Software

Mozilla on Monday announced the first alpha release of its Fennec mobile browser for the Windows Mobile 6 operating system. This alpha is available only on the HTC Touch Pro from Sprint. Versions for other smartphones will be unveiled later. While Microsoft continues to upgrade the sixth version of ...

With the release of Ubuntu 9.04 last week, it's not too surprising that few other topics got much attention on the Linux blogs in the ensuing days. Yes, there was a rather intriguing discussion of porn and piracy over on DaniWeb and LXer; and yes, a moderately active conversation fired up the Slashd...

I wonder if Levi Strauss would have made billions selling his blue jeans if he had said that the zipper was "sold separately." I wonder if cell phones would be as ubiquitous as they are today if everyone had to learn to speak binary in order to communicate using them. I wonder how many people would ...

In a sagging economy, doing business as usual is rarely prudent and usually disastrous. Companies often must change the course of strategies, or in some cases accelerate them. After a spate of business meetings during the marathon that is Mobile World Congress, one takeaway is the acceleration in th...

Taking aim at the next generation of computing -- virtualization and the cloud -- Novell on Tuesday unveiled Suse Linux Enterprise 11. Suse Linux Enterprise 11 has been optimized for the major hypervisors -- VMware ESX, Microsoft Hyper-V and Xen. It runs on the x86, Itanium, IBM Power and IBM System...

I'm not what you would call a major gamer, but I've played the console version of "Guitar Hero: World Tour," and I didn't get booed off the stage every time. So that makes me an expert, right? When you're playing "Guitar Hero" on a mobile phone, the most important thing to bear in mind is that you'r...

In our age of instant gratification, no one likes waiting for anything. That's why the sluggish launch time of a typical personal computer can make a consumer irritable. It's also why instant-on computing has become a sort of Holy Grail for hardware and software makers in the industry. The pursuit o...

If nothing else, you've got to give the people over at QuickOffice credit for being early movers. They are the first to bring us an application that will open Microsoft Word documents and Excel spreadsheets on an Android-based phone. They're also the first, to my knowledge, to figure out how to reor...

Where aggregates content from a variety of content providers, and they're all location-based. Need a fill-up, or a cup of coffee, or maybe a quick dozen roses? No problem. The main page is a grid of icons. There's one for Yelp, which brings up a list of Yelp categories such as restaurants, home serv...

Oh, Linux is Linux, and Windows is Windows, and never the twain shall meet -- isn't that how the saying goes? Well, not quite, of course, but it might have been if Kipling had only lived long enough to get to know our favorite operating system. The fact of the matter is that Linux and Windows must a...

Several years ago, I helped develop some software that integrates and monitors certain business processes. We chose to use Linux-based systems because of some key free and open source software that allowed us to put together a sophisticated and comprehensive software platform. So often, the defense ...

When I first spotted Brain Genius, I figured it would be a fun way to while away some extra minutes and maybe beef up my brain cells a bit. This game is developed by Glu Mobile, which is one of the more prolific developers for the Android platform as well as for other mobile platforms. Glu makes sev...

Wikitude was a top-50 finalist in the Android Developer Challenge, and like ShopSavvy, it is a good illustration of what's possible with the mashing together of the G1's capabilities. In this case, Wikitude uses the GPS for location-awareness and combines that with the wealth of information that's a...

Freescale Semiconductor has launched a new low-cost processor, the i.MX515, that's designed to power what Freescale hopes will be new lines of Linux-based netbooks retailing for less than $200. There are lots of interesting angles to Freescale's efforts -- the lower price point, the technology behi...

Given the many options out there, someone in the market for a portable computer may have a hard time deciding whether to go with an ultra-small netbook or a small-but-not-THAT-small notebook computer. If you want a netbook, you've got another choice ahead of you: Would you like that with Linux or Wi...