Nexus One – Google Phone

Google lauched Nexus One on on January 5, 2010. Singapore, is one of the few countries together with USA, UK and Hong Kong, that Google is making the phone available for delivery to.

Here are some of the phone details.

Pricing & Availability

• USD$529 (without contract)
• USD$179 (with 2 years contract from T-Mobile USA)

Verizon Wireless in the US and Vodafone in Europe plan to bring in the Nexus One as well during Spring 2010. The Nexus One will ship to three international market at the moment, UK, Singapore, and Hong Kong.

Shipping To Singapore
If you are living in Singapore and interested to get the Nexus One, here is the price breakdown for you:

• Nexus One phone (without contract): USD$529
• AC Adapter (Singapore): USD$19.99
• DHL International (Shipping & Handling): USD$28.32
• Total: USD$577.31 or SGD$806.10 (USD$1 = SGD$1.3963)
• After adding in 7% GST: SGD$862.52

Hardware Specifications

• Display: 3.7″ AMOLED 480×800 WVGA display
• Thinness: 11.5mm; Weight: 130g
• Processor/Speed: Qualcomm Snapdragon 3G QSD8250 chipset, delivering speeds up to 1GHz
• Camera: 5 megapixel auto focus with flash and geo tagging
• Onboard memory: 512MB Flash, 512MB RAM
• Expandable memory: 4GB removable SD Card (expandable to 32GB)
• Noise Suppression: Dynamic noise suppression from Audience, Inc.
• Ports: 3.5mm stereo headphone jack with four contacts for inline voice and remote control
• Battery: Removable 1400 mAh
• Personalized laser engraving: Up to 50 characters on the back of the phone
• Trackball: Tri-color notification LED, alerts when new emails, chats, text messages arrive

Software Innovation

• Google Maps Navigation: offering turn-by-turn driving directions with voice output.
• Email: multiple Gmail accounts; universal inbox and Exchange support.
• Phone book: aggregate contacts from multiple sources, including Facebook.
• Quick Contacts: easily switch between communication and social applications.
• Android Market: access to more than 18,000 applications.
• Enter text without typing.
• Use a voice-enabled keyboard for all text fields: speak a text message, instant message, tweet, Facebook update, or complete an email.
• Tell your phone what you want it to do.
• Search Google, call contacts, or get driving directions by just speaking into your phone.
• Take personalization to the next level.
• Dynamic, interactive, live wallpapers react to the touch of a finger.
• More widgets and five home screen panels allow for further device customization.
• Capture camera-quality pictures and video with your device.
• 5 megapixel camera includes LED flash, auto focus, zoom, white balance and color effects.
• View pictures and Picasa Web Albums in the new 3D Gallery.
• Record Hi-Res MPEG4 video, and then upload to YouTube with one click.
• Read your voicemail messages.
• Get transcribed voicemail with Google Voice integration, without changing your number.

Doodle, Scheduling Meetings Made Easy

Doodle is an free online tool that lets you collaborate between participants online through a poll. The poll is a graphical presentation of "when are you free".

It's easy to decide on timings as it is presented nicely on a table and openings are made very clear.

Doodle now

Facebook vanity URL

Recently, I read an interesting article on techcrunch. It is about the recently launch facebook custom URL that link to your profile.

Eg. www.facebook.com/usernamehere
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Internet Explorer 8 Final Released

Internet Explorer 8 Final was finally released today at 12am. It's feels less horrible and is way faster than pervious version. Though if you use other browsers like Chrome, Firefox, Opera and Safari, you will find a lot of very famaliar features.
Firstly, tab and frames are individual processes, so if one of them crashes, the browser would not fail. Application crash recovery is also introduced in this version.

Another famailar feature is the smart address bar as well as search suggestions.

The address bar was also redesigned to highlight the domain name. Moreover, Internet Explorer 8 finally passes the acid2 test and supports web standards although there are about 200 major websites that do not work with Internet explorer 8's web compliant view and will switch  to compatibility view. But Microsoft decided to put a broken page icon on the address bar when pages are rendered in compatibility view. New (blank) tabs do not take forever to open ad list recently closed tabs, accelerators and an option to launch an InPrivate Window.

Other new features include:

• InPrivate Browsing
• Delete Browsing History
• User Preference Protection
• Caret Browsing
• Accelerators
• Web Slices
• Suggested Sites
• Tab Color Grouping
• SmartScreen Filter

Get it now

Virtualization goes mobile

VMware demoed a touchscreen Nokia N800 featuring its mobile hypervisor at its VMworld Europe 2009 conference in Cannes today, showing Windows CE and Google's Android running at the same time.
Customers can run two operating systems on one phone simultaneously, or move their phone's contacts, apps and other data from handset to handset easily using virtualisation technology regardless of the underlying hardware or the user interface or input method.
The phones with VMware's mobile virtualisation platform will have 2 main functions.

• Allow users back up their system and data on a VM, so that they can easily transfer contacts and other information regardless of the operating system if they get a new phone.
• Run multiple VM instances on a single phone allowing users have multiple profiles on the same phone, transfer profiles & data sets across handsets.

However the system is still under testing.