Google Archive

"Hot on the heels of Apple's subscription service announcement, Google has lifted the curtain on its own offering that will allow publishers to set a price for recurring content delivered via your Google login. The payment system is called 'One Pass', and it allows publishers to offer not only subscriptions, but also metered access, 'freemium' content, and even individual articles. So far, One Pass seems more flexible than Apple's offering, and the company will likely take a much smaller cut from publishers than Apple will."

"Google may be planning to keep Android 2 and 3 segregated in a long-term split of the platform, according to a ViewSonic source on Monday. The 2.4 update, once thought to be called Ice Cream, is now said to be a continuation of Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) that would simply add backwards compatibility for dual-core apps on single-core phones. Ice Cream, Pocket-lint heard, should be Android 3.1 and would keep the two apart in features and the interface."

Usually it's Apple doing the event thing, but today the thunder's on Google. It held a press event to officially unveil Android 3.0 Honeycomb for tablets, as well as a revamped Android market. Gizmodo has a hands-on of the Motorola Xoom running Android 3.0, as does Engadget. Also today, the Android Market has been updated with a web frontend which allows for the seamless purchase and installation of Android applications from within your browser, which are then pushed to your device(s). In-application purchases have been added as well.

The web is already aflame with Google's accusation that Bing is stealing its search results. Google created code to manually rank certain bogus search terms, and ten created mock web pages as the top search results for these bogus terms. It turned out that Bing would list the exact same mock web pages as its top search result for these bogus terms. Google is unhappy with it, but in all honesty - since when is it wrong to copy in the computer business?

"Sometimes the sheer wrongness of what is posted on the web leaves us speechless. Especially when it's picked up and repeated as gospel by otherwise reputable sites like Engadget. 'Google copied Oracle's Java code, pasted in a new license, and shipped it', they reported this morning. Sorry, but that just isn't true."

I didn't plan on this, but there's really nothing I can do. Unless you want me to write about the upcoming ten billionth download from the iOS App Store, you'll have to settle for this. On the Chromium blog, Google has clarified its decision to drop H.264 support from the Chrome web browser, and in it, Google basically repeats the things that those concerned about the future of video on the web have been saying for a long time now: H.264 on the web kills innovation.

Stuff just keeps on piling up today - and I'm trying to work through my second playthrough of Mass Effect 2 on insanity (fourth playthrough overall). I have the sneaking suspicion, though, that nobody sympathises with my problems... Anywho, Google just unveiled the tablet user interface for Android 3.0, Honeycomb. Looks pretty decent I guess - somehow, it reminds me of Tron.

"Google's new Nexus S smartphone is the first Android device to use the Ext4 filesystem. The company published a statement on the official Android developer blog earlier this month to discuss how adoption of Ext4 on Android will impact third-party application developers. In a follow-up post last week, Ext4 developer Ted T'so commented on the transition and offered some further clarification regarding concerns about fsync data loss issues, which he says pose minimal risk on Android due to the higher level of quality assurance testing."

In a story about an upcoming tablet from MSI launching in March, the Taiwanese website Digitimes might just have spilled the beans about the approximate launch date of Android 3. The tablet mentioned will ship in March-April next year with Android 3. Android 3 will be optimised for tablets and some big name companies, including Motorola and Lenovo, were holding back on these tablets until the version 3 release. On Techradar, Google's Andy Rubin already showed off an Android 3 prototype tablet from Motorola that gave some clues as to what Android 3 might be capable of. This includes easier navigation requiring absolutely no physical buttons, as well as 3D processing power. Android 3 is also said to have a redesigned UI, support for higher resolution 1280x760 displays and has a strict minimum hardware requirement of a 1Ghz CPU, 512 RAM and a minimum display size of 3.5".

The source code for Android 2.3 has been released. "Nexus S went on sale yesterday morning in the US, running Gingerbread. Just like I did for Froyo, I'm open-sourcing the matching Android platform source code, right after the first consumers get their hands on it. I'm going to start literally right now, and the process will take a few hours."

Google held a Chrome event today, and the rumours had suggested we might see the launch of Chrome OS today. This turned out to be nonsense, and in all honesty, the entire event didn't really deliver much in the form of new information. The Chrome Web Store has been opened, and the first Chrome OS netbooks will arrive in the middle of 2011.

After countless rumours, leaked screenshots, and what not, Google has officially unveiled Android 2.3, dubbed Gingerbread, today. Accompanying the release of this new Android version is the Nexus S, a Samsung-made successor to HTC's Nexus One, which delivers the pure Google experience - unlocked, without additional crap.

Finally! After pioneering sandboxing of Javascript and tabs in the browser, Chrome is now finally busy moving Flash into a sandbox. Windows users of the dev channel have been fed the new release with Flash sandboxing already.

The European Commission has decided to open an antitrust investigation into allegations that Google has abused a dominant position in online search, in violation of European Union rules. The Commission will investigate whether Google has abused a dominant market position in online search by allegedly lowering the ranking of unpaid search results of competing services which are specialized in providing users with specific online content such as price comparisons (so-called vertical search services) and by according preferential placement to the results of its own vertical search services in order to shut out competing services.