Archive July 2009
8 iPhone Inspired Desktop Wallpapers
The Hi-Tech Squad has trawled the internet and found 8 iPhone inspired wallpapers for your desktop. If you can’t afford to buy your own iPhone, or maybe you friend has one and you don’t or maybe you are just an iPhone fan, then enjoy these pictures and may your dreams come true!
Windows 7: A Gamer’s Delight?
The soon to be released final version of Windows 7 is expected to be a great platform for gaming. People who aren’t contented with their game play experiences with the XP or Vista need to check out the Windows 7 to get the best of their games. Now the most pertinent question in most of your minds would be - How can Windows 7 be better than the Windows Vista or XP with respect to gaming? or How can Windows 7 be a gamer’s delight? Read more…
Firefox 4.0 Mock up: What’s New?
Ambitious Mozilla is always working to keep Firefox on top of the browser wars. It released Firefox 3.5 a month ago, recently released screen shots of Firefox 3.7 and now one more Firefox 4.0.
At their wiki site Mozilla has released two mock up themes for Firefox 4.0. These are named A and B.
Read more…
How To Stay Connected to the Hi-Tech Squad
The Hi-Tech Squad’s blog can be found at http://hitechsquad.com, in fact this is where you’re currently reading this post. The Hi-Tech Squad is dedicated to posting news, tutorials, tips, reviews and links to what is happening in technology around the Web each day.
There are a number of ways of following the blog:
Bookmark it – many of our readers simply bookmark The Hi-Tech Squad or set it as their homepage so that every time they log on they see the latest post.
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Social Bookmarking – The last way that people are using to keep track of the latest posts on the The Hi-Tech Squad blog is via a variety of social bookmarking tools. You’ll notice at the bottom of every post on the blog that there’s a little row of buttons for bookmarking the post on Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon, you can also Tweet about the post on Twitter. In bookmarking our posts you have a way of finding them later when you need them but you also spread the news about The Hi-Tech Squad a little and help us continue to grow.
Comments – Finally we love it when people leave comments on our site and what’s more you can include a link to your own blog or website and here at the Hi-Tech Squad we don’t mark the links are NOFOLLOW but instead we want the search engines to find your site.
Ricoh Announces the GR Digital III
Ricoh has announced the release of the GR Digital III camera. The GR Digital III builds on the success of the popular GR Digital II but the image quality to a higher level with a new image processing engine, a new CCD (1/1.7-inch CCD with a total 10.40 million pixels), and the newly developed 28 mm/F1.9 GR Lens. Performance has also been enhanced in areas such as quick shooting, operability, and power of expression.
The Digital III features a 3 inch LCD display, high sensitivity with support for ISO 1600 and a long battery life with up to 370 shots per charge.
In order to fully respond to the needs of our customers for the GR Digital III, Ricoh will continue to offer the customization services (fine tuning of shutter release button sensitivity, AE/AWB, etc.) that they have provided since the introduction of the GR DIGITAL.
The new GR Digital III will be available in the UK for £529.99 ($870) from the middle of August.
Will Apple’s New Touchscreen Tablet Be Called iTablet?
Apple is planning on launching a touchscreen tablet this year similar to the iPod and iPhone but on a larger scale (with a 10″ screen). The question now remains, what will it be called?
Many of Apple’s products start with ‘i’ like in iPhone or iPod. So using this idea what could the new tablet be called?
The most obvious one (and also the most popular according to Google Trends) is iTablet. Other possible names are iTab or iPad or iPage. However Apple may also want to capitalize on the iPod branding so like there is an iPod Touch, iPod Nano, iPad Classic etc maybe this new device will be an iPod Page or iPod Tablet or even iPod Slate.
Read more…
Yahoo Says Bing to Microsoft in New Search Deal
Microsoft and Yahoo have been trying, for a long time, to come to an agreement about how they can work together and fight Google together. Finally after what seems like years of negotiations they have finally inked a deal.
In this new deal Microsoft’s Bing search engine will power the Yahoo website and Yahoo will in turn become the advertising sales team for Microsoft’s online offering.
The 10-year deal gives Microsoft access to the Internet’s second-largest search engine audience, adding a potentially potent weapon to the software maker’s Internet arsenal as it girds for an all-out assault against online search and advertising leader Google Inc.
“Microsoft and Yahoo know there’s so much more that search could be,” said Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer. “This agreement gives us the scale and resources to create the future of search.”
In return for turning over the keys to its search engine, Yahoo will get to keep 88 percent of the revenue from all search ad sales on its site for the first five years of the deal, and will have the right to sell ads on some Microsoft sites.
Yahoo has been struggling to make profits in recent years. But last year it rejected several takeover bids from Microsoft in an attempt to go it alone. Yahoo said the deal would benefit Yahoo’s users and advertisers. Read more…
Free Music for Topping up Your Phones
In a move to fight music piracy, Orange joined hands with Channel 4 and Universal to offer a new music streaming service. The new service which has been named Monkey is targeted at a young mobile market as they are less likely to have expensive mobile handsets. The move that aims at preventing music piracy will offer customers about 600 minutes of music if they topped up their mobile phones for a minimum of £10 a month. Orange has also joined hands with Blyk, a mobile advertising firm and has plans to send new promotional offers and free offers to its customers according to their tastes.
Tom Alexander, Chief Executive of Orange UK, said that unlike other music services meant for high end mobile phones or ones in which one has to pay for downloading music, Monkey was a totally new service that meant music for everyone and all that one needed was a basic mobile phone and a top-up every month. Customers could avail the service by dailing 247 from their mobile phones and could choose from different music genres. Users are also given access to a site where they can create their own playlists or share tracks.
Source: BBC
Bokodes to Replace Barcodes
Barcodes, the traditional representation of data readable by optical scanners is no more a fashion. Researchers in the US have been working on means to replace the traditional black and white stripes of the barcode and have finally succeeded. They have developed the Bokodes, one that can hold up thousands of times more data than the traditional barcodes. Researchers have quoted that, the Bokodes unlike their striped counterparts don’t need special optical readers but can be read by a standard mobile phone camera.
iPhone App. Store Banned all Google Voice Applications
We have seen iPhone store banning applications in past for just no reason, but this time the victim is giant Google voice applications. This decision seems more of an influence of AT&T.
So is AT&T afraid of Google voice applications? The answer is yes, because Google voice lets the user do much stuff for free that AT&T charges like free calls and sms in USA. Some of the iPhone applications being banned from the app store are GV mobile, GV dialer and VoiceCentral.
Google has the official Google voice application only for Blackberry and Android and when asked for the iPhone, they have now admitted that iPhone said “No” to them.
A question arises here, why iPhone banned Google voice applications? The answer may be because these applications replicate the services iPhone and AT&T provides.
But for application developers it’s not at all fair on the part of iPhone to pull their applications off the App. Store. Sean Kovacs has reported on his blog, “Richard Chipman from Apple just called – he told me they’re removing GV Mobile from the App Store due to it duplicating features that the iPhone comes with (Dialer, SMS, etc).”
This will affect the developers and they will surely go away from iPhone, which is serious for iPhone. So, iPhone and AT&T needs to think again on their decisions.
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