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Sony crafting VAIOs with Chrome OS, external GPUs and Thunderbolt tech?

Published by Gets Topic in Uncategorized on March 19th, 2011 | Comments Off

Sony’s top-secret prototype labs must be clocking hours like mad, as Sony Insider reports that the company has two more surprises in store — in addition to a PlayStation tablet, dual-screen clamshell and sliding PC, the skunk works has cooked up a Chrome OS notebook, as well as a “VAIO Hybrid PC” that defies any sort of meaningful explanation in just three words. The Chrome OS device is reportedly modeled after Google’s own Cr-48 reference design with roughly the same dimensions and keyboard but an oh-so-slightly smaller 11.6-inch screen, and NVIDIA’s Tegra 2 running the show alongside 1GB of RAM and 16GB of flash storage. Sony’s also shooting for eight hours of battery life, and a weight of just 2.2 pounds.

All of that pales in comparison to what Sony’s plotting for this “Hybrid PC,” though. The publication says we’re looking at a thin-and-light Core i7 notebook with an incredible 8 to 16.5 hours of battery life, Intel Thunderbolt and an internal SSD, all of which plugs into a dock of some sort that adds a Blu-ray burner and external graphics (by AMD) for gaming and multimedia. We don’t have any pictures or proof at this point, but it sounds like a whopper of a tale, and just the sort of thing that Intel was talking about making possible with the 10Gbps of bandwidth that Thunderbolt brings.

Android Gaming Has Finally Arrived (PC World)

Published by Gets Topic in Uncategorized on March 19th, 2011 | Comments Off

Android gaming. Two years ago, the iPhone was effectively the only phone that supported serious gaming–unless you consider Brickbreaker on the BlackBerry to be the ultimate gaming experience. Last spring, Google proved that it was serious about gaming when it hired games industry veteran Mark DeLoura to act as its “Developer Advocate” for games. But gaming developers seemed a bit hesitant to climb on board with the platform. When we surveyed the games available in the Android Market, we found a lot of sad rip-offs of popular iPhone games, plagued by shoddy graphics and buggy game play. There wasn’t even a games section in the Market!

But the announcement last fall of an Android version of the well-loved iPhone game Angry Birds signaled that other popular, big-name games might be headed to Android as well. And rumors of an Android-based Sony PlayStation phone, which could supposedly play 3D PSP games, further strengthened the perception that Android might finally be ready for gaming.

Dedicated Gaming Handsets

Xperia Play, the gaming phone features a D-pad (for in-game direction control), four game control buttons and a set of circular touchpads in the middle, which function like a joystick for some games. You won’t find the PlayStation logo anywhere on the phone, but the Xperia Play will be able to run certain PlayStation games.

Sony also announced its PlayStation Suite, a standard “software platform” designed to bring PlayStation games to more devices–specifically, to ones that run at least Android 2.3 and receive a “PlayStation Certified” designation from Sony. The games will be distributed through a marketplace that Sony will set up later this year. The result should be a lot more Android phones in the future that are tricked out for optimal game control.

At this year’s Gaming Development conference, Sony Ericsson also revealed that the Xperia Play will be the official mobile phone of Major League Gaming (MLG), North America’s official pro video games league. MLG attracts about 40 million gamers and represents some of the top professional gamers in the world. The fact that a mobile phone is now regarded as a medium for competitive gaming is a huge step for Android gaming.

Will we see dedicated gaming handsets from other manufacturers? It’s hard to say. Aside from Sony Ericsson, no phone manufacturer has any track record in the gaming world. And Nintendo has said publicly that it has no interest in making mobile devices, so there’s no competition from that quarter (though you can play old Nintendo games on your Android phone via an emulator). Microsoft’s mobile XBox Live is one of the best features of Windows Phone 7, so we would love to see Redmond work with an OEM to develop a dedicated gaming phone.

Gyroscopes Become the Norm

The iPhone 4 was the first phone to ship with a gyroscope, but Android phones are following suit, starting with the Samsung Nexus S, which launched earlier this year. Most top-of-the-line Android smartphones are likely to have them this year.

I Love Katamari game, you tilt your phone to roll the Katamari ball through the various levels.

A gyroscope provides greater precision and accuracy thatn an accelerometer for controlling your phone. It also permits developers to make richer, more immersive motion-controlled games. For example, in first-person shooter games like Eliminate: Gun Range, you can aim your weapon by tilting the phone subtly. Now that more Android phones are shipping with gyroscopes, we hope to see games of similar quality on the platform.

Powerful Gaming-Optimized Chipsets

The mobile chipset makers are helping phones deliver a better gaming experience by designing low-power chipsets for 3D gameplay. Qualcomm’s new generation of Snapdragon chipsets feature the Adreno 220 GPU, which enhances graphics performance with rich 3D effects and detailing. At Qualcomm’s booth at Mobile World Congress 2011, we saw a demo of the new game Desert Winds and were impressed by the smooth gameplay and the rich, realistic graphics.

At GDC, Qualcomm announced a deal with Gameloft in which the game distributor will rerelease some of its best-selling high-definition game titles, optimized to take advantage of the Snapdragon processor and Adreno GPU.

Similarly, dual-core Nvidia Tegra 2 chips for tablets and phones are designed with gaming in mind. One goal of Tegra 2′s GeForce GPU is to deliver responsive mobile 3D game playability without compromising battery life. Virtually all of the demos we saw of Tegra 2-powered devices (including the LG Optimus X, the Droid Bionic, and the Motorola Xoom) showed games in action–and they were quite impressive. Nvidia even has its own app store (Tegra Zone) for Tegra-powered phones and tablets. Like Qualcomm’s, these games are optimized for one particular chipset.

Gaming SDKs Made for Android

Software development kits–or SDKs, as they are more commonly known–are extremely important to developers. They provide the framework and resources that developers need in order to create successful programs and applications. Without access to a platform’s SDK, a developer has little or no chance of creating appropriate software for a specific platform.

Android has the largest market share for mobile devices, thanks to its flexible SDK, which allows developers to get their games out to a bigger audience on a wide variety of devices. Developers can also work with manufacturers (as Gameloft is with Qualcomm) to take full advantage of the latest and greatest hardware for their games.

The Xperia Play, for example, will be among the many future Gingerbread devices that support the Havok physics engine. Havok will permit richer 3D experiences and is already well known in the gaming world. The Xperia Play (and other Tegra 2 devices) will be able to take advantage of the benefits of the Havok engine through the PlayStation Suite.

Having a free, open SDK is one of Android’s greatest strengths. Anyone can download the SDK and create an app–an opportunity that many computer programming courses take advantage of. Developers can submit their apps directly to Google’s Android Market, or they can try third-party sites such as GetJar or even Amazon’s App Store. The developer can customize the SDK to suit specific needs or wants.

Immersion, a company that develops haptic feedback for various devices, including phones, recently released its Motiv haptic SDKfor Android. This SDK enables developers to create tactile feedback within their applications. Haptic feedback can be used in many application scenarios, but we think its best use is for gaming.

When we met with Immersion, they showed us a demo of a pinball game developed with Motiv. The gameplay was fantastic: The vibration of the ball hitting the sides of the “machine,” made the game feel as though we were playing it on a real pinball machine. This SDK opens up lots of exciting opportunities for game developers and gives them the opportunity to make their Android game do something iOS games can’t. Why? Because iOS and the iPhone don’t support haptic feedback.

Better Money in Android

Aside from the hardware considerations, game developers have other incentives to go with the green robot. Spacetime Studios, creators of the popular Pocket Legends 3D MMORPG on both iOS and Android, has said that Android users are approximately three times more active than their Apple counterparts. Pocket Legends is free to play and is primarily supported by in-app purchases, so much more revenue is coming from Android users than from iOS users. Spacetime has found that, even though in-app purchases are more streamlined on iOS, Android users buy more things. Likewise, Android users are more likely to click ads, thus bringing in even more revenue.

Jean-Francois Greyelin, developer of the game PewPew, agrees: “For starters, the market share of Android is very big, so you have a lot of potential customers. In my case, PewPew has been more downloaded and in less time on Android than on the iOS.”

iOS developers looking to jump ship to Android have some help in the form of the social gaming platform Openfeint and Chinese developer The9. The9 wants to invest $100 million in various projects and (together with Openfeint) plans to scour the App Store looking for good candidates for funding. As a result, Android is likely to host quite a few iOS ports; but once developers are accustomed to the platform, we may begin to see a lot more original content on Android devices.

With new game developers looking at Android as a viable gaming platform and with MLG pushing the Xperia Play as their official handset, Android is on its way in becoming the mobile gamers’ OS. At the very least, we’ll see a slew of excellent games beyond cheap iOS rip-offs.

Make Any Content on the Web Embeddable With Embedly (Mashable)

Published by Gets Topic in Uncategorized on March 18th, 2011 | Comments Off

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Name: Embedly

Quick Pitch: Embedly is a platform for converting URLs into embeddable content.

Genius Idea: Embedding all the media on the web.

When traversing the web, most site visitors will stay on a page 250% longer when there’s embedded media, Sean Creeley tells me. This stat is based on findings from a Google AdWords test he ran last year.

Creeley is the founder of Y Combinator startup Embedly; Embedly’s mission is to make it painstakingly easy for publishers and application developers to add that embedded media and better engage their web users.

“The idea is to engage the user where they are,” says Creeley. “We really want to get the user where they live, instead of making them try to jump through hoops to view multimedia content.”

Embedly can make a call to any web URL or RSS feed, grab the associated media — photos, videos, audio and text — and embed it on a third-party site. So, what the “New Twitter” can now do for TwitPic photos and YouTube videos in the stream, Embedly can do for nearly anything.

In fact, Embedly has created the consumer-facing Parrotfish — available as a Safari, Firefox or Chrome plugin — to bring the web’s media from more than 165 providers into the Twitter.com experience. Twitter becomes infinitely richer via Parrotfish and gives all those URLs your friends share in their tweets instant context — even Mashable articles become readable on Twitter.com.

Parrotfish is just proof of Embedly’s behind-the-scenes technology — something you likely encounter as you flit about the web but never notice it. On a daily basis, Embedly serves 5.5 million URLs to 1,100 sites.

Here’s what that means: if you use Yammer, Tweetdeck, Bit.ly Bundles, Storify, Keepstream, Reddit and several other social web products, then you’re using Embedly. Embedly powers the content embedding for all of these services so that URLs come alive as content you can see or hear on site. On Meetup, for instance, Embedly makes it possible for users to add and listen to SoundCloud tracks on site.

The Embedly customer can choose from a free plan with access to 250 providers or the pro plan that unlocks content associated with any URL or RSS feed. The paid service comes with daily, hourly and minute-by-minute breakdowns of the most popular URLs and domains, as well as Google Safe Browse security features to protect their site visitors against masked URL phishing tactics.

In the future, the Boston-based company hopes to help more publishers get their content off their site and assist with the “Youtube-ization of the Internet,” says Creeley. “Every piece of content is going to be able to be shared and embedded elsewhere.”

Look for the startup to push into the mobile frontier first. Embedly plans to release an iOS library and Android library, which will let customers add embedded content into the mobile experience. The company will start accepting signups for beta access next week.

Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

Tags: 5 Million, Daily Basis, Embeddable, Embedly, Friends Share, Genius Idea, Google, Mashable, Multimedia Content, S Media, Social Web, Startups, Twitter, Web Users, World News, Y Combinator, Youtube Videos

Google guesstimates release dates for movies and games

Published by Gets Topic in Uncategorized on March 18th, 2011 | Comments Off

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You can already do plenty of calculations and conversions right in Google’s search box, and it looks like the company’s now made it even smarter still. Searching for the title of an upcoming movie or video game plus “release date” will now instantly give you Google’s best guess for when the title will actually be released, which is apparently based on how often it’s been mentioned on certain websites. So far, we’ve only been able to get it to work with movies and games, although it seems pretty likely that it will soon expand to other areas as well — maybe even gadgets? Try it out yourself and let us know if you find anything.

[Thanks, Mario]

Tags: Best Guess, Conversions, dates, gadgets, Games, Google, Google Search, guesstimates, Mario, Movies, release, Release Date, Release Dates For Movies, Search Box, Video Release, video-game, World News

Motorola Xoom with Sprint insignia, Nexus S 4G logo leak out

Published by Gets Topic in Uncategorized on March 18th, 2011 | Comments Off

If you’ve been following these here pages closely, you’ll know that a little device named the Nexus S 4G is coming to Sprint’s network, with the expectation being that it’ll be announced at CTIA early next week. Fueling our previous info on the matter, we’ve now gotten ahold of an image purporting to be the logo that Sprint and Google will be using to represent their new WiMAX-equipped collaboration. That can be found after the break, but what you’re really eager to learn more about is that image of a Motorola Xoom with a Now Network logo on it, right? Well, it comes from the same source, whose record of revealing Sprint pre-release hardware (and not getting fired) is quite exemplary, so we’re willing to credit it as the real deal. We’ve no launch dates or pricing details to share as yet, but it’s not unreasonable to expect Sprint will be disclosing all that juicy info during its extra-long CTIA presser. And if not, we’ll keep tracking down these leaks and get it to you anyway!

[Thanks, r0fl]

Incoming search terms for the article:nexus s review