Digital Technology News, Camera, Camcorder and Cool Gadget Reviews

HTC has announced a pair of new smartphones with Facebook branding.The cringe-inducingly named ChaCha and Salsa devices are the first to carry the logo of the world’s biggest social networking site. However, Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg stated during the press conference that dozens of branded devices will appear this year.

Both handsets have a dedicated Facebook button under the usual buttons at the bottom of the handset. This smart shortcut button will have myriad uses depending on what you’re doing at the time. For example, it could upload a photo or video, share a web address or location, or post a link to a music track you’re listening to.
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Google has announced that it will merge the smartphone and Tablet editions of its Android operating system, combining the best features of both into a single OS.

This will happen in the next version of the smartphone operating system. Currently, the smartphone OS is Android 2.3 (Gingerbread), while Tablets will run Android 3.0 (Honeycomb).

Strictly speaking, there will also be one more edition of the smartphone-only OS, Android 2.4. This will let applications designed for dual-core Tablets run on single-core smartphones.

Android 2.4 will retain the Gingerbread codename. It may come as no surprise that the combined smartphone and Tablet version of Android will be called Ice-cream Sandwich.

As well as combining the two operating systems, Google announced that there will be a new version of Android every six months. We can only hope that as well as pushing out such frequent updates, Google can persuade handset manufacturers to match the pace. Currently, many smartphones lag far behind the latest release.

Amazon’s heavy focus on its Kindle eBook store appears to be paying off, with the retailer revealing that it now sells more Kindle books than paperbacks.

The company, which sells its own range of Kindle eReaders, announced during its fourth quarter earnings call that it has seen sales of electronic books overtake sales of physical paperback books for the first time in the company’s history. “Since the beginning of the year, for every 100 paperback books Amazon has sold 115 Kindle books,” the company said in a press statement.

Sales of digital books have also overtaken those of hardback editions, with Amazon claiming that it sells three times as many Kindle editions as hardback editions.

The figures represent actual sales from the company’s US bookselling business, and exclude the many out-of-copyright titles Amazon provides Kindle users free of charge. It also includes sales of paperback and hardback books where there is no corresponding Kindle version. Read the rest of this entry »