9to5 Staff

Image via PCWorld.com

(Cross-posted on 9to5Mac.com)

Samsung will next week demo a new LCD display technology that will put future tablets in the Retina Display realm. Developed by Samsung’s subsidiary Nouvoyance, the new WQXGA 10.1-inch display stuns with a whopping 2560-by-1600 pixel resolution. Take a deep breath – that’s more pixels than on your 27-inch iMac and double the pixel count on full HD displays.

It uses PenTile RGBW technology that consumes 40 percent less power, a statement claims. Samsung will show off this tech at the SID Display Week 2011 International Symposium next week. The company expects to have commercial availability of this technology for tablet applications later this year.

At screen size and resolution this large the display features a pixel density of 300 pixels per inch – enough to file as a Retina Display. Apple says that 300 pixels-per-inch is the limit of the human retina where the eye is unable to distinguish between the individual pixels, meaning curves appear smooth and continuous rather than jagged and pixelated. It’s widely accepted that the next iPad will sport Retina Display technology which was first inaugurated ten months ago on iPhone 4.

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(Cross-posted on 9to5Mac.com)

A new episodic update to movie tie-in Angry Birds Rio has just went live, bringing more marmoset mauling action happening on the Copacabana beach, new secrets and more juicy Golden Fruit. Android fans can get it free from Amazon Appstore for Android and a bit later via Android Market and GetJar. They’ve also launched a new pre-order web shop for upcoming Angry Birds merchandise at comingsoon.angrybirds.com and released Angry Birds Rio Samba, a 99-cent iTunes single based on the game’s music theme. More info and the Copacabana beach episode trailer right below the fold.

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Looks like a guy in the above image has a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 hooked up to his MacBook Air. I bet he’s manually dropping some files from the Mac notebook to his brand spanking new tablet, which is easy because Android devices mount as external USB storage.

That’s pretty much everything he can do, though. That is, unless he was using Eltima Software’s SyncMate, an all-around syncing application for the Mac. It’s been around for ages and in most recent version they added support for Android devices. Read on…

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiYND_zvIc0&w=670&h=400]

The entire hour-long presentation is now available on YouTube for your viewing pleasure.

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(Cross-posted on 9to5Mac.com)

Here at San Francisco’s Moscone West, the Google I/O 2011 keynote has just wrapped up. Being their most important annual pilgrimage for developers, the show is a launchpad for important new products and announcements. For some people, the biggest news is that popular Angry Birds franchise is now available for the most popular platform of all – the web.

Joining Google’s senior vice president of Chrome Sundar Pichai on stage was Peter Vesterbacka, the CEO of Espoo, Finland-based multi-million dollar Angry Birds developer Rovio Mobile. Wearing a red Angry Birds sweatshirt, Vesterbacka announced that the Angry Birds web app is now available on the Chrome Web Store.

The web version taps several new Chrome capabilities to ensure smooth experience one would expect from a native version. “It’s one of the best we’ve built to date,” Vesterbacka quipped as he cut through several levels of Angry Birds with ease. More information and three screenies right after the break.

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Chromebooks, the just announced notebooks optimized to run Chrome OS, will benefit from new features in Chrome OS. When Google introduced Chrome OS a year ago, many people wondered how useful the upcoming notebooks would be the software’s clunky handling of external storage, your documents and other items. Google has been perfecting Chrome OS with these specific concerns in mind and today they dispelled myths that Chromebooks won’t be a fit for the average Joe Schmuck.

First up, Chrome OS has built-in players for music and video that show your content in a panel form factor by default. You can, however, take your video to fullscreen with a simple click. Another sought-after feature is a file manager that pops up when you slide a USB thumb drive or other peripherals to a Chromebook. But what about photos?

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Sundar Pichai, senior vice president of Chrome, has just announced two cool Chrome notebooks up on stage here at Google I/O 2011. He used a new word to describe them – Chromebooks. Add that to your vocabulary, I have a feeling we’re gonna use it a lot moving forward.

Samsung’s 12.1-inch Chromebook, shown above, has eight-hour battery and sports instant-on performance, like Apple’s MacBook Air, with eight-second boot time.

Acer’s machine, seen below, has a 11.6-inch display, 6.5-hour battery and also boots in just eight seconds. So, how much will those beauties cost you?

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Google just said at Day Two Keynote that users have installed 70 million web apps found in the Chrome Web Store in the first three months. To put things in perspective, Google said Chrome has been downloaded 160 million times worldwide so far. The store is also available in 40 new languages as of today.

The company also introduced a simple way to enable one-click purchases withing web apps themselves, via Google Checkout. So, what’s the deal? Unlike Apple which takes 30 percent cut on iTunes content sales or in-app purchases, Google said it would take just five percent. “We at google felt we can do a little better”, a Google engineer said during the keynote in a hint at Apple’s 70:30 revenue sharing deal.

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In addition to a whopping 160 million Chrome downloads so far, up from 70 million a year earlier, Google shared some interesting stats related to their live video feed of the keynote. Yesterday’s keynote had been viewed by 60,00 simultaneous users, topping 600,000 people at its peek. Currently, Day Two Keynote is underway. You can tune in at a dedicated Google I/O Live – it’s the next best thing to being there in person. Alternatively, check out live YouTube channel.

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Sundar Pichai, senior vice president of Chrome, just said that the Chrome browser now has more than 160 million Chrome users worldwide, more than doubling the application’s 70 million-strong user base just a year ago. We are officially impressed!

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(Cross-posted on 9to5Mac.com)

Just sayin’…

It’s a familiar scene. MacBook-toting journalists, bloggers and guests providing Apple with omnipresence and free advertising at rivals’ events, thanks in large part to the glowing Apple logo on the well-designed notebook family. Who knows, this time next year some of these folks might carry around machines with the Google logo on them if there’s any substance to the whispers of subscription-based Chrome OS notebooks. Check out seven additional Apple sightings below the fold and meet us in comments.

Check out the sticker: “My other computer is a data center”. Touche.

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Google I/O Day Two Keynote is set to begin at 9:30 here at the San Francisco’s Moscone West. Yesterday’s was all about Android and today we will learn what’s in store for the Chrome browser and the Chrome operating system for notebooks. According to Forbes, Google will announce a $20 a month hardware subscription option for Chrome OS notebooks.

Instead of dropping a couple of hundred dollars upfront, you’ll be able to get a free Chrome OS machine as long as you continue paying twenty bucks a month to Google. The offering will include both the hardware and the accompanying cloud services and will be targeted at students, a Google source told the publication. That could put Apple, the leader in education, in an uneasy position. The Forbes piece says nothing about hardware refresh cycles or a possible 3G/4G connection bundle.

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A lot of interesting news came up during yesterday’s Android-focused keynote. We’ve processed key announcements for you, but there’s a whole bunch of tidbits and nice-to-knows that came in yesterday’s keynote. As we await Chrome OS-related Day Two Keynote, why not watch the entire video footage from yesterday? It’s embedded below the fold or available over at YouTube.

The hour long presentation includes a bunch of Google engineers giving cool on-stage demos, in addition to key executives like the Android head Andy Rubin and vice president of software engineering Vic Gundotra. Hint: Scrub to mark 2:10 for an amusing anti-Apple moment. You can also rewatch the Google I/O 2011 countdown, in case you missed it. Google will provide real-time video stream of Day Two Keynote, which is scheduled for Wednesday, May 11, at 9:30am Pacific time.

(Left) Software engineering head Vic Gundotra sits in the front row as his colleagues demo new Android features (Right) Audience members comparing their slates

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Hot on the heels of a plethora of yesterday’s Android announcements, Google has launched a new site aimed at app developers. In a nod at “The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, a sci-fi comedy series by Douglas Adams, the company named it “The Guide to the App Galaxy by Google”.

Available here, this useful new place is meant to “help app developers, regardless of platform, build a business on mobile – whether they’ve just launcher their first app or are looking for additional tips as they grow their portfolio“, Google says. Resources include Google’s AdMob network to promote apps via paid campaigns or cross-promote apps within one’s own portfolio.

It’s all about monetizing lazy users who aren’t keen keen on paying for Android apps as much as their iOS counterparts. In addition to the freemium model, the site notes, developers will benefit from better understanding of the ways to monetize users with in-app adverts and in-app purchases as opposed to one-time paid downloads.

Hint: Use the arrow keys on your keyboard to navigate the spaceship through the site.

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(Cross-posted on 9to5Mac.com)

Bud Tribble, Apple’s long-time vice president of software engineering, testified before a US Senate subcommittee yesterday alongside Google’s US director of public policy Alan Davidson. The two executives fielded questions from Senators related to privacy issues and the practice of location data gathering via mobile devices running iOS and Android software.

Senator Charles Schumer said he was having issues with apps like Buzz’d and Fuzz Alert and expressed his disappointment that neither Apple nor Google pulled down those programs yet, even though RIM did. He suggested Google looks “narrowly” at third-party programs which help avoid police DUI checkpoints.

You agree that it is a terrible thing, and it probably causes death.

Challenged by Senator Schumer, Apple’s Tribble said his company is “looking into” the legality of DUI apps.

We’re in the process of looking into it — we have a policy that we don’t allow apps that encourage illegal activity. If the apps intent is to encourage people to break the law, then we will pull it. I will take that back.

Both Apple and Google have been asked to provide more detailed answers within 30 days, This is my next reported. Makes you wonder what’s next – going after benign programs that assess your driving skills?

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If you missed big announcements from today’s Google I/O 2011 keynote, don’t sweat – here’s your recap of key takeaways. Google executives first touted 100 million Android activations so far and about 400,000 new devices being activated each day. Other mind-boggling stats include 200,000 free and paid applications on Android Market and 4.5 billion downloads since Android’s launch less than three years ago. That was just a warm-up for big announcements, though…

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Google this morning kickstarted its annual I/O developer conference with a keynote full of surprises. Prior to that 9am presentation, however, the company was running a nice teaser over at the official Google I/O page. Thanks to some HTML5 magic, visitors could marvel at a dot-matrix display counting down the remaining hours, minutes and seconds. With each passing second the numbers would fall apart into dozes of dots bouncing off the screen edges. Missed that finale? No problem, Google has you covered with a Chrome Experiment that allows you to rewatch the last twenty seconds of the countdown.

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When Google’s senior vice president of engineering Vic Gundotra put up a slide during the morning keynote speech at Google I/O 2011 developer conference, the crowd of developers erupted into thunderous applause. You could have almost felt there was something in the air and you needn’t be a rocket scientist in order to figure out that Google will poke fun of its Cupertino frenemy given how Steve Jobs frequently downplays Android’s success at Apple’s events.

The company later posted the above image as part of the official photo stream, their way of ensuring the press and Apple get the message. They also shared some mind-boggling stats reflecting Android’s astounding growth in a little more than two and a half years
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This video just went up on the official Google blog, helps shed more light on the just announced music locker service.

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(Cross-posted from 9to5Mac.com)

The Google I/O 2011 annual developer conference is running today and tomorrow at the San Francisco’s Moscone West. The morning keynote has just wrapped and our own Seth Weintraub was at the show. Apart from walking away from the keynote with a free Samsung Galaxy tablet, he spotted Jay Freeman, also known as Saurik – the brains behind the Cydia unofficial app store.

Saurik, one of the prominent figures in the jailbreak community, says there isn’t going to be an Android Cydia but his presence at the Android-focused event is nevertheless interesting. “He says he works a lot with Google developers and app engine”, Seth wrote in an email. One may never actually need a Cydia store for Android due to Google’s proclaimed openness and the fact that the company does very little screening in its mobile app bazaar.

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(Cross-posted from 9to5Mac.com)

A keynote that kick-started  this year’s Google I/O 2011 developer conference has just finished. Before the curtains went down, a company engineer summarized a host of announcements and stressed how the Android ecosystem is growing as new devices are arriving to market with each passing day. He specifically mentioned one of the latest arrivals, Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet which is essentially the same product as the Galaxy Tab only with a larger 10.1-inch display.

“It is not yet available to anyone”, the engineer said, adding “except one”. The crowd immediately erupted into applause, sensing an Oprah moment. He then announced that each and every person attending the keynote will get a free Galaxy Tab 10.1. Official stats Google fed to the press mention that some 5,500 people purchased conference ticket in just 59 minutes so they’re giving away at least 5,500 tablets. Quite a way to get rid off excess inventory, skeptics could say. If only Apple gave away gadgets to WWDC attendees…

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