This video posted via TechCrunch, kinda makes qwerty look archaic. This technology is coming out for the Omnia II (which is a winmo phone) and is supposed to later come out for an unnamed android phone. When it does, iPhone could have trouble.
[via http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/23/swype-iphone-leaked-video-android/]
Looks like YouTube is asking IE6 users to upgrade. http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/14/youtube-will-be-next-to-kiss-ie6-support-goodbye/
And according to Stat Counter, it looks like IE6 is still a significant amount of web traffic. http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-ww-daily-20080701-20090715-bar
So upgrade already, it’s almost 8 years old now.
Are you ready for BingTones? This just seems silly, but oh well!
The Samsung Omnia gets very little press. I have had one for about 6 months now, and I am still pleased with it. Feature for feature it seems to leave other phones in the dust. I know most people dislike the windows mobile UI. But with features like the following I think I can overlook the few times where I actually have to look at the Windows Mobile UI:
5 Megapixel Camera
With a 5 MP camera on your phone it basically replaces your camera. I know it’s not going to replace your DSLR, but it definitely replaces your simple point and shoot cameras. The other feature about the camera that you really don’t see very many other places is the smile detection; the phone can be set to take a picture when all the faces in the picture are smiling. I was skeptical at first of this, I thought there was no way this was going to work. Surprisingly, it works really well. I have used it for some of those awkward occasions where you would have normally used a timer to automatically take a picture. Also, if you have an Omnia from any other carrier than Verizon you have geo-tagging. That is where the camera uses the phone’s GPS and records the longitude and latitude of where the picture was taken into the picture’s properties. Another crazy cool feature of the phone is it’s business card recognition. Open up the business card app and take a picture of a business card and it automatically parses out the person’s info directly from the photo and puts it into your contacts. This has worked really well for me.
GPS
Again, thanks Verizon for turning off the GPS, I am still waiting for that patch to turn the GPS back on. Seriously, you can’t do things like this in the age of location-aware apps. Live Search with the Gas Prices feature would be so much better if I didn’t have to type in the address.
Video/Audio
This is one of the few phones I have ever seen that support Divx and Xvid movies; and of course it supports the staple, MP4, WMV, H.263 and H.264. It also supports MP3, AAC, AAC+, WMA, OGG, AMR and the DRM protected music. It also has a built-in FM radio with RDS (not too many phones that can boast that). One last thing it supports A2DP and AVRCP. (I love that iPhone finally is adding this with a patch, therefore the technology was built into the phones all this time, it was just turned off.) It also supports DLNA, which is quickly becoming widely accepted. Crazy that my phone can push media directly to my TV.
Lifehacker had an article regarding Windows 7 versus Mac OS X Leopard:
http://lifehacker.com/5277207/windows-7-versus-mac-os-x-leopard-the-feature+by+feature-showdown
Personally I think this article was a little gutsy when the WWDC was going to be the very next week and it was guaranteed that it was going to announce the successor to Leopard: Snow Leopard. To summarize the competition was close but Snow Leopard was decided as the favored operating system. The author’s comparison points were interesting and I think it was a fair assessment of the two operating systems.
However, I thought it was bizarre that they would compare Time Machine to Windows backup. My first thought was about how I never use windows backup. I just make a habit to store my important files on a secondary drive and keep the operating system on it’s own drive. The real backup system is Windows Home Server. And then a colleague of mine at work pointed out their poll at the bottom of article asks for people to rate the favorite feature about each operating system, and with 10% of the votes Time Machine was the readers favorite feature of Leopard. Wait, I thought Mac’s were secure and didn’t crash, then why is the backup/rollback system the favored feature? I think I deal more with the taskbar, themes, aero and the file explorer way more than I ever think about my backup. I am happy it’s there but I tend to go more with the set and forget it method. But, I guess that is just me. That’s just my two cents.