Plus 100 million in five months

This announcement of crossing the 500 million active Facebook users threshold comes less than six months after the company announced it had over 400 million users back in February. In effect, the company, which is now about six years old, grew 25 per cent in a half a year. Remarkable for any Internet service; unreal for one that now boasts around 1/13 of the world’s entire population as users.
Facebook stories

Zuckerberg announced a new Facebook application called Facebook Stories along with the active Facebook users’ announcement. Essentially, the application will serve as a touchy-feely place for Facebook users to share how the service has come to have meaning in their lives beyond that of a mere social network.

This very premise of being more than a ‘cool’ social network is a key focus of Zuckerberg’s. Speaking at the Computer History Museum in the United States, Zuckerberg emphasised that the company cares not for being ‘cool’. He said: ‘We’re here to build something useful. Something that’s cool can fade. But something that’s useful won’t.’
Bigger than a company

Like Google and Microsoft before it, Facebook is evolving into a service that’s bigger than the mere business it facilitates. As a result of its enviable reach, and social impact, the company comes under constant scrutiny for its privacy policies.

Additionally, leeches (or is that jilted business partners?) have emerged to make various claims of ownership, copyright infringement, and ‘he-did-she-said’ tomfoolery. The most recent of which saw a New York man claim he owned 84% of Facebook, prompting a judge to temporarily freeze the transferring of assets within the company.

Are you one of the half a billion active Facebook users? If so, how has your opinion of the service changed in recent times, if at all?

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The term PDA was first used on January 7, 1992, by Apple Computer CEO John Sculley at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nevada, referring to the Apple Newton. In 1996, Nokia introduced the first mobile phone with full PDA functionality, the 9000 Communicator, which has since grown to become the world’s best-selling PDA and which spawned a category of phones called the smartphone. Today the vast majority of all PDAs are smartphones, selling over 150 million units while non-phone (“stand-alone”) PDAs sell only about 3 million units per year. HTC, Apple, Palm, Nokia N-Series, and RIM BlackBerry are typical smartphone brands.

Currently, a typical PDA has touch screen for entering data, a memory card slot for data storage and at least one of the following for connectivity: IrDA, Bluetooth and/or WiFi. However, many PDAs (typically those used primarily as telephones) may not have a touch screen, using softkeys, a directional pad and either the numeric keypad or a thumb keyboard for input.

Software typically required to be a PDA includes an appointment calendar, a to-do list, an address book for contacts and some sort of note program. Connected PDAs also typically include E-mail and Web support.

Many of the original PDAs, such as the Apple Newton and Palm Pilot, featured touchscreen for user interaction, having only a few buttons usually reserved for shortcuts to often used programs. Touch screen PDAs, including Windows Mobile devices, usually have a detachable stylus that can be used on the touch screen. Interaction is then done by tapping the screen to activate buttons or menu choices, and dragging the stylus to, for example, highlight. Text input is usually done in one of four ways:

* Using a virtual keyboard, where a keyboard is shown on the touch screen. Input is done by tapping letters on the screen.
* Using external keyboard or chorded keyboard connected by USB, IR or Bluetooth.
* Using letter or word recognition, where letters or words are written on the touch screen, and then “translated” to letters in the currently activated text field. Despite rigorous research and development projects, end-users experience mixed results with this input method, with some finding it frustrating and inaccurate, while others are satisfied with the quality.[1] Recognition and computation of handwritten horizontal and vertical formulas such as “1 + 2 =” was also under development.
* Stroke recognition (one Palm implementation is called Graffiti). In this system a predefined set of strokes represents the various characters used in input. The user learns to draw these strokes on the screen or in an input area. The strokes are often simplified character shapes to make them easier for the device to recognize.

PDAs for business use, including the BlackBerry and Palm Treo, have full keyboards and scroll wheels or thumb wheels to facilitate data entry and navigation, in addition to supporting touch-screen input. There are also full-size foldable keyboards available that plug directly, or use wireless technology to interface with the PDA and allow for normal typing. BlackBerry has additional functionality, such as push-based email and applications.

Newer PDAs, such as the Apple iPhone, iPod Touch and Palm Pre include new user interfaces using other means of input. The iPhone and iPod touch uses a technology called Multi-touch, as does the Palm Pre and HTC HD2.

iPod Touch

Apple iPhone

Palm Pre

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NewsRack has proven it’s worth as a RSS feeder. By connecting to my Google Reader account, all of my RSS feeds are available. The app caches the articles for an offline read. What’s great about the app is that you can enter a category and click the unread link at the top. This
pulls out all the unread articles across all blogs in that category. There is also a read all button after you’ve been through the category.

Price: $4.99

4 Kindle

iBooks does not have all the books I’ve been looking for so I’ve resorted to buying books from Amazon for the Kindle app. The Kindle app allows you to create notes and highlight text whereas iBooks allows you to copy, search, bookmark and check the dictionary for words being selected. I’d love to use iBooks more, but they simply do not carry what I’m reading.

Price:Free

3 Zinio

I’ve used Zinio for digital magazines for quite some time and when I bought the iPad I knew the device would be perfect for viewing digital magazines. When I first “purchased” the Zinio app, I had to read magazine while connected to the Internet or I the app did not work for me. The developers have apparently fixed that since the first version. The digital magazines can be read in portrait or landscape mode and allow you to zoom in.

Price:Free

2 IM+

I purchased IM+ which seemed to be the only instant messenger client in the app store when I was looking for a client. The product exceeded my expectations and connected to all my IM accounts including Facebook not to mention Twitter and Skype connectors. The client includes a built-in browser, custom status and geo-location. For an extra couple of bucks, you can purchase speech recognition for the app.

Price $9.99

1 Mail

Yes, I’m talking about the Mail app that comes with the iPad. The iPad has completely changed the way I access my iPad.
I have mail connected to Gmail (not using Exchange but the Gmail connector) and checking for new mail is quick while navigation between the folders is easy. The message content takes of roughly 70% of the screen on the right. The interface is so much better than what can be done with an iPhone. As a side note, I check my personal and Gizmos for Geeks email on the iPad almost all the time.

Price Included

What are your favorite iPad apps?

Doug Felteau

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Remotely lock or wipe data on Your lost or stolen iPhone

A new app launching for the iPhone this week lets you find lost iPod touches, iPads and iPhones and, should you so wish, wipe the data off them remotely.

It is of course every Apple iPad or iPhone owners nightmare – to realise that you have lost your phone or have forgetfully (drunkenly) left your iPad in a bar.

MobileMe trial

Providing you have Apple’s ‘Find My iPhone’ app installed on another iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch you’ll be able to track down your lost iPod, smartphone or tablet PC.

The catch? You’ll need to shell out £59 for Apple’s MobileMe each year.

You can give MobileMe a free 60 day trial to see if you might be able to justify the expense.

The app also lets you remotely lock your lost Apple device or even choose to delete all the data on it remotely, if there are things on there you don’t want to find their way into the wrong hands.

Via Apple

By Adam Hartley

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Microprocessors have also become commonplace in mobile devices such as cell phones, but until recently there was a vast gulf between the simple processors embedded in such things and their more complex cousins in personal computers. In the last few years, however, mobile processors have vastly increased in capability. Today, a smart phone might have a one-gigahertz processor and gigabytes of data storage, roughly equivalent to the computational power that a high-end desktop computer had in 2000. The implications are immense. The multi­media capabilities of modern cell phones are enabling millions of people in poor countries to access the Internet. And new mobile applications, such as location-based services and augmented reality, are moving into the mainstream.

The surging demand for mobile computing power is changing the way the semiconductor industry thinks about chips (see “Mobile Chips Threaten High-­Performance Manufacturers“). The constraints of batteries mean that performance per watt is replacing processing power as the metric that chip makers like to brag about. And the emphasis on networking and multimedia applications in mobile devices is moving manufacturers’ focus from general-purpose processors to those that have specialized circuitry for tasks such as handling audio and video (see “Designing for Mobility“). Manufacturers are also working out how to accommodate the limitations of silicon, which are making it harder and harder to deliver ever more processing power at an ever lower price (see “The High Cost of Upholding Moore’s Law“). Yet some of the biggest performance gains we’ll see in the next few years won’t come from new ways of making chips but from new ways of programming them (see “Multicore Processors Create Software Headaches“).

technology review

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