We're big fans of Google's Chrome web browser here at Redmond Pie, and the majority of us use it as our daily driver on a variety of desktop operating systems, be that Mac OS X, Windows or even on the odd occasion, Ubuntu.
This year's CES has shown beyond a shadow of a doubt that 2012 is going to be the year that the computer market at large is going to catch up with Apple. At least, it will in the world of ultra-light, ultra-portable notebooks like the MacBook Air.
If you take a journey back into the not-too-distant past, and ask people to give a breakdown of the makes and models of mobile devices they used before they made the leap across to a smartphone, I am pretty confident that a small number of handsets will appears in everyone's list who is of a certain age. If I go back approximately a decade, Nokia was probably the dominant handset manufacturer with the latest release being the must-have phone amongst school kids and business men alike.
We have now been living with Siri since October 2011 when the iPhone 4S was made available for public consumption. There is no denying that Siri is a powerful addition to a mobile device, with the intelligent voice assistant being able to analyze voice commands and perform specific tasks based on this audible user instruction. But it seems as if the jury is still out on Siri by a lot of people, with a portion of user citing the lack of scope as reason.
With the release of the iPhone 4S in October 2011, we also saw the public release of the iOS 5 operating system which powers it. Naturally, registered developers already had their hands on iOS 5 for quite some time, meaning; when the public offering was announced during the 4S keynote, few people were surprised at the operating system’s capabilities. However, putting the lack of surprise aside, one of the largest update to the latest major version of iOS is the way in which it handles and displays notifications.
Since the launch of the original iPhone nearly 5 years ago, Apple has prided itself on keeping customers coming back for more with every new release.
If ever, we needed confirmation that the world of jailbreaking is still an alive and kicking community-driven activity, then it sure is. Today we are seeing the revelation that the recently released Absinthe tool, which is used to offer freedom to owners of A5 devices received more than one million downloads in a single day.
If anyone wondered whether Apple's entry into the world of digital textbooks was a good idea, then they should feast their eyes on this not inconsiderable number - users have downloaded 350,000 textbooks in just three days.
Not even the two outgoing CEOs of RIM would argue that the company's ill-fated BlackBerry PlayBook tablet was a success. In fact, as far as tech flops go we'd argue that it's right up there with the HP TouchPad.
In a move which is sure to draw comparisons to the Cydia store which exists on jailbroken iOS devices; tablets and phones running the Android operating system are set to get an unofficial application store which will be home to all of the applications which have been rejected or banned by Google, as well as modifications and custom ROMs. The iOS App Store is notorious for being tightly monitored by Apple, with the Cupertino company having the last say over what gets accepted for sale. Finding software which is available for Android devices outside of the official marketplace has never been particularly difficult, however, it looks set to become a whole lot easier.
