HTC Hero gets reviewed

Originally announced on June 24, HTC hero has earned a special place in the hearts of smartphone lovers with its killer looks and beautiful interface. Reviews of the HTC's latest phone have started flowing in from major websites and as usual, Hero gets a mixed bag of praises and complaints. A short highlight:

Engadget.com: "If this build of Android were to be loaded atop the guts of a 3GS or Pre, the performance would likely be astounding, but fused with the two-year old architecture of previous devices, it's mostly disappointing......this build is a bit too much for a device like the Hero to handle, and that makes for an uneven, sometimes frustrating experience" -Full review.

Boygeniusreport.com: "HTC’s achievements and innovations aren’t anything to dismiss, they are what to me makes Android usable, but with the current hardware powering the HTC Hero, things become murky and frustrating" - Full review.

Slashgear.com: "It’s reassuring to know that not only is the Hero a great smartphone but that it’s only likely to get better as HTC continue their tweaks. It’s safe to say that, in the HTC Hero, Android has come of age." - Full review.

HTC has done an incredible job with their latest smartphone. With an eye-catching design and the beautiful Sense UI, the phone is arguably the best looking Android based handset available in market today. However, looks alone doesn't make a product worthy and Hero does fail to impress in other areas. HTC's Sense UI looks very promising, but the underlying hardware is simply not enough to keep everything running smooth without lagging. As pointed out by many reviewers, if HTC can combine this OS with a better hardware platform, something like Tegra or Snapdragon, we might have a true winner that could easily drive the IPhone and Palm Pre a run for their money. Who knows, HTC is aware of this and something very big is under development and Hero is a small example of what's yet to come.

Symbian enters the app store market with "Horizon"

It's a well known fact that Symbian is the worldwide leader in operating system for smart phones with more than 49.3 percent of world smart phones using their OS. But, as companies like Apple, Google, RIM, Microsoft and Palm have taken the Mobile OS market very seriously, Symbian's market share has been steadily declining for the past few years. To remain competitive in the market, the company has announced many initiatives this year. One of such initiative is the recently announced application publishing platform - "Symbian Horizon". The new service aims to simplify the task of distributing applications developed for the Symbian OS by third party developers. Unlike Apple's app store, there is no revenue model for the service, a developer has to submit the program and the company would take care of signing the app, publishing the app to the store, managing the transactions and so on, all at no cost to the developers. “Our goal is to encourage robust application development, increase revenue and application diversity in mobile stores, and improve the consumer experience – all for the greater benefit of the mobile ecosystem”, says Lee Williams, Executive Director of the Symbian Foundation. The service is expected to launch in October while developers can submit their programs right now on the official page. Hit on the read link for the official news on Symbian's blog.

Read - Scanning The Horizon

Microsoft announces Office web applications

Worldwide Partner Conference 2009 has kicked off at New Orleans and Microsoft has announced that Office 2010 has finally reached the technical preview engineering milestone. A number of new features have been announced and showcased in the event. PowerPoint is getting video and image editing capabilities, Word, PowerPoint and OneNote are getting a new feature called as co-author, using which more than one user can edit the same document simultaneously in real time, Microsoft Backstage for easy document preparation, a new feature called Sparklines for Excel are the few among the many great useful features announced in the event. Microsoft has promised that the final product will land on the second half of 2010 while the public preview is expected to arrive this year. For those who can't wait, the preview version is already available on all major torrent trackers.

While the new features of Office 2010 was nothing mind blowing, what was really interesting was the announcement of Office Web applications. Microsoft made it clear that Office Web applications will work smoothly on various browsers including Firefox and Safari, however Chrome is still not supported possibly due to the Silverlight dependency of the proposed web applications. Whats more shocking is, the entire range of Office Web applications will be available to all Live subscribers at free of cost. That's a direct competition against Google's free online Docs suite launched almost three years ago. It should be noted that the web version of Word, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote will be light weight versions of the original software which means that there will be some limitations. Microsoft has promised that the same look and feel of the documents will be preserved regardless of the browser of choice for both PCs and mobile phones.

Though the new web based applications might affect the revenue generated by desktop version of the Office suite, analysts believe that the move is really smart from Microsoft as this means that customers will continue using Microsoft products, which might be profitable in the long run. Google announced their plans for a new OS just last week and now Microsoft has fired back with their web applications. With the same familiar user interface now on the browser, combined with a range of new features just announced, Microsoft's Office Web applications might become a serious threat to the Google's Docs. But we can't draw into any conclusion until the service is launched next year. Until then, both Microsoft and Google have plenty of time to tweak and refine their products to prove one's superiority over the other. Hit on the read link for the official page for the preview of the new versions of your tried and trusted Office applications.

Read - Introducing Microsoft Office 2010 Technical Preview

VLC Media Player 1.0.0 now available

If you are looking for a one stop solution to satisfy all your video playback needs, there is no doubt that VLC media player is the best choice you can opt for and nothing else even comes close. Originally started as an academic project by students in 1996 the player has evolved into the best open source media player in the planet. Supporting almost every possible video and audio formats, the player provides a wide range of features and options using which the user can play, record or even stream the content over the network. Since the project is open source, various developers across the globe have contributed and now after 13 years, the player has finally reached version 1.0. The new version has a number of new features, bug fixes and support for more media formats. The official page reports that their latest player has hit 3 million downloads within the first 3 days of launch and an estimated 8 downloads per second. That’s an amazing figure for an independent open source project. Hit on the read link for the official page to download and it's guaranteed that you will never use windows media player again!

Read - VLC media player: The cross-platform open-source multimedia framework, player and server

Silverlight 3.0 is out of beta

Microsoft Silverlight is a web application framework something very similar to Adobe Flash. When the framework was first announced way back in 2006, it provided limited functionalities, but now after years of development, the framework has evolved into a mature platform and poses a serious threat to Adobe Flash. Silverlight 3.0 was first announced at the MIX09(Web Design and Development Conference) event. Available as beta version since the announcement, Silverlight 3.0 has undergone a variety of changes and bug fixes. Now after almost 4 months, Microsoft finally decided to ship the final version of their web application framework today. The latest version is now available for download and the compatible browsers for now seems to be Windows Internet Explorer 6/7/8, Firefox 2/3, and Safari 3/4. Microsoft promises that Silverlight 3.0 would deliver "high-definition video in full-screen mode, with stutter-free live and on-demand video". Hit on the read link for the download page and test drive the latest version yourself.

Read - Microsoft Silverlight: Light up the web.

Google Chrome OS - another breaking news from the search Giant!

With Google gaining market share in every web related products with their Google Apps, it was quite obvious that they would bring out an OS of their own. That's right, Google today announced their official entry into the OS market with their "Google Chrome OS". Unlike Windows, the new OS from Google will be 'an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks'. However, as the product evolves with time, it is inevitable that the new OS will find it's way to full-size desktop systems. For now, Google has announced that their new OS will work on both x86 as well as ARM chips and we'll see the OS in action sometime in 2010 on a number of netbooks from multiple OEMs. The architecture behind the OS would be a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel.

For those of you wondering about the overlap with Android, the company is very well aware of that and claims, "we believe choice will drive innovation for the benefit of everyone, including Google". Now that Google has officially entered the OS market, neither Microsoft nor Apple would be seriously disturbed as this is just an announcement and nothing more. However, both the companies wouldn't take this so lightly since this is Google we are talking about. First it was Google Wave and now this, the engineers at Google now have some real main stream products to work on this year apart from Android and the company's dedication to Open Source really pleases many of the developers outside Google as well. We have to wait and see if Chrome OS can be a real winner or just another Linux distribution as it is really too early to conclude anything with just an announcement. Hit on the read link for the official news on Google's blog post.

Read - Introducing the Google Chrome OS

Sony VAIO W series netbooks officially announced

It's still hard to believe that it really took this long for Sony to launch their first true netbook. But after the long wait, it's finally here. Dubbed as VAIO W, the new series of netbooks features some decent spec but the design is not as impressive as someone would expect from a Sony product. The new device checks in with 10.1" screen, 1.6GHz Atom processor, 1 GB RAM, 160GB HDD, Wifi: Atheros 802.11 b/g/n and all the usual stuff we might expect from a netbook. The netbook ships with Windows XP and three colour options to choose from: pink, brown and white. The only feature which makes the new W series netbooks stand apart from the crowd is the 1368x768 resolution. However with a price tag of $499 and a chubby design, consumers have a plenty of other options to choose from. When compared with the impressive lineup of netbooks from Asus and Acer, Sony is really late to the party and their latest W series fails to impress. Hit on the read link for the official press release on Sony.ca.

Read - Sony debuts new mini notebook in cool new colours