Jul 01

MeeGo for handsets makes its first appearance

By admin UI, design concepts, hardware No Comments »

As promised, Nokia and Intel have revealed the pre-alpha version of MeeGo for handsets today, supporting the Intel-powered Aava reference phone and the Nokia N900.

Whats most interesting at this early stage is the UI, which appears to have taken a big Nokia-influenced step away from the Intel-designed MeeGo netbook and tablet UI — and were definitely detecting some hints of Android and webOS here and there. Seriously, just check out that task switching interface. Of course, MeeGo is open-source, so were sure Nokia has some deeper UI customizations in store — like homescreen widgets, which are notably missing here.On a deeper level, this build of MeeGo includes the base MeeGo APIs, including Qt and the MeeGo touch frameworks, the Firefox-based browser, a photo viewer, and some basic UI elements like the status bar, app launcher, and virtual keyboard.

There are pre-built images for the Atom-based Aava handsets available now, but N900 owners will have to do a little building until someone makes an image available. Be warned, though: theres a long enough list of known bugs, and while thats totally fine for pre-alpha code, it might not be too fine for your device. Thats not going to stop us from installing this thing, but you be careful, alright? And let us know how it goes. Video of the UI after the break.P.S. Given that the N8 is destined to be the last Symbian N Series device, we cant help but feel its being overshadowed by MeeGo before its even out. Can we pre-pour one out? Is that a thing? It is now.

via MeeGo for handsets makes its first appearance — Engadget.

May 06

Goodbye petabytes, hello zettabytes!!

By jeromewagner cloud computing, hardware, insights, storage No Comments »

Goodbye petabytes, hello zettabytes

• Massive figure equal to a million million gigabytes

The growth in digital content last year alone was enough to fill 75bn Apple iPads. Photograph: Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP

Every man, woman and child on the planet using micro-blogging site Twitter for a century. For many people that may sound like a vision of hell, but for watchers of the tremendous growth of digital communications it is a neat way of presenting the sheer scale of the so-called digital universe. The explosion of social networking, online video services and digital photography, plus the continued popularity of mobile phones, email and web browsing, coupled with the growing desire of corporations and governments to know and store ever more data about everyone has created an unprecedented amount of digital information and introduced a new word to the nerd lexicon: a zettabyte.

Research published today estimates that the so-called digital universe grew by 62% last year to 800,000 petabytes – a petabyte is a million gigabytes – or 0.8 zettabytes. That is the equivalent of all the information that could be stored on 75bn Apple iPads, which would equal the digital output from a century's worth of constant tweeting by all of Earth's inhabitants.

By way of stark contrast between the output of present day humanity and its pre-digital predecessor, experts estimate that all human language used since the dawn of time would take up about 5,000 petabytes if stored in digital form, which is less than 1% of the digital content created since someone first switched on a computer.This year, the planet's digital content will blast through the zettabyte barrier to reach 1.2 ZB, according to the fourth annual survey of the world's bits and bytes conducted by technology consultancy IDC and sponsored by IT firm EMC. A zettabyte, incidentally, is roughly half a million times the entire collections of all the academic libraries in the United States.

via Goodbye petabytes, hello zettabytes | Technology | The Guardian.

Apr 15

Psion’s new take on internet business | Business | The Guardian

By admin MobileOS, cloud computing, design concepts, hardware, insights No Comments »

Psion is encouraging its customers to adapt its products and then share that knowledge with everyone online

Richard Wray

guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 14 April 2010 19.34 BST

A Psion Series 5 electronic personal organiser, 1999 vintage. The Organisers were a big hit with gadget fans in the 1980s and 1990s. Photograph: David Sillitoe

Next month one of the more venerable names in British technology will start field tests of its latest device: the product of a complete overhaul of the company and another test case for a new way of doing business spawned by the internet.

The newest handheld computer from Psion is based on individual modules which resellers and buyers can configure and even add to, to meet their specific needs. Rather than relying on the traditional one-size-fits-all model – or its expensive alternative, making bespoke products for each customer – Psion is actively encouraging its customers to adapt its products. It is also encouraging its customers to then share their experiences and get involved in research, development and after-sales care, by using the internet.

“We opened up an online community and customers and partners [resellers] are starting to talk to each other,” according to John Conoley, Psion’s chief executive. “At first, frankly, it was frightening. We are in there too and we are learning, we make mistakes and get flamed occasionally … but at other times you see a customer with a problem and one of our resellers – often from a completely different market – will chip in and deal with their issue.”

The idea of using the internet to interact with all users of a particular product or service is becoming increasingly popular in business, with executives talking about “mutualising” their operations. For many companies it makes financial, rather than purely philosophical, sense.

Mobile phone company GiffGaff – funded by O2 – gives money to users who help others with their technical problems, saving on customer support costs.

via Psion’s new take on internet business | Business | The Guardian.

Mar 04

First Look: How Penguin Will Reinvent Books With iPad

By admin design concepts, hardware, insights, uncategorized No Comments »

As the race to be be ebook format of choice hots up, Penguin is making some bold, experimental bets. These first-look demos of forthcoming books from iPad’s iBook Store, presented by Penguin Books’ CEO John Makinson in London on Tuesday, give an idea how publishers might approach Apple’s tablet…

via paidcontent

Feb 28

Apple admits using child labour

By admin employment, environment, green-it, hardware, insights, it-management, ngo No Comments »

At least eleven 15-year-old children were discovered to be working last year in three factories which supply Apple.The company did not name the offending factories, or say where they were based, but the majority of its goods are assembled in China.

Apple also has factories working for it in Taiwan, Singapore, the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, the Czech Republic and the United States.Apple said the child workers are now no longer being used, or are no longer underage. “In each of the three facilities, we required a review of all employment records for the year as well as a complete analysis of the hiring process to clarify how underage people had been able to gain employment,” Apple said, in an annual report on its suppliers.

Apple has been repeatedly criticised for using factories that abuse workers and where conditions are poor. Last week, it emerged that 62 workers at a factory that manufactures products for Apple and Nokia had been poisoned by n-hexane, a toxic chemical that can cause muscular degeneration and blur eyesight. Apple has not commented on the problems at the plant, which is run by Wintek, in the Chinese city of Suzhou.A spokesman for Wintek said that “almost all” of the affected workers were back at work, but that some remained in hospital.

Wintek said n-hexane was commonly used in the technology industry, and that problems had arisen because some areas of the factory were not ventilated properly.Last year, an employee at Foxconn, the Taiwanese company that is one of Apples biggest suppliers, committed suicide after being accused of stealing a prototype for the iPhone.Sun Danyong, 25, was a university graduate working in the logistics department when the prototype went missing. An investigation revealed that the factorys security staff had beaten him, and he subsequently jumped to his death from the 12th floor of his apartment building.

Foxconn runs a number of super-factories in the south of China, some of which employ as many as 300,000 workers and form self-contained cities, complete with banks, post offices and basketball courts.It has been accused, however, of treating its employees extremely harshly. China Labor Watch, a New York-based NGO, accused Foxconn of having an “inhumane and militant” management, which neglects basic human rights. Foxconns management were not available for comment.In its report,

Apple revealed the sweatshop conditions inside the factories it uses. Apple admitted that at least 55 of the 102 factories that produce its goods were ignoring Apples rule that staff cannot work more than 60 hours a week.The technology companys own guidelines are already in breach of Chinas widely-ignored labour law, which sets out a maximum 49-hour week for workers.

via Apple admits using child labour – Telegraph.

Feb 02

Tablet (The Chromium Projects) – Google’s Tablet Project

By admin design concepts, hardware, insights, it-projects No Comments »

A posting on Google’s Chromium blog reveals that the company is considering a touch-sensitive tablet computer like Apple‘s iPad.

It says that the tablet would have
- Keyboard interaction with the screen: anchored, split, attached to focus.
- Launchers as an overlay, providing touch or search as means to access web sites.
- Contextual actions triggered via dwell.
- Zooming UI for multiple tabs
- Tabs presented along the side of the screen
- the ability to create multiple browsers on screen using a launcher.

There’s also a concept video which has made its way to YouTube:

In its ghostly way, it reminds one a great deal of the Apple iPad launch, particularly in its use of multi-touch -- though that multi-touch functionality is also reminiscent of Jeff Han’s work.

The concept (which presently just looks like wonderful work with Photoshop -- it doesn’t have any physical reality) is likely to remain just that for some time, since Google surely won’t want to alienate any more potential hardware manufacturers for the Chromium OS having just annoyed those like Motorola which thought that the Android mobile OS would be their saviour, and have now found that Google is competing directly with them through the Nexus.

Yet in the Tech Weekly podcast for this week London literary agent Clare Alexander, of Aitken & Alexander, mentioned that the book trade has been hearing that Google could come up with a tablet. Clearly, there is a lot of interest in this field. The appearance of this post and this video is only going to enhance it.

According to Erictric,

“Rumor actually had it that HTC in partnership with Google would unveil a tablet prototype to an exclusive group of guests in a private session at the Consumer Electronics Show 2010 at the beginning of last month. Later in the month, HTC Australia and New Zealand Sales and Marketing Director Anthony Petts confirmed the rumor, then stated that work on said tablet had been halted completely.”

A little extra from Erictric:

“At the beginning of this year, we posted an editorial piece in
which we stated that this year [2010] would be the year of the tablet.
We noted that there were three major contenders that could dominate the
tablet wars. They were Apple with the iPad, Google with an unveiled
device, and Microsoft with the Courier. With what we’ve seen so far,
Apple can not be expected to compete with iPad, as it is basically a
weak device compared to the concepts of the Microsoft and Google
tablets. In our humble opinion, that’s what revolutionary devices are
supposed to be like.”

Umm -- while there are certainly Windows tablets out there (which launched with all the splash of philosophical trees falling in forests), one must say that it’s always better to bet on revolutions happening from devices that have actually been demonstrated and have a ship date. Google’s tablet sure looks purdy, but it’s a long way from doing any revolving of anything.

Tablet (The Chromium Projects).

Jan 27

Apple’s iPad

By jeromewagner hardware No Comments »

After nearly a decade of rumors and speculation, Apple’s finally unveiled the iPad. It’s a half-inch thick and weighs just 1.5 pounds, with a 9.7-inch capacitive touchscreen IPS LCD display, and it’s running a custom 1GHz Apple “A4″ chip developed by the P.A. Semi team, with a 10-hour battery life and a month of standby. It’ll come in 16, 32, and 64GB sizes, and it’s got the expected connectivity: very little.

There’s a 30-pin Dock connector, a speaker, a microphone, Bluetooth, 802.11n WiFi and optional 3G, as well as an accelerometer and a compass. There’s also a keyboard dock, which connects underneath in the portrait orientation, support for up to 1024×768 VGA out and 480p composite out through new dock adapter cables, and a camera attachment kit that lets you import photos from your camera over USB or directly through an SD reader.

The device is managed by iTunes, just like the iPhone — you sync everything over to your Mac. As expected, it can run iPhone apps — either pixel-for-pixel in a window, or pixel-doubled fullscreen — but developers can also target the new screen size using the updated iPhone OS SDK, which is available today. The 3G version runs on AT&T and comes with new data plans: 250MB for $14.99 and an unlimited plan for $29.99 a month contract-free. Activations are handled on the iPad, so you can activate and cancel whenever you want. Every iPad is unlocked and comes with a GSM “micro-SIM,” so you can use it abroad, but there aren’t any international deals in place right now — Steve says they’ll be back “this summer” with news on that front.It starts at $499 for 16GB, 32GB for $599, and $699 64GB.

Adding 3G costs a $130 per model, so the most expensive model 64GB / 3G is $829. The WiFi-only model will ship in 60 days, and the 3G models will come in 90.

via Engadget.

Jan 24

10 outdated elements of desktop operating systems

By jeromewagner communication-standards, hardware, industry best practise, insights, operating systems & collaborative tools No Comments »

We’ve come so very far in the way computer operating systems treat us, and in the way we treat those computer operating systems. They multitask, they animate, they reach into the internet and pull down our favorite parts, they rarely crash and they’re always on. It’s a far cry from a decade ago, but I think we could go so much further. The advent of the cheap, ubiquitous touchscreen, always-available internet and continually cheaper and more powerful hardware has revolutionized the phone industry, and I think it can also help the desktops and laptops we know and love do more for us. But a laptop isn’t a phone: we’re supposed to get a lot done on it, under some unrealistic deadlines, and some random company with big ideas can’t come along and reinvent the desktop OS in one fell swoop — that simply isn’t practical when we have things to do.

So what’s an OS to do? I think there are serious opportunities for evolution available to the Microsofts, Apples and Ubuntus of the world, but they involve embracing new technologies in new ways. And stealing a ton of ideas from phones. A finger on a screen is not a mouse on a pad, an internet browser is not the end-all be-all of the internet, and playing Crysis in a quad HD resolution at 60 fps is not the ultimate expression of gaming for 95% of the population.

Join me as I explore a few bits of legacy cruft that need to be addressed before the desktop OS can become as important to this decade as it was to the last one.

via Editorial: 10 outdated elements of desktop operating systems — Engadget.

Dec 15

Hosted Security for Email, Web and Instant Messaging

By jeromewagner 24x7 Management And Support, cloud computing, communication-standards, disaster-recovery, document-management, green-it, hardware, industry best practise, it-management, it-projects, media-tools, ngo, proffesional bodies, uncategorized No Comments »

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via Hosted Security for Email, Web and Instant Messaging.

Dec 15

Past Events | Service Management Specialist Group | Our Groups | Specialist Groups | Membership and Networking | BCS – The Chartered Institute for IT

By jeromewagner 24x7 Management And Support, cloud computing, disaster-recovery, document-management, email-branding-disclaimers-and-signature-management, employment, green-it, hardware, industry best practise, insights, it-management, it-projects, media-tools, network-security, offsite-backup, online tools, proffesional bodies, server architecture No Comments »


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