Articles by: Timell Grant

Amazon has officially thrown its hat into the tablet octagon with the announcement of the Amazon Kindle Fire. The Kindle Fire will be available November 15th and features a 7-inch gorilla glass IPS display, dual-core processor, 512MB of RAM, 8GB of internal storage WiFi, up to 8 hours of continuous reading or 7.5 hours of video playback and comes with a free 30-day trial of Amazon Prime.

Microsoft announced a deal with Jinni which is basically a search engine for movies and television shows. Jinni uses its movie genome (similar to how Pandora uses its music genome) which consists of taste-and-mood based discovery to allow for a more personal and intimate video search experience. Mood based discovery allows you to search or browse content based on categories like mood, plot and style.

Last Thursday HP decided to discontinue operations for webOS devices, performing the Japanese equivalent of seppuku on the TouchPad and webOS phones. The HP acquisition of Palm gave hope to die-hards and fans alike that their fantastic operating system would get proper hardware support. With Thursday’s announcement everything came full circle and that hope dwindled. While HP dangles webOS over our heads, the only potentially viable options left for the operating system would be licensing it to others or placing it in/on other, non-phone/tablet devices such as cars, printers and PC’s.

This is the time of the year when everyone looks at the calendar and realizes that school is just around the corner. Internships are ending, fall is coming and trepidation builds as essays written in Times New Roman 12 size font, double spaced with 1-inch margins will soon once again become a reality. Enter Samsung, they have some products in mind for the dorm dwellers and newly recruited.

Mozilla announced plans to release it’s own open sourced web-based mobile operating system, currently known as “Boot to Gecko” (B2G). This is very similar to the approach Google has taken with Chrome OS targeting netbooks with one slight caveat, Google isn’t using Chrome OS on smartphones or tablets. Mozilla’s new project, Boot to Gecko, will be using Gecko (Mozilla’s browser layout engine which is also used in Android) as well as some components from Android for its underlying foundation.

The ongoing public bickering between Apple and Adobe only continues to grow it seems. Last Friday (July 22nd) Adobe posted a bulletin of known issues between its products and Apple’s latest operating system, Lion. It seems many took this as a sign of Apple trying to kill off Adobe and Flash from the desktop scene as is the case with their iPad/iPhone/iPod products.

Anonymous posted on it’s twitter account that it has hacked NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) and retrieved about one Gigabyte of data. As of now they’ve only posted a couple of documents one of which was uploaded to pdfhost.net which at the time of writing is currently down and unreachable and another was uploaded to pdfcast.org but was ultimately removed for violating the sites ToS (Terms of Service).