HP: No Windows Phone 7 devices from us
According to HP Executive VP Todd Bradley, the company has officially dropped any future plans to create smartphones with Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 operating system.
All smartphones will come instead, with WebOS, the mobile operating system acquired by the company when it purchased Palm.
Adds Bradley: “Our intent is to focus those resources and really make webOS the best OS it can be.”
HP is one of Microsoft’s oldest partners, and the company did not want any bad blood, adding it would still “Microsoft’s biggest customer,” just not in the smartphone market.
Since acquiring Palm, HP has dropped plans for a Windows 7 tablet, and now for Windows Phone 7 phones.
Motorola, the other major American player in the smartphone market, has also declined to create Windows Phone 7 devices.
YouTube testing new form of embedding
YouTube has announced this weekend that they have begun testing a new way of embedding code that would support both HTML5 and Flash.
By using “iframes,” the code will either use the Flash plugin or switch to HTML5, depending on what device or browser you are currently using.
If the video has ad overlays, or other features not yet supported by HTML5, it will force Flash, but that is the only time.
Embedded videos should now work on Android and iOS devices, which do not have Flash support yet.
YouTube Mobile already has HTML5 built-in, but now the embedded videos will work on other sites, such as when browsing Afterdawn from your smartphone or tablet.
View a test video here: New Way To Embed YouTube Videos
Internet may have less than one year’s worth of IP addresses left
The Internet currently uses IPv4 (Internet Protocol version 4), which uses 32-bit numbers, allowing for the availability of a total of 4 billion IP addresses.
According to experts, about 94 percent of those addresses have already been allocated, and the Internet may run out of IP addresses by 2011, at least under the current IPv4 system.
A new system, IPv6, would use 128-bit numbers, allowing for an almost infinite amount of IP addresses. So far, however, adoption has been slow.
If adoption of the new system doesn’t happen soon, Google Internet evangelist Vint Cerf warns that a “black market” for IP addresses would start, taking “away from the decentralized nature of the Internet.”
“Without IPv6, the Internet’s expansion and innovation could be limited,” also notes American Registry for Internet Numbers president and CEO John Curran. “Delaying IPv6 deployment may strain the work of Internet operators, application developers, and end users everywhere.”
Google is one of few companies that already puts all its services on the IPv6 protocol, with Facebook being another notable company.
Verizon and Comcast, two of the largest ISPs, have begun testing the protocol, as well.
Video Daily: Droid X suffers from antenna issues, as well?
Apple, in an effort to move some of the negative publicity away from their iPhone 4 “antennagate” onto other phone makers, has released a video testing the new Motorola Droid X, which appears to have the same issues when held in the “death grip.”
Posting the video on YouTube and their own site, Apple shows off the Droid X being held in two different grips, with the cell signal bars magnified in the corner.
When barely held, the phone has two bars. When held in the “death grip,” the bars slowly but surely fall to zero.
While Apple may insist that every other smartphone has the same issues as their iPhone 4, has anyone heard complaints from a real user?
14 Million Americans don’t have access to broadband says FCC
In their most recent report on the status of broadband internet in the US, the FCC has finally admitted “broadband is not being deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion.”
Although this is the sixth Broadband Deployment Report to be issued by the agency since 1999, it is the first to reach this conclusion. Previous reports have been widely criticized for both the benchmark by which broadband was defined and the methodology for determining service areas.
For example, in the last report, from 2008, 200kbps downstream (download) speed was still considered broadband. Additionally, a single address capable of broadband service was equated to the entire zip code being served.
In the current report notes, “Our examination of overall Internet traffic patterns reveals that consumers increasingly are using their broadband connections to view high-quality video, and want to be able to do
so while still using basic functions such as email and web browsing.”
In order to more accurately reflect that reality the standard for broadband has been raised to 4Mbps downstream and 1Mbps upstream. Service areas were based on numbers from the National Broadband Plan, published earlier this year.
Group starts ‘UltraViolet’ digital entertainment locker
Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE), the syndicate of technology, cable and entertainment companies has introduced their long awaited cloud-based digital locker today, dubbing the service Ultraviolet.
Consumers would create an Ultraviolet account which would allow them to purchase movies, TV shows and music and access it from any web-connected device like HDTVs, Blu-ray players, smartphones, tablets and gaming consoles.
DECE consists of Best Buy, Cisco, Comcast, Cox Communications, Fox Entertainment, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, LG Electronics, Lionsgate, Microsoft, Motorola, NBC Universal, Netflix, Nokia, Panasonic, Paramount Pictures, Philips, Samsung Electronics, Sony, Toshiba, and Warner Bros.
The group expects to launch the service later this year, and any device manufacturer, entertainment producer or other company “that want to offer the UltraViolet service would have to license its technology specifications from the consortium,” says IW.
Licensing requirements will be “as light as possible,” however.
The two notable names missing from the list are Disney (who is creating a rival system; Keychest) and Apple, which already has iTunes as a “digital locker” for content played back on iPods, iPads, and iPhones.
Pandora hits 60 million users
Pandora has announced today that they have reached 60 million registered listeners, seeing strong growth thanks to availability on a plethora of devices.
When 2009 began, the streaming music recommendation service had 20 million users. By the start of 2010 they had 40 million. It took until April to reach 50 million, and just over 3 months from that point to tack on another 10 million registered listeners.
Pandora says the growth is mainly thanks to expansion on mobile devices. Apps on the iPhone and Android devices are regularly the most popular free apps available and Apple finally updated to mutli-tasking with iOS4, giving users the ability to stream the music in the background, via 3G or Wi-Fi.
Android users have always had that ability.
Furthermore, Pandora is now becoming a standard on set-top boxes from many different device manufacturers.
If the trend continues, Pandora will hit 100 million listeners during early 2011. Not to mention they are also finally profitable after being on the verge of bankruptcy last year.
With Watch Instantly booming Netflix plans to upgrade PS3 client
Yesterday Netflix CEO Reed Hastings announced plans to update the streaming video client for the PS3.
The update, which he expects to be available before the company’s third quarter earnings are released in October, will eliminate the requirement for a disc. Besides the obvious convenience for customers, this will allow them to continually update the interface as the Netflix Watch Instantly UI is improved.
Netflix continues to grow, largely on the strength of their ever expanding lineup of offerings for streaming to computers, set-top boxes, HDTVs, Blu-ray players, game consoles & other devices.
In the second quarter of 2010 year on year subscriber growth grew to an impressive 42%, which Hastings attributes primarily to the growing popularity of streaming. Although disc shipments continue to increase, they are being replaced by streaming more quickly than Netflix had forecast previously.
Netflix also plans to expand their streaming service into Canada later this year, although they won’t be giving much in the way of specifics until closer to the launch date.
Having already conquered traditional brick and mortar movie rental operations in the US, including the Blockbuster and the now defunct Movie Gallery, Netflix appears to be setting their sights on competing with the new subscription service from Hulu.
Hastings says he intends to watch Hulu Plus closely to find more areas to improve the Netflix streaming service. But ultimately he believes the bigger competitive threat are cable and satellite providers.
Microsoft has best quarter ever thanks to Windows 7
Microsoft reported their latest quarterly earnings today and the company had its best quarter ever, thanks mainly to incredibly strong sales of the Windows 7 operating system.
The software giant says they have sold about 175 million licenses of Window 7, making it easily the fastest selling operating system in the company’s history.
Furthermore, consumers and especially corporations have increased their purchases of Microsoft software.
Microsoft posted revenue of $16.04 billion, on 22 percent growth. Earlier this week, rival Apple posted their best quarter ever as well, seeing revenue of $15.7 billion.
The company had net profit of $4.52 billion, a 33 percent jump year-on-year.
Sales of Windows rose to $4.55 billion from $3.17 billion and sales of Office and other software rose to $5.25 billion from $4.57 billion.
The company’s Entertainment and Devices group, which includes the Xbox 360 and Zune players, lost $172 million, closing in on profitability.
HP working on WebOS netbooks
During the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference this week, Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein has confirmed that the company, under the new management of HP, will also be creating WebOS netbooks, alongside tablets, smartphones and printers.
Says Rubinstein: “We’re working a wide variety, as Todd said, smartphones definitely, slates, netbooks, working with the guys in the printer group. webOS [...] will have a unified user interface across all of these, will have a unified developer environment, and it’s all based on the foundation that we build in webOS from day one.
When we developed webOS, we thought about making this scalable across a variety of mobile devices; that’s what we’ll be delivering going forward.”
While tablets, printers and smartphones had been confirmed in the past by either HP or Palm, netbooks had only vaguely been mentioned.
In April, HP purchased Palm for $1.2 billion, after outbidding RIM, Apple and Lenovo.
With the acquisition, the company also acquired all of Palm’s patents and its WebOS mobile operating system.
