Droid Globe

WebOS takeover by Samsung

Clifford van Slimming — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 09:33:39 +0000

The website digitimes showed up some information about a buy on WebOS by Samsung. Raymond Wah, the vice president of the HP PC division, have been attracted to lead the Samsung’s PC division. They also in negotiation to purchase the division of WebOS. Samsung and HP denies these rumors.

With the acquirement of Motorola by Google, Samsung sees the urge to take this approach to differentiate itself with the competition. Samsung want to put there focus on the creation of their own software, and they want to get knowledge with this buyout. This way Samsung can get the same strategy as Apple being able to manage software and hardware together.

The take over of the department at HP seems to be a strategic move by Samsung. The South Korean manufacturer supplies many parts to HP, now leader in the PC division. Although only a low margin sits on laptops, Samsung has a high margin on parts they give to HP.

Adobe launched Edge, the HTML5 alternative for Flash

Clifford van Slimming — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 10:22:01 +0000

The struggle between Flash and HTML5 has been around for a few years now. The support for Flash on iOS devices was not available giving Adobe a hard time to keep Flash around. But with the release of Edge they changed there strategy. With this new piece of software web-developers are able to easily create web animations with HTML5.

The launched version of Adobe Edge is still a beta version, and will be available for free on the Adobe Labs site. The full and paid version will be available around 2012. For now developers will be able to create Edge animations, the development of games will be soon available.

Thanks to the launch of Adobe Edge, the adoption of HTML5 will be wider on websites. Flash will still be available for those projects that require tasks that are not available on HTML5 such as complete 3D-games. HTML5 will be more efficient for showing simple web content and/or banners and video.

Information about Windows 8

Clifford van Slimming — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 10:06:51 +0000

A while back Microsoft has delivered some facts about the new version of Windows, we want to sum some of these facts. Microsoft new version of Windows will put it focus on touch, just like Apple did with their new OSX codename “Lion”. They introducing a new interface, based on the tiles we had seen on the Windows Phone 7. This interface is mainly focused on tablet interfaces, but will be used and seen on all devices such as laptops, desktops and others systems.

This new approach is the biggest one since the introduction on Windows 95. I think this new step is a vital for the future we are heading, touch interfaces will be more and more used as main-stream input interfaces, and the “old” way windows works is just not good enough to handle this direction. My main concern is that it will be also introduced on desktop devices, where most of the input is delivered through a mouse and keyboard. I hope the user experience will be the same for them.

Silverlight Windows Phone 7 only?
The Aero-interface of Windows 7 will still be available in Windows 8, this for the sake of compatibility. Microsoft wanted to make an OS that is the same for a range of devices. They wanted to run the same run-time to run on tablets, laptops, desktops etc… With this in mind, they focused there cross-platform run-time to make use of HTML5, JavaScript and CSS. Which seems a bit strange because they always told us that Silverlight would be the new cross-platform run-time. In the Windows 8 ARM version the native support for Silverlight is removed, which seems a logical step since they now targeting Silverlight as the main development environment for Windows Phone 7. If they keep ditching support for Silverlight on the Windows 8 platform is not known, but for the sake of backwards compatibility I think they will bring back support for this run-time.

Hardware support
Specs on hardware are interesting for Windows 8. Microsoft advises to use a screen-ratio of 16:9, this will probably not be restricted. Devices with a resolution lower than 1366×768 will not be able to run the new Windows 8 interface and will be presented with the older Windows 7 Aero-interface. Also they must the use for UEFI, a new BIOS version that supports faster boot times.

We can call this new approach revolutionary, and probably required to slay down the competition. We will know more once the Microsoft Build Event has taken place in September.

Windows 8 gets the looks of mobile

Clifford van Slimming — Sat, 16 Jul 2011 16:29:00 +0000

The new Windows mobile was fully focused to touch. The total user interface had an overhaul to make it more work for a mobile device. Now this technology has been ported towards the desktop version of Windows, Windows 8. Is this the correct approach? I don’t really know. Its all focused on devices with a touch screen, and currently the majority of the users don’t have a computer with a touch screen. The start-up screen now also works with tiles, and you can flip screens back and forth. Microsoft posted a YouTube video of all this cool stuff, but they use the hands as a pointing device, I’m interested if its still usable when actually using a mouse.

Tweetbot for iPhone

Clifford van Slimming — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 13:49:18 +0000

Recently tabbots released a new iPhone application called Tweetbot. There are a million twitter clients available, and most of the users used the official twitter application made by twitter.com. But they lost a lot of people when they added the new top bar in there application, then Tweetbot appeared!

Tweetbot is a nice replacement to the official twitter application, it looks stunning! They put much effort in design and features. A nice customizable tab bar, nice fluid navigation and cool sounds! Also nice gestures like triple press to reply.

OK it has some flaws, sometimes it feels a little bit slow, but I guess they will fix it in the near future. For the first version they released its a great utility! Good job tabbots!

Nintendo is losing grip on the mobile gaming market

Clifford van Slimming — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 10:14:07 +0000

In 2009, 70% of the american players played a game on the Nintendo DS. In the years to follow this market share dropped to 57%. This was recently published by Flurry Analytics. The biggest competitors of are iOS and Android. Together they holded a 34% market share in 2010. The numbers are not yet available for this year, but with the lift of of Android and iOS devices it seems logical that Nintendo is losing grip.

Recently there was told that the sales where bad for the Nintendo 3DS. They sold 400k in the US which is pretty week for such a device, analyst had thought they would sell 500 – 750K. The iPad sold a lot better, in the month of March they sold around 2.5M devices.

Nintendo will get more competitors with the arrival of the Honeycomb-tablets, which will arrive end of this month.

Some amazing artwork made on iPad

Clifford van Slimming — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 14:10:29 +0000

Sometimes you stumble across a video thats jaw dropping. Well this artist makes you do that. The guy made a portrait of an older man with a beard on his iPad with the “Brushes” app.

The total portrait took 3 hours to complete and was streamed live to the audience on 21 June, where you could chat live with Kassan.

He made a quick motion video and published this on YouTube. Go watch this awesomeness!

There are allot of artistic applications available on the iPad, I wonder how many of these videos we could expect in the near future. Keep them coming!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OLP4nbAVA4

HTC Hero 2.1 Update available

Clifford van Slimming — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 13:47:07 +0000

Finally news from HTC releasing there HTC Hero 2.1 update. Its the second part of the update where your phone is realy updated to Android 2.1 (first update was a preparation software update). For availability you can check your device (Settings > About > Updates). With this update you will lose all content on your device so backup before you dive into the world of android 2.1.

It took a while before this update was available, they delayed this update a few times: February, March, April, May… But finally the update can take place.

If you don’t see any updates try to change your system clock a few hours ahead of time.

Microsoft Courier your own digital journal device

Clifford van Slimming — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 22:49:50 +0000

Sometimes you stumble across some awesome device, Well the Microsoft Courier is such a device that makes you scream! Recently they released a new mock up video of the device, internal specifications are not yet available. The device contains two screens which can be flipped together just like a book. The device will run on the same OS as the Zune which we believe is Microsoft CE 6.0. The interface will be pen based, with build in handwriting recognition, so you can draw and write on screen. Not much too tell about this device, and the cost of the thing. But from what I heard it will be released in Q3/Q4.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=sM6N_V43tXQ

Windows Phone 7 Series revealed

Clifford van Slimming — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 13:44:23 +0000

First of all I want to congratulate two dear friends of mine, they gave birth to a little baby girl with the name Isa.

Now to the point, the revealing of the new mobile operating flagship Windows Phone Series 7. With this new version they want too step away from there old and non touch friendly mobile operating system and introduce a new and friendlier interface to work with. This version is based on the Windows CE 6 kernel, like they used on the Zune HD. The first handsets that will running this operating system will be available this summer.

The interface is a completely renewed with the intention for more finger friendliness. It looks like pages from a newspaper where you can swipe through, my personal opinion is that it looks a bit messy at start, and you can lose focus on where you are. But maybe it just takes time to get used too.