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We pretty much knew that Windows Mobile 7 is coming next week at MWC, but the Wall Street Journal has a piece up confirming the announcement, along with a few other interesting details. As we’d heard, the new UI is a riff on the Zune HD interface, and the OS “reflects a much tighter focus” on hardware / software integration, all based around a “small number” of hardware chassis specs — pretty much what we’ve known, but it’s interesting that the Journal’s source says the plan is to “limit the wild variation” that’s typically been the hallmark of Windows Mobile. The WSJ also says that the long-rumored Pink project is a separate phone designed to replace the Sidekick — which we also basically knew — but that it won’t make an appearance at MWC at all. Hmm, sounds like someone ought tell all those Twittering Danger employees. We’ll see what happens — it all goes down early on Monday.

Wall Street Journal: Windows Mobile 7 coming next week originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 12 Feb 2010 15:22:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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“Like” is probably the most abused word in the English language.

And on Facebook, the word takes on a whole spectrum of meaning from casually approving a shared news story to being totally enthusiastic about a friend’s game-winning soccer goal or marriage proposal over the weekend. So what if you want a bit of granularity?

Threadsy, which puts e-mail and social network updates together in one stream, just launched a feature that allows you to “dislike” or “love” Facebook status updates.

They’re easter egg features in the new version of Threadsy that users have to figure out how to unlock. (Clues are here.) It’s a variation on a feature they experimented with last year — the ability to “abhor” lame status updates. (See example below). After testing it out, the company found that people actually wanted a “dislike” option rather than an “abhor” one.

Even though it was meant as a joke, “people generally thought that ‘abhor’ was too strong,” explained Scott Kendall, who leads product at Threadsy. “However, we’ll consider adding ‘abhor’ and potentially other emotions in the future.  Abhor actually completes the emotional spectrum nicely: like is to dislike as love is to abhor.”

So far, people are more affectionate than nasty. Users are “loving” updates more than they are “disliking” them.

Facebook adopted a “like” feature last year as a lightweight way of letting people interact with others on the social network. It’s a data goldmine for the company — “likes” increase user engagement, because it’s easier to get people to click a “like” button than write out a comment.

It also gives Facebook vital information about how strong relationships are between different people. If you “like” or comment on another person’s status updates frequently, they’re more likely to appear in your news feed.

Filed under: Hardware, Software, Apple, iPhone

MobileCrunch has an interesting post up about five things the iPad has and does that Apple would do well to bring back to those of us using the iPhone. I think we’ll see more of these as we go along (especially as, you know, some of us actually get to touch and use the device), but this list is a good start.

Bluetooth keyboard support is something that only jailbreakers could do on the iPhone, but it shows up day one on the iPad. The iPad, according to those checking out the SDK code, will also be able to share files with the desktop, and different apps on the iPad will even be able to identify themselves as owners for certain filetypes, which is another cool trick that Apple should teach the old iPhone dog. And of course, that processor — we can probably expect to see a smaller version of it in a future variation of the iPhone sooner or later, since Apple is always fighting to get battery life and speed to the max.

Of course, the iPad and the iPhone are two different devices, and Apple will want to keep some things separate — as we’ve heard already, there are certain interface guidelines for the iPad that the iPhone will never use. But especially if we see the expected update to the iPhone later this year, it’s a good guess that we’ll also see some of the iPad’s more reusable features find their way to the “iPad mini.”

TUAWFive things to bring back from the iPad originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 29 Jan 2010 16:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Apple Corporate, Hardware, Retail, Mac Pro

While researching MacBook Pros, the folks at cmyplay produced an infographic charting the relative prices of MacBook Pros around the world. The variation is amazing.

The lowest cost was found in the US … mostly. Certain models cost less in Hong Kong, but as the author notes, that could be due to exchange rate fluctuations. Prices were significantly higher in South Africa. For example, an entry-level 13″ MacBook Pro 2.26GHz in South Africa retails for about the same prices as a mid-level 15″ MacBook Pro (2.53GHz) in the US. Note that Apple does not have official representation in South Africa.

However, the highest prices were found in Brazil (where Apple does have official representation). As cmyplay notes, “For the amount to purchase a top-of-the-line MacBook Pro 2.8GHz in Brazil, a person could buy two of the same machine in the US.” One Brazilian commenter noted that Brazil’s import duties and sales tax, especially on electronics, is very high.

Good work, cmyplay! Your graphic is beautiful and offers a perspective we might not otherwise have considered. Make sure you visit the post to see the full image.

[Via Gizmodo]

TUAWMacBook prices around the world originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 11 Jan 2010 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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One thing that Google made clear today is that the HTC-built Nexus One is the first in a line of so-called ‘Superphones.’ And HTC doesn’t have the exclusive right to manufacture them, Google’s VP of Product Management Mario Queiroz said today.

“We could very well do a Nexus Two with Motorola,” he said. “We’re working as quickly as possible.”

So that might appease the handset maker, which launched the Droid two months ago only to have it overshadowed by the Nexus One. In deciding to put its marketing muscle behind an HTC-manufactured device, Google risks alienating the very manufacturing partners that have helped the Android operating system become a credible competitor in the smartphone space.

Queiroz didn’t say when a Nexus Two, Three or Six might show up. But judging by Google’s pace in going from 1 to 20 Android-based phones in a single year, the next phone could come soon.

(”Nexus Two” isn’t trademarked yet, so the second one could have some other name variation. But “Nexus One” belongs to Google, not to HTC, according to the United States Patent and Trademark Office.)

You know that Condé Nast tablet / digital magazine demo we saw recently (non-ironically paging through a copy of Wired)? Well now Time Inc. has gotten in on the same game, showing off its version of a digimag running a touch-friendly issue of Sports Illustrated. The company not only buzzed everyone with the charming walkthough video — a floating hand paging through SI on a sleek, black tablet (embedded after the break) — but also had a live, functioning variation of the product up and running on a touchscreen HP laptop. The gist of the project seems to be that the publisher will be able to offer this digitized version of its magazines in some sort of agnostic format, one that would be accessible to PCs and phantom Apple tablets alike. Peter Kafka over at All Things D says that he had a chance to play with the demo and it was, “quite a bit of fun.” While it’s clear that both Time and Condé Nast are taking parallel routes to online publishing (the former is purely in concept mode, the latter is working with Adobe on digital versions of its titles as we speak), one thing is painfully clear: both companies have shockingly similar ideas about what the future of magazine publishing looks like. We hope Apple has been informed.

Continue reading Time Inc. shows off magazine tablet demo, plans future anger about 70/30 profit split

Time Inc. shows off magazine tablet demo, plans future anger about 70/30 profit split originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 02 Dec 2009 18:09:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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You’ll find an abundance of tools to test your internet connection speed but what if you want to test the quality and reliability of the connection? Pingtest gives you feedback on your connection.

Pingtest allows you to select servers from around the world and test your connection to them. Your connection is graded based on packet loss, ping time, and a composite of all the ping tests called jitter—an indicator of how much variation exists in your ping times.

If the screenshot above looks familiar that’s because Pingtest is brought to you by the same company behind the wildly popular Speedtest—a web-based tool for checking the speed of your internet connection.

Have a favorite tool for measuring your internet connection? Let’s hear about it in the comments.

Mac users got some love from Apple this week in the form of an update to Snow Leopard, as well as one for Safari. But it’s not all good news for Apple fans–hackers are out to get jailbroken iPhone users and those running Atom-based hackintoshes will be stuck on Mac OS X 10.6.1. Read on to get the low-down.

Mac OS X 10.6.2 out now along with Leopard security update: Come and get your Snow Leopard update to 10.6.2! If you’re still on Leopard, though, security fixes are available as well.

Truly malicious iPhone malware now out in the wild: While previous “attacks” on jailbroken iPhones were benign, a variation of the same attack quietly extracts personal data from an infected device. Please, folks, change your default passwords.

Like the human language, bird singing demonstrates a remarkable capacity for variation. Some bird species have the ability to modify their dialects over the course of a single generation—if not less. The indigo bunting and yellow-rumped cacique, for instance, have been known to change their tune in a year or less. In other cases, species like the wood thrush have kept the dialects used by their parents and neighbors going for decades at a time. Despite a steady amount of research looking into the matter, the question of why, or why not, some dialects endure while others perish has yet to be satisfactorily resolved.

According to WordPress, there are more than 60 million page views that come from mobile phones per month for WordPress.com blogs. With that kind of traffic, how your site renders on mobile devices could be a big boon to increasing engagement.

That’s why we’re excited to learn that WordPress has just launched two new mobile themes for WordPress.com blogs that will be automatically displayed when a compatible mobile phone attempts to access your site.

For smartphones with top notch mobile browsers, like the iPhone or Android devices, the theme will be a tweaked version of WPtouch, while other devices will sport a variation of the WordPress Mobile Edition.

From the sound of it, WPtouch is pretty spiffy and even includes custom header image scaling. WordPress also shares that, “visitors greeted by WPtouch will get easy access to posts, pages, and archives. They’ll get fancy AJAX commenting and post loading.” As for phones running less sophisticated browsers, the mobile theme will help your site load faster and display as much relevant information about your blog as possible.

Given that the new mobile themes are default, you don’t have to do anything to see the new changes made to your WordPress.com blog. However, if you’d like to disable the mobile themes, you can do so from your Dashboard under Appearance -> Extras.

While we think the news is great for hosted WordPress blog owners, we’re slightly disappointed that the mobile themes aren’t available for those of us who have self-hosted WordPress blogs.

Tags: blogging, Mobile 2.0, mobile theme, Wordpress, wptouch