According to the Bing Community, Bing will take a big step forward in terms of social search. Yusuf Mehdi, Senior Vice President of the Online Audience Business at Microsoft, announced at SMX Advanced that a Bing site will start to integrate information from Facebook and Twitter.

Bing.com/social – which isn’t live at the time of this writing – is supposed to build on the connection Microsoft has been establishing with Twitter over the past year or so. And indeed, rather than just return celebrities’ profiles or a stream of status updates, it should utilize “the full Facebook firehose with non-pages content.”

In an email to WebProNews, a Microsoft representative explained, “bing.com/social uses public updates from Fan Pages and aggregated data from public updates to deliver real-time results and enables users to make better decisions by tapping into micro-content generated by people across the world.”

No one needs to worry about their thoughts being paraded in front of random searchers, however, because Microsoft took some precautions even where public updates are concerned. Just popular links, and not any names, photos, or user-sourced text, will be shown.

All in all, this arrangement sounds rather impressive. Bing.com/social appears to stand a good chance of winning a following outside search- and tech-centric communities, too, since Facebook remains so much more popular than Twitter.

Tweet This Post

TechCrunch reports that Steve Jobs unwrapped the latest iteration of iPhone at the WWDC. It’s called the iPhone 4 which is in fact, the same leaked device we saw couple of months back. The iPhone 4 is just 9.3mm thick, about 24% thinner than the 3GS and is claimed to be the world’s slimmest smartphone.





Phone’s specs include: Apple A4 SoC, HSPA, 3.5-inch screen (960×640), HSPA, Bluetooth, 802.11n Wi-Fi, GPS, Compass, Accelerometer, Gyroscope, 5MP camera with LED flash, 720p video recording, front facing camera, FaceTime for video calling and micro SIM slot.

The few new features iPhone 4 boasts are:

Design: It’s pretty much evident. iPhone 4 has broken from the previous iPhone mold and has brought in a new design made of glass and stainless steel. The front and the rear part consists of glass whereas the side is covered with stainless steel and gaps that make up for the integrated antennas.

Display: Apple has bumped up the display too which is known as the Retina Display. iPhone 4 has the same screen size of 3.5-inch but has 960×640 pixel resolution support or 326 pixels per inch. The display has an IPS-based panel for a wide viewing angle and a 800:1 contrast ratio.

Processor: iPhone 4 is powered by in-house built A4 chip. We’re not sure if it’s the same as the iPad but we’ll know soon. Anyhow, the new processor and a space has led to a bigger battery and thus, extra battery life. iPhone 4 has up to 7 hours of 3G talk time, 6 hours of 3G surfing, 10 hours of Wi-Fi and video, 40 hours of music and 300 hours of standby.

Camera: iPhone 4 has got an upgraded camera. The phone now boasts a 5MP backside illuminated sensor and has LED flash to capture pictures and videos in the dark. Its got 5x digital zoom, tap to focus but interestingly, it has added the support to record 720p HD videos at 30fps. (The iPhone 4 also has the iMovie for iPhone. iMovie brings in a lot of features to edit videos, add effects, music etc. right on the iPhone. It will go $4.99).

iOS 4: The iPhone 4 will run Apple’s iOS 4, which is nothing but the new name of iPhone OS 4. Apple touts it as the “most ambitious release to date” and opens up 1500 developer APIs and about 100 new features for the consumers, including multitasking! iOS 4 will also include Bing search created completely with HTML5.

FaceTime: It’s a built-in app that allows users to set up video calls between iPhone 4 to iPhone 4 users. All it requires is Wi-Fi and supports both front and rear cameras.

Pricing & Availability: The iPhone is coming on June 24 in US, France, Germany, UK and Japan in 16GB and 32GB capacities. It will go for $199 and $299 respectively whereas the iPhone 3G will be discontinued and iPhone 3GS will take its place for $99. Pre-orders start from June 15.

18 more countries will get it in July while the number will go up to 88 by September. Hopefully, India will be included in the roll out.

Tweet This Post

Hardmac reports that Apple overnight has posted an HTML5 showcase page to make its case for the technology. The page includes a handful of examples showing how it can be used for advanced media on the web, including media, typography and transitional effects. Its opening takes a clear shot at Adobe’s assertions that Flash is a standard, pointing out that a plugin by definition can’t be a standard feature.

“Standards aren’t add-ons to the web. They are the web,” Apple said.

The statement is potentially self-contradictory, however, as the page asks users to download Safari if not using the browser, even for a browser with some HTML5 support like Google Chrome. Few if any current browsers have a complete HTML5 implementation and may render some demos improperly even if they support common uses of HTML5, such as video.

News of the promo page arrives just as a new study from Streaming Media shows that 49 percent of web media sites plan to support HTML5 by no later than the end of 2011. About 22 percent either have HTML5 in place or plan to use it by the end of this year.

Apple may not necessarily require full HTML5 support to provide online video to the iPad and iPhone 4.0 devices. The same report obtained by TechCrunch added that only 43 percent of sites had no current plans to support the iPad. Although 19 percent either couldn’t mention their plans in either direction, 38 percent either have a native app or page or will by the end of next year. Most of those will have theirs ready sooner, by the end of 2010.

Regardless of approach, Apple’s devices are also the most supported for mobile content: 65 percent of developers plan to cater to the iPhone, but only about 40 percent want to serve Android and BlackBerry. Just over half, at 53 percent, plan to serve up a universal stream that should theoretically serve most or all of their visitors.

Tweet This Post

iTechNews reports that Taiwan’s own AsusTek kicked off Computex 2010 today with Chairman Jonney Shih announcing of three tablets, the Eee Tablet, the 12″ Eee Pad EP121 and the 10″ Eee Pad EP101TC. Asus is claiming an iPad-like ten hour battery life for all three devices. With battery life being such a crucial benchmark for tablets, we hope this figure holds up to real world usage.

Claimed as a fusion of the notepad and the e-reader, the Eee Tablet will likely appeal to as many artists as it does students. Instead of e-ink, Asus has used a backlight-less 8-inch (1024×768) TFT-LCD display with 64 shades of grey, which gives the Eee Tablet the ability to turn pages in just one tenth of a second. With a touch resolution of 2450 dpi, this is apparently one of the most accurate touch displays available. Lecture slides can be snapped with the 2 megapixel camera and “written” on instantly. Expansion is provided by USB and microSD slots.

The 12″ Eee Pad EP121 runs on a CULV Core 2 Duo CPU, and while most tablets choose power-sipping operating systems, Asus has gone with Windows 7 Home Premium, and still claims a 10 hour battery life. The keyboard setup is decidedly iPad-esque – you can use an on-screen keyboard or a docking station-slash-keyboard device. The Eee Pad comes with a web camera, runs Adobe’s Flash. No price was mentioned for the EP121, though the tablet is likely to become available in Q1, 2011.

An estimated price of USD$399 to $449 was thrown in the air, which beats Apple’s iPads selling from USD$499 to $699.

Tweet This Post

It’s been a couple of months since Wired Magazine showed us a preview of its Apple iPad app, but the Wired Magazine App is finally available in the App Store. The app appeared in the early hours of the morning and it offers the June issue of the magazine plus interactive content and extras for iPad readers, including videos and slide shows.





We’re happy to say that the app is as shown in this preview with fluid navigation, well-placed interactive content, and eye-pleasingly crisp graphics and text. Wired Magazine has always been one of our favorite publications in paper form and the added features and overall slickness of the iPad version only enhance it, making it well worth the $4.99 price tag in our view.

Tweet This Post