If you have been following AfterDawn over the past two weeks, you have undoubtedly read about “antennagate,” Apple’s ongoing iPhone 4 situation.
The iPhone 4, due to flawed hardware engineering, drops phone calls when held in the left hand, as your hand covers the antenna.
Yesterday, CEO Steve Jobs announced the company would be providing free cases to iPhone 4 buyers, as the bumpers would eliminate the antenna issues.
Jobs says the number of dropped calls per dials is tiny, but so far the problem has been a PR disaster for Apple.
Whoopi Goldberg, of the popular TV show “The View,” went on a rant yesterday about the iPhone and its dropped calls, saying it made her so angry that she threw the phone out of her car, “murdering” it.
Result for: engineer
Today during the VidCon 2010 conference, Google has announced that YouTube will now support video with 4k resolution, over double what the current 1080p standard allows for.
4k has a pixel resolution of 4096 x 3072, whereas 1080p has resolution of 1920 x 1080.
“To give some perspective on the size of 4K, the ideal screen size for a 4K video is 25 feet; IMAX movies are projected through two 2k resolution projectors,” says Ramesh Sarukkai, a YouTube engineer.
Many users will not be able to even run the videos at this point, as it requires “super fast broadband,” likely with 15Mbps as a bare minimum.
Result for: engineer
Until this week, the answer to whether the upcoming Chrome OS could run Windows apps was “no.”
The Chrome OS is completely in “the cloud,” so all apps had to be accessed through the Chrome Web browser, and installed and “saved” to the Chrome OS.
This week, however, Google software engineer Gary Kačmarčík has announced “Chromoting”, a feature that will give users a chance to access “legacy PC applications” through a remote desktop connection process.
Says the engineer: “We’re adding new capabilities all the time. With this functionality (unofficially named “chromoting”), Chrome OS will not only be great platform for running modern web apps, but will also enable you to access legacy PC applications right within the browser. We’ll have more details to share on chromoting in the coming month.”
While that leaves details on Chromoting scant, most believe that the process will be a sharing function that will require a home/office computer to be kept on, while the Chrome OS computer uses remote access.
