Posts tagged “google”.

Smartphone OS comparison at Gizmodo

October 14th, 2008

Owning an iPhone and a Newton, it’s always fun to poke around at other mobile operation systems when I get the chance. The other day, I put my stylus on a Palm for the first time, and got to play around with it for a bit.

Gizmodo puts all the major smartphone OSes – RIM’s Blackberry, Apple’s iPhone, Windows Mobile, for instance – against each other in a run down of features, pros, and cons.

The only classic mobile OS in the bunch is the “basically dead” Palm OS in the Centro, which is sad, considering (a) the Palm OS looks so dated with the other systems and (b) Palm succeeded where the Newton did not in a lot of ways. Now it’s a dying system.

Google’s Chrome comic nods to the original iMac

September 5th, 2008

Just read through Scott McCloud’s excellent comic about Google’s new web browser, Chrome (maybe you’ve heard about it?).

On page 25, Google gives props to the original iMac (above), circa 1998, and how it was an original “internet device” from the old HTML days. But what’s up with the dancing moon?

I haven’t tried Chrome out yet, because they haven’t released a Mac version, but it’s got me curious – and it has received glowing reviews from a lot of the sources I’ve read. Have you tried it?

Einstein emulator on Android: oh the possibilities

September 3rd, 2008

Is Google’s Android mobile platform the Newton fan’s savior at bringing a Newton-clone app to fruition?

When Apple announced the iPhone SDK, I wondered whether someone could use it to develop an Einstein-based Newton app – even just to mess around with – for Apple’s Mobile OS X.

Because of the licensing agreement, a Newton app is probably impossible. But on the open-source Android OS and its new Android Market, the dream of a modern-day Einstein hack might be realized.

Now that Android has its own “app store,” some bootstrapping developer could do something really cool. A touch screen, a stylus, some sort of handwriting recognition, and access to the OS’s dates and contacts and notes, and you might be all set.

I’m positive its nowhere near that simple to develop a Newton emulator for a mobile phone. But one can dream, right?

iGoogle’s online haiku randomness

March 31st, 2008

iGoogle’s haiku generator

If you use iGoogle at all, which I do and love, one of the more unique widgets I’ve found is an online haiku generator, called the Computer Generated Poetry gadget (above).

It takes the form of a haiku using random words, a user-defined refresh rate (mine’s every 30 seconds), and the structure – haiku or freeform – you prefer. The “about” page says the gadget “builds a poem from a part-of-speech tagged list of English words.”

Currently, at this very moment, mine says:

answer an empire
consultant escape such Green
confined own topic

Here’s that, Newtonized:

answer an empire
Consultant excape suih Jrean
sonfined own topic

You need a to have a Google account to use iGoogle, but once you do, you can add all types of gadgets to your customized homepage, like weather, stocks, news, and even random haiku.