9to5 Staff

That Google’s been developing a Dropbox-killer code-named “Platypus” has been rumored for years and today TechCrunch’s MG Siegler (who is becoming his own blogger) chimed in with a short post claiming that Google Drive “will have a software component to take on Dropbox”. The Google Operating System blog, however, is adamant that Google Drive is nothing if not a Google Docs feature, arguing against expecting a brand new service.

The article does mention the possibility of a companion desktop app, pointing to Felipe Zorzo who found solid evidence that Google Drive is also the name of a downloadable software, as seen in the above screengrab. Whichever the case, the prospect of a Google-branded cloud storage enhanced with syncing capabilities akin to Dropbox is holding some tech watchers captivated, yours truly included.

The success of Dropbox, a cross-platform cloud storage solution created  by Drew Houston and Drew Houston (they turned down an Apple offer), has helped in large part mainstream the concept of cloud storage. Previously, cloud storage had been confined to the realm of geeks and tech-literate audience.

Whether or not Google pursues the Dropbox route by providing a standalone software to sync folders on your computer is debatable, although it seems to be the case. With that in mind, Google’s services should benefit from tapping a centralized storage and their clout is bound to give any other competing solution out there a hell of a run for their money.

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What’s a mobile site? Judging by their online presence, a lot of businesses have no clue so Google set out to educate them by launching a dedicated GoMobile site at howtogomo.com. Assets available at the site teach businesses how to create mobile web sites and it comes with a dozen interesting case studies of mobile web sites done right, including Google’s own.

It provides education, case studies and best practices for marketers large and small that don’t yet have mobile sites. The site also features a handy emulator that shows you how your site looks on smartphones. In short, Google says, mobile web sites should load fast and must be easy to use, which entails that no pinching and zooming is required. Some folks were quick to note that Google’s new mobile initiative does not apply to their own blog post announcing the change, which fails to render on iPhone properly.

Interested parties can also register for a webinar titled “Making Mobile-Friendly Websites: Best Practices in Action” due November 10 at 11am PST/2pm EST. Additionally, Google takes into account mobile optimized sites or landing pages when determining ad quality rankings. Speaking of mobile advertising…

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Coming from Apple’s iOS ecosystem, one of the things that struck me the most was the overall jerkiness of Android’s user interface. Despite powerful dual-core processors and more than capable GPUs, Android lacking the iOS’s smooth presentation was hard to swallow. Not so with Ice Cream Sandwich though.

Google’s impressive presentation left me believing that Android 4.0 will become the first major Android revision to close the gap with iOS in terms of smoothly animated interface Apple is known for. Google today wrote at the official Android Developers blog that hardware acceleration is on by default for all applications, for the first time:

With this new pipeline, all drawing operations performed by the UI toolkit are carried out using the GPU. You’ll be happy to hear that Android 4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich, brings an improved version of the hardware-accelerated 2D rendering pipeline to phones, starting with Galaxy Nexus.

App developers who use API levels lower than 14 will still have to turn on this capability manually, but it’s a simple matter of updating the AndroidManifest.xml file. There is also a new view available to apps which plays nice with fading edges and allows for hardware-accelerated transformations such as moving, scaling, rotating, animating, scrolling and more. It works with any content, including video, and in real-time. Google says it’s not done yet perfecting Android’s graphics subsystem, hinting at enhancements in future versions of the platform.

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Life In A Day is a historic film documenting what it was like to be alive on July 24, 2010. Executive producers Ridley Scott and Tony Scott and director Kevin Macdonald teamed up with technology partners YouTube and L, inviting folks all over the world to film their lives and answer a few simple questions on the project’s official YouTube channel. Individuals from 192 countries have responded and sent in 4,500 hours of video material – all of it shot on a single day, July 24, 2010. They combed through raw footage to carefully select the best clips and put together the most unusual and such a moving story abut us as a species on this planet.

The movie was shown at the Sundance Berlin and SXSW Film Festivals before hitting the big screen in theaters globally. Life In A Day delighted the Times of London which called it “a thrilling piece of cinema”, while  the Washington Post considered it “a profound achievement”. Thanks to Google, this unique cinematic experience is now a free YouTube stream with such perks as subtitles in 25 languages, all major resolution presets (including full HD 1080p) and what not.

If you have time, 9to5Google wholeheartedly recommends sitting through this 97-minute historic documentary project, which is bound to inspire your inner self and touch your soul. Now, why haven’t I thought of this?

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Research firm Canalys in its new report ranked Taiwanese handset maker HTC (owned by the Formosa Plastics Group conglomerate) the leading smartphone vendor in the United States. The finding is based on the reported third-quarter shipments by major phone makers – including HTC, Samsung and Apple – and per-country performance estimates stemming from historic trends. As you know, Apple sold 17.07 million iPhones during the September quarter, a 16 percent sequential decline the company blamed on the rumor-mill hype. Meanwhile, Samsung passed Apple by an estimated ten million units and HTC today reported shipments of 13.2 million handsets.

As for the United States, Canalys estimated HTC’s shipments at 6.4 million devices (5.7 million own handsets and 700,000 units with T-Mobile branding). Apple shipped an estimated 4.6 million iPhones in the country (4.9 million for Samsung). In all, HTC in the September quarter was the leading phone vendor in the United States, Samsung was second (plus #1 smartphone maker globally) and Apple ranked third. Canalys analyst Chris Jones said:

However you count it, HTC has become a deserved leader in the US smart phone market. This is an awesome achievement for HTC, which has built a premium brand in a highly competitive market in just a few short years. It now has a strong range of 4G Android products, with devices ranged by each of the major carriers, and offers some of the most compelling and differentiated products found on the platform today.

There is, however, a difference between selling and shipping. As for Samsung’s numbers, these could be called into question to a certain extent because the company stopped divulging smartphone and tablet sales back in June, citing competition from Apple. Let’s not forget the mobile space is a fickle one and prone to seasonalities and that Apple could regain its crown during the holiday quarter. That’s not to say HTC’s lead in the United States isn’t well-deserved, quite the contrary…

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Dropping huge statues on the front lawn of their Mountain View campus has become something of a tradition for Google. Realizing the practice has evolved into something greater than a simple PR stunt, little wonder the company began using it to celebrate events other than major Android releases. For example, Google allowed its Doodle team members and friends to carve six giant pumpkins on the campus front lawn in celebration of this year’s Halloween.

The pumpkins were specially delivered from nearby Half Moon Bay and some weighed well over a thousand pounds. It took them eight hours to carve the pumpkins into the Google logo. Check it out in a time-lapse video above and make sure to sit through the end for the Halloween spirit surprise. Go past the break for a behind-the-scenes clip on Google’s giant pumpkin Halloween doodle.

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The new Motorola Droid Razr smartphone

Motorola Mobility, the handset maker in the process of becoming an integral part of Google in the stunning $12.5 billion takeover bid, will shed eight hundred jobs. The restructuring conveniently takes place ahead of the Google acquisition, reports Bloomberg. The move was approved October 24, as revealed in the company’s regulatory filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Job cuts will incur $31 million in related costs – to be recorded this quarter – and include $27 million severance pay and additional four million dollars in costs associated with facilities closures. The company’s spokeswoman Jennifer Weyrauch-Erickson said:

Motorola Mobility continues to focus on improving its financial performance by taking actions to manage the company’s costs.

The company last week reported $32 million in the September quarter losses, on sales of $3.3 billion stemming from quarterly shipments of 100,000 Xoom tablets and 4.8 million smartphones. The company doubled down on Android. Earlier this month they released the Droid Razr high-end Android device and last week said they planned to update their Android devices to Ice Cream Sandwich six week’s following the official release to OEMs.

When the proposed Google acquisition gets greenlighted by U.S. regulators, Motorola will become the search giant’s in-house smartphone design shop, allowing for fully integrated experiences as both the Android software and services and Motorola-designed hardware get developed and integrated under the same roof.

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Each year at CES the tech press goes abuzz with futuristic flexible displays, but the hype consequentially dies down as concepts fail to materialize in consumer products. Even Steve Jobs dismissed foldable display at the D8 conference, commenting on them as being “many, many years into the future”. But Samsung has been toying with flexible displays for some time and now they are about to mainstream the technology with consumer mobile products sporting bendable displays.

According to PCWorld, the South Korean conglomerate is “aiming to launch mobile phones with flexible displays next year”. The official confirmation came during a third-quarter earnings conference call with analyst, with spokesman Robert Yi saying:

The flexible display, we are looking to introduce sometime in 2012, hopefully the earlier part. The application probably will start from the handset side.

Flexible displays are rollable and bendable to adopt various curved appearances. They can even survive impacts from a hammer! How about your smartphone folding into a wrist watch?

International Business Times recently claimed Samsung was working on a Galaxy smartphone with a flexible AMOLED display, dubbed the Galaxy Skin. The AMOLED display uses plastic polyimide substrate instead of glass, which in itself allows for high flexibility. Microsoft, too, is betting on flexible displays in its vision of the post-PC future. Samsung Mobile Display showed off at CES 2011 a prototype of a 4.5-inch flexible AMOLED Display with electro activity polymer, seen below. Another clip right after the break.

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As hinted, Google today announced in a post over at the official Google TV blog a new version of their software for set-top boxes, based on Android Honeycomb. It features a simpler and customizable user interface, brand new app for browsing movies and television shows, an improved YouTube and search experience and Android Market with apps. The revamped interface offers the new customizable home screen where you can put your favorite content for quick access. Just like your other Android devices, you can now hit the “all apps” section on your Google television to access shortcuts to your apps.

Speaking of apps, Google says 50 developers are now working on porting existing smartphone or tablet apps or writing new ones specifically for Google TV. Programs requiring a touch screen, GPS or telephony won’t show up in Android Market on Google TV. The new YouTube experience makes it easier to enjoy high-definition clips posted to the popular video sharing service, allowing you to turn any topic into a channel and supporting Google TV search.

Also new is the TV & Movies built-in app used to browse through 80,000 movies and TV episodes across cable or satellite, Netflix, Amazon, YouTube and many other video sources on the web – and it comes with an opt-in recommendations engine. The new Google TV software drops on Sony set-top boxes “starting early next week” and Logitech boxes “soon thereafter”, the search company confirmed.

Interesting that the compatible hardware is ready, but will have to wait for an over-the-air update. For example, Logitech’s Revues boxes with Honeycomb stickers have been spotted in stores. Check out more juicy screenies and demo clips below the fold.

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Samsuing today announced earnings for the three-month period between July and September. The South Korean conglomerate said operating profit from its telecom division more than doubled on an annual basis, hitting a record 2.52 trillion won, or about $2.2 billion, while sales grew 37 percent. The figure amounted for 60 percent of the company’s total profit of 4.25 trillion won, or about $3.85 billion. Total profits for the conglomerate shrank 23 percent year over year due to a broader slowdown in the memory chips market. Samsung’s semiconductor unit benefited from strong demand for chips used in its own Galaxy devices and rival Apple’s iOS gadgets. Total revenue for the quarter climbed three percent to 41.27 trillion won, or $37.35 billion.

“Despite the difficult business environment due to the economic slowdown in developed markets, Samsung achieved a solid performance and recovered its double-digit operating profit margin in the quarter, driven by strong sales of our smartphones,” said Robert Yi, Vice President and Head of Investor Relations.

Samsung stopped divulging smartphone and tablet shipments in July for competitive reasons, but highlighted that its flagship Galaxy SII smartphone sold more than 10 million units in the five months since its introduction. Strategy Analytics estimated Samsung’s smartphone shipments for the quarter at 27.8 million units, up nearly four times from a year ago and a 44 percent sequential growth. Samsung’s share of the global smartphone market was an estimated 23.8 percent in the third quarter versus 14.8 percent for Apple. How things change fast in the mobile world.

Apple for the first time this year missed Street expectations after shipping 17.07 million iPhones in the September quarter. Even though Apple’s iPhone performance represents a 21 percent unit growth over the year-ago period, it’s also a 16 percent quarterly decline from the 20.34 million iPhones they shipped in the July quarter, beating Nokia and Samsung to emerge as the #1 smartphone maker. Apple suffered a blow as customers postponed their purchases in anticipation of a new iPhone model.

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Pictured in the image above is a revamped search interface for tablets Google’s been tinkering with. According to the Google Operating System blog, tweaks include a new settings button below the search box that lets you disable SafeSearch and use the advanced search filters. Another prominent change: The most popular search silos are now lined up right below the search box rather than being tucked away under the More menu. This lets you re-use your search term to retrieve web results, images, videos and news with a single tap. The new horizontal layout also suggests that Google could soon retire the lefthand side navigation links which are still present in desktop search. A change for the better, if you ask us.

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Employees chilling out at Google’s Mountain View headquarters in California.

Google’s spending on acquisitions has gone up this year, a 10-Q filing with that Securities and Exchange Commission revels. Last year, the Mountain View, California-headquartered search Goliath acquired 48 companies. This year, however, Google already through September snapped up 57 startup in a move to strengthen its portfolio of services and expand into new areas. A textbook example: Google’s $700 million purchase of travel data company ITA Software Inc. in April, which later led to the launch of the new Travel Search service in select cities.

In September, Google acquired restaurant review guide maker Zagat for $151 million. That transaction gave the company a huge foothold in local and put the likes of Yelp and Open Table on the defensive. The Zagat move should enable Google to improve its Offers service. Google also in the same month bought another bargain offering property, German-based DailyDeal, for $114 million and in August become the owner of San Francisco-based startup Dealmap in exchange for an unknown sum. Dealmap is a daily deal service with over two million users that aggregates nearby offers on a map.

The search company  also grabbed real-time bidding platform Admeld for $400 million. The service lets publishers sell ad inventory in real-time, to the highest bidder, making it a natural fit for Google’s Doubleclick for Publishers, which is part of their Publisher tools. Google is reportedly eyeing InterDigital for their patents (Samsung and others are also potential bidders) and is believed to be in talks to acquire Hulu for a sum unknown. Heck, even a potential Yahoo! takeover by Google is on the table.

Don’t forget that the $1.4 billion includes Google’s spending on acquisitions through September. That being said, and with three more months to go, Google is likely to acquire a few more companies before the year ends.

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Trevor Prideaux, pictured above, was born without his left arm, but that doesn’t stop him from enjoying his smartphone, perhaps more than most. Rather than despair, Mr. Prideaux, who works as catering manager, decided to think different. He arranged with his medical team to contact Nokia and float an interesting idea calling for a specially designed prosthetic arm with a phone-shaped cradle carved out. That way, Mr. Prideaux can use his Nokia C7 touchscreen phone comfortably rather than juggle with it.

He told The Telegraph:

I think this is the first time this has ever been done in the world – and it is brilliant.

We think it’s exciting that some companies out there are willing to go extra mile and adapt their tech in order to help disabled individuals get thins done. Kudos to Mr. Prideaux for having the guts and willingness to fight bureaucracy and push his idea. Here’s to the hoping that other vendors will pay notice and provide phone accessories that can be used comfortably with artificial limbs.

Also, maybe while they are in there, they could throw in extended life batteries and some dope speakers with a decent sub.

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Ice Cream Sandwich, the latest version of Google’s mobile operating system meant for both smartphones and tablets, will support the previous-generation Nexus S smartphone in addition to the forthcoming Galaxy Nexus device manufactured by Samsung for Google, the search giant confirmed. However, owners of the original Nexus One smartphone, which had been manufactured by Taiwan’s HTC Corporation as Google’s showcase Android phone in January 2010, will be left out in the cold because that device is not powerful enough to run the latest Android software, The Telegraph reported today.

Google’s Hugo Barra told the paper that Ice Cream Sandwich will drop as a free software update for the existing Nexus S handset “within weeks”, shortly after the latest Galaxy Nexus device lands on store shelves in November. Realistically, there are some limits as to which software can perform well in a satisfactory manner on older devices. MG Siegler pointed out that the iPhone 3GS is seven months older than the Nexus One and yet it runs the iOS 5 software. However, it should be points out that Apple is routinely leaving out older-generation devices with its mobile operating system revisions.

iOS 5, the latest version Apple released for public consumption earlier this month, does not run at all on the original iPhone or iPhone 3G. Even though it does run on iOS 5, it should be noted that some high-end features are not supported on that handset because the hardware is just not up to the task. Apple also intentionally limits some software features to the latest hardware for marketing purposes. Search assistant Siri, for example, is an iPhone 4S exclusive.

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Coldplay, a British alternative rock band which sold over 50 million albums, will be performing today at the American Express UNSTAGED event. YouTube and VEVO have joined forces to bring you a real-time stream of the performance, scheduled to begin at 1pm PT today. The official YouTube blog mentions that “this is the first time UNSTAGED series has streamed from an international venue, and fans from Argentina to Zimbabwe will be able to tune in and watch”.

If you’re a Coldplay fan, don’t forget to tune in at youtube.com/ColdplayVEVO. Coldplay was also one of favorite contemporary bands of Apple’s recently deceased co-founder Steve Jobs. No wonder the company invited them to perform for employees at the October 19 private memorial at Apple’s Cupertino, California corporate campus. That 20-minute performance can be seen embedded right below. Go past the fold for Coldplay’s “Shiver” music video.

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Google today announced in a blog post that the stable version of Chrome 15 is now available for download for Windows, Mac, Linux and Chrome Frame. You should have been auto-updated by now, but you can always check for updates manually by choosing About Google Chrome from the Chrome menu bar. This version of Chrome adds more than a dozen tweaks, under-the-hood improvements, the obligatory bug fixes and goodies for end users, the most notable being a redesigned New Tab page. The new Tab Page, the company explained in a separate blog post, features rethought layout which is more streamlined and easier to navigate. Granted, this tweaked interface is pretty clever and a pleasure to use.

Big app icons are still front and center, grouped according to your choosing at the window’s bottom. You can switch between the Most Visited, Recently Closed and Apps sections or rename a section by double-clicking its name. In addition, you can move your apps around and reorganize them just like your smartphone’s home screen icons. This includes “swiping” between different home screens by clicking the arrow icon, moving apps between the home screens and creating a new home screen by dragging an app to the bottom area of the page where you sections reside. In previous version, you would remove a web app from Chrome by right-clicking its icon on the New Tab Page and selecting Remove from Chrome.

A quicker way of uninstalling Chrome web apps is now available: Begging dragging an app icon and the “Remove from Chrome” trash can icon will automatically appear in the lower-right hand corner. Just drag your app onto this icon to trash it. Accompanying this Chrome update, Google today also updated its Chrome Web Store with a matching new look combining web apps and themes and featuring the sticky lefthand category pane, handy item overlays, a brand new reviews interface that links to the Google+ profile of each reviewer and more.

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The new clean look of Chrome Web Store. Click for larger

Google has quietly slipped a redesign of its app store for Chrome web apps. The new Chrome Web Store look (above) adopts a much cleaner layout than its predecessor (below). No longer are various store sections scattered all over the place. Instead, the redesign calls for all store features aligned vertically in the lefthand navigation pane, offering a one-click access to any category no matter what you’re currently browsing. Consistent with the broader changes in other Google properties, your account name is now in the upper right corner.

The store is a true web app: It’s zippy, has infinite scrolling and sports big screenshots to really bring items to life. Also cool is the use of overlays to open extension pages. The new look is being rolled out and it may take a while before it becomes available. If you don’t see it yet, check that you are logged in with your Google Account. The new interface works in the Chrome browser so expect and the old version will load when accessing the store with a browser other than Google’s.

Chrome Web Store expanded to 24 new countries last month and sixteen new markets a month earlier. The ten-month-old project is now available in 55 countries around the world and it hosts web apps which accept in-app payments with a flat five percent fee.

The old Chrome Web Store look.

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UPDATE: It’s official now.

Blogger, Google’s blogging service, is about to get Google+ features, just like Gmail, the main Google.com search page and the Google login page, to name a few. TechCrunch discovered a message in the “Edit User Profile” section of Blogger’s Settings which reads:

Connect Blogger to Google+ : Use your Google profile and get access to upcoming Google+ features on Blogger.

The Learn More and Get Started help links were dead at post time, but the latter’s URL indicates you will be able to drop your Blogger profile altogether and opt for your Google Profile instead, a prudent move consistent with the search company’s recent moves. Google+ will likely obsolete the Friend Connect part of the Blogger service as well.

Google is also gearing up to integrate Google+ with both Reader and Google Apps and is rumored to launch a new music download service with social sharing features within the next two weeks. Google’s vice president of product Brad Horowitz said at AllThingD’s AsiaD Conference last week that Google+ features will eventually roll out to Google’s every property. He said the company “shipped the plus”, remarking “We have yet to ship the ‘Google’”.

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The Wall Street Journal reported this morning that the search giant could launch “within the next two weeks” a rumored music service dubbed Google Music that would tie with the Google+ social network to recommend songs to users, along with the ability to download individual tracks:

Users of Google Music, as the service is tentatively named, could recommend songs in an online library to Google+ contacts, who in turn would be allowed to listen to those songs once for free. The songs would then be available for sale as MP3 downloads, probably for around the usual 99 cents each. Executives at Google have told people in the music industry that they plan to start the music-download service this week or next week, even though they are unlikely to secure the rights to sell music from at least two of the four major label groups in time. The song-recommendation feature would work only for music released by record labels with Google agreements in place.

EMI could support Google’s music service at launch and Vivendi is currently in talks. Sony and Warner are unlikely to have agreements in place in time for the launch. In addition, “two organizations representing independent record labels also were close to Google Music deals” people familiar with the matter told the Journal.

If it launches, a music service from Google is sure to step on Apple’s toes. Apple has long dominated the digital music landscape. The company in the September quarter sold 6.62 million iPods, a 27 percent annual units decline due to iPhone cannibalization. However, Apple’s music player, which on Sunday turned ten, still holds 70 percent of all MP3 music players sold in the United States, with the iPod touch constituting over half of all iPods sold. iTunes remains the world’s largest music retailer with a total of 16 billion song downloads to date north of 60 percent of digital song downloads in the US.

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When Asus chairman Jonney Shih sat opposite the Wall Street Journal columnist Walt Mossberg at the AsiaD conference saying his company was taking Android seriously, he wasn’t kidding. The Eee Pad Transformer Prime, the successor to his company’s Eee Pad Transformer tablet, will run Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich.

However, the device will have Android 3.2 pre-installed when it ships shortly and will be upgradeable to Ice Cream Sandwich via a software update, which will be arriving by the year’s end, DigiTimes reports:

The first batch of Transformer Prime tablets will run on Android 3.2 before migrating to Android 4.0 by the end of 2011, said Shih, who unveiled the new tablet at the All Things Digital (AsiaD) technology forum being held in Hong Kong from October 19-21.

Like its predecessor, the 10-inch Eee Pad Transformer Prime functions as a tablet which can be docked to a keyboard attachment that turns it into a full-fledged notebook replacement. It is powered by Nvidia’s latest quad-core chip dubbed Kal-El and the company recently released a nice-looking teaser announcing its imminent arrival. They used advanced material processing so the device features high-quality chassis crafted from aluminum. The keyboard dock is understood to include a touch panel and expansion slots.

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Here’s something you don’t see every day. It’s pretty awesome so we thought we should share this with you. What you see in the clip above is a kit consisting of an ARM-powered robot called CubeStormer II which is hooked to a Samsung Galaxy S II smartphone which runs a custom Android app. The software acts as the robot’s brain and uses the phone’s back camera to capture live video of the Rubic’s cube. It analyzes footage and features color recognition to determine the exact location of each colored square. The results are passed to the ingenious Cube Explorer app that solves the puzzle and issues the commands to the robotic arms

It’s really breathtaking seeing the robot solve the Rubik’s Cube puzzle rapidly and faster than any human. In fact, it even beats the human world record set by Feliks Zemdegs who had a best time of 5.66 seconds at the Melbourne Winter Open 2011 solving a 3×3×3 Rubik’s Cube. The speedcuber, as it’s nicknamed, is the brain child of one Mike Dobson who designed, built and programmed the thing.

If you want to see it in action, don’t miss the ARM TechCon 2011 which runs October 26 and 27 in Santa Clara, California. Another video after the break depicts the original CubeStormer robot which was much bulkier and slower than the new version. Also, more information and interesting details about the robot’s construction and design.

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