In a conference call, Mr. Schmidt said the three had been making decisions together, but it was a slow process. The new organization is expected to streamline things by “elevating me and having Larry running things day to day,” Mr. Schmidt said.
Google has had an unbelievable run under Schmidt, but the company’s services and products feel more and more fragmented and half-baked. Hopefully, this change will be a good one. I think it will be.
Google’s Mike Jazayeri, Product Manager for Chromium:
We expect even more rapid innovation in the web media platform in the coming year and are focusing our investments in those technologies that are developed and licensed based on open web principles. To that end, we are changing Chrome’s HTML5 video support to make it consistent with the codecs already supported by the open Chromium project. Specifically, we are supporting the WebM (VP8) and Theora video codecs, and will consider adding support for other high-quality open codecs in the future. Though H.264 plays an important role in video, as our goal is to enable open innovation, support for the codec will be removed and our resources directed towards completely open codec technologies.
Tomorrow, Apple will open the Mac App Store, and assumedly, a flood of new apps will be available to OS X users.
I fear that most of these apps will be not unlike iOS apps — simple, one-task apps that just re-arrange web data. While that works on mobile devices, I’m not sure it will on the desktop. I don’t want another 45 apps in my Dock to do what I can do now without them.
Single-core Android tablets like Samsung’s Galaxy Tab won’t meet the minimum requirements for Honeycomb, Google’s tablet-optimized operating system version, according to a manufacturer.
[…]
Samsung’s Galaxy Tab has a 1 GHz Hummingbird processor and a 1024-by-600 resolution display. The company has previously suggested that the Galaxy Tab would update no further than the smartphone-focused Android 2.3 (“Gingerbread”), but Cha’s comments appear to seal the Tab’s fate as a rapidly aging product.
There’s an iPad market, and the iPad could be classified as a tablet, from a hardware-centric viewpoint. But the market for non-iPad tablets is about as big today as it was before the iPad, which isn’t nothing, but it’s close enough to nothing that Apple doesn’t need to worry about it.
Go read (or Instapaper) this right now. Marco’s dead on — the iPad is a stand-alone product, and the tablet market is just as sad today as it was a year ago. If not more so.
A bizarre Christmas gift mix-up brought a Marion 12-year-old more than she had on her wish list. It was not exactly a lump of coal, but a set of southern Illinois parents may have preferred that to the gift they gave their daughter.
The young girl opened her gift and got an eyeful of porn. They bought what they thought were Coby Kyros pads for their 12 and 15-year-old daughters. They are similar to the Apple iPad and Amazon Kindle. Within a couple minutes, they realized one of the devices had more than just games and email apps.
Be sure to check out my piece over at Macgasm, in which I discuss Intel, ARM, Android, Apple and the Newton. All at once.
Say what you will about Android, but this is just awesome:
In what can only be described as a stellar publicity stunt, Google launched seven Nexus S smartphones into near space. The devices were fixed to weather balloons and sent over 100,000 feet above the Earth’s surface. Luckily the phones had some company on their journey, as can be seen in the image above showing an Android that tagged along for the ride. The Nexus S phones were equipped with various sensors to see how they would perform on the journey, and they were each running different Google apps such as Google Maps, Google Sky Map and Latitude. In case you were curious, the Nexus S GPS unit managed to function up until about 60,000 feet and the phone remained operational to -50° C.
Gmail creator Paul Buchheit via Business Insider:
Prediction: ChromeOS will be killed next year (or “merged” with Android). Because ChromeOS has no purpose that isn’t better served by Android (perhaps with a few mods to support a non-touch display).
I’m pretty divided right now on Google’s first take at the Chrome notebook. It’s both brilliant and bewildering. It’s both the future and a nightmare. But it’s definitely not boring, which is more than you can say for a lot of “new” technology these days. Watching it mature will be fun. But first the hardware needs to grow up.
If I could buy the Cr-48 right now, would I? No. But I’d download Chrome OS and install it on some cheap netbook.
Wow.
The best part is that a second user has the exact same post… stealing content about stolen property. How very meta.
That’s how Google describes the Cr–48 notebook it is using for developers and testers to start kicking the tires on Chrome OS.
It also speaks volumes to how Google sees the world and the future of computing.