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Android phone T-Mobile G1 Emulator

vtech — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 13:24:14 +0000

When you are about to make up your mind on whether to buy a revolutionary, expensive smartphone, what is the main factor in finalizing your final decision? The ability to test out all the functions and play around with the interface is really an important part of the decision making process. This what really has been done to the new launch of first ever Android phone, G1. While smartphone enthusiasts are excited about the features and all the hypes, they surely want to test it first hand before the device comes into the market.

T-mobile make this possible by setting up a flash based emulator for the upcoming Android phone T-Mobile G1 which visualizes some of the functionality of the touchscreen based phone. Though it provide almost every functionality, there are few functionality might not be correctly displayed like the size that is not proportionate to the real one.

Having said that, the Android phone emulator really does the job by providing a comprehensive overview of some of the functions that the Android phone will offer. It is possible to get a first impression of the Google maps,Google browser and other functions like sms, receiving calls or mms. As we can expect there is no real interaction with the emulator though (i.e. call someone).

It takes ages to load from my end. I'm not sure why is that but I finally manage to get into the emulator and play around with it.

[tags]Android phone, T-Mobile G1 Emulator, smartphone, touchscreen smartphone[/tags]

First Major Update for Google Chrome

vtech — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 13:39:30 +0000

We heard mixed reactions from internet users ranging from hailing Google Chrome as first ever browsers that really delivers in term of speed and User Interface to the other extreme who thought it is a total failure. As soon as it made its first footprint on the web, there were several issues related to security had been raised but guys at Google are fast at finding the workarounds and patching up all the weaknesses.

Google released its first update (0.3 from 0.2 version) recently which small bug fixes with the primary highlight is on various kind of plugins incompatibility. With many issues raised previously seemed to be taken care of by Google in the recent update, we can say they do listen and pretty responsive.

Among fixes highlighted are as follow:

Improve the performance and scrolling of plugins. This especially improves pages with multiple plugins playing video.
Fixes plugins not playing when embedded in a third-party frame on a page.
Fixes a problem where using Flash plugins could lock up Google Chrome and cause 100% CPU usage.

For what's worth, this update is only available to the developers. If you interested in being part of the development process, you can also take part in the developer community by opting in as a developer (not necessarily a real developer). Just download this utility and choose Dev from the two options.

[tags]google chrome, chrome major update, open source browser[/tags]