My friend Seth Weintraub of 9to5 Google (and 9to5 Mac) makes a coherent case for choosing Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1″ over the iPad 2. (Sure, there are at least as many arguments for choosing the iPad 2, the biggest by far of which is LOTS OF GREAT TABLET APPS–but Seth does a much better job than most of summarizing why you might opt to choose a non-Apple tablet.)
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Yahoo Tries Its Hand at App Discovery
The iOS and Android application marketplaces may both stock hundreds of thousands of programs–a reasonable percentage of which are pretty darn impressive–but it can be surprisingly tough to find the good stuff. Neither Apple’s App Store nor Google’s Android Market does a fantastic job of steering you towards every program you might find useful and/or entertaining, giving third parties such as Chomp an opportunity to full the void.
Now a very large third party is entering the fray: Yahoo. It’s launched an app search engine for iOS and Android designed for desktop browsers, plus an app called AppSpot, available in iOS and Android versions, that recommends apps and lets you search for them. I’m glad it’s doing it–this is a logical challenge for a search engine to take up–but the results so far are mildly pleasant at best.
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Redbox Game Rentals Go Nationwide, Filling a Void Left by Blockbuster
Redbox is coming to the rescue of video game rentals, adding games to every one of its ubiquitous DVD kiosks.
Starting today, all 21,000 Redbox kiosks in the United States will rent video games for $2 per night. That’s more expensive than Redbox’s $1 per night movie rentals, but it’s on par with Blockbuster’s game rental rate of $9 per five nights, and is more flexible.
And besides, Redbox kiosks are easier to find nowadays. After Blockbuster declared bankruptcy in September, the number of U.S. stores in operation dropped from 3,300 to 1,700. Redbox is hoping its grocery and convenience store presence will lead to more game rentals. “We make it very convenient by having our kiosks in front of the places people are at every day,” Joel Resnik, Redbox’s vice president of games, said in April when the company announced its game rental plans.
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Still Missing: A Place to Get Those Crazy Kinect PC Apps
As promised, Microsoft’s making it easy for developers to create Kinect PC apps with a non-commercial Kinect for Windows software development kit.
The SDK provides access to raw data from Kinect’s motion sensors, skeletal tracking of one or two people, advanced audio processing (such as identifying a sound source) and plenty of sample code. To show how developers can make their own Kinect apps, Microsoft hosted a 24-hour coding session that resulted in a motion-controlled quadricopter, a virtual orchestra conducted by hand gestures and a video conferencing tool that can identify and zoom in on the speaker.
Just one problem: If you’re a Kinect owner who wants to see what the motion-sensing camera can do — beyond dancing video games on the Xbox 360, that is — Microsoft still doesn’t make it easy to find and download these creative Kinect PC apps.
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Facebook’s HTML5 Surprise?
Yesterday, TechCrunch’s MG Siegler wrote about an unreleased Facebook photo app for the iPhone. Today, he’s reporting that Facebook is working on a super-ambitious platform for Mobile Safari on the iPhone and iPad–one that uses HTML5 to deliver the sort of experience usually associated with native iOS apps. He doesn’t have any real details, but it could be cool, and would explain Mark Zuckerberg’s famous disinterest in doing a Facebook app for the iPad.
There are some nifty browser-based mobile apps out there–Google’s Gmail for phones and tablets comes to mind. But there hasn’t been a truly killer app yet of the sort that leaves millions of people thinking that Web apps rather than local apps are the wave of the future. If Facebook is at least trying to pull off something like that, it’s exciting news.
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Google’s Challenge: Being Itself, Only More So
Here’s my newest TIME.com Technologizer column, on the new search features which Google unveiled this week.
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Am I the Only One Who Likes Physical Android Buttons?
Boy Genius Report has posted some thorough alleged specs for Google’s next unannounced Nexus phone, possibly dubbed the Nexus 4G. Many of the specs are what you’d expect from a flagship Google phone, such as a dual-core processor, 1 GB of RAM, 1080p video capture and LTE connectivity.
But what’s most intriguing about this rumor is the possibility that Google will completely do away with hardware buttons on the next version of Android, called “Ice Cream Sandwich” or Android 4.0. The home, menu, back and search buttons will presumably become part of the software.
It wouldn’t be an unexpected change. Android 3.0 Honeycomb, the software version optimized for tablets, already lacks physical buttons, and Google has made clear its intentions to merge smartphones and tablets onto a single software version with Ice Cream Sandwich. But it’s harder to picture how Android tablets’ button-free concept would work on Android phones.
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Mobile Location Privacy a Hot Topic on Capitol Hill
An effort to ensure consumers know how their mobile location data is being used and shared is underway on Capitol Hill, with a bipartisan bill now making its way through Congress. Called the Geolocation Privacy and Surveillance (GPS) Act, the bill was written by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah).
The bill was simultaneously introduced in both the House and Senate today.
It aims to codify how companies may use and share data, as well as giving consumers more power in consenting to such tracking. In addition, the legislation provides guidelines on how government and law enforcement may use the location data on wireless phones.
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Copious Aims to Help Real People Buy From Real People
Who would you rather buy something from–a shadowy stranger or a person with a well-established, positive online reputation? A new online marketplace called Copious that’s launching today is betting that just about everybody would opt for the latter. And it aims to shed light on its buyers and sellers by tying together their activities on Facebook, Twitter, and other social venues so you know a bit about them before dough exchanges hands.
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Facebook’s Photo App for iPhone
TechCrunch says that it’s got its hands on a massive cache of info about an unannounced photo-sharing app for the iPhone–from Facebook. And it says that the app looks amazing.