Jake Smith

In an attempt to connect with his fans, Digg’s founder Kevin Rose announced that he will now be forwarding his personal domain to Google+. His personal domain, kevinrose.com, was once used for his somewhat popular blog. In recent months, his blogging has slowed down — making forwarding to Google+ a smart move. Rose tweets:

Decided to forward kevinrose.com to Google+. G+ gives me more (real-time) feedback and engagement than my blog ever did.

Google+ is great for sharing longer posts, where you can get faster feedback from readers. Obviously, you can’t host ads on Google+ to make money off your posts, but we assume Rose isn’t too worried about that. Who said Google+ wasn’t catching on?
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While it hasn’t hit the U.S. shores yet, Samsung’s Galaxy S II is booming overseas. Interestingly, ABI Research has torndown the beloved device, revealing that Samsung has incorporated technology that hasn’t been used before — in any device. What’s worth noting in the teardown is the Galaxy S II’s processor, the Samsung Exynos 4210 dual-core. The Exynos is believed to be a big competitor to the Tegra 2. ABI Research says Samsung has set “a new benchmark for almost every category on which a smartphone is measured.” The new changes include:

• Exynos dual-core apps processor. 118.8 mm2 die size with amperage specs roughly similar to the Tegra 2.
• New single-packaged multi-band multi-mode PA from RFMD.
• New CMOS-based antenna switch.
• New lower-power XMM6260 cellular chipset from Infineon.

ABI has also listed in their teardown circuit board photos, performance measurements, cost information, and board area data. We’ve heard Samsung has started totally from scratch with this device. The teardown is definitely worth checking out.

A new extension Google+Facebook adds your Facebook newsfeed right into Google+. As you can see in the screenshot above, a Facebook icon is placed right next to the home icon at the top of the page. While it doesn’t give you all the functionality of Facebook, it’s a nice tool to have to update your status and check out the latest news from your friends that haven’t moved to Google+.

Google+Facebook was developed using the Crossrider framework, a framework that is used to build an extension across all three popular browsers: Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer. While we wish the extension was up on the Chrome Web Store, for those of us who use Chrome, it sadly isn’t. For now we’ll have to hit up the download that is available on Crossrider. Check out Crossrider’s demonstration of Google+Facebook after the break.

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Motorola’s answer to the rugged business phone is the Motorola Titanium, announced with the Xpert over two months ago. We never heard an official release date from Sprint, but SprintFeed is reporting that the Titanium will launch July 24th on Sprint’s network, for $149. The body style of the Titanium reminds us of the Droid Pro, packing a full QWERTY keyboard. Other features include a 5-megapixel camera, 2GB microSD, Wi-Fi, and..

Android 2.1…

WTF..That’s Original Droid two year old vintage software people!

In the flyer above it says the device meets “Military Specifications 810G”, being able to withstand dust, shock, vibration, solar radiation, and low pressure (and recent Android updates).

A feature that we believe could be a great selling point is Nextel’s push-to-talk. The service industry relied on push-to-talk on Nextel’s older phones, and the Titanium could bring it back. We look forward to seeing how this device will work in the field.

Ad Age is reporting that Google+ will open up brand pages within the next two weeks. The brand pages will resemble Facebook’s, who has seen great success gaining ad revenue from them.  Ford, MTV, and Mashable are expected to be the first pages. As they wait for their official page, Ford has already set up a profile — acting as a mock page. For companies that would like to get a page, they can simply fill out a form. The form must be popping, because Google told Ad Age they can barely keep up with requests. Check out Google’s thoughts of Ford’s move below.

Ad Age: So it turns out plenty of companies are interested in setting up a business page on Google+, so much so that you’re having to turn off some of these pages. What’s the plan?

Christian Oestlien: We’re basically nine days in to what you could describe as a multi-year project. We’ve gotten several thousands of applications to be in the test group since we opened it up last night.

Ad Age: Ford is one of them, and it appears to be very active already. Are you asking it to take down its page?

Mr. Oestlien: We’re positively overwhelmed by how quickly Ford has become involved with the project. They’re doing to some incredibly cool stuff like the “hangout” they’re doing this afternoon with their customers. It’s the kind of stuff we’re looking to test.

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As spotted by Dain Binder on Google+, Blogger is receiving a redesign just like the rest of Google’s products. The new redesign resembles Gmail’s new look, sporting new buttons and an overall touchup. Currently, the new design can only be viewed in the draft section of Blogger, but we’d bet this is coming to the full site soon. More images after the break.

via The Next Web

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Android users who downloaded the updated  Maps application today got a nice surprise.  Google Maps for Android now features offline viewing. To enable the new feature, simply navigate to the Labs section of the Maps application and enable the Download Map Area option. After this is enabled, each time you want to download maps for offline viewing you will need to visit a Place page, click the more button, and then select the option to store locally. Maps will then store a 10 mile radius, locally to your device.

Offline viewing is available for Android because of the way it displays the maps. Android uses a vector-based system for displaying map tiles, where the iPhone uses an image based. This means Android can pull maps using about 1/100th of the data the iPhone would. Maybe we’ll see a change to the iPhone’s Google Maps soon.

via TechCrunch

Google is now testing an experimental design on YouTube, called Cosmic Panda. The new design is not enabled by default, but you can use it today by enabling it in YouTube’s TestTube.

The design is totally new and focused on channels, playlists, and videos. Besides the obvious style change, other features include auto-refresh commenting, dark background on video pages, and much more. Give it a try yourself.

via The Next Web
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Grab them while you can! Google has just posted their invite button in Google+, that allows users with accounts to invite users without. We feel for you — those who haven’t tried the new social network. Since we care about you so much, uncle 9to5 is here to help.

Update: After inviting hundreds of people, we’ve exhausted our supply of Google Invites.  If we didn’t get to you, we’ll try again next time :D

Google+ user Ufuk Kayserilioglu was able to use his Google Apps account in Google+ for a short time today — sorta. As he notes below, he was able to sign into Google+ with a Google Apps account with some accidental trickery.

I discovered it by accident: I was logged into Google+ with my Google Account and into my Google Apps account (on the Paralaus domain), as secondary, with multiple sign-on. For some reason Google decided to log me off all my Google accounts. At that point, I made the initial login with my Google Apps account and secondary with my Google Account. I was unaware that Google+ was open on another tab. I tried to reshare something publicly, and was confused that it was saying Paralaus where it should be saying Public. Picking that options told me that only “People on Paralaus can find and view” my post. It was then that I realized I was able to use Google+ with my Google Apps account in a hybrid mode where I was not fully logged in but some elements were available; almost as a preview. ;)

Our own Seth Weintraub would love to see this feature come to Google+, as I’m sure many of you would too. While this was just a ‘preview’, we do expect Google Apps support to come very soon.

via Google Operating System
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Facebook has a nifty feature that allows users to give their profile a link like facebook.com/9to5Google, instead of facebook.com/19238288asd8a8. This feature allows for easier sharing of profiles, and sadly the new social network Google+ doesn’t offer anything of the sort. We’ve stumbled upon a new website, called Gplus.to, that allows Google+ users simply create a shortened URL for their Google+ profile. The shortened URL will be something along the lines of gplus.to/9to5google.

The shortened URL is pretty easy to setup, with the help of a little guide on the website. Gplus.to is currently boasting 32,000 users, and it seems to be growing at a fast pace. If you have a profile on Google+ why not give this a try? Let us know how it goes.
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Cross posted from 9to5Mac

According to Google Employee Erica Joy, the Google + app is awaiting Apple’s approval in the App Store. It also sounds like it is a iPad univeral app.  Hopefully it gets through quicker than Google Voice which took over a year to clear the gauntlet.  Cross posted from 9to5google.com

24100   via Mashable

Android Central has received an exclusive screenshot that points to an August 4th launch date for the Droid Bionic. The Droid Bionic was announced at CES last January, and has seen hardware reconstruction since then. Motorola calls the changes ‘expanded features, functionality and an improved form factor’, but we don’t have any details past that. The screenshot above also points to a July 14th release date for the Droid 3.

The Bionic has already received FCC approval, so it’s just a matter of time before we see this phone hitting the LTE waves. Of course this date could always change. If you haven’t seen this phone yet, check out the press image after the break.

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Hot off the heels of withdrawing their counter-suit against Apple, Samsung has announced they have sold 3 million Galaxy S IIs in just 55 days. This is a new record for the company beating sales of the Galaxy S by 30 days. What’s surprising here is this phone hasn’t landed in the U.S. yet (at least not tied to a carrier), but is seeing great sales worldwide. Samsung says sales have been doing very well in Europe and globally (especially Korea), selling one device every 1.5 seconds, or 55,000 a day. In the U.K., Samsung has been the number one manufacturer for 17 straight weeks.

Check out the press release after the break.

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Google has always integrated products, into products, into products. Google+ is no different, where we see many of Google’s product incorporated into this invite only product. One of these is Picasa, who historically only had a storage limit of 1GB, but now that Google+ is on the market things have changed. ReadWriteWeb has posted a break down on what pictures count torwards what storage.

As it turns out, there’s nothing to worry about. If you’re signed up for Google+, photos up to 2048×2048 pixels and videos up to 15 minutes long won’t count towards this free storage limit. And Google will automatically resize photos for you when you upload them to Google+, so they stay under the free size limit.

That means only photos uploaded directly to Picasa Web Albums over the 2048×2048 size will count towards the 1 GB of free storage, explains Google. And when that limit is reached, photos will be automatically resized.

Meanwhile, for non-Google+ users, there are slightly stricter rules: photos up to 800×800 and videos up to 15 minutes won’t count towards free storage. Again, when the 1 GB limit is reached, larger photos will be resized down.

To sum this up, any Google user can now upload unlimited pictures to Picasa as long as they’re under 2048×2048. If they’re above 2048×2048 you are given 1GB of storage, but they’ll be resized. Google+ users can upload photos up to 2048×2048 that won’t count towards the limit, and Google will automatically resize them to stay within the limits. Get storing!

Related articles

• Free storage limits – Picasa for Google+ users (picasa.google.com)
• Google Takeout lets you pull your data out of the cloud (9to5google.com)

Android Central has gotten their hands on a table showing the Droid 3, Droid 2, and Droid X2 side-by-side. The Droid 2 and Droid X2 are already out on Verizon, but the image above sheds light on what the Droid 3 will be. There isn’t a release date quite yet; we know it’s coming to Verizon at the very least.

The Droid 3 will be sporting Honeycomb, a 4-inch touchscreen, 1GHz dual-core processor, 8MP rear-facing camera, and front facing-camera. The image above also reveals this will be a world phone. We’ll keep you updated about when this phone will drop.
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For those of you looking for a smaller alternative to the Samsung Galaxy 10.1, your wait is coming to an end very soon. DroidMatters is reporting that the Samsung Galaxy Tab 8.9 has just passed through the FCC certified with AT&T bands, under the name A3L-GTP7300.

The device is reportedly packing 8.9-inch 1280×800 display, Honeycomb, 1GB of RAM, Tegra 2 dual-core processor, 3-megapixel rear-camera, 2-megapixel front-camera, and 16/32/64GB of internal space. You can bank on a 3G version of the 8.9 being out very soon, but we are also thinking there is going to be a Wi-Fi version too. Check out the hush hush agreement that the FCC obviously messed up on below:
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Matching Google+, redesigned Maps, Search, and Calendar, Google has released a redesign for Gmail. The theme of this redesign is to remove the clutter, something some of you might think Gmail suffered from. F0r now, we notice new colors and an overall buffer of the page. To get your hands on these new designs select the ‘Preview’ or ‘Preview Dense’ theme from the settings.
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Google+ was announced earlier in the week, but currently it is invite only. Last night Google opened invites for all users and later closed it down. Some of you may have been lucky and received an invite from us, but others not so. On his personal blog, David Di Franco has posted a guide on how to bypass the invite system, for now.

1. View your “Circles” page.
2. Click “Add a new person” to add someone to your circle.
3. Select your person from the list. If they are not appearing, simply input their email address.
4. Add the person to your circle. After doing so, go to “Home” where you can view the stream.
5. Compose a new post, but make sure the box is checked next to “Also email…”
6. Click “Share” and you’re set. Now the person will see the post in their inbox, which will grant them access to Google+.

We can’t guarantee this will work, but if you have a friend with Google+ ask them to give it a try. I’m buuuusy….

The HTC Evo 3D has passed through the FCC’s desk packing AWS bands, reports TmoNews. Interestingly, these AWS bands point to T-Mobile’s 4G network. But as we have experienced before, something going through the FCC doesn’t necessarily mean its coming out anytime soon.

The EVO series has been exclusive with Sprint since the EVO’s release. This FCC filing definitely points to this device going to T-Mobile, breaking Sprint exclusivity. We’ll keep you updated if this phone actually hits or not, but in the mean time read our review of the device.
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Whip out your syrup and bacon, because Engadget is reporting that the Samsung Galaxy S II is coming to Canada on three carriers. This device is on its way to Bell, Virgin Mobile, and SaskTell. Bell and VirginMobile have yet to release any pricing. SaskTell will be carrying the phone for $79.99 on a 3 year contract, which seems like a reasonable price but absurd commitment. SaskTell and Virgin Mobile are saying the device is on its way in the coming weeks, where Virgin Mobile is holding a contest to win the phone that ends July 19th. Expect to see this phone soon.