Next-gen Snapdragon Mobile Chip: Quad-core, 2.5GHz

Hardware 36 Comments
"The name Snapdragon is fast becoming well-known among consumers as the chip to have inside your smartphone. Offering speeds of up to 1.5GHz at the moment, it's certainly one of the fastest mobile chips out there. Qualcomm doesn't want the reputation of Snapdragon to falter, though, so the chip manufacturer has just announced an update that will have smartphone and tablet users drooling. The next iteration of the Snapdragon processor line is codenamed Krait and uses 28nm manufacturing technology. It will be offered in single, dual, and quad-core versions with clock speeds up to 2.5GHz. If the huge increase in performance wasn’t enough for you, Qualcomm also boast a 65% reduction in power use over existing mobile ARM chips."
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Intel’s Medfield Smartphone Chip Now in Production

  Submitted by anonymous Intel 7 Comments
Intel says its Medfield chip, designed for low-end smartphones, is in production and will ship later this year. Tablets using Intel's Oak Trail chips will ship this year, before Medfield will appear in products. According to Intel's Ultra Mobility Group, Medfield will have the fastest processor on the market, the same standby time as chips from competitors and the longest active power use time of any chip.
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Nokia New Strategic Direction: What is the Future for Qt?

Qt 27 Comments
With the news that Nokia is choosing Windows Phone 7 as its main smart phone platform, there has been some doubts concerning its commitment towards Qt and Meego. On the QT blog, Nokia's Director of Qt ecosystem discusses its future. Nokia re-affirms it's committed to Qt, and also says it will be launching a Meego device later this year. Nokia after all is not the only company with an interest in this platform and tablets from other companies like Fujitsu is already starting to emerge.
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Flash Player 10.2 Out of Beta, Drops All PPC Support

Internet 15 Comments
"Today's release of Adobe Flash Player 10.2.152.26 is considered final by Adobe, according to the company's Flash Team Blog, and ushers in a new level of hardware-accelerated video decoding in most modern Intel Macs The company has dropped all support for PowerPC-based players, including security updates, in a clear sign that the 10.1/10.2 releases are a "reference" release for Flash playback."
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No Release Candidate for Ubuntu 11.04

  Submitted by Debjit Ubuntu 18 Comments
"According to the original release schedule, the final release of Ubuntu 11.04 "Natty Narhwal" on 28th April was to be preceded by a Release Candidate on 21st April. Release Candidate has been scrapped and in its place, the Release Team has added a second beta on 14th April. The changes has been necessitated by the fact that 21st April is just before Easter and, so, many developers and testers would be unavailable during the time."
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HP Donates $10000 Server To webOS Homebrew Community

Wireless 31 Comments
"There was a piece of news that didn't happen to get mentioned at last night's developer event. HP has made a donation to a charity on behalf of the WebOS Internals homebrew group that is valued at over $10,000. A few weeks ago, it became clear that future growth in webOS would outpace the server infrastructure that WebOS Internals currently has in place. They were going to need some beefy hardware to keep up with the demands of acting as the a central repository for webOS homebrew apps, patches, and kernels. So they asked HP's Phil McKinney, who has arranged to donate an HP Proliant DL385 2u server with 32 gigs of RAM and 8 terabytes of disk space. They made the decision a few weeks ago and the server is en route." Very welcome news. Like Palm before it, HP gets it.
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Patent Troll MPEG-LA Opens Attack on VP8, WebM

  Submitted by aa Multimedia, AV 70 Comments
Well, well, well. The MPEG-LA is showing its true colours. After a decade of threatening to patent troll the living heck out of Theora, the company led by a patent troll has now finally put its money where its mouth is. Well, sort of. They don't actually have any patents yet, they're asking people to submit patents they believe are essential to the VP8 specification. Update: MPEG (so not the MPEG-LA) has announced its intent to develop a new video compression standard for the web which will be royalty-free. "The new standard is intended to achieve substantially better compression performance than that offered by MPEG-2 and possibly comparable to that offered by the AVC Baseline Profile. MPEG will issue a call for proposals on video compression technology at the end of its upcoming meeting in March 2011 that is expected to lead to a standard falling under ISO/IEC 'Type-1 licensing', i.e. intended to be 'royalty free'."
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Why Nokia Chose Windows Phone 7, and Why It’s a Good Move

Wireless 242 Comments
A lot of people are wondering why Nokia didn't choose to go with Android. How can Nokia differentiate themselves when Android is a lot more open and free than Windows Phone 7? As usual, the key to this is in the details. If you read the announcements carefully, you'll see that Microsoft offered Nokia something Google most likely didn't. Update: What a surprise. Elop just confirmed Nokia has a special deal with Microsoft. Whereas HTC, Samsung, and so on are not allowed to customise WP7 - Nokia is, further confirming my theory.
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Nokia, Microsoft Announce Deep Partnership

Wireless 119 Comments
It's official. Dismissed as a silly rumour by many, Nokia and Micorsoft have just announced a very comprehensive partnership in which Windows Phone 7 will become Nokia's prime smartphone platform. It goes a lot deeper than that, though. Update: Qt will not be available for Windows Phone 7. Qt will remain the development platform for MeeGo and Symbian. Update II: During its Capital Market Day event, Elop confirmed Nokia will not make a comprehensive MeeGo product line. It will be a platform to learn from, but it won't become a competitive platform. Update III: Android was not an option because it would be difficult to differentiate there. Update IV: There will be 'substantial reductions in employment' in Finland and around the world. Also, before I forget, thanks Engadget for the live-blogging where I get this stuff from!
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How One Man Tracked Down Anonymous – And Paid a Heavy Price

Internet 49 Comments
Absolutely fantastic article over at Ars about a guy trying to hunt down Anonymous - which cost him and his company dearly. "Aaron Barr believed he had penetrated Anonymous. The loose hacker collective had been responsible for everything from anti-Scientology protests to pro-Wikileaks attacks on MasterCard and Visa, and the FBI was now after them. But matching their online identities to real-world names and locations proved daunting. Barr found a way to crack the code. But had he?" A comment to the article says it best: "Personally, I'm rooting for Anonymous. I may not care for their attitude or their methods sometimes, but I think a little fear and caution on the worst excesses of those who would impair our rights is good thing." Governments and companies should fear the people - not the other way around.
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Windows 7 SP1: February 16 on MSDN, February 22 for Web

Windows 2 Comments
"Microsoft has informed close partners that SP1 has hit the Release to Manufacturing milestone. MSDN and TechNet customers will receive the bits on February 16, followed by a general web release on February 22. According to sources close to the matter, Microsoft sent out internal announcements to mark the RTM of Windows 7 SP1 in January. Russian site Wzor confirmed the RTM too and has leaked several versions of Windows 7 SP1 for various languages."
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