia page views per month. Despite the success with Google’s mobile OS, Wikipedia updated its apps with Open StreetMap data in favor of the service’s “nearby view” feature.

Wikipedia further explained the reasoning behind the switch:

Previous versions of our application used Google Maps for the nearby view. This has now been replaced with OpenStreetMaps – an open and free source of Map Data that has been referred to as ‘Wikipedia for Maps.’ This closely aligns with our goal of making knowledge available in a free and open manner to everyone. This also means we no longer have to use proprietary Google APIs in our code, which helps it run on the millions of cheap Android handsets that are purely open source and do not have the proprietary Google applications. OpenStreetMaps is used in both iOS and Android, thanks to the amazing Leaflet.js library. We are currently using Mapquest’s map tiles for our application, but plan on switching to our own tile servers in the near future.

In the last couple of months alone, both Apple and Foursquare also shifted to OpenStreetMap. It is worth mentioning that Yahoo implemented OpenStreetMap data within Flickr in 2009 for a plethora of worldwide cities, such as Baghdad, Beijing, Kabul, Santiago, Sydney, and Tokyo.

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Google expanded its GoMo initiative to offer small businesses an opportunity to mobilize their websites for free.

According to Fortune, the Mountain View, Calif.-based search engine teamed with startup Duda Mobile to offer the $9 per month service at no cost for an entire year starting today. Users will save $108 a year, and then they can purchase the premium service after the complimentary period ends—if desired.

In a blog post, Duda Mobile’s Dennis Mink explained the collaboration:

Our hope is that by offering both the education AND the service at no cost for one year, we can help businesses make the shift to mobile more quickly, benefiting both their business as well as us consumers who no longer want to pinch and zoom our way through their regular websites on our phones.

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YouTube now automatically allows short 1080p videos to convert to 3D.

The video-sharing platform just announced on the official YouTube blog that it is expanding a beta feature released last year, which gives users the option to convert YouTube videos to 3D with just a click of a mouse. Since the beta launched, creators have converted hundreds of thousands of videos to 3D.

The popularity of the feature encouraged YouTube to implement 3D viewing in the Quality settings under the gear icon on the YouTube player.

“Then pop on your 3D glasses and see YouTube in another dimension (like the video above),” explained Technical Staffer Deb Mukherjee and Software Engineer Chen Wu in the blog post.

The Googlers even recommended watching “YouTube Rewind 2011” to get the full YouTube 3D experience (below).

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The first HTC Evo One reviews are starting to flood the gate before its official launch tonight and initial impressions indicate the device has both good and bad points.

An.droid-life.com said the smartphone is bulky, yet it boasts stellar-quality Beats Audio by Dr. Dre, Ice Cream Sandwich OS with Sense 4.0, and a 8-megapixel shooter and 1.3-megapixel camera worth drooling over.

Despite the praise, the reviewer noted the device “just feels like HTC’s same old thing.” The trimmed Sense and usual ICS experience seemed a bit ho-hum, but then he added that his time spent with the smartphone was limited so complete details are not possible at this time.

A screenshot gallery is available below.

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The rumor mill is grinding away after a Samsung representative announced the Galaxy S III is now in the testing phase, while other reports indicate the device will sport a Galaxy Nexus-like screen without employing PenTile pixel layout.

AsiaE reported the device is undergoing tests in South Korea. The phase typically lasts two months, but the article suggested Samsung wants testing done sooner. Meanwhile, Korean website DDaily said the smartphone’s 4.65-inch 720p Super AMOLED screen will not employ the PenTile pixel layout.

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