Ten things you should know about the Ice Cream Sandwich OS

Ice Cream Sandwich is the fourth incarnation of Google’s Android operating system (OS) for smartphones and tablets – the successor to previous versions Gingerbread and Honeycomb (a tablet-only version)

This increasingly nippy time of year seems an odd choice to be discussing ice cream sandwiches – unless said confection is the latest in a tasty-sounding software series from Google.

Ice Cream Sandwich is the fourth incarnation of Google’s Android operating system (OS) for smartphones and tablets – the successor to previous versions Gingerbread and Honeycomb (a tablet-only version). It’s not yet in wide release, but software developers are already hard at work adapting their apps to this major redesign.

Phones supporting Ice Cream Sandwich will be available from Bell and Virgin Mobile from early December. Rogers gets it in January.

Here are 10 things you need to know about Ice Cream Sandwich:

Google's goal was to unify the OS for smartphones and tablets, so regardless of screen size, Android will look the same. Because of this, the user interface has had a makeover, migrating the best of Honeycomb’s tablet features to phones and adding resizable widgets and a new, more readable font.

You will be able to unlock your phone by looking at it, thanks to Face Unlock, a new facial-recognition feature. However, Google does warn that this is not as secure as other authentication methods, such as passwords or PINs, since “someone who looks similar to you could unlock your phone.”

There’s no Flash player available for Ice Cream Sandwich yet. Adobe says it should arrive by year end, but that’s it – there’ll be no more mobile Flash after that.

New feature Android Beam uses Near Field Communication (NFC) to transfer data between devices – you can swap information by holding phones a short distance (maximum about 20 cm) away from each other. In addition, you can receive information from NFC-enabled displays, and Beam allows for e-commerce payment by simply waving the phone over a reader – or tapping it, as with PayPass. The phone must, of course, contain an NFC chip.

The redesigned calendar lets other apps add events and reminders. Multiple calendars and colour-coding let you keep business and personal schedules separate, yet you can still see what’s happening in your life at a glance.

Like Windows Phone 7, Ice Cream Sandwich now imports details from your social networks into contact records. When you first start up your phone, you’re prompted to join Google’s own social network, Google +.

Need a screenshot of a smartphone app? Ice Cream Sandwich includes the ability to take snapshots of the display, store them locally, edit and share them.

With all of these features, it’s all too easy to blow your data plan out of the water. Ice Cream Sandwich includes new monitoring tools so you can see how much data you’ve used, what application used it, and whether it was over cellular or Wi-Fi. You can set alerts to warn you if you’re approaching your plan’s limit, to help avoid expensive charges, and can define how much data apps are allowed to consume in the background (updating maps or sharing location data, for example).

Android’s camera system has had some serious polishing, too. Google says there’s now zero lag-time from shutter to shot, stabilized zoom while recording, and time-lapse settings. Face detection finds and focuses on faces in frame, and you can grab a still snapshot while recording a video by simply tapping the screen. The icing on the cake: There’s now a built-in photo editor, so you can tweak those shots before sharing them.

Audio file management is now much easier thanks to the new visual voicemail, which integrates messages, voice transcriptions and audio files into a single app. Third-party apps will be able to integrate with it as well.

There’s more, of course, for both work and play. Check out the Android site for your own taste of the Ice Cream Sandwich.

Read More

Atom-smasher shut down for two months

The world's largest atom-smasher has been shut down for two months following a helium leak, just 10 days after it was switched on amid great fanfare to probe the secrets of the universe.

“There has been an incident in a test. One section of the machine will have to be repaired,” James Gillies, a spokesman for the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), said Monday.

CERN said in a statement that a fault occurred Friday afternoon, resulting in a “large helium leak into the tunnel.”

“Preliminary investigations suggest that the most likely cause of the problem was a faulty electrical connection between two magnets, which probably melted at high current leading to mechanical failure,” it said.

There was no risk to people, the centre added, saying that a full probe is under way.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was started on Sept. 10, with physicists cheering the successful testing of a clockwise beam, comprising strings of protons, and then an anticlockwise beam in preparatory testing ahead of first collisions.

But the LHC had to be shut down a week later due to an electrical hitch that affected a cooling system for high-powered magnets designed to steer beams of particles around the LHC's 27-kilometre (16.9-mile) circular tunnel.

The cooling system is important as the steering magnets in the LHC tunnel are chilled to as low as -271 degrees Celsius (-456.25 degrees Fahrenheit), which is close to absolute zero and colder than deep outer space.

At this extreme temperature, electrical currents overcome resistance, thus making it easier and cheaper to power electro-magnets.

The LHC was only turned back on again on Friday, but the latest setback has once again forced operations to halt.

As the sector where the fault occurred would have to be warmed up from its extreme temperature for repairs to take place, the LHC would now be halted for “a minimum of two months,” resulting in further delays to the first collisions.

The LHC took nearly 20 years to complete and at six billion Swiss francs ($5.46 billion U.S.) is one of the costliest and most complex scientific experiments ever attempted.

It aims to resolve some of the greatest questions surrounding fundamental matter, such as how particles acquire mass and how they were forged in the “Big Bang” that created the universe some 13.7 billion years ago.

Counter-rotating beams are whizzed around the tunnel and then are smashed together in four huge laboratories.

Over the 10-15 years in which the LHC will operate, masses of data will spew from these collisions and will be scrutinised by physicists around the world.

Read More

NASA spots Earth’s twin (or closest match yet) outside solar system

Bill Borucki, Kepler principal Investigator at NASA's Ames Research Center, speaks during a news conference about the newly discovered planet Kepler-22b on Monday in in Moffett Field, Calif.

A newly discovered planet is eerily similar to Earth and is sitting outside our solar system in what seems to be the ideal place for life, expect for one hitch. It’s a bit too big.

The planet is smack in the middle of what astronomers call the Goldilocks zone, that hard-to-find place that’s not too hot, not too cold, where water, which is essential for life, doesn’t freeze or boil. Its surface temperature is near 22 C, scientists say.

The planet’s confirmation was announced Monday by NASA along with other discoveries by its Kepler telescope, which was launched on a planet-hunting mission in 2009.

That’s the first planet confirmed in the habitable zone for Kepler, which had already found Earth-like rocky planets elsewhere. Twice before astronomers have announced a planet found in that zone, but neither have been as promising.

“This is a phenomenal discovery in the course of human history,” Geoff Marcy of University of California, Berkeley, one of the pioneers of planet-hunting outside our solar system, said in an e-mail.

The new planet – named Kepler-22b – has key aspects it shares with Earth. It circles a star that could be the twin of our sun and at just about the same distance. The planet’s year of 290 days is even close to ours. It likely has water and rock.

The only trouble is the planet’s a bit big for life to exist on the surface. The planet is about 2.4 times the size of Earth. It could be more like the gas-and-liquid Neptune with only a rocky core and mostly ocean.

“It’s so exciting to imagine the possibilities,” said Natalie Batalha, the Kepler deputy science chief.

Floating on that “world completely covered in water” could be like being on an Earth ocean and “it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that life could exist in such an ocean,” Ms. Batalha said in a phone interview.

So far the Kepler telescope has spotted 2,326 candidate planets outside our solar system with 139 of them potentially habitable ones. Even though the confirmed Kepler-22b is a bit big, it is still smaller than most of the other candidates.

Chief Kepler scientist William Borucki said he thinks the planet is somewhere between Earth and gas-and-liquid Neptune, but that it has a lot of rocky material.

The planet is 600 light years away. Each light year is 5.9 trillion miles. It would take a space shuttle about 22 million years to get there.

Read More

Yahoo to weigh deals for Asian assets

The "Yahoo" sign, which overlooks the I-80 freeway from 6th St. is dismantled,2011 in downtown San Francisco.

Yahoo Inc.is discussing a plan to slash its stakes in China’s Alibaba Group and a Japanese affiliate in a complex deal worth roughly $17-billion (U.S.), sources familiar with the matter said.

The deal – the latest proposals put forth in recent months to resuscitate the once high-flying Internet company – is expected to be considered by Yahoo’s board on Thursday, one of the sources said.

The board was uninterested in entertaining offers for the entire company at this point, the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, added.

Yahoo’s increasing difficulty in competing with Internet heavyweights such as Google Inc. (GOOG-Q629.703.880.62%) and Facebook have forced it to explore proposals to revamp its business. The former Internet powerhouse, which fired its Chief Executive Carol Bartz in September, has a market value of around $18.5-billion.

The company’s board has come under fire from prominent shareholders for its seeming lack of movement and for putting its own interests ahead of those of shareholders.

Alibaba chief Jack Ma has said several times he would like to buy back Yahoo’s stake in his company, one of Asia’s largest Internet corporations. Investors have long said Yahoo’s investment in Alibaba, along with its 35 per cent slice of Yahoo Japan, are far and away the U.S. company’s most prized assets.

Last week, sources told Reuters a consortium consisting of private equity group Silver Lake, Microsoft Corp. and venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz were reworking a bid for a minority stake in Yahoo.

In the latest deal, Yahoo would effectively transfer most of its 40 per cent of Alibaba back to the Chinese company and all of its stake in Yahoo Japan to Softbank Corp. in return for cash and assets, one of the sources said.

The exact value of the deal would depend on how the assets are valued, one source said.

Yahoo shares, which languished in the red along with much of the technology sector on Wednesday, reversed course and ended the session almost 6 per cent higher at $15.99. It inched further upward in after-hours trading to $16.09.

Read More

China passes U.S. as top patent filer in 2011

Published applications from China’s patent office have risen by an average of 16.7 per cent annually from 171,000 in 2006 to nearly 314,000 in 2010, data from Thomson Reuters Derwent World Patents Index showed. Workers are seen inside a Foxconn factory in the township of Longhua in the southern Guangdong province in this May 26, 2010 file photo.

China became the world’s top patent filer in 2011, surpassing the United States and Japan as it steps up innovation to improve its intellectual property rights track record, a Thomson Reuters research report showed on Wednesday.

The report said the world’s second-largest economy aimed to transform from a “made in China” to a “designed in China” market, with the government pushing for innovation in sectors such as automobiles, pharmaceuticals and technology.

However, legal experts said China would need to do more before it can lead the world in innovation as the quality of patents needed to improve.

The government provided attractive incentives for companies in China to file patent applications, regardless of whether a patent was eventually granted, they said.

“The idea of subsidizing patents is not bad in itself, however it is a blunt instrument because you get high figures for filings, but it does not tell you anything about the quality of the patents filed,” said Elliot Papageorgiou, a Partner and Executive at law firm Rouse Legal (China).

“One thing is volume, quality is quite another. The return, or the percentage of grants, of the patents is still not as high in China as, say, in the U.S., Japan or some places in Europe,” he said.

The Thomson Reuters report said published patent applications from China were expected to total nearly 500,000 in 2015, following by the United States with close to 400,000 and Japan with almost 300,000.

Published applications from China’s patent office have risen by an average of 16.7 per cent annually from 171,000 in 2006 to nearly 314,000 in 2010, data from Thomson Reuters Derwent World Patents Index showed.

During the period, Japan had the highest volume, followed by the United States, China, Korea and Europe, the report said. It did not give figures for 2011.

“The striking difference among these regions is China – it is experiencing the most rapid growth and is poised to lead the pack in the very near future,” it said.

Of total patents filed in China, the percentage of domestic applications rose to nearly 73 per cent in 2010 from less than 52 per cent in 2006, indicating that Chinese companies have outpaced foreign entities in the patent boom.

In terms of patents overseas, Chinese companies have also been climbing in the rankings, according to data from the World Intellectual Property Office (WIPO).

In 2010, China’s No.2 telecommunications equipment maker ZTE Corp was second on the list of applicants, ranking just behind Japan’s Panasonic Corp.

U.S. chip maker Qualcomm Inc. came in third, while China’s Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd, the world’s second-largest telecom gear maker, was fourth, according to WIPO.

Chinese companies have been trying to be more innovative as they transform from contract manufacturers to regional and global brand names producing higher end products to improve margins.

Patent filings have also increased among Chinese companies due to legal battles that they have had to fight, especially in the telecommunications sector. For instance, Huawei and ZTE have been embroiled in patent disputes over fourth-generation wireless technology.

Read More

Twitter unwraps advertiser-friendly redesign

A new Twitter experience is rolling out over several weeks; access it now by getting the iPhone or Android apps released today. Feedback on the changes? Share your thoughts with @feedback using the hashtag #newlook. If you need help, pose any questions to @support.

Twitter revamped its website on Thursday in an effort to make the microblogging service easier to use and to help companies better showcase their brands.

The new version of Twitter, which the company is gradually making available starting on Thursday, features a redesigned look as well as technological improvements that it said will speed up the service.

Twitter allows people to send 140-character messages, or “tweets,” throughout the network of over 100 million users. It is one of the Web’s most popular social networking services, along with Facebook and Zynga.

The company faces competition from Google Inc., which introduced a social networking service with capabilities similar to Twitter.

The new version of Twitter features a revamped profile page, in which a company can highlight a specific feature, such as videos or photos. Previously, the profile pages displayed a chronological list of the company’s most recent Tweets.

With the changes, it will be easier to find people and companies with Twitter profiles. All it will take is typing an “at” symbol in front of a user's handle. Entering a subject with a hash tag — the pound symbol — in front of it will show everything on Twitter related to that topic. And clicking on a specific tweet will display any other exchanges tied to the message to provide further context about the discussion.

Twitter is taking steps to build a profitable business on top of its popular service. The company began showing ads on limited parts of the service in 2010 and is expected to generate about $140-million in ad revenue this year, according to estimates by industry research firm eMarketer.

The company said it has more than 3,400 advertisers and it expects to launch an advertising system early next year that will allow companies to quickly create marketing campaigns on Twitter.

Read More

Smartphones dialling up new business for stores

The meteoric rise of smartphones and tablets is revolutionizing the way people shop, but it’s also breathing new life into an unlikely place: the traditional bricks-and-mortar store.

For years, a growing number of shoppers have opted to do their buying on the Web rather than in the mall. But now, the digital and the physical retail worlds are intersecting as new devices – and the software available for them – are helping shoppers do everything from finding discounts to finding parking.

These devices represent a huge opportunity for merchants, who have been struggling to keep up with technological changes since consumers started to tap into their mobile phones for shopping information over the past year. While shoppers continue to do more of their browsing and buying online, enticing them into real stores would also give retailers a chance to push even more products, bolstering profits in both digital and real-life avenues.

It’s a testament to this brave new world of digitally-assisted shopping that one of the most important weapons in many customers’ arsenals this holiday season is a smartphone app designed by a firm in Calgary.

For years, Poynt has been one of the most popular apps on almost every smartphone, giving users the ability to search for businesses, look up movie listings or even reserve tables at nearby restaurants. But this holiday season, the app maker has seen its users take advantage of their smartphones to supercharge their bricks-and-mortar shopping experience.

“They’re not just looking up a store listing – they’re calling the store, they’re checking inventory, they’re mapping directions to get there, and then they’re setting their search location from that store to go to the next one,” said Margaret Glover-Campbell, Poynt’s vice-president of marketing. “We’re definitely seeing more and more of that as people are starting to understand what their phones can do.”

Pam Stone, a 31-year-old real estate broker in Vancouver, is one of a growing cohort of customers standing at the junction of digital and physical shopping. Ms. Stone recently used a Future Shop mobile app to hunt down and buy a video game. She said the process was painless because her package was ready for pickup at the store when she arrived.

“It was much faster this way,” she said. “You know how the stores are these days. It’s kind of overwhelming.” When searching for the $69 game as a gift for her cousin, she was able to find out that there were six of them left at the store close by, where she headed soon after to fetch it. “It’s the new thing,” she said. “It’s the new wave.”

Future Shop and its sister chain Best Buy, both owned by Best Buy Co. Inc. were early adopters of mobile strategies, having launched iPhone apps more than a year ago and extending them to all mobile devices this month. Shoppers are able to browse their websites, find a store where a product is available, take advantage of special promotions and make the purchase on the spot.

The early signs point to momentum building for the retailer’s mobile payments. On Cyber Monday – the big Nov. 28 e-shopping day because of the bargains offered – 11 per cent of shopper visits to FutureShop.ca were made on mobile devices, double the proportion of a year earlier, said Thierry Hay-Sabourin, director of commerce at Future Shop. What is more, 8 per cent of revenue on Cyber Monday was generated from mobile devices, up from 1.4 per cent the previous year, he said.

“It’s a good representation of the growth we’re seeing from the mobile devices,” he said. “We’re seeing that trend continue in December.” On Dec. 24 at 8 p.m., when the online retailer starts offering Boxing Day sales, the company expects a rush of mobile purchases.

Part of the appeal for consumers and retailers is access to the “endless aisle” of e-commerce. “ Retailers can stock many times more product offerings online than they can cram into their stores. Electronics chain Future Shop, for instance, carries four times as many items on its website as in its stores, he said.

Other retailers, such as Loblaws, Tim Hortons and McDonald’s, are starting to offer mobile payments, enabling their checkout scanners to process transactions with devices equipped with a “near-field communication” (NFC) chip. While NFC is expected to eventually be embedded more universally in cellphones – making mobile payments more common – café giant Starbucks Corp. hasn’t waited for NFC technology to take off: It started allowing U.S. customers last January – and Canadian customers in November – to use a phone app as a mobile wallet.

Individual retailers aren’t the only ones taking advantage of mobile devices. A number of malls, such as the Yorkdale Shopping Centre, have developed apps that let users not only navigate the stores, but even find a parking spot. The Yorkdale app quickly pinpoints where a user is in the mall, and can be used to find directions to other stores. In the U.S., startups such as FastMall have taken that idea one step further, launching an app that contains maps of more than 1,250 different malls.

The Yorkdale, FastMall and countless other shopping apps are also increasingly incorporating digital discount coupons into their services. Such coupons have been around for years, but with mobile devices, companies can tailor them to a user’s precise location, making it far more likely that user will walk into a nearby store to cash in on the deal.

Indeed, the U.S. version of the Poynt app recently incorporated coupons into its app – something the company hopes to bring north of the border soon.

Read More

Chinese microbloggers mock latest round of state controls

China further tightened rules on microblogs on Thursday, requiring new authors on seven websites in southern Guangdong province to register their real names, state-run Xinhua news agency reported, in a move users decried as ineffective.

Microblogs such as Sina’s Weibo allow users to issue messages of a maximum of 140 Chinese characters that can course through tens of millions users everyday, defying censors with posts on sensitive topics such as human rights and the foibles of the top leadership.

The new rule was quickly mocked by microbloggers whose posts in many cases have sparked off national online protests against official corruption and reported events such as the deadly collision of a bullet train this year quicker and more accurately than official media.

“I say a couple of things, and they’re going to come get me?” said one, using the name Pan Gui. “China has more than a billion people; if a few hundred million complain are they going to have a place to put them all away?”

“What’s this about?” wrote another, posting as Wang Weijin. “They want to control our freedom of speech???”

It is not clear how many microbloggers there are among China’s nearly half-billion Internet users. Some estimates say 300 million.

But Xinhua quoted Tong Liqiang, executive deputy director of the Beijing Internet Information Office, as putting the number at 63 million – with 600 million microblog IDs in Beijing alone. But many are unused dummy accounts.

Websites in Guangzhou and Shenzhen cities in Guangdong including Tencent Holdings Ltd., China’s biggest Internet company by revenue, will only require newly registering users to provide their real names, the report said.

Users will continue to be allowed to post using their real names or pseudonyms.

The new regulation is intended to “foster healthy Internet culture” and “strengthen management and guide social networking services and instant-messaging tools,” Xinhua quoted a statement from Guangdong province as saying.

“Experts claim the new rules will purify the Internet environment, as fake and fraudulent information is often seen spreading through microblogs, which are gaining popularity among users.”

Last week Beijing authorities gave all Weibo users 90 days to register their real names or face unspecified consequences.

Read More

BlackBerrys to clock off alongside VW workers

The working day is over and the Christmas holiday has officially begun, but the blinking red light or vibration of a BlackBerry is still maddeningly hard to ignore.

Angered by the blurring of the dividing line between the workplace and home, Volkswagen’s powerful works council has struck an agreement with management that employees who use a BlackBerry and whose pay is governed by a collective wage tariff agreement will be subject to new e-mail restrictions.

So from now on, VW’s e-mail server will cease routing messages 30 minutes after the end of an employee’s shift and will only begin sending e-mails again half-an-hour before the next working day begins.

The agreement is expected to affect more than 1,000 VW employees who have a company BlackBerry. It is unclear if other heavily unionized German companies are considering such a rule.

“The new possibilities of communication also contain inherent dangers,” Heinz-Joachim Thust of VW’s works council told the Wolfsburger Allgemeine Zeitung.

A VW works council spokesman confirmed the existence of the BlackBerry agreement but explained that the rule did not apply to senior management or other workers who fall outside trade union-negotiated pay brackets.

The works council sought the restriction in response to the tendency for BlackBerry users to be contactable by employers at all hours and amid a growing awareness in Germany of the risks of employee burnout.

BlackBerrys began life as toys for executives but have since become a staple of corporate life. So great are their perceived addictive powers that the e-mail devices quickly earned the monicker “CrackBerries.” But employees have long been forced to trade the convenience of owning a BlackBerry with being “always available.”

The works council said that so far there had been very positive feedback to the new e-mail rules, which came into force earlier this year. Workers will still be able to make phone calls using their BlackBerrys at any time.

Volkswagen workers have been working flat out this year as the company bids to overtake Toyota and General Motors as the world’s biggest car maker by sales.

At a recent employee rally in Wolfsburg, Martin Winterkorn, chief executive officer, congratulated workers on completing 38 extra shifts and producing 50,000 additional vehicles, putting the company on track to sell more than 8 million cars this year.

Mr. Thust did not immediately respond to an e-mailed request for comment. It is unclear if his BlackBerry was switched off.

Read More