With Apple’s latest operating system launching next week we thought we’d compare the features of the new iOS5 against the Android. We have compared Android 2.3 Gingerbread ‘out of the box’ so to speak. There is much ability to edit Android so we have compared the default version for the Android.

In terms of Unified Notifications the new Notification Centre from Apple bares a few resemblances with the Android notification system. On both operating systems you can pull down a panel of notifications from the top of the display, access notifications when the phone is locked and when your are using the phone. In this area there is no major difference between the two.

For Phone to Phone messaging the iPhone wins. iOS5 debuts Apple’s iMessage system which allows iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch users to send messages directly to each other over the internet. It is similar to the BlackBerry BBM system, something which Apple has obviously kept a close eye on. Android doesn’t have this feature as default, you can download apps such as WhatsApp which are also available on other platforms.

iOS5 also beats Android when it comes to their Reminder system. Both platforms can set basic reminders but iOS5 goes one step further and allows you to set location based reminders. This is quite extraordinary, you can set a reminder for when you arrive at a location, leave a location or for both. You can now sync your reminders with other Apple devices also using iCloud.

A camera is now a huge aspect of a phone, therefore quick access to the camera is a useful feature. Using iOS5 you can jump to your camera without unlocking the phone, perfect for capturing those unexpected moments. In order to access the camera on Android you need to unlock the phone first.

Editing photos on your phone is becoming more and more popular. Both platforms give you the ability to crop and rotate images on your phone. However in iOS5 you can now auto-enhance photos and get rid of red eye on your phone, this takes it one step further than Android.

Many browsers are available for Android but the default one doesn’t have tabbed browsing. iOS’s in built Safari has had this ability for some time. It is amazing that Google have done a small update to add tabbed browsing!

Gaming is another increasingly popular feature on mobile phones. Game Centre on the iOS now allows you to download and review apps without logging in and out. A similar online gaming community is not available on Android.

Synchronization over Wi-Fi is for some, an important feature. Android allows you to syn your contacts using Gmail over Wi-Fi, the iOS5 doesn’t currently offer this. However a new feature in iOS5 is the ability to sync your iTunes library over Wi-Fi, including music and videos.

Currently iOS5 does look like it will be the better operating system. However, it will be interesting to see what they are like hands on on their respected devices.

Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google, today denied the accusations that Google fixed search results so Google products and services were the top ranking sites.

“May I simply say that I can assure you we’re not cooking anything.”

Those were the words of Eric Schmidt in Washington at a congressional hearing yesterday. The anti-trust subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary are currently investigating whether Google’s market position has caused them to be irresponsible and abuse their position.

Another US government agency, the Federal Trade Commission, is also inquiring into Google’s market position.

Being the biggest search engine, Google, has considerable market power. There have been figures of a 75% market share quoted before which is astonishing. In many offline markets, companies would have been investigated a long time ago for their large market share.

Schmidt told senators “Google does nothing to block access to any of the competitors and other sources of information.”

Schmidt was also asked of he thought Google was a monopoly (dominant company). Schmidt responded that Google was ‘in that area’. He also went on to say that Google feels it has a certain amount of responsibility because of its extremely high  market share.

When asked about Microsoft, who have seen years of investigations into their market status, Schmidt added “We get it. By that I mean, we get the lessons of our corporate predecessors.” Microsoft have been found to be anti-competitive in the past and have heavy fines as a consequence, something Google looks to avoid.

There is growing concern for Google as a company and many think it is getting too big. In the recent years they have acquired YouTube, DoubleClick and Motorola Mobility. Motorola Mobility was however, bought in order to gain patents for smartphones.

Schmidt was chief executive of the company but was replaced by Larry Page in April after 10 years in the position.

Google+ is set to open up to the anyone and everyone. Google’s latest attempt to break into the massive social network market has been under closed testing in the last two months.

The closed testing was opened up to journalists and those in the technology fields. These initial members were, however, allowed to invite their friends and the user base grew by millions. After two weeks of launch, Google releases a statement saying that Google+ had 10 million members. Not bad considering very few were given initial access.

Some say that Google+ has been popular because it allows people to group their friends using circles and group hangouts. Group hangouts allow you to web chat with up to 9 friends at one time. You can also share YouTube videos from your phone using Google Hangouts.

Google has not released any official member numbers since the 10 million figure but Comscore, a web analytic company, estimated that there were 25 million members after one month of closed testing.

The rapid membership growth has not been unnoticed by other social networks and Facebook has recently announced ideas similar to that of Google+. Facebook, however, say that these ideas have been in the pipeline for some time and are not a response to Google+.

For once Google is actually one of the least powerful players in a field, lacking behind Twitter’s 200 million users and Facebook’s 750 million users.

Along with the full release of Google+, Google is also adding some other additions to its’ service. The ability to video hangout using an Android smartphone is something new to mobile phones. It is currently very hard to have multiple video chats with people at the same time on smartphones.

It will be interesting to see how ell Google+ fairs as many have reported that the user membership growth has slowed in the last few weeks. It will be one to watch, will it be able to really pose a threat to the likes of Facebook and Twitter?

What is Overflowing News

An info that you can find on every common blogs/news portal is often called as overflowing news. This happens when A+ brands like (Google, Apple, Facebook) launches any product and have any breakthrough update

Google and Intel have announced a new partnership for Android chip making. The partnership has been formed to improve the running of the Android OS on Intel processors.

The development partnership is especially important for Intel, as they are currently lacking in the mobile phone processor market. Intel is currently the worlds biggest chip maker but has not managed to make headways in the mobile phone device market.

ARM holdings are currently the leading manufacturer of low power processing chips and dominates the market. For what once was a small Cambridge based business it has certainly grown to an industry leader.

Smartphones and tablets have seen a massive increase in demand over the last year or so, many of these devices run Google’s Android operating system so it is vitally important the OS gets the best out of the chips inside. Android is currently the leading OS for smartphones and with this new deal it is only likely to increase.

The news on this partnership comes days after HTC announced they wanted to buy an OS. This deal hopes to get the best out of both the OS and the hardware in an Android device. Maybe this will attract HTC to stay with Android and use Intel processors in the future due to the extreme performance and capabilities.

Intel only recently released their version of ARM’s processors. Many analysts have said that Intel has been to slow to respond to the ever growing smartphone and tablet market. Maybe this new partnership will push Intel on top of ARM?

Google announces the Magnifier, a site that helps you discover new music. This comes after their launch of the Music Beta over three months ago. Magnifier provides access to a host of music including live performances, artist interviews, great music, free songs, and access to videos. It aims to cover all kinds of music and related artist and people who create it.

Google made this announcement on their official blog and quoted

Today we introduced Magnifier, a new music discovery site that will keep your collection growing’. They also added that ’The featured artist on Magnifier this week is Grammy-nominated indie rock band ‘My Morning Jacket’

The site also announced that they are going to give two tracks from the My Morning Jacket to users that access Music Beta. Of the two tracks that Google is giving away, one of the tracks called The Day is Coming is exclusive for Magnifier users.

To gain access to the Magnifier, complete the following:

1. Access and log in to your Music Beta account.

Note: If you do not have a Music Beta account you can request for an invitation at Music Beta’s site

2. Move to the Magnifier option.

3. Select the songs you want from the list available, and click Add free music.

This automatically adds the songs you have selected directly to your library in your Music Beta account.

Voice Search is a feature that enables you to tell Google what you are looking for, and Google then returns the results of the search. Voice recognition will help you save time and enhance your overall user experience. Google spoke about this new advance at a media event in San Francisco. They also addressed issues of barriers on mobiles, and announced speech recognition and computer vision technology.

According to the Google Blog

in the past two years, mobile search traffic has grown five-fold. Mobile search today is growing at a comparable pace to Google in the early years

Voice search will help you as a user to conduct these searches without having to type the content of your search in a very small screen. They also believe that Voice Search traffic has grown six-fold.

Google admitted that they have invested a lot of resources on voice recognition in the recent past, they also revealed that at this point in time, they teach their

English Voice Search system using 230 billion words from real queries so that we can accurately recognize the phrases people are likely to say

They have announced Voice Search on desktop is rolling out now on google.com in English, and that Search by Image will be rolled out globally in 40 languages soon.

Google’s recent Farmer update slammed down content farms like e-how, Demand Media, and eZine Articles. Of these many farmer boys, one goes to Google to meet in a therapeutic setting. Google SEO answers the many questions on the Farmer Update to the Google algorithm. This is a spoof video, people. A spoof. Any simularity to content real or imagined is just that, imagined. Not real. Repetitive. Farmer update, farmer update. Farmer update.

Wired.com concludes

Google announced a new update last week to its search engine that addressed the growing complaint that low-quality content sites (derisively referred to as content farms) were ranked higher than higher-quality sites that seemed to be more important to users. This major change affects almost 12 percent of all search results, and the web is still buzzing about its implications, which include dramatic losses for some companies (Mahalo, Suite 101), and gains by some established sites known for high-quality information.

distilled.co.uk concludes

Ensure your content us unique and useful – there’s nothing terribly new here (good content has always been best practice) but I do think Google tightened ship slightly on duplicate content and thin content pages
Ensure there is a good amount of value added to users above the fold on your page – value here is a difficult concept to nail down algorithmically but for your site it should be fairly easy to figure out. Perhaps consider using a service like feedback army to test your site with random people. Ask them some of the questions that Google ask – would you put credit card details into this site? do you trust this site? If the answers don’t give a positive response – keep going with adding value (or making the value add clearer!).
Get rid of aggressive ads and images that look like ad blocks. Whether it’s adsense, kontera, banner ads or just large images that look like ads – make sure they don’t take precedence over your content
Re-design your site to make it look like a web 2.0 site. Did I really just say that? Yes, I did. Because Google’s algorithms are now based on what people want to see, not where the actual value is – so you need to fit in. If your site is the ugly one the you’re far more likely to get hit than if your site is good looking.
Make your site look more trusted. This has always been a good thing – it helps conversion rates – but you should ensure you have a good about page, privacy policy, contact page etc to ensure people feel comfortable using your site.

Video on The Google Panda Psychologist Talks with a Content Farm

Google search since its launch has been one of the most important sources for people to search for anything. However, with years they have made the choice to consistently better the search and hence have grown from strength to strength over the years. The latest addition for better search options now allows you to personalize your search results further.

Google announced recently on their official blog that they are ready to provide you the ability to block sites that you don’t want returned in your search result. If there are sites that you know are spam or generally sites that you do not want to see, you can now simply block those sites out so they never get featured in your search.

Now, when search results are displayed under each link returned there will be an additional option called Block all URL.com. This is in addition to links like Cached and Similar that are already displayed.

To block the website that is returned, click Block all URL.com. This automatically, blocks the site and provides you the option to unblock the site. After blocking a URL the URL will not be returned on your search. To unblock it all you need to do is go through Search Settings or click on Manage blocked sites

Google has been facing quite some issues regarding user’s low profile. It initially encouraged users to create their own profile provided a short bio and links to personal sites. However, this was low key and most users didn’t even realize that it existed. Now, after the increasing popularity of Facebook and its profile update, Google has followed suit.

The Google Profile that was launched about two years ago has undergone a major enhancement as announced in the Google Social Web blog. The whole revamp is featured around what the world would like to see of the user when the user’s profile is searched.

The Google Profile page will provide users with the feature of adding pictures to the profile page. Additionally the content is displayed in the right column with bigger font. Additionally, the profile is broken up into sections based on the kind of information revealed like education qualification, employer detail, and so on.

According to the blog, Google hopes that the design will help users to provide information that is most important to them. The updates to the profile like Facebook’s recent update will be done gradually yet automatically. In addition to that, updating the user’s profile will be as simple as clicking on the new Edit Profile button on the profile screen.

If you have trouble remembering dates and events, it is easier to record information somewhere to ensure that you are reminded at the time when you have to get something done. Google has just the solution to set reminders. You can use the Checker Plus Lite for Google Calendar to help you with this. The Checker Plus Lite is a Google Chrome extension. It provides desktop reminders for anything, starting to simple tasks, reminders for meetings and events. When a reminder is set, the notification is displayed on the Windows screen above the system tray. Additionally, it also provides you with the flexibility to change the display for your convenience.

After downloading and installing the Google Calendar Events Notification ensure that you are logged in with your Google credentials. After logging in you can click its icon and edit or change the settings.

1.    Click the Google calendar icon, and select Options.

This displays the Options dialog box.

2.    Under Option, you can select the different setting you want for notification.

Some of the options that can be set include enabling desktop notifications and how they must appear or be displayed, the kind of events that must be displayed, if you need voice notification, what to do in the offline mode, size of notification text, and so on.

3.    Once you select all your options, you can click Save Settings.

4.    A notification message will be displayed on the system tray are with the scheduled event.

In the Android Developers blog, Xavier Ducrohet, Android SDK Tech Lead posted a blog announcing the release of the SDK Tools for Android 3.0. In the blog he announced ‘The APIs are final, and you can now develop apps targeting this new platform and publish them to Android Market. The new API level is 11’.

Apart from the new platform Google has also released updates to the SDK Tools (r10) and the ADT Plugin for Eclipse (10.0.0). To help developers and users understand the extent of the changes made and the platform’s highlights, Google has provided information in the Android 3.0 Platform Highlights page.

The ADT Plugin in particular has an array of changes including, a new palette with categories and rendering previews, accurate rendering of layouts, ability to manipulate the View properties using selection-sensitive action bars, and improvements to zoom features like – fit to view, persistent scale, and keyboard access. Additionally, changes and improvements have been made to “merge” layouts and layouts with gesture overlays.

Google had released a test version of the Android 3.0 Honeycomb SDK in January 2011 to help developers test their application on the platform. However, this time they have made a more formal unveiling of the platform as a completed product.

While searching for results in Google have you ever wondered why a certain page even figured in your top search results? Finally, Google is trying to fix this. In their official blog, Google revealed

We’ve been exploring different algorithms to detect content farms, which are sites with shallow or low-quality content

They also announced in their blog that they are working towards getting feedback on sites directly from the users that receive results. The beta or experimental version to filtering out sites with low-quality content is being launched on Chrome extension.

You can download Personal Blocklist Extension for Chrome. Once this extension is installed you can block sites from web search results, and manage them based on your needs. Additionally, this information is sent to Google for further investigation and record. Google can also use this information to rank signals for search results.

To suite a global audience, even at a early stage, Google Chrome has launched this extension in English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Turkish.

[via - Google Blog]

If you are using Google Chrome and Gmail in it then you might be interested in the new desktop notification features that Google has introduced. Many a times it may happen that you are working on other browser window and miss out on some important chat or email that you received in your Gmail. Now you will not miss any conversation as Google has introduced HTML5 based desktop notifications that shows a pop-up whenever a chat message or new email arrives.

Google’s Andrew Wilson said –

Many of us are guilty of constantly switching back to Gmail to check for new messages. And if you’re like me, you’ve probably missed an important chat message because you weren’t looking at your Gmail window when it came in,

If you use Google Chrome, these days can be over since we just launched HTML5 desktop notifications which display pop-ups whenever a chat message or new email arrive

You might have noticed “update desktop notification” showing by default on top of your inbox and if you have missed, then to activate this feature, go to Gmail settings and activate desktop notifications. You can also customize it so you only receive Gmail or Gchat notifications, or only priority inbox notifications.

[via - Google Blog]

Google’s present CEO Eric Schmidt had just made an announcement to withdraw his service as CEO after managing the position for about a decade now. Google’s Co-founder Larry Page will take up the challenge of CEOship from 4^th of April 2011. However Eric Schmidt would remain as Executive Chairman and would concentrate on external affairs, relations with partners, consumers, governments and so on.

Eric Schmidt at Google Blog says

As Google has grown, managing the business has become more complicated. So Larry, Sergey and I have been talking for a long time about how best to simplify our management structure and speed up decision making—and over the holidays we decided now was the right moment to make some changes to the way we are structured,”

Larry will now lead product development and technology strategy, his greatest strengths, and starting from April 4 he will take charge of our day-to-day operations as Google’s Chief Executive Officer,” he adds

Another announcement from Google’s come is that Sergey Brin will no longer be the Google President and will take up the role of Co-founder. He would concentrate on the long-term strategy, more favored technology and new products. For Larry Page this seems to be a new experience as he has never worked as CEO for any public company, so he will have to be ready for huge challenges. And because the competition with Apple and Facebook is not unknown, he will have to work even harder.

The Nexus S has been in the news a lot lately. Now too, the report findings published by the dailymail UK have got some more great news that has pleasantly surprised Google. The news suggests that the Nexus S actually works well event at 60,000 feet.

The Google Nexus S is the first Android 2.3 smartphone that uses the Gingerbread operating system and was launched by Google in early December 2010. Reports suggest that the Nexus S smartphones was attached to payloads and were taken into the Earth’s outer atmosphere using weather balloons.

This test was conducted to test the limits of Nexus S, and reports suggest that the phone performed really well in this test.

Zi Wang of Google Android was reported to have said

We wanted an opportunity to collect some interesting data about the sensors in Nexus S – GPS, gyroscope, accelerometer, and magnetometer

The test was launched on November 13, and cameras were strapped around the phone publish footage on how it worked. The travel time took approximately two hours and 40 minutes to ascend and 34 minutes to descend.

The report revealed that the Nexus S can withstand temperatures of minus 50 degrees Celsius. Additionally, that at 60,000 ft the GPS could still track the phone.