HTC Desire Gingerbread update is now coming, says HTC

HTC has confirmed that Android Gingerbread will no be coming to the HTC Desire, despite claiming yesterday that the device didn’t have enough juice for it

n a bizarre turn of events, HTC has now re-confirmed that its HTC Desire handset will indeed be getting updated to Android Gingerbread, despite claiming yesterday that the handset didn’t have enough memory to run both Gingerbread and Sense.

At least, that was the case. Now, it’s no longer true – Android 2.3 is coming to the HTC Desire. But how is HTC going to achieve this? Didn’t it just say the Desire doesn’t have the internals for Android 2.3?

Simple, HTC is going to make some choice tweaks and amendments – AKA: cuts – to the update so that it’ll suit the Desire’s RAM capabilities.

Here’s the new official line, again via HTC’s Facebook page:

‘To resolve Desire’s memory issue and enable the upgrade to Gingerbread, we will cut select apps from the release. Look for status updates starting next week. We apologize for any confusion.’

But what will these cuts be? Where will they be implemented? And what kind of affect will it have on the Desire? Pocket-Lint is pretty worried about this, and rightly so too.

At present, no one knows. So what’s a Desire user to do? Well, we’d say wait and see how the update turns out (cuts-an-all) before you rush out and get the update. That way, you can see what the pros and cons are and, most importantly, what kind of cuts HTC has made.

Granted this will be quite annoying, especially if you’ve been dying to get Android 2.3 on your Desire, but it’s definitely the sensible approach. After all, you don’t want to turn your HTC Desire into a HTC Hero – Android 2.3 ain’t worth that.

by knowyourmobile.com

Google Introduces Google Reader Play: The Highly Customizable Application

Google, the most popular web – based engine has initiated a web browsing tool called Google Reader Play. It facilitates the reader to browse the content linked with Google Reader News Feed. Google’s management has explained the function of Google Reader Play as a visual way to surf the internet. It is only available in Beta version, for now.

Google Reader works by assembling a slideshow of popular videos, photos and blog posts based on Google’s reader recommended items feature. According to Garrett Wu, software engineer at the firm said, “Google Reader Play is designed to make Reader more accessible and easier to use and try”.

According to Wu, a user does not does not have to establish a catalog of feeds to follow. Google reader play does not follow your list of feeds but rather it learns from your browsing history. The reader play uses the information entered by the user as likeable content and displays the useful content similar to what has been mentioned. It allows the user to choose the preferred categories and the application will itself showcase the material from those categories.

In addition, he commented that Google Reader Play has not been launched to replace Google Reader but it is an extension to it. Both the application serves the same purpose. Google Reader Play gives you the freedom to organize your feeds and get the related stuff presented to you aptly.

Try the google reader play here.

Google Maps Adds Directions for Cyclists

Cycling enthusiasts tend to be a passionate bunch. So it is not surprising that there are lots of questions about biking information on Google Maps forums. One group, called googlemapsbikethere.org, has collected more than 51,000 signatures asking Google to add biking directions to its maps.

On Wednesday, the company is answering the call, offering biking routes in 150 American cities in Google Maps. Google plans to unveil the service during the National Bike Summit in Washington. The event will be followed by a group ride at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Tex.

Bicycling advocates are, not surprisingly, enthused.

“We think this is fantastic,” said D.L. Byron, publisher of BikeHugger.com, a blog about bike culture based in Seattle. “It will open up reliable transportation options to cyclists.” Mr. Byron said that while plenty of programs allow cyclists to upload their routes to the Web, no other service provides optimal directions for cyclists in urban settings, at least not on a national scale.

Mr. Byron predicted that the Google service would help to promote cycling as an alternative mode of transportation. “A lot of people would love to get on their bike but are afraid they won’t find a safe route,” he said. “If you make these options more available to people, they will do it.”

Much like the driving and walking directions on Google Maps, the service selects a route and calculates estimated cycling times after a user provides start and end points. The routing algorithm attempts to select optimal directions that avoid freeways and busy roads and intersections, and take into account bike paths, bike lanes and bike-friendly streets. They will seek to route around hills, whenever practical. Google Maps will also offer a “view” geared for cyclists that will display bike-friendly routes. A mobile version is likely to follow soon, said Shannon Guymon, a product manager for Google Maps Directions.

“We feel pretty good about our routing model,” Ms. Guymon said. But Google expects to use input from users to help improve suggested routes over time, she said.

Google has teamed up with the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy, a nonprofit that creates networks of trails from former rail lines, to obtain information on bike trails in more than 150 cities.

As for cycling times, Ms. Guymon said the estimates are “conservative.” “If you are in good shape, you are going to beat these times,” she said.

In San Francisco, the route from Dolores Park to the Golden Gate Bridge, through the Golden Gate Park Panhandle and along Masonic Avenue, suggests about 40 minutes. Any riders who can do better?

by gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com

Google will phase out support for IE 6

Google will phase out support for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6 Web browser starting in March, the company said Friday.

“Many other companies have already stopped supporting older browsers like Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers. We’re also going to begin phasing out our support, starting with Google Docs and Google Sites,” Rajen Sheth, Google Apps senior product manager, wrote in a blog post Friday.

The announcement comes more than two weeks after Google reported that its servers had been the target of attacks originating in China. Those attacks targeted a vulnerability in IE 6, for which Microsoft has since issued a fix.

Support for IE6 in Google Docs and Google Sites will end March 1, Sheth said in the post. At that point, IE6 users who try to access Docs or Sites may find that “key functionality” won’t work properly, he said.

Sheth suggested that customers upgrade to Internet Explorer 7, Mozilla Firefox 3.0, Google Chrome 4.0 or Safari 3.0, or more recent versions of those browsers.

According to StatCounter, IE6 has 18 percent market share among browsers.

Google upgrading to Ext4, hires former Linux Foundation CTO

Well-known Linux kernel developer Ted Ts’o announced this week that he has joined Google, leaving behind his previous role as CTO of the Linux Foundation. Ts’o, an expert on filesystem development, played a central role in creating Ext4, the latest generation of the dominant Linux filesystem.

In a statement on his blog, Ts’o expressed enthusiasm for his new job and pointed to a recent mailing list post by a Google engineer which reveals that the search giant is in the process of upgrading its storage infrastructure from Ext2 to Ext4. Ts’o says that he will continue working on Ext4 and other parts of the Linux kernel while he is at Google.

His departure from the Linux Foundation is not sudden or unexpected—the organization has an informal policy of rotating people through the CTO position at regular intervals. When Ts’o took the job in 2008, he came from IBM and it was understood that he would serve a two-year term with the foundation. With his term completed, he has decided to join Google instead of going back to Big Blue.

Ext4 faced some criticism during its development following the discovery of possible data loss issues relating to the filesystem’s implementation of delayed allocation. Ts’o created patches that have addressed those issues, minimizing the potential risk. Google’s decision to deploy Ext4 is a strong endorsement of the filesystem’s reliability and affirms its suitability for enterprise adoption.

In a mailing list post, Google engineer Michael Rubin provided more insight into the decision-making process that led the company to adopt Ext4. The filesystem offered significant performance advantages over Ext2 and nearly rivaled the high-performance XFS filesystem during the company’s tests. Ext4 was ultimately chosen over XFS because it would allow Google to do a live in-place upgrade of its existing Ext2 filesystems.

“The driving performance reason to upgrade is that while ext2 had been ‘good enough’ for a very long time the metadata arrangement on a stale file system was leading to what we call ‘read inflation’. This is where we end up doing many seeks to read one block of data. In general latency from poor block allocation was causing performance hiccups,” he wrote. “For our workloads we saw ext4 and xfs as ‘close enough’ in performance in the areas we cared about. The fact that we had a much smoother upgrade path with ext4 clinched the deal.”

The Linux Foundation has not yet announced who will be the organization’s next CTO. It would be fitting for the foundation to use its newly-announced Linux Jobs board to find a worthy candidate, but it’s more likely that the organization will pick someone from their growing roster of member companies.

Next version of Nexus will be enterprise phone

Google Inc executive Andy Rubin said on Friday that the next version of the Nexus One phone, which was made by HTC Corp, will be for enterprise users and might have a physical keyboard.

Such a device could potentially pose a competitive threat to BlackBerry maker Research In Motion, which has a strong position in the enterprise cellphone market.

Rubin, the brains behind Google’s Android operating system, made the comment during an interview with Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg at an event hosted by the newspaper.

The comment followed Google’s announcement earlier this week that it would sell phones direct to consumers via its website.

Google’s Growth and Censorship Woes in China

Google this week said it would stop censoring search results on Google.cn, its search engine for users in China, and that the company may exit China altogether. Google has had a bumpy ride in China, where it trails leading search engine Baidu.com by a large margin and has faced tough government censors. The below timeline tracks Google’s history in China:

Sep. 2000: Google starts offering a Chinese-language version of its search engine for worldwide users.

Sep. 2002: Chinese visitors to Google.com are rerouted to other Web sites as the domain name is temporarily hijacked in the country.

July 2005: Google appoints former Microsoft executive Kai-Fu Lee as head of Google’s China operations. Microsoft sues Google to block Lee from being hired, but the companies later reach a settlement and Lee keeps the post.

Jan. 2006: Google launches Google.cn, a version of its site for Chinese users that censors pornographic and certain politically sensitive search results. Human rights groups slam Google for bowing to Chinese government demands for censorship.

April 2007: Google apologizes for using part of an application developed by China’s Sohu.com in Google software that lets users type Chinese characters by inputting standard English characters.

March 2008: China blocks YouTube and Google News after riots in the country’s western region of Tibet, a move apparently meant to stop the spread of information about the politically charged events. YouTube and other Google services such as Blogger have previously been blocked in China.

Aug. 2008: Google begins offering free, ad-supported downloads of music to users in China in competition with a similar service from Chinese search leader Baidu.

March 2009: China again blocks YouTube. It remains blocked through the present.

June 2009: China publicly criticizes Google for allowing Google.cn to serve up pornographic search results. Google.com and other Google services are briefly blocked in the country before Google removes the sensitive results from its search engine.

Sep. 2009: Kai-Fu Lee leaves Google China to start his own company, in a move seen as a blow to Google.

Oct. 2009: A Chinese group says it is considering legal action over alleged copyright infringement by Google in the company’s book scanning project. Chinese authors and media start adding their voices to the criticism of Google.

Jan. 2010: Google says it will stop censoring Google.cn and that the move may lead it to close its China offices. Google also says it has been targeted by sophisticated cyberattacks that originated in China and appeared meant to access the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists.

Google removes banking apps from Android Marketplace

A programmer who goes by the nickname “09Droid” has just illuminated security concerns sure to come into sharper focus as tech and financial services corporations move to popularize mobile device banking.

Antivirus supplier F-Secure says 09Droid offered more than 50 mobile banking applications for sale through Google’s Android Marketplace, the app store for smartphones based on the Android operating system. Google pulled the apps on Monday. Several banking firms included in 09Droid’s apps issued warnings for their patrons not to use them.

F-Secure Chief Research Officer Mikko Hypponen says no one in the security community had a chance to reverse engineer 09Droid’s first-of-its-kind banking app, so it could simply be a program that redirected users to the bank’s online website.

On the other hand, 09Droid could have rather easily programmed in stealthy code to silently steal account log-ins. The programmer did sell some number of apps prior to Google yanking them. Hypponen notes that Android apps do not go through an approval process akin to the certification process required of apps made available through the iPhone App Store or through Signed by Symbian programs.

As a rule of thumb, he recommends avoiding any third-party banking apps on any platform unless you know for certain it is expressly approved by your bank. To date, F-Secure has not seen any malicious apps sold through iPhone App Store, Palm App Catalog, BlackBerry App World or Windows Mobile Marketplace. However, the security company has seen the “Signed by Symbian” certification process subverted a couple of times.

New Google Phone?

A Google company blog post over the weekend raised questions as to whether a new phone being tested by Google employees is just a way for employees to improve upon the Android operating system or is an actual prototype that will be released in 2010.

Numerous sources online have reported the device’s existence, including photos of a handset that resembles a cross between the HTC Hero and Passion, running Android 2.1. Few specs for the Nexus One are known; however, most reports suggest that the phone is an unlocked GSM device that will sell directly to consumers. Additionally, HTC has filed a report for the Nexus One with the FCC.

Ken Hyers, senior analyst for Technology Business Research, questions the logic of a solely Google-branded device. “What I find fascinating is the idea that they are just on the cusp of some really good success and now they’re going to go and compete with their own partners. I don’t think it’s wise,” Hyers said.

Hyers said that Google may see an opportunity to develop a device that connects to all of Google’s applications and services. However, he still finds the idea full of holes. “The great thing about an unlocked GSM phone is that you can take it anywhere. However, Nokia’s tried that in the United States and failed miserably,” he said.

“Nokia has had great success with the unlocked model in Europe. So maybe we shouldn’t look at this strictly from a U.S. viewpoint,” he said, noting that if the device is being developed for an international market, it would not be in direct U.S. competition with Google partners such as Motorola and HTC.

Sprint to offer HTC Hero

Sprint will be getting the highly anticipated Android-based HTC Hero, sans the quirky form factor with which the device debuted in Europe with T-Mobile and Orange.

According to a press release, the Sprint Hero will be available at all Sprint retail locations and online beginning Oct. 11 for $179.99 after a $50 instant savings and a $100 mail-in rebate with a two-year service agreement. Pre-registration begins today online.

From pictures provided by Sprint, the U.S. version of the Hero does not appear to take the device’s European form factor, which included a unique beveled mouth piece.

European & US HTC HeroRoger Entner, senior vice president of the communications sector for Nielsen IAG, said the U.S. version is a great improvement. “I have no idea why it was left out, but they got rid of a great big wart,” Entner said. “Ideally, you want to keep it flat. That bevel on the European version was just an admission that they couldn’t get the mic and voice quality right.”

Enter said the quality of the recent wave of Android phones has produced some possible competitors to the iPhone. “We’ll see if they’re competitive with the iPhone. They should come pretty close,” Enter said, adding: “Hopefully it means less iPhone envy on Captiol Hill.”

The HTC Hero features an integrated 5 MP camera and camcorder, Bluetooth 2.0, GPS, Wi-Fi, exapandable microSD slot up to 32 GB and integrated Facebook, Twitter and Flikr.

Including the Hero, Palm Pre and BlackBerry Tour, Sprint now has three high-profile smartphone devices on its network. The carrier also offers what is considered one of the cheapest rate plans on the market. Sprint’s Simply Everything plan provides unlimited nationwide calling, texting, e-mail, data and navigation for $99.99 per month.