One feature that has been conspicuously missing in Android since its launch has been a biggie–multi-touch. Multi-touch is the wonderful input method that reads multiple touch inputs at once. It gives for a more ‘natural’ control of input, instead of zooming in/out by tapping plus/minus signs, you can simply pinch or pull the screen. We’ve said it before but: Multitouch has become the benchmark for touchscreen browsing. The iPhone has it, the Pre has it, Android should definitely have it by now.

Luckily, CNET reports that official multi-touch support will be coming to the Android 2.0 update, which is expected to release this holiday season. Having multi-touch in Android is necessary not because of just its improvement to the user experience but it will take away a bullet point from its competitors. And to clarify, Eclair, not Donut, is expected to be 2.0.

Excited for the multi-touch news?

View original post here: 
Multi-Touch Coming to Android in 2.0, Eclair ?

We’re still not sure whether multitouch capability will be making its debut on the Android 2.0 operating system in due time, but the following firmware update from the Eclair branch could point towards such an implementation. After all, HTC did include their own multitouch functionality into the HTC Hero, while other notable programmers with the technical know-how also managed to do so themselves. Well, guess we can only find out when the first Android 2.0 devices start to seep into the marketplace, and frankly, having multitouch would increase the desirability of owning an Android phone instead of the other fruity one.

Permalink: Multitouch could appear in Android 2.0 from Ubergizmo | Hot: Wii, PS3 and Natal Motion Sensing

View post: 
Multitouch could appear in Android 2.0

Well, it’s looking increasingly like those very first shots of a rumored Dell smartphone that cropped up way back in June were indeed the real deal, as two separate sets of purported spy pics have now turned up showing an identical-looking phone. Better still, they also show the device powered on, offering us our first look at Dell and China Mobile’s customized Android interface for the thing. The Boy Genius Report also goes one step further with a complete list of the phone’s purported specs, which includes quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE connectivity, a 3.5-inch 640 x 360 display, a 3-megapixel camera with a flash (and support for 30 fps video), Bluetooth, A-GPS, and a microSD card slot for expansion, to name a few features. Head on past the break for one more, equally blurry shot, and dive into the links below for a few pics and details.

Read the rest here:
Dell Mini 3i smartphone captured in pair of spy shots

One of our trusty ninjas just blessed us with the following information: first up, real pictures of Dell’s Chinese market smartphone code-named Benzine. Just as TechCrunch reported, we’ve been told the handset is “launch ready.” Here are the full specifications for this Dell smartphone:

• Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE class 12
• Size: 68.6cc
• 103g grams weight
• Dimensions: 58 x 122 x 11.7mm
• Display: 3.5″ nHD 640
  

These days, the whole “I shipped a million!” claim is becoming more and more common, but it’s still worth pointing out that HTC has managed to move a whole bundle of its Android-based myTouch 3G (or Magic, as it were) since debuting in April. Or, that’s the story, anyway. According to a dangerously brief blurb over at Digitimes, the outfit’s head honcho quipped that the Magic has “surpassed one million units,” and he also noted that it would begin to focus more on the mid-range market as opposed to always dealing devices at the high-end. So, raise your glass high for this one folks, and let the countdown to a million Hero handsets begin while you’re at it.

Read more here:
HTC reportedly moves a million Magic smartphones, boogies down at midnight

The T-Mobile myTouch 3G has been rooted. The wonderful folks of XDA developers have already hacked the myTouch 3G and were even thoughtful enough to provide detailed instructions on how to gain root yourself!

As with all rooting methods, if done incorrectly it may brick your device, so please tread carefully when following the instructions. Rooting a phone can be beneficial to those who want to take advantage of the full power of the phone–you can upload custom ROM, install apps to SD Card, etc–but it comes with obvious danger such as turning your once functional phone into a very expensive paperweight. If you’re not the most tech savvy we recommend you sit this one out, but for the rest of you–go right to your rooting needs!

Here are the instructions on how to root your myTouch 3G as posted by Amon_RA of XDA developers.

The rest is here: 
How To Root the T-Mobile myTouch 3G

HTC CEO Peter Chou has just revealed that HTC’s Second Android Device, the HTC Magic (or T-Mobile myTouch 3G or Google Ion), has just surpassed 1 million units sold. The Magic was launched in many parts across the world in April but just launched in the US this August. The HTC Magic is a definite success for HTC and we can assume that they hope that the HTC Hero (which just launched in Taiwan) will replicate the same levels of success. The more Android users in the world, the better!

Are you one of the million who own a HTC Magic, T-Mobile myTouch 3G, or Google Ion?

[digitimes]

Go here to see the original: 
HTC Magic Has Sold 1 Million Units

Augmented reality (or AR) is fast becoming as ubiquitous a term as “Web 2.0.” The field is getting noisier by the day, and AR as a field of research now has to co-exist with its status as an industry buzzword. Knowing the difference between the two is important. To do that, we have to examine the field and then revisit the buzzword you may have heard 10 years ago.

What Is Augmented Reality?

Augmented reality is a human interface for information that uses spherical coordinate systems to display information relative to the position of the viewer. Its most common application today is the overlay of information on the viewfinder of digital cameras. This is already a feature in many mid-point to high-end digital cameras that overlay the position of faces on the screen.

There are currently two distinct methods of augmented reality: marker-based and gravimetric.

Gravimetric Augmented Reality

Gravimetric AR uses data from a gravimeter to calculate the precise positioning and angle of a display device to determine the center, orientation, and range of a spherical coordinate system.

The first platform that was capable of delivering gravimetric AR applications on mobile phones was the Open Handset Alliance’s Android operating system running on the HTC Dream (better known as the TMobile G1).

One of those applications is Mobilizy’s Wikitude, which overlay’s Wikipedia data over the mobile phone’s camera view. Point the phone’s camera lens at the Golden Gate Bridge, for example, and see information overlaid on it. Move the phone around to find things on the bridge that you may not have noticed before.

Marker-Based Augmented Reality

Marker-based AR uses a camera and a visual marker known as a fiducial to determine the center, orientation, and range of its spherical coordinate system.

Hosted by the University of Washington, ARToolkit is the first fully-featured toolkit for marker-based AR. It is freely available under the GPL open-source license for personal use. ARToolworks Inc. is the commercial licensor of the platform.

The most popular marker-based AR applications use the FLARToolKit, a descendant of ARToolkit, which uses Flash to overlay information on video from a computer’s webcam when a fiducial marker is visible.

Among the most recent implementations of this method is GE’s Smart Grid information website, where readers can print out a fiducial marker and hold it within range of their webcam. The screen then displays an interactive 3-D model.

The iPhone’s World

At the iPhone’s launch in 2007, John Doerr, Partner at Kleiner Perkins, joined Steve Jobs on stage. Speaking of this technology’s potential, he said, “Think about it: in your pocket you have something that is broadband and connected all the time. It’s personal; it knows who you are and where you are. That’s a big deal, a really big deal. It’s bigger than the personal computer.”

Over the past two years, we have seen the iPhone seed an entirely new field of mobile-connected experiences, with many mobile applications and competing platforms.

Because AR uses a spherical coordinate system to display data, it needs to know not just the orientation of the device but the direction in which the camera is pointing. To do this, it needs an accelerometer capable of gravimetry — or, simply put, it needs a compass.

The iPhone 3GS is the only iPhone that can run gravimetric AR applications. ARKit, an open-source toolkit for creating AR applications on the iPhone 3GS, was just created and released at iPhoneDevCamp last weekend. Apple alerted its developers last week that AR applications will not be available in its App Store until September. The Palm Pre does not have a compass, and the BlackBerry Storm has no AR apps. So, for now, Android phones are the only mobile gravimetric AR devices in the wild.

Augmented Reality and Ambient Intelligence

Ambient intelligence is a human interface metaphor. It implies that the connected devices around us are all connected to some form of intelligence. We see this when we drive through an automated toll system like FasTrak on the Golden Gate Bridge. Using the RFID tag issued by the bridge authority, the bridge knows who we are and what to do. We don’t have to actively submit intelligence of our own: the ambient intelligence takes care of the job.

Globally positioned data is so voluminous that not all of it can be displayed. That fact combined with the bandwidth limitations of mobile carriers creates quite a challenge for the industry: deliver the data that is relevant to the user and location, and before the user gets there.

The holy grail of the mobile AR industry is to find a way to deliver the right information to a user before the user needs it, and without the user having to search for it. This holy grail is likely in a ditch somewhere beside a well-traveled road in the district of the semantic Web, ambient intelligence and the Internet of things. Be wary of any hyped-up invitation to invest in a company that claims to have gotten the opportunity right. What we’ve seen in the commercial industry to date is a rather complex version of a keyboard, mouse, and monitor.

Guest author: Sid Gabriel Hubbard is a blogger, Internet entrepreneur and three-time CTO. He leads the Android Maker’s group in San Francisco and the Bay Area Augmented Reality Meetup Group and is a contributing member of the iPhone ARKit open-source project.

Original post: 
Augmented Reality: A Human Interface for Ambient Intelligence

Oracle has upped the ante when it comes to virtualization with the release of three new tools for building virtual infrastructure in the enterprise.

Oracle’s new offerings are graphical utilities that allow both end users and ISVs to create pre-packaged virtual machines, and they’re free to boot. One is open source and based on Oracle Enterprise Linux JeOS (Just enough OS). The other is for Oracle’s Siebel CRM, and to top it all off its an extension of the Validated Configurations program for testing a stack for deployment.

JeOS, which was originally thought up by Canonical, basically means that users can whip up just enough of the Linux stack to support a particular set of applications. That allows both a high level of customization, but it’s a system still backed up by enterprise-class support from your vendor, in this case Oracle.

The availability of a VM template builder means developers can create these slimmed-down implementations of Oracle Enterprise Linux (but not other versions of Linux) within a VM image. While Oracle is mostly touting it as a graphical utility, you can work from the command line too, if you’re familiar with JeOS scripts.

The proprietary counterpart of the new VM template does much the same thing, but for Siebel CRM instead of Linux. All three offerings are free at this point, though a license is required to actually use Siebel CRM.

These releases come on the heels of Oracle acquiring the proprietary Virtual Iron, which it later killed, and this is the first big step into virtualization for Oracle since then.

View post: 
Oracle Unveils Virtualization Templates

Google just rolled out 18 social gadgets for its iGoogle start page. These social gadgets turn iGoogle into a far more interactive and social experience, as users can now play casual games with other iGoogle users and share videos and to-do lists right from the iGoogle homepage. As Google’s Marissa Mayer and Rose Yao, iGoogle’s product manager, told us yesterday, while the first incarnation of iGoogle was about connecting people with information, the service will now also focus on connecting people to each other.

These new social gadgets already launched in Australia earlier this month, so this announcement doesn’t come as too much of a surprise, though the U.S. launch also brings a number of new U.S.-centric gadgets to iGoogle from organizations like NPR, the Huffington Post, and the New York Times.

All iGoogle users in the U.S. will get access to these gadgets over the course of this week and Google plans to expand the reach of these social gadgets beyond the U.S. and Australia in the near future.

iGoogle as Google’s Social Hub?

On the surface, this doesn’t seem like a major announcement. However, while Google is slowly building out its repertoire of services that leverage the OpenSocial platform, the company never really tied all of these services together. With this announcement, though, it looks like iGoogle could become the central hub for social activities on Google’s ecosystem. After all, iGoogle already knows who your friends are because it can tap into your Google Contacts, where you can manage your friends by adding them to the “Friends” group.

Keeping Up With Your Friends

iGoogle currently offers two interesting ways to keep up with your friends’ activity: a timeline and an ‘updates’ feed. The timeline even allows users to post Facebook-like status updates. The good thing about the update stream is that users can see their friends’ activity on iGoogle, even if they don’t have a specific gadget installed themselves.

Social Gadgets

The current crop of gadgets is interesting in its own right. The ToDo gadget, for example, allows you to share a list of chores with your family members. Electronic Arts developed a nice version of Scrabble for iGoogle and the NPR gadget allows you to share news stories with your friends.

Another outstanding gadget is the YouTube gadget, which allows you to easily share interesting video clips with your friends. The problem here, though, is that the gadget doesn’t directly tie in to your activity on YouTube itself. When you share something on the actual YouTube website, it doesn’t automatically appear in your iGoogle gadget. This seems like a missed opportunity and exemplifies the problems Google still faces as it tries to centralize its users’ social activities across the large variety of services it offers.

The fact that there is no social Google Reader gadget for iGoogle so far also feels like a missed opportunity. While the Google Reader team has been adding more social features to its product, a stronger integration with iGoogle would really take this to the next level. We can only hope that an enterprising gadget developer will soon create this link between iGoogle and Google Reader.

Lots of Potential

Overall, we get the feeling that these social gadgets have a lot of potential, but it will take some work from third-party developers to really make the most out of this opportunity. The 18 social gadgets Google released today definitely make iGoogle a more attractive start page and it will be interesting to see what gadgets developers will come up with. Google itself, however, still has to work on creating a more integrated experience.

Original post:
iGoogle is Now Social: Google Launches Social Gadgets