Jash’s Blog

Everyone was expecting a tablet from Apple. But HP has come up with their new Dream Screen tablet. It does not run Windows or Linux, but uses its own platform that can play music and videos, open photos, and run web apps like weather, facebook, etc. It comes in 10 inches (US$ 249) and 13 inches (US$ 299) and 2GB internal memory along with a HP version of Apple Remote with volume and navigation buttons. You can also hook up Memory cards and USB drives and copy content.

Personally, I think it definitely needs a web browser! and a Video-out or HDMI port. This will be useful to connect it to a LCD display to watch movies and movies from a USB hard drive. That’s what I use my Mac mini for. A DVD drive is also welcome, it will then also act as a complete media center solution. And as HP has an AppStore for their Printers, they can also release apps for this device and it will be perfect.

Releasing October 11th. Buy Now: 10 inch | 13 inch

Apple’s next generation OS finally starts shipping. Snow Leopard is available for $29 for Leopard users as an upgrade. The family-pack comes for $49 (5-user). If you are not a Leopard user or use an OS older than Leopard, then you have to get the Snow Leopard box set for $169. However, there was an article on Lifehacker blog about installing the $29 version on Tiger. Link is here. Snow Leopard only workes on Intel macs so Power PC users will have to upgrade their macs.

Amazon is giving Snow Leopard for $25 with Free Shipping. So, that’s the greatest deal on the internet. Buy Snow Leopard for $25 from Amazon.  Buy Snow Leopard Family Pack.   Get Box set.

And after the whole RIP drama, tr.im is back up! tr.im has been my favorite URL shortner, but not any more. I do not trust them, they can close down anytime (maybe next week) and come back up next month. Or even add Advertisements to URL redirects. So, you may not be sure how long your URL is going to be good. I do not trust them. I am using TinyURL at the moment.

Anyways, this was just for the information.

Happy trimming!

Twitter tremendously increased the number of URL shortening services with tr.im being very famous and preferred by many. tr.im had a simple and nice website with a dashboard that gives statistics of each URL trimmed.

The Nambu Network has however decided to shut down tr.im as they wanted to get money out of it by selling the service, or at least a part of tr.im, but no one showed interest in purchasing the service. The next thing was to start charging the users, which was not possible as there are a hundred other similar services that offer free URL shortening. So, to stop the database from expanding and bandwidth from being consumed, The Nambu Network decided to shut down tr.im.

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Google just announced about a new project they are working on. Its the Google Chrome OS. Google is amazed by the feedback of their web browser Google Chrome with over 30 million users. Now, Google thinks that the Operating Systems today are not Web-friendly or Web-optimized. So, Google is making an Operating System called Google Chrome OS which will be focused on Web users.

Google Chrome OS will be a light-weight and Open Source OS targeted for netbooks. The source code will be available in around the last quarter of 2009 where as the OS will be available to consumers in the end of 2010.

More on official Google Blog post.

Microsoft has just announced the pricing of Windows 7. Windows 7 is a major OS Upgrade from previous versions of Windows yet pricing well decided. So here it goes….

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Yahoo! has announced that Yahoo! 360, the social networking service by Yahoo! will be closing on July 13th. Yahoo! 360 consisted of a blog and “connections” or friends. The reason behind discontinuing this service is not mentioned, however users of Yahoo! 360 were sent an E-mail saying that they are re-branding Yahoo! 360 as Yahoo! Profiles. Yes, I know Google just launched Google Profiles, and this is exactly the same thing by Yahoo! but with a little bit of enhancements.

I would call this a mixture of Google Profiles with Wordpress and Twitter. The main page of Yahoo! Profile displays information about the user and a display picture, along with the status (What are you doing?). Users also get a blog and friends list.

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Google Chrome is one of the most preferred browsers today. Thought it was launched accidentally while the build was pre-mature, Chrome has gained a significant amount of users and is also preferred over Firefox to some users.

Chrome has only been for Windows as of now and the Mac and Linux versions were under development. However, Google has just released a beta version (which is rather a Pre-beta) of Chrome for Mac and Linux. This build is not very stable yet and Google has warned “DON’T DOWNLOAD THEM!” in their blog post here. But if you are really enthusiastic and don’t mind the little bugs, you can give it a try.

Download
Mac version
Linux (32 bit)
Linux (64 bit)

After all the Windows 7 release date rumors, Microsoft has announced that Windows 7 will be releasing on October 22, right in time for the holiday shopping season. The release is only 1 day early to the release date of October 23 given by Acer UK’s Marketing director here.

If you are looking to try out the RC build, then head out to this guide that will take you through the steps of getting Windows 7 RC installed with your current Windows installation.

Microsoft’s Bing search engine just went live on the internet. Bing is not exactly a search engine, its a decision making engine. That’s what Microsoft says. Besides letting you search for quick facts like “Capital of Canada” or “Longest river”, it also searches for options like “Cheapest flight from Dallas to Cincinnati” and lists the flights along with the fare, timings and availability right on the search page, so you can choose conveniently. This could be used for various things like planning a vacation or Shopping online by searching for a product and getting rates of the products in all stores on a single page. Thats awesome! Besides, searching the web, Bing also has Image, Video, News and Maps search. Maps gives you directions and lists local businesses in the area. Another feature in Bing is “xRank” that shows searches made by people living near your region.

To sum it up, Bing is interesting and worth a try. Visit Bing.com

Video after the break.

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