Google Android Logo

After MUCH hype, the Google operating system Android has finally launched on a handset. The open source OS, dubbed Android, has been available for many months now, to allow developers to create applications for the OS, even though no physical device was available for it to be tested on!

After much talk about this being the true iPhone killer, the handset has finally launched with T-Mobile. Manufactured by HTC and called the G1, the handset was launched late yesterday in New York by the heads of Google, Larry and Sergey when they pitched up at the official press release in roller blades!

Check out the video of the handset in action!

This July, Street View went international for the Tour de France, and in August, expanded coverage to Japan and Australia. Now, Street View is coming to another new frontier: your phone.

We’ve also added other features to help you search for and get to businesses and locations. You can now read business reviews, so you’ll know if it’s actually worth driving across town to that store. And once you decide where to go, you can get there on foot using the same walking directions (beta) we recently launched on desktop. Finally, we hope you’ll notice significant improvements in search speed with this version, as well as better location accuracy in all versions thanks to this week’s My Location update.

Check out this video to see the new release of Google Maps for mobile in action:

The newest Google Maps for mobile is available now for BlackBerry and many Java-enabled phones. To download it to your phone, visit google.com/gmm from your phone’s web browser or on the desktop. We’re working on bringing all these new features to other platforms as well, so stay tuned.

Nokia N96

When the N95 was released, it was all but universally adored. Even today, nearly two full years after it was first revealed, it’s still one of the most respected in Nokia’s lineup. From the get-go, we knew the N96 was more evolutionary and less revolutionary; after all, the two handsets even look alike. The general consensus this time around is about what we expected: the N96 is a fine phone, and a worthy successor, but probably not worth the high price it’s currently demanding. Oh sure, the call quality was stupendous, battery life was satisfactory and the multimedia playback was superb, but some critics were a bit displeased with the fit and finish given the premium price tag. All in all, don’t go into the links below expecting any huge surprises — the N96 is a nicely revamped, high-priced N95, and if that’s what you’re looking for, there doesn’t seem to be any underlying issues that should hold you back from indulging.

Read – PhoneArena (“Nokia seems to have taken more of a lateral step than pushing forward with innovation.”)
Read – MobileArsenal (“…doesn’t have anything we didn’t see before…”)
Read – LordPercy (“…an improved, quality phone…”)
Read – Mobile88 (4 out of 5 stars)

Tonight, at 7:30pm, during a national address the South African President, Thabo Mbeki has resigned.

This comes on the back of the ANC MEC’s request for him to step down as leader of the nation.

Admittedly, he was not a very responsive leader and he did fail to make critical decisions in time, however, we as a nation should not forget the good that he has brought to our nation.

South Africa has come a very long way from our Apartheid era. We are not the most perfect nation and we are not the safest country to live in. But comparatively, our nation has made significant progress under the leadership of Thabo Mbeki.

I have a lot of respect for him for the good that he has brought us, though, hypocritically, I too have been eager to criticize him in his moments of weakness.

I really hope that we remember him for the good that he has brought us! Thank you Thabs, what you just did, must have been REALLY hard for you!

It is with great regret (to me) that the formality of handing over our nation to Jacob Zuma, has started!

This is a quick video review of the Nokia E71 that I found online!

Part 1:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/v/tAghR7zw9w4[/youtube]

Part 2:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/v/DMs7z1CAxH4[/youtube]

It is really great that Symbian is starting to show signs of maturity across their OS. One of the really great features of the Nokia E71, is the highly manageable alarm clock. We take this feature for granted, but we must admit that we use this feature alot more than quite a few other features on our phones.

Setting up the alarm on the Nokia E71 is slightly different to the standard Symbian S60 layout, in that it is now found in a new folder in the menu and the alarm settings now allow it to be a lot more customisable.

Follow this easy step by step guide to set up the alarm:

1. Press the menu button. By default, this is the button with the home icon. See the diagram below:
   

   Nokia E71 Menu Button

2. Open the Office folder.
3. Open the Clock application
4. Use the right scroll to open the alarm tab.
5. Press the Options button and click on New Alarm.
6. Set the time.
7. Give the alarm a name.
8. Set how often you would like it to repeat, daily, weekly, or workdays.
9. Click OK!

You can have multiple alarms set for multiple tasks, with multiple repeat schedules, which is very cool.

This is a really BRILLIANT video and an absolute MUST SEE for anyone interested in the internet or Google!

The first 2 minutes are in Spanish, its the introduction and you can ignore, but the rest of the video is in English, so don’t worry.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDpR_yGjqzk&hl=en&fs=1]

I’ve noticed a trend with Google country managers; they are all really brilliant speakers! They have this natural coolness about themselves and are all filled with some REALLY amazing stats about their company.

A regular to my blog will know by now that I’m a HUGE Google fan. I’ve said it before and I will stand by my statements, that if any company takes over the world, it should be Google!

They have recently been VERY aggressive in shaping the way we use the internet and have even been trying to OWN the internet, by buying up ISP’s, laying down cables and even looking at launching satellites to facilitate cheaper internet access.Google Gears was a major step towards cloud computing and Google has strategically launched an array of other products to enable a semantic web environment. Their latest product has been over blogged about recently and has definitely shaken up the browser market, Google Chrome.

Google has the habit of building really great applications and offer them free to the public. They are usually at the forefront of usability, speed and reliability, but is Google Chrome actually better than Firefox? I still find myself using Firefox as my default browser as my love for Firefox’s extensibility is yet to be challenged by a similar offering. Especially with plugins like the Cool Gmail Skin, Firebug and a host of other really great plugins available!

LifeHacker has recently done some pretty good testing on Google Chrome, Firefox 3.0 and Internet Explorer 8.0b. The test results are VERY interesting:

The Tests

As with my previous browser tests, I installed completely fresh copies of the three browsers on my Windows Vista laptop, with all settings left to defaults. With the second beta of Internet Explorer 8, I reset the browser to factory settings and chose whatever Microsoft suggested during the click-through setup.

My test system has the same specs as before: A 2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 2GB of memory, and running Windows Vista Home Premium. For the time-based tests, I again used Rob Keir’s ultra-lightweight timer app, simultaneously tapping the “\” key with “Enter” to launch a browser shortcut or folder full of bookmarks. I performed each test on each browser three times and averaged out the results, while eliminating obvious oddities. (With Vista’s often empirical hard drive usage, there were definitely artificially long start-ups).

It’s the same system I used to test Internet Explorer 7, Firefox 3 RC3, Safari for Windows, and Opera 9.5, so you can make fair comparisons between all the browsers. It’s not scientific in the strict sense, but it’s meant to measure browser performance as real humans experience it—load, click, and wait.

Test 1: Startup Time—Winner: Chrome!

Drawing inspiration again from Mark Wilton-Jones trend-setting tests, I timed each browser loading up “cold” load (straight off a system restart) and “warm” (having run twice already). I used a locally-saved copy of Google’s minimalist home page to negate net connection variations, and, to compensate for Vista’s start-up fickleness, timed each browser exactly two minutes after boot-up. Here are the first results:

Note the small scale of the time on the X-axis: Even though Chrome was (quite surprisingly) slower at startup than Firefox or even IE 8, it’s less than a second of difference between them all. That’s a bit more than an error from my twitchy fingers, but probably not enough to rate any one browser on. Let’s check out the warm boots:

As you can see, Chrome’s noticeably fast on reload, although all the results are so close it’s hard to confidently crown a winner. Just like last time, IE 8 slightly edges out Firefox on warm boots, but lags just a bit behind when starting up.

You don’t start your browser to look at clean, white, locally-saved pages, do you? No, you speed around your must-visit sites, and often keep a bushel of them open at once. For the next test, I led each browser page-by-page through the assortment of web sites pictured at right—some heavy with interactive elements, some just text and pictures—before jumping back to a blank page (entering about:blank does this in any browser) and loading all the links at once. Each browser keeps a spinning icon on tabs as they load, so I measured from first click to the last tab settling in.

IE 8 and Chrome clock in too close to call, but Firefox fell behind. Based on the minuscule difference in cold-boot time and the two warm tests, I’d call Chrome the fastest, but definitely hand IE 8 a Most Improved Player trophy at the awards banquet.

Test 2: JavaScript & CSS—Tie: Firefox & Chrome!

JavaScript continues to grow in importance as a browser benchmark, because it’s the backbone of no-reload interfaces like Gmail, Facebook, and lots of other webapps. Once again I used Sean Patrick Kane’s revised JavaScript speed tests and averaged out three results to measure the browsers:

Firefox bests Chrome in this test by a handy lead, while IE 8 takes nearly twice as long (in milliseconds, of course) to perform all the actions Sean runs it through. It’s anybody’s guess who’s got the most objective test—CNET’s testers show Chrome wr
ecking all comers, while Mozilla’s own tests declare their orange scrapper the winner in tight races. I can only take away that IE 8 is definitely an improvement from IE 7’s fall-behind pace, while Chrome and Firefox are pretty evenly matched…

…until I ran the CSS tests, that is. CSS determines the layout and appearance of a page, and nontropp’s downloadable form makes a browser work like a page designer on an all-guarana-and-coffee diet.

In the CSS test, as you can see, Chrome takes a commanding lead, Firefox doesn’t lag too far behind, and IE 8 actually stalled and froze on just about one of every two loads I ran. When it came out of memory freeze, it did report consistent times, though—consistently behind. One could hand the Dynamic Web Performance title to Firefox for the probably weightier JavaScript test, but Chrome also shows a notable grace in running down the type frequently found on blogs. Let’s call this a tie.

Test 3: Memory Use—Winner: Firefox!

How far the great-great-nephew of Netscape has come in its respect for your system’s resources. Measured by Vista’s Task Manager from cold boots and then with eight tabs loaded, Firefox shows some serious savvy with megabytes:

Do note, however, that Chrome handles tabs differently than others—each tab loads as its own process, so that if it crashes or stalls, the rest of your reading doesn’t go down with it. So if you’ve got solid-state chips to spare, it’s not that much more of a hit to run Chrome in a busy session.

As with our last test, we’ll note that browsing is much more than speed and bit usage—many of us can’t imagine web life without our favorite extensions, or Windows integration, or, soon enough, Chrome’s unique features.

What’s been your experience with the newest competitors in the web field? Got your own criteria to compare? Share it all in the comments.

Kevin Purdy, associate editor at Lifehacker, wrote this feature in all three beta browsers. His weekly feature, Open Sourcery, normally appears Fridays on Lifehacker. Subscribe to the Open Sourcery feed to get new installments in your newsreader.

I’ve had the Nokia E71 for two weeks now and admittedly I am still in awe at the device.

I’ve been looking for a new phone for a while and had been waiting patiently for the iPhone 3G’s South African launch. But when Vodacom did the unforgivable and postponed the launch for the 3^rd consecutive month, I started looking for something better.

First impressions of the phone is WOW! Its an absolute stunner to look at it. With its dark metal finish, the dimples on the back and the big screen makes this phone very pretty.

Its officially the thinnest smart phone and has an awesome form factor that fits comfortably into any pocket without bulging or being uncomfortable.

Check out the full specs on the Nokia site. The box has a nothing extra fancy in it and ships with the standard stuff that we have come to expect from Nokia: a very small charger, a single ear handsfree headset, a leather strap, a leather pouch, cd, booklets and of course the phone and battery.

The battery that ships with the phone is absolutely great! I keep the Bluetooth and wifi on all day for syncing with my laptop and for my push mail and I really hammer out emails on the phone all day long and I’m currently having to charge my phone every 2nd day.

I have setup Mail for Exchange and Nokia Email for my work and personal emails. They are both push mail clients and were phenomenally easy to setup. With super easy interfaces.

The phone bears a nice big bright screen. Its fairly easy to read under bright light conditions as well. It rings fairly loud and the built in loud speaker is nice and clear and the mic does a great job while I’m in the car.

The vibrating feature is a bit half-assed though. Having the phone on silent with vibrate only is not going to work for me, so I’ve had to edit the profile to beep once just to make sure it catches my attention.

The keyboard is cool, though the spacing between the buttons make it easy to mistype. The shift key is also in a very arb place and its fairly difficult to use at first, but you get used to it after a few dozen emails. But expect to be using the backspace button quite a bit.

The phone is a finger print magnet! I’ve had to start keeping a little clothe on my desk to wipe it down every now and again, because the prints become disturbing after a while.

Symbian has definitely made lots of improvements on the OS. I was using a Nokia N80 previously and found that with 4 or 5 applications open at a time, the phone lags or even crashes and restarts itself. But the E71 does an amazing job of multi tasking. I have used upto 6 applications at once and have yet to see any sign of lag on the phone. Switching between them is seamless too.

I love the search feature on the phone which works the same as Windows Vista’s Search.

I love the fact that from the homescreen, as I type, it sorts the contacts list, which makes for quick and easy calling.

I love how I can type a contacts name in the TO section of an SMS and it will auto search my contact list. It also supports auto complete, which is really clever.

I love waking up to find the weather report on my phone waiting for me.

I love how easy the alarm clock is to setup with multiple alarm settings that are each highly configurable.

Packed with a huge onboard memory, I have been installing applications on the phone from Nokia’s new Labs website called BetaLabs. There are some really great apps out there as well.

Talking of which, the default themes on the phone is absolutely shocking! It reminded me of Windows 3.1.1 and the very first hour of using the phone, I set out looking for a new theme! I also realised that there are SO many really stupid themes out there… but I found one that I really like!

I also don’t use the second home screen. Maybe because I’m used to having only one home screen, so for now, I don’t see the point of the feature. And I also HATE that all new SMSes, Missed Calls or Voice Mails are listed at the bottom of the phone as buttons. Its really annoying to have to scroll down through all items on the home screen to get to the SMS icon. Why did they do this? Maybe I’m missing the point.

I’ve read a lot of great reviews for this phone and I would like confirm that this is an absolutely great handset. Nokia has really done an awesome job with this phone, so well done Nokia!

I highly recommend the phone to anyone who is looking for business focussed device!

I got the Nokia E71 from MTN on a ProCall 120 contract for the MTN Service Centre at Canal Walk within 30 minutes of applying. I was helped by the most competent sales staff that I have encountered in a VERY long time, so well done MTN!

Jacob Zuma has completely stuffed up the credibility of the “INDEPENDENT” Judicial system of South Africa. A system that is supposed to be above all entities and treat every South African with the same judgemental waryness, has successfully proved that Jacob Zuma is above the law!

My question now to South Africa is, why would we want someone who has been suspected of criminal activities (rape, fraud, corruption) to lead us? Why is he even being considered by the public? Is this the kind of leadership that we want?

And why are people still on Zapiro’s case?