9to5 Staff

Software maker Microsoft is putting up a strong opposition to Google’s intentions to buy a wireless patent portfolio belonging to the now bankrupt Canadian telecommunications firm Nortel, arguing that any new owner of the intellectual property should honor their existing “worldwide, perpetual, royalty-free license to all of Nortel’s patents”, reports Reuters.

Under the terms of that sale agreement, which will likely face competing bids from many of the world’s largest tech companies, Google would be given the right to terminate existing agreements.

Google in April announced intentions to bid $900 million on Nortel’s patent trove, the move some deemed as the search giant’s attempt to buy its way out of patent mess related to Android.

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Native editing is coming to the Google Docs app for Android, in addition to “lots and lots of improvements”

Members of the Google Docs team have revealed some interesting new features slated for an upcoming revision of Google’s online office suite which is due soon. Product managers Scott Johnston, Jeff Harris and Ronald Ho plus engineer DJ Lee and community manager Teresa Wu described some of the new features in a Q&A session with Reddit readers (via Business Insider). For starters, .txt previews are coming back to Google Docs. Next, cloud printing via Cloud Print will be supported across platforms and through browsers other than Google’s own Chrome. Go past the break for more new stuff, including Cloud Connect, offline editing and Android app improvements.

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As of yesterday, Toshiba’s 10-inch Android tablet dubbed the Thrive is available for pre-order from the online Toshiba store and Office Depot, starting at $430 for the entry-level eight gigabyte version. The 16GB and 32GB versions will set you back $450 and $570, respectively.

As we previously informed you, the Thrive runs stock Android Honeycomb 3.1 software and has full-sized USB and HDMI ports allowing you to attach a plethora of USB-compatible peripherals, from thumb drives, mice and keyboard to printers, digital cameras and camcorders. Other features include a microSD card slot, a swappable battery and slim profile measuring just 0.66 inches.
[vodpod id=Video.10981375&w=425&h=350&fv=]

T-Mobile’s G2 with Google, a successor to the wildly popular G1, an inaugural Android smartphone, has been discontinued after short eight months on the market. TmoNews spotted a change in T-Mobile’s inventory system which lists the device as “discontinued” – that is, no longer available for replenishment – since June 6. Released in October of 2010, the G2 featured stock Android experience, a slide-out QWERTY keyboard and HSPA+ modem enabling T-Mobile USA to market the phone as 4G-capable.

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IHS iSuppli has dissected and analyzed the Series 5 Chromebook from Samsung Electronics, estimating the cost of components that go into the product at $332.12. The total cost to produce the Chromebook is $334.32 after the $12.20 manufacturing cost. BOM excludes other costs associated with bringing the product to market, such as research and development, packaging, marketing, merchandising, software, licensing, royalties, administrative and transportation costs, cost of sale and what not.

“The Chromebook’s focus on providing a compelling user experience has resulted in the inclusion of some advanced hardware features not typically found in low-cost notebooks”, iSuppli noted. The 12.1-inch computer sports a sealed battery providing eight hours of run time on a single charge. Like the MacBook Air, the Samsung Series 5 Chromebook is designed around 16GB of all-flash storage for instant-on performance and includes 2GB of RAM. A teardown analysis by iFixit revealed a dual-core 1.66GHz Atom N570 processor and Intel’s NM10 graphics chip.

The priciest component?

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Following Delta Airlines and Alaska Airlines pilots testing in-flight use of iPads, Samsung today announced that American Airlines will feature the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 in their premium cabins. American Airlines will deploy six thousand Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 units onboard select flights beginning later this year which will

replace the airline’s current personal entertainment device in American’s premium cabins on transcontinental flights between New York’s JFK and Los Angeles, JFK and San Francisco, and Miami and Los Angeles served with 767-200 and 767-300 aircraft; international flights to and from Europe and South America served with 767-300 aircraft; and transcontinental flights departing from Boston to Los Angeles served with 757 aircraft.

Although American Airlines has a flight-checking app on the App Store and offers an in-flight video streaming service to its iPad-using customers, they have not rolled out Apple’s device on commercial flights yet.

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Google is leveraging Chrome’s extensive support for the latest HTML5 spec to roll out interesting new features that are available first on their own browser first, like dropping file attachments directly onto the Gmail compose window. The latest version of Chrome has enabled another nice perk, the ability to paste images from your system clipboard into the Gmail compose window.

Just copy an image from your favorite image editing program, a web page, another email message or any other source and paste it right into your Gmail message using the standard CTRL + V shortcut (Command + V on Macs). You’ll need to wait a while until the image uploads, depending on your screen resolution. Daniel Cheng, a Google software engineer wrote in a blog post that the new feature is especially handy for passing screenshots…

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A SPDY session in Chrome

Google-developed SPDY protocol (pronounced “SPeeDY”), an optimized hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP), was unveiled in late 2009 as part of the “Let’s make the web faster” initiative. In Layman’s terms, instead of opening several dumb connections SPDY uses a single connection between the server and the user’s browser. It intelligently delivers the files that make up web pages while allowing web developers to prioritize more important pieces like the user interface code and graphics over article images (more technicalities here).

Currently, Chrome is the only browser with built-in support for SPDY and today arrives the first commercial implementation of the protocol via Strangeloop’s Site Optimizer, a software tool that analyzes websites for bottlenecks. According to Technology Review, the protocol has sped up websites by ten to twenty percent:

At first, this will only make a difference for people who visit websites using Google’s Chrome browser (the only one that supports SDPY), but Strangeloop expects that it could end up having a big impact on mobile devices as well, since Google is likely to build SPDY into browsers designed for Android.

Transactional web sites like Amazon could benefit greatly from more speed as it translates into higher sales. Other vendors have not updated their browsers with SPDY support, giving Chrome competitive edge, but also derailing the search giant’s plans to make SPDY an industry standard. Google cites lab tests pitting performance of web apps over HTTP and SPDY, claiming a 64 percent reductions in page load times in SPDY. Another notable benchmark after the break…

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With an IDC-estimated 10.8 million units shipped during the first quarter of this year, Samsung files as the world’s fourth-largest smartphone vendor, behind Nokia, Apple and BlackBerry maker Research In Motion. However, the rising popularity of Samsung’s feature phones and dumb handsets powered by their own operating system called Bada has helped the Korean phone maker capture the #2 slot in terms of all handset units shipped globally.

Samsung was outdone only by Nokia in the first quarter. According to IDC’s Worldwide Mobile Phone Tracker, Samsung shipped 70 million handset units during the first quarter of this year versus the 108.5 million Nokia phones. With 18.7 million iPhones Apple came in fourth, behind LG Electronics which shipped 24.5 million handsets. That was last quarter…

The global handset landscape is going to alter rapidly by the June quarter’s end, predicts Japanese research firm Nomura. Their analyst was quoted as saying that “Nokia looks set to relinquish its smartphone crown (in unit terms) to Samsung and Apple”. This means, their analyst argues, that Nokia will be #3, with Samsung and Apple taking the #1 and #2 slots, respectively. Mind you, Nokia has been the world’s top handset maker since 1996…

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Finally, Google is adding device compatibility checks to its mobile bazaar. This much-needed feature checks system requirements of an app you want to download against your device hardware and software information. As a result, you can tell whether that latest game or entertainment app supports your device before you download. This should also help eradicate problems with non-techies downloading programs that are not designed for their device or don’t run very well. The enhancement is being rolled out as we speak, AndroidCentral claims.

As if there has ever been any doubt that Chrome OS would eventually run on tablets, developer François Beaufort has discovered a number of touch-related tweaks in the latest Chromium browser build. And because enhancements from the Chromium project usually trickle down to the Chrome browser and Chrome OS, it is very likely that Google is accelerating tablet plans – especially with Microsoft’s Windows 8 now in the picture. “I compiled Touch UI version of Chromium to see how it looked like”, Beaufort wrote in a Google Buzz post. As you can see from the screenshots (two more below the fold), the Chrome interface has been optimized for touch-based input…

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Gmail was the most widely used Google Apps service for Brown University (above), but Chat tops the customer satisfaction charts (below)

Brown University conducted a telling survey in May, asking some 1,100 students and faculty/staff members to evaluate Brown’s migration to Google Apps for Education eighteen months ago. Like everywhere, Gmail was the service of choice for a whopping 98 percent of the respondents, but satisfaction index for Chat – used by two-thirds of the respondents – topped the charts: 99 percent for Chat versus Gmail’s 90 percent. Nearly five out of five undergraduate, graduate and professional student respondents were “Very Satisfied” or “Satisfied” with Google’s web-based email.

Google Sites was less popular, having been used by one in three respondents. Docs and Calendar were used by the respectable 85 percent and 79 percent of the respondents, respectively. Most frequently used apps on a daily basis? Gmail (97 percent), Calendar (60 percent), Chat (33 percent), Documents (29 percent) and Sites (eight percent). And when issues rose, nearly half the respondents sought answers on Google’s official help pages and Google search.

More food for thought and four additional pretty charts bellow.

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At a Sprint press conference which took place half an hour ago, Motorola pledged to launch more than ten new wireless gizmos this year, including the flagship Motorola Photon 3G and Motorola Triumph smartphones. The Photon 4G files as Motorola’s first 4G device and the Triumph is their first Virgin Mobile USA device.

The Photon 4G, pictured above and available this summer, sports a dual-core 1GHz Tegra 2 chip from Nvidia, a 4.3-inch qHD display, dual cameras and a kickstand. The device runs Android 2.3 Gingerbread, features international GSM capabilities and has the Motorola webtop application that lets you access desktop-class applications while hooked up with a Motorola accessory dock. Go past the break for the Triumph info and official specs.

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According to All Things D, T-Mobile USA is partnering with games service WildTangent on Android game rentals costing 25 cents per day. The game service draws from WildTangent’s service for PCs which has 25 million active users. Due later this year, it will come preloaded on select Android device and support carrier billing. T-Mobile USA is even attended the E3 show in Los Angeles this week, a first-ever for the company, to promote the initiative.

The idea here is to try games before you buy them, similar to the Android Market’s 15-minute refund policy and Google’s try-before-you-buy system. If you later buy the game, the 25-cent charge is applied against your purchase. The system is designed around the WildCoins virtual currency costing between four to ten bucks a month. Purchased WildCoins can be then used to pay for game rentals and in-game micropayments.

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You will be soon able to take full advantage of Google Maps Navigation with your Android smartphone while offline thanks to new caching capabilities, the Dutch site All About Phones reported, citing “an informed source”. Of course, Google Maps has had offline caching via HTML5 since last year, but this only remembers map tiles you’ve accessed rather than the whole map. As a result, there’s no easy way to plot a new route without being connected to the network. That will change soon, the source hints…

The new mode should enable full offline navigation, the story goes. In its present incarnation, Google Maps Navigation provides automatic rerouting when outside network coverage, but only after you’ve begun a route. Without going into much detail, the source basically says that Google will remove the requirement for network coverage plus cache more data, allowing you to navigate to a new destination when outside your network coverage. The publication quoted a parts supplier for Android smartphones who told them that Google plans on rolling out the new full offline navigation via a Google Maps Navigation app update, due this summer.

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We got our review unit  yesterday, but today marks the release of Samsung’s first production Chromebook called the Samsung Series 5. The teardown experts over at iFixit have been quick to dismantle the computer and peek under its hood. Their teardown analysis paints the Series 5 machine as “a well-polished version of the rather imperfect Cr-48 prototype Chromebook”. This means that the Series 5 improves on the Cr-48’s clunky trackpad and mediocre battery life, iFixit explained.

The Series 5 fixes the major shortfalls of the Cr-48 and adds the polish necessary to strike lust into the heart of a broad consumer base: sleek looks, 8+ hours of battery life, and optimized performance.

They gave the notebook a decent 6 out of 10 Repairability Score. What about the innards?

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Google has updated the stable Chrome channel with new security, privacy and graphics acceleration enhancement. Carrying a build number of 12.0.742.91, Google’s browser now warns you before downloading certain malicious files “without Chrome or Google ever having to know about the URLs you visit or the files you download”, software engineer Adrienne Walker explained in a post on the Chrome blog.

The team has also advanced Chrome’s GPU-assisted hardware acceleration to include 3D CSS elements on Mac OS X Snow Leopard and Windows Vista or later. Finally, Google has worked closely with Adobe to provide greater control over local storage for Flash Player’s Local Shared Objects directly from Chrome’s settings, without having to visit a special page on Adobe’s site to tweak your settings . Thanks to Chrome’s silent updating mechanism, your copy of Chrome will automatically update itself to the latest stable version available. If not, choose About Google Chrome from the wrench menu.

Cross-posted on 9to5Mac.com

Check out GPU-acceleration improvements in the “Shaun the Sheep” Chrome experiment which lets you rotate and scale the video, disable or enable cool reflections and more.

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With all three players having introduced their respective music lockers in the skies, we can now pit their respective offerings against each other. The above chart is from paidContent which opined that “Apple doesn’t always get it right the first time” before observing that in iTunes “syncing should be faster and easier” while “song quality may get a boost”.

Apple yesterday took the wraps off iTunes Match, a new feature that scans all your music (regardless of sources) to make matching songs instantly available using iCloud. “With 18 million songs we’re most likely to have what you got”, Jobs said at yesterday’s unveiling. He noted that Apple will automatically upgrade all matching songs to 256Kbps AAC. On the downside, you cannot stream songs with iCloud – yeah, you read that right. What that means is you have to download each iCloud song that is not saved on your iOS device before you can listen to it. What else should you know?

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A team of Italian designers have beatten Motorola to the Android wristwatch punch with an interesting-looking device dubbed  i’mWatch. Mike Elgan reports that the deviec runs an ARM9 IM233 chip and has 64MB RAM.

One of the i’mWatch’s features is that it relays information from incoming phone calls, even if you have an iPhone (which, if you want this watch, you don’t have…)

Google last week updated their mobile search page on Android and iOS devices with visual tweaks, including quick access to multiple searches via handy tabs, enlarged icons that provide an easier access to search silos and more. It looks like another face-lift has been recently rolled out. Now when you run a search at m.google.com, a small magnifying icon appears next to each item on the search results page. Tapping it takes you to full-screen so you can flip through big beautiful thumbnails one screen at a time. Each thumbnail is a live preview of what the site looks like and is accompanied by a shortened description that normally appears on the search page. It looks kinda cool, like a cross between Reader Play and Fast Flip.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtXZXhTpywY?rel=0]

Motorola’s upcoming handsets are leaking all over the web. The latest? How about three guided tour videos showing off the various features of the upcoming Droid 3 smartphone? The Droid brand has done very well reviving Motorola’s ailing phone business while putting Android on the map and Motorola Mobility recently refreshed the brand with the Droid X2 launch on the Verizon Network. With the third incarnation of the smartphone that started the Android craze Motorola is hoping to woe consumers with more oomph, a continuation of the strategy which has served them well thus far. Check out two more Droid 3 videos below the fold…

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