Looking for a netbook with a little more oomph, or perhaps a thin-and-light laptop that doesn’t break the bank? We’re not quite sure which category the Acer Aspire 1551-5448 falls under, but we reckon it’s liable to satisfy both camps with an 11.6-inch LED-backlit display and a 1.5GHz AMD Turion II Neo K625 CPU. Like the single-threaded Aspire 521 and 721 cousins we’ll be reviewing later this week, this dual-core machine sports a ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4225 GPU for stutter-free 1080p playback, and extra memory to boot. Here, Acer crammed 4GB of DDR3 RAM, a 320GB hard drive, 802.11n WiFi, HDMI-out and a six-cell, five-hour battery into a package weighing just over three pounds. If you’ve got $550 to drop, there’s an Aspire 1551 with your name on it, available now practically wherever laptops are sold.

Acer Aspire 1551 hits retailers with 1.5GHz dual-core Turion II CPU originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 29 Jun 2010 02:02:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Back in May, Google showcased the next version of Android, codenamed Froyo. Chuck full of new features like Flash support, the ability to turn your phone into a Wifi hotspot, and huge speed gains, Android users have been eager to try it out for themselves. Some of them already have — Google rolled out Froyo to a small number of Nexus One years in late May, but most people didn’t receive the update. Now, Froyo is finally rolling out to all Nexus One users over the air, with plans to have it deployed to most people by the end of the week.

From the Nexus One blog:

Starting today, Nexus One users will begin to receive the Android 2.2 (codenamed Froyo) over-the-air software update on their phones. This update provides some great new features including support for making your handset a portable hotspot and support for Adobe Flash within the browser. For a complete list of everything we’ve included in Android 2.2, please see the Android 2.2 Platform Highlights.

In order to access the update, you will receive a message on your phone’s notification bar. Just download the update, wait for it to install, and you should be all set. This update will be rolled out gradually to phones – and most users will receive the notification by the end of the week . We hope you enjoy these new features.

Some Nexus One users have been running the build that was sent out to a small batch of users in late May (even if you didn’t actually get the update over the air, it was possible to download it elsewhere). I’ve been running this build for the last month, and have found it to be a huge improvement over 2.1.

Of course, most Android users will still have to wait a while (months, in many cases) until their devices will get 2.2. That’s because it’s still up to hardware manufacturers to port the OS over to their devices — a process that can be further complicated by ‘skins’ used by some companies, like HTC’s Sense.

Location based social network Foursquare is the darling of the media’s eye these days and appears to be growing very fast. Rumors are growing louder that Netscape co-founder Marc Andreesen’s venture capital fund is about to invest in the startup and the company now reports that it sees “100,000 new users every 10 days.”

Is old-school local social network Yelp scared? No, says Eric Singley, Yelp’s Director of Consumer and Mobile Products. Singley told us he finds Foursquare’s user numbers “hard to quantify” and said “they don’t blow my mind.” Foursquare may be fun, he says, but Yelp remains the best place to find good restaurants and bars to patronize. Yelp is also much bigger than Foursquare. Tonight the company is making a number of mobile announcements that seem aimed directly at defending Yelp’s crown.

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Yelp Mobile is Already Big

Starting tonight, local businesses that have created free accounts and claimed their listings on Yelp will receive additional analytics specific to mobile user traffic: the number of times they’ve shown up in mobile search, the number of times mobile users have clicked to call them by telephone and the number of times users have clicked for directions to their business.

Yelp says that 2 million unique users searched on a mobile Yelp app last month, performing 27% of the total searches the company saw. The entire Foursquare network claims 1.8 million users. Yelp said this Spring that it sees 31 million unique visitors to its website every month.

That means Yelp is probably at least 15 times as big as Foursquare. The tech press is fixated on Foursquare (ourselves included) because it is more social networky, more innovative and may be significantly faster growing. It’s only 15 months old. It’s also a lot less useful than Yelp is.

Founded by an ex-PayPal crew more than five years ago, Yelp has raised about $30 million in venture funding itself. Two and a half years ago it had a rumored valuation that was already two and a half times what Foursquare’s reported valuation is today.

Possibly as soon as next month, Singley says Yelp will release an Android app with check-ins, a feature clearly modeled after upstarts like Foursquare but that Yelp says is proving successful with its users as well.

Foursquare is very interesting, as a multi-purpose location platform it may prove a very disruptive technology. Maybe. But it will be hard pressed to turn the tables between business owners and consumers the way Yelp has in this country and it remains a fraction of the size as a business, despite the hype.

Business owners all around the United States will begin getting emails tonight showing them just how important Yelp’s own mobile applications are to their bottom line. Foursquare loyalty programs might be big someday, but Yelp mobile numbers are likely to make a big impression right away.

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Continue reading HTML5 speed test finds IE9, Firefox 3.7 lead the pack in Windows, Chrome a distant last

HTML5 speed test finds IE9, Firefox 3.7 lead the pack in Windows, Chrome a distant last originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 25 Jun 2010 03:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Fresh off a $33 million funding round, Playdom is making its fifth acquisition of the year today. The gaming giant is buying social gaming startup Hive7. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Hive7, which is backed by True Ventures and was founded in 2005, develops social games for Facebook and MySpace. The startup is best known for its flagship game, Knighthood, which combines combat and diplomacy in a medieval setting. Other titles include Youtopia, Kick-Off, and Sindicate. Hive 7′s developers and team have already joined Playdom’s Mountain View offices.

Playdom has been on quite a shopping spree over the past few months. The company, which recently brought on a new CTO, has steadily been expanding its presence on Facebook and in the social gaming space, most recently acquiring MMORPG developer Acclaim Games, Facebook game developer Offbeat Creations and developer Three Melons. Playdom also invested $5 million in Facebook game developer MetroGames. And Playdom bought popular branded game developer Merscom.

Of course, the gaming company has been raising large amounts of money to fuel these acquisitions of gaming platforms and talent. This week, the company raised $33 million from Disney’s Steamboat Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners and New World Ventures. And in November, Playdom raised a massive $43 million at a $260 million valuation. According to our stats from November, Playdom has 28 million monthly game users. 60% of traffic is from MySpace v. 40% from Facebook. Playdom’s main competitor is gaming giant Zynga, which is a leading game developer on Facebook.

Numbers released from comScore today show that U.S. Internet users watched nearly 34 billion videos online in the month of May, up from just over 30 billion in April. Hulu served up nearly 1.2 billion videos last month, nearly 3.5% of the overall market, while Google remained supreme, accounting for 43% of the market – a whopping 14.6 billion videos – with its powerhouse property, YouTube. Still, Hulu, a place where many watch full episodes of network television, is slowly inching from the pack, and Fox Interactive Media, sitting near the bottom of comScore’s rankings, wants a piece of the action. They’re target? Mobile.

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Back in January, Hulu managed just over 900 million videos, 2.8% of the overall market and nearly twice as much as the next highest ranked provider, Microsoft. Since then, they’ve grown slightly to 3.5%, fending off the other providers and cementing their position as a leading online video provider. Hulu’s 43.5 million unique visitors in May watched an average of 27 videos each, which is more than a quarter of the number watched by YouTube visitors.

Fox Launches Mobile Hulu-esque Subscription Service

Fox Interactive Media, which ranks 9th on comScore’s top 10 based on total videos served, announced today that it is taking a stab at mobile video subscription service with what it calls Bitbop. Is it an iPhone app? No. An Android app? No. A mobile website? No. It’s an application for the BlackBerry.

BitBop, available on the BlackBerry Bold, Curve and Tour models, is a free application that allows users to watch many of the same TV shows and movies they know from Hulu directly on their phones. While the app is free to download, it comes with a subscription fee – $9.99 a month – to access content. Family Guy, The Office, 30 Rock, Glee, CSI, Friday Night Lights – all the major players are present and accounted for.

If you’re asking yourself why the service is only available on the Blackberry – and why wouldn’t you – it’s because Fox has inked an exclusive deal with BlackBerry makers RIM (Research In Motion). It’s a curious partnership, since the majority of BlackBerry owners use their devices mainly for work and enterprise functionality – not exactly the kind of people who are more like to watch online video on their mobile device, if you asked me.

Still, it will be interesting to see how it plays out and if Fox can boost their low video market share numbers. There is certainly a market for on-demand mobile video – the success of Netflix’s iPad app and the anticipation of its iPhone app can speak to that thread. Whether that market is on BlackBerry devices is yet to be seen, but this partnership could bode well for both parties.

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The official Twitter app is keeping up with the times by rolling out iOS 4 support in its latest build. With the program now able to run in the background, you’ll finally be able to send tweets while switching in and out of other applications. It also means you won’t have to relaunch the app every time you want to check up on the latest happenings, it’ll just keep your place like a good and loyal piece of software. Retina Display-friendly graphics are also part of the new package, along with “more secure” tweeting, if you ever felt insecure about the integrity of you shorthand missives. All it’s missing now are the millions of “sent from my iPhone 4″ messages, a gap we’re sure you’ll be filling pronto.

Twitter for iPhone now ready for iOS 4 multitasking originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 23 Jun 2010 02:22:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Opera Software has struck a deal with Russia’s federal mobile operator OJSC MegaFon under which MegaFon’s special package “Unlimited Internet with Opera Mini” will be distributed to all Russian territories.

That may not sound like much at first glance, but you have to consider that MegaFon boasts over 53 million mobile subscribers, spanning all seven Federal Districts of Russia.

Furthermore, MegaFon serves some 39 percent of all mobile Web traffic in Russian territories, according to recent research (it was first in Russia to run a 3G network based on UMTS). The operator says internal statistics have shown that Opera Mini subscribers effectively generate twice the traffic than any other MegaFon user.

Tomorrow at the 2010 Semantic Technology Conference, Primal will launch a new publishing platform. It’s grandly described as a "semantic synthesis platform," but simply put it’s a publishing platform that automates the production of content. What’s more, the resulting web pages include no original content. It’s all aggregated from other sources.

So in many ways this is reducing Web publishing to its most basic form, devoid of new content. Is this “automated content manufacturing,” as founder Paul Sweeney described it to me today, useful to people?

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The stated goal of Primal is to deliver a "personalized content experience that is based directly on [a user's] individual thoughts and ideas." Primal Pages, the first application of this platform, is a webpage builder that enables a user to create a web presence based on their topics of interest. The content sources include Wikipedia, Yahoo! and Flickr.

The use cases of Primal, according to Sweeney, include a teacher building a website of course materials for their students and a small business providing information to support their product.

In my initial tests today, Primal seemed a little raw – although the UI is slick. The brainstorming and ‘find content’ aspects of the product are essentially search features that surface keywords and media from sites like Wikipedia and Flickr.

What’s most interesting about Primal is the publishing aspect, the webpage builder. This is well designed and easy to use. Within a matter of minutes I was able to ‘author’ a webpage about my favorite band, The Velvet Underground.

However, as noted above, it had no original content on it – which means it doesn’t add much value to the Web as a whole.

Primal appears to be competing with other lightweight publishing services, such as Tumblr and Posterous. More so, the so-called Geocities 2.0 startups like Weebly and Yola. The difference is that Primal is much more automated than any of those services, which takes a lot of creativity out of publishing.

I asked Sweeney how he thought Primal compared to Demand Media, the content farm that is pumping thousands of pieces of content onto the Web each day. He acknowledged that Primal will also pump a lot of (unoriginal) new pages onto the Web, but he said that Primal content is architected by the end user and not the company.

Despite the rather hyperbolic terminology in the company’s press release (an upcoming product called ‘Primal Thought Networking’ apparently "supercharges your thinking by remembering, organizing and connecting your ideas in your own machine-readable thought network"), the product itself is interesting because it takes Web publishing down to its very basic bare bones. Whether this is something that enough consumers need or want – and whether it’s good for the Web – is yet to be determined.

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It was inevitable, really, that a phone as widely leaked as the Droid 2 would end up caught on video. Doing the honors for us today are Android and Me, who’ve compared the new Droid to the classic variant. Funnily enough, they didn’t find too much deviation from Motorola, describing the two handsets as “virtually identical,” with the major physical change being the replacement of the previous keyboard’s navigation pad with arrow buttons. The front end’s soft buttons have also changed to Moto’s Blur options, but otherwise you’re still looking at a 3.7-incher with a 5 megapixel imager. The big improvement seems to have been under the hood with a new 1GHz TI OMAP3630 processor and 512MB of RAM (PowerVR SGX530 graphics unit remains the same) driving the Droid 2 to some robust benchmark scores. Of course, we don’t see the handset booted up in this hands-on video, so treat these specs and results as provisional until we hear from the official horse’s mouth in a couple of days.

[Thanks, Naveed]

Continue reading Motorola Droid 2 stars in its first video, touts 1GHz CPU and 512MB of RAM?

Motorola Droid 2 stars in its first video, touts 1GHz CPU and 512MB of RAM? originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 21 Jun 2010 02:27:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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