Fifteen Years of the Internet Explorer Logo

Everything you ever wanted to know–and then some–about the Internet Explorer logo.

Mophie’s iPhone 4 Case Adds Suprisingly Little Bulk

Mophie has built a name for itself with its line of external battery cases for the iPhone and iPod. There’s always been a real problem with these (at least for me), and that was the sheer amount of bulk they add. It appears the company may have finally figured out how to combat this problem from the case I saw in New York City on Wednesday.

Actually, the battery pack looks all but like an typical hard case, but a little thicker. As you can see, the case itself mimics the actual design of the phone itself, so from a distance you may not even notice it.

While I love my Mophie and think that a battery extender is almost a necessity for any heavy smartphone user, the bulk it adds is cumbersome and sometimes slightly annoying. The fact that the company has been able to shrink down the case to eliminate a large chunk of that bulk is very impressive.

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Clear Joins Prepaid Wireless Broadband Fray

These days, every wireless provider seems to be doing prepaid wireless broadband, and Clear is no exception. The company has introduced Rover, an offering that it tells me is aimed at the “MTV Generation” through both its marketing and branding. While the company does offer a contract free product for postpaid customers, its still a monthly plan that is the same cost as its contracted offering.

Rover is a little different in how it measures out its various plans. Instead of using the megabyte, all prepaid plans are for unlimited use. The catch here is that its by the day, week, or month: once you run out of time, you have to buy a new block.

Pricing is fairly competitive. A day will set you back about $5, while a week costs $20, and a month $50. This may work better for some of us — instead of guessing how much data we need, instead we can plan out for a period of time that we’d need data access.

The Rover Puck (shown above) is the $149.99 piece of equipment you’ll need to make it all happen. The device will let up to eight users share the connection, but Clear is also offering the Stick, a $99 USB modem intended for a single user. A little more expensive than other offerings like Virgin Mobile’s Broadband2Go, however if you are in Clear’s coverage area and speed matters, it will be a much faster connection.

Is Internet Explorer’s Market Share Slide Reversible?

In the early part of this century, it seemed like a given that Microsoft’s Internet Explorer would retain a market share north of ninety percent forever. Then Firefox came along in 2004–and ever since, IE’s fate has seemed to be one of slow but steady market share losses to superior competition. The point was reemphasized when Google’s Chrome came along two years ago: It’s been growing nearly as quickly as Firefox did in its first couple of years, while Firefox also continued to grow and IE degraded..

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Samsung Galaxy Tab: On Sale Soon. Everywhere!

It’s official: Samsung has announced that its Galaxy Tab will go on sale in the U.S. in time for the holidays–and it’ll be available from AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile. No news yet on exact release dates–or, more important, what the device itself and service plans will cost. (I’m still rooting for a contract that will make both the Tab and the monthly charges pretty reasonable–if they’re too high, the tablet won’t be an attractive proposition for people who already own a smartphone.)

The Unwelcome Return of “Best Viewed With Internet Explorer”

Remember the bad old days of the Internet, when it wasn’t a given that one primary objective of any Web site should be to work equally well in any modern browser? Some sites slapped “Best Viewed With Internet Explorer” or “Best Viewed With Netscape Navigator” logos (or both of them) onto their home pages, like perverse badges of honor. It was like turning onto a highway and discovering signs saying it was best driven in a Buick or a Kia.

Eventually there were sites that would only operate properly in IE, most often because they used Microsoft’s IE-only ActiveX. (I have the horrible feeling that such sites are still out there, although the last one I encountered myself belonged to a financial institution which I stopped doing business with in 2009.)

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Why I’d Never Pay for Activision’s Video Game Cutscenes

Activision-Blizzard Chief Executive Bobby Kotick has a novel idea, which he shared at a recent entertainment industry conference: Scrape up the cinematic interludes from video games, string them together, and sell them back to video game fans as standalone movies.

Kotick believes his company could charge $20 or $30 for the entirety of a game’s non-interactive content, according to Gamasutra. This isn’t something he expects to happen in the near future, but with improvements in computer animation, cutscenes-as-movies could become a reality within five years, Kotick said.

What a terrible idea.

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Engadget Reviews iOS 4.2 for iPad

I can’t remember when I’ve been as excited about an operating-system upgrade as I am about iOS 4.2 for iPad. Engadget’s Josh Topolsky has installed the beta and published a nice walkthrough.

Google Music Scuttlebutt Reads Like an iTunes Wishlist

Reports of a music service from Google have been in the rumor mill since June, but without any useful details on how the so-called Google Music might work. Now, Billboard is citing anonymous sources in a lengthy Google music service tell-all.

Supposedly, the service will provide a la carte music downloads, just like iTunes, but with a batch of online features to sweeten the deal. In addition to downloads, Google users could opt to spend roughly $25 per year for digital locker access, letting them stream or download their libraries on any web-connected device, Billboard says.

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Mossberg on iPad E-Reading

The Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg prefers to do his e-reading on an iPad. (So do I, most of the time.) And he’s reviewed iPad e-readers: Apples iBooks, Amazon’s Kindle, and Barnes & Noble’s Nook.

Liaise is Live

More DEMO news: Liaise, one of the more interesting products at last years’s fall DEMO event, has come out of beta. It’s a clever Outlook plug-in that scans your e-mails, finds action items mentioned in them, and helps you track them, follow up with coworkers, and generally verify that the action actually happens. Liaise is aimed at folks in large companies, but it only costs $50 per person per year, so it’s not out of reach for small business types or even individuals who need task-management help.

The Credit Card as Gizmo

People are always talking about credit-card-sized gadgets–remember Xircom’s REX PDA? Here at DEMO, however, a startup called Dynamics is showing credit-card-sized gizmos that really are credit cards.

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Veebeam Shoots HD Video from PC to TV

I’m spending part of this unusually busy tech-news week at the DEMO conference in Silicon Valley. One of the most potentially cool products I’ve seen is Veebeam, a new setup for wirelessly broadcasting Internet video from a computer to a TV set. In a way, it’s a competitor to Internet TV boxes such as Apple TV and Roku. But instead of getting you whatever movies or shows are available on the box you choose, it gets you anything you can watch on your laptop or desktop, including Hulu, iTunes downloads, and more.

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Sneak Peek: Slacker’s On-Demand Music Service

Tonight at the annual Pepcom holiday event in New York, Slacker will preview its new on-demand music service, a major upgrade to the existing application available on the Web, and on Android, Blackberry, and iOS phones. As long-time Slacker fans here at ZNF, we couldn’t be more excited about the launch. In addition to caching stations and enabling downloads of favorite tracks (available with today’s Slacker premium service), the new on-demand service will let users call up and play specific artists and songs at will. The new genre stations, pre-programmed by Slacker DJs, will provide details on the top station artists and songs, with an option to jump around to those tracks and others at any time. The search function will also provide more information on artists and songs, including what stations they’re programmed on, associated albums, etc. You’ll also be able to sort and play favorites easily, and there will be significantly more functionality for programming your own custom stations from any mobile interface.

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HTC Dilutes Android With New Sense

It’s telling that HTC doesn’t refer to Sense as a user interface or a layer atop its Android phones, but rather as a “holistic experience filled with moments of delight.”

That’s pure marketing jargon, but it also shows how HTC wants to strike its own path with Sense, and to be less reliant on the core Android experience. The proof is in a batch of new Sense features, which will initially appear in HTC’s Desire HD and Desire Z handsets. I’m guessing they will eventually come to HTC smartphones in the United States, as well.

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Internet Explorer 9: Microsoft’s Browser Gets Back in the Game

Apologies in advance for the mixed metaphor: For many years, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer has been a sleeping giant that’s marched to its own drummer. Ever since Firefox appeared in 2004, Microsoft has struggled to figure out what IE should be in the new era of browser competition; it remains the world’s default browser, but it long ago lost the hearts and minds of nearly all of the serious browser users that I know.

At first, the company simply let 2001′s IE6 calcify, as if it wasn’t certain that the world needed a major new version of Internet Explorer at all. Then it released IE7 and IE8–bland updates that felt like they existed in a parallel universe of their own rather than the one in which Firefox and Safari (and, for the last two years, Chrome) have been evolving rapidly and cribbing each others’ best new features.

And then there’s Internet Explorer 9, which is debuting in beta form today at a bash in San Francisco. (I’m attending the event, and Microsoft provided me with the beta a few days early.) It’s easily the best new version of Microsoft’s browser in…well, in this century: The last IE upgrade that was this pleasing was version 5, which shipped in 1999. In most respects that matter, IE9 finally catches up with the competition. In a few, it’s sprinted past them. It’s just plain good.

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