If Siri is the key to an Apple TV, what will Google do about it?

All signs point to the cryptic comment recorded in the new Steve Jobs bio — that he “finally cracked” the right way to create an Apple television — referring to Siri as the key to a super-simple living room experience. The New York Times surmises that a voice-controlled TV is in Apple’s future, with potentially revolutionary ramifications.

It would be revolutionary, if it wasn’t already possible to do some of those things with Google TV — the original, much-derided one. The few Google TV owners out there can already download the Google TV Remote app for their Android phone or iPhone and use voice commands to search for content.

Likewise, Google has loaded voice search onto its Android phones long before Siri was added to the latest iPhone. But here’s where the Apple difference comes into play. Google Voice Search is a feature, whereas Siri is being promoted as an experience. With its new ads, Apple is showing you how Siri can change your life, and presumably it will try to do the same thing when and if a Siri-powered Apple TV does eventually emerge. You can almost see the ads now: one good-looking person after the next turning the TV on, changing channels, searching for movies, recording shows, all with Siri.

This is precisely the Apple m.o. used to dominate the market with the iPod and iPad, which were able to defeat competing products that out-featured them. The iPhone might have done the same thing if Apple didn’t roll it out with only a single carrier.

It doesn’t have to be the same result if Apple does indeed introduce a Siri-flavored TV. That’s because there aren’t any signs that an Apple television will be released in the immediate future. It gives Google time to promote the voice capabilities of Google TV as it launches version 2.0 of the platform, as well as to work with TV manufacturers to bake those features into new sets. In essence, it has to think like Apple in order to preempt Apple. It ultimately won’t matter to consumers that Google was first to let you use your voice to search for content through your TV, in the same way that it didn’t matter that there were MP3 players before Apple introduced the iPod.

Google was helped enormously when Apple tethered its iPhone initially to AT&T, as it gave a huge opening to Android to provide a similar smartphone experience if you were with another carrier. Otherwise, Google hasn’t done well when it’s involved itself with hardware. But it has the blueprint, the critical feature, and the headstart it needs to beat Apple to the punch in the TV game.

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How-to: Get emoticons in iMessage and iOS 5

Summary: Dozens of emoticons, right there on the keyboard!

I’ve been getting quite a few question along the lines of the following in my mailbox over the past few days:

Can I use emoticons in iMessage?
Can I use emoticons in iOS 5?

Yes you can. In fact, iOS 5 on the iPhone and iPad allows you to switch to a keyboard made up entirely of emoticons and allows you to use them all over the place!

Here’s how to activate them.

Click Settings > General > Keyboard

Click International Keyboards then select the Emoji keyboard.

With that done all that remains is for you to switch between the two keyboards. You do this using this button:

Doing that for the first time brings up this notification:

Then you get the keyboard … and it’s pretty cool!

 

There are a load of emoticons to choose from (click here to see them all). You can use these all over the place, but remember that they’ll only display properly on iOS devices, so if you use them in say the Twitter app, only other iOS users will be able to see them properly, so use them with care!

Enjoy!

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A Windows 8 smartphone could be coming next year

The XPPhone 2 is slated to run Windows 7 and 8.

A Chinese company says it will bring the yet-to-be-released Windows 8 to the small screen.
In Technology Group has seemingly dedicated itself to merging the Windows PC experience with the smartphone--something the company has dubbed the "post-smartphone." They started with phones running Windows XP a few years ago, and by earlier this year, ITG's XPPhone was available with Windows 7. Now it says a far slimmer, lighter, and energy efficient XPPhone 2 that will run both Windows 7 and the PC version of Windows 8 (once it's released) is in the works.
Though it seems doubtful to me that many consumers will find a need for so much Windows in their pocket, ITG has made sure to pack the XPPhone 2 with the meaty hardware to pull it off. This beast will boast a 1.6GHz processor and 2GB of RAM. ITG's Web site also mentions the possibility of an insane 2GHz model. There's also plenty of storage space to house Microsoft's notoriously bulky OSes, with 112GB on board.

ITG sees the XPPhone 2 as a desktop replacement.

ITG is billing the XPPhone 2 not just as a phone but as the "smallest notebook PC in the world," measuring 140mm X 73mm X 17.5mm. The pitch is basically that the phone is easily dockable and can stand in for a laptop, desktop and in-car navigation system. The success of this kind of a device will likely depend on it being at least more usable than the English translation of its press release, which requires several aspirin to navigate, with sentences like: "The Editor considers that, presently it forms three camps of smart phone in the way of tripartite confrontation--The Apple, Google & Moto, and Intel & Microsoft & xpPhone, of which stands for three complete different technical orientations."
Let's hope they took the money they saved on their translator and put it into engineering. Engadget reports that we could see an XPPhone 2 release as soon as January.

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HP reverses course, opts not to sell PC division

Is HP having a Netflix moment? Two months after announcing plans to sell off its PC division and one month after naming Meg Whitman as its new CEO, HP said today that its Personal Systems Group (PSG) will remain a part of the company.

"HP objectively evaluated the strategic, financial and operational impact of spinning off PSG. It's clear after our analysis that keeping PSG within HP is right for customers and partners, right for shareholders, and right for employees," Whitman said in a statement. "HP is committed to PSG, and together we are stronger."

HP said it consulted with "subject matter experts" across its businesses and functions, which revealed a "depth of the integration" across its operations, as well as the significant contributions that PSG brings to HP.

After reviewing those results, "the decision was actually very straightforward," Whitman said during a Thursday afternoon conference call with analysts. "HP and PSG are better together."

Getting rid of PSG would not benefit shareholders, Whitman continued. Furthermore, it would be "very challenging for a new PC company to build such a strong brand," she said. "At the end of the day, the costs and risk of a separation are simply greater than any value we could create."

"As part of HP, PSG will continue to give customers and partners the advantages of product innovation and global scale across the industry's broadest portfolio of PCs, workstations and more," said Todd Bradley, executive vice president of PSG. "We intend to make the leading PC business in the world even better."

In announcing its decision to ditch PSG in late August, HP said it was looking to "fundamentally transform the company." It would refocus on products that "drive higher value solutions to enterprise, small and midsize business and public sector customers," HP said at the time. The announcement also included the $10.2 billion acquisition of U.K.-based Autonomy and the death of webOS development and devices like the HP TouchPad.

Whitman acknowledged that "we confused the market pretty dramatically on August 18." The top question she gets these days is, "What is HP?" and said the company needs to refocus. "We're on it," she said.

When asked about its tablet strategy and the future of webOS, Bradley said its "thinking hasn't changed."

"We're continuing to focus on a Microsoft-based tablet that we have and we'll develop on Windows 8," he said. "From a webOS perspective, that's kind of the next piece of work to complete." The whole team is working to "make the right decisions" on webOS.

"I think we need to be in the tablet business, and we're certainly going to be there with Windows 8," Whitman continued. "We're going to make a run at this business," and HP will likely have a decision on webOS in the next couple of months.

In late August, HP pushed the idea of spinning off its PC business, launching a series of ads that said HP "would be a $40 billion business with the agility and freedom of a start-up." One of those ads touted HP's status as the "number-one PC maker on the planet," which it said it achieved by staying focused on consumers. A spin-off, therefore, would create "a more agile organization to help us better anticipate change and quickly respond to customers."

One month later, however, Léo Apotheker was out as CEO and Whitman was in. After landing the gig, Whitman said she was "honored and excited to lead HP. I believe HP matters – it matters to Silicon Valley, California, the country and the world."

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iPhone battery drain--'Setting Time Zone' may be culprit

Having initially pointed out customer complaints about subpar battery life in the iPhone 4S, the U.K.'s Guardian newspaper has followed up with a report about a possible culprit and a possible temporary fix.

The Guardian said yesterday that some 4S users who had griped on Apple's support Web site about the power drain were being contacted by the company and sent diagnostic files that could be sent back to Apple for analysis. Numerous users have been saying their phones are lasting just a few hours, even with minimal use, the Guardian said.

Now the paper reports that a location-based feature in the phone that detects when you've physically moved to a different time zone and then resets the phone's clock accordingly may be the problem.

Apparently, the "Setting Time Zone" feature is polling cell phone towers constantly to determine the phone's location, rather than doing so only on occasion. The phone's location-tracking setup triangulates information on the power of cell tower signals in order to situate the device.

The Guardian quotes Oliver Haslam, of iDownloadBlog:

It appears that iOS 5?s GM release introduced a bug that causes the Setting Time Zone function to keep the location tracking circuitry running constantly, draining battery power considerably. Switching it off may mean that your iPhone will no longer set its own time zone when you travel, but that's a small price to pay for having your iPhone last more than 12 hours on a full charge...We have tested this method on 4 different iPhone 4S handsets, including an iPhone 4 and an iPhone 3GS. All have reported drastically improved battery life after switching "Setting Time Zone" off.

The Guardian reported that some users have seen little difference after switching off the feature and that Apple itself has not yet weighed in on what the specific issue might be. But Haslam's temporary fix seems worth a shot.

"Setting Time Zone" is found under Settings/Location Services/System Services.

The iPhone 4S launched two weeks ago in the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and several other countries, and expanded to 22 additional countries yesterday. It boasts an extra hour of 3G talk time compared with the iPhone 4, while coming in at 100 hours less of standby time, based on Apple's own testing. CNET's own iPhone 4S battery testing with a model on Sprint's network yielded 9.2 hours of talk time on the carrier's 3G EV-DO Revision A network, coming in as the strongest iPhone battery test to date.

The phone continues the trend set by previous iterations, sealing the battery inside to allow for better use of space. As a side effect, users can't swap it out with another battery, as most other phones allow.

A teardown of the iPhone 4S earlier this month by iFixit revealed that the battery in the 4S is slightly more powerful than the one in the iPhone 4, but not by much. Users get an extra .05 WHrs of juice compared with the battery that was in the iPhone 4. The big difference, of course, is that the iPhone 4S sports a dual-core a5 processor.

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Microsoft: Android is standing 'on the shoulder of companies like Microsoft'

Summary: Microsoft: ‘Licensing is not some nefarious thing that people should be worried about.’

Google is standing ‘on the shoulder of companies like Microsoft who made all these billions of dollars in investments‘ with its Android mobile OS, claims Horacio Gutiérrez, deputy general counsel in charge of Microsoft’s intellectual property group.
Gutiérrez makes this claim in an interview with SFGate.
Speaking in relation to the huge amount of litigation currently going on between mobile device players, Gutiérrez said that ‘there is a period of unrest and a period of readjustment, until the claims on the ownership of different pieces of technology are well known’ and that licensing and cross-licensing is required to make these problems ‘disappear into the background.’
Gutiérrez also believes that ‘licensing is not some nefarious thing that people should be worried about’ but instead ‘the solution to the patent problem that people are reacting so negatively about.’
Gutiérrez goes on to defend the software patent system, claiming that ’many things that earlier were implemented in hardware …  are now implemented in software’ and that the ‘patent system has actually played a role in securing the leadership that the United States has in this field.’

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