We’re entering the day of the liveblog here at CES with all the major electronics manufacturers finally ready to make their big splash announcements for 2011. LG is almost certain to drop some knowledge on us about its new triumvirate of Android smartphones, while 3DTVs, of both the mobile and supersized variety, are expected to feature strongly as well. Let’s not waste time prognosticating, however — there’s a set of well groomed Korean gentlemen ready to do right by us with a surely awesome presentation. Why keep them waiting? Jump past the break for all the steaming-hot liveblog action.
Surprise of surprises! On the day that Europeans finally got to dig into the Windows Phone 7 cake in earnest, Twitter’s official app for the hot new platform has also gone live. We’ve downloaded it to our own WP7 device and are having a play around with it now. If you need a refresher as to what it looks like, check out the video after the break.
Update: Okay, we can neither log in nor get signed up at present, though others have clearly achieved the feat already. Twitter.com itself keeps alternating between its new and old versions, so we suspect there’s quite a bit of work going on behind the scenes at present. To answer your queries, loading time from the live tile menu to the top tweets page above is approximately three seconds, while scrolling is basically identical to the perfection available on WP7′s own apps. Swiping laterally gets you into Trends, Suggested, and Nearby categories which take a couple of moments to load up their tweets, but otherwise match the performance.
Exiting to the live tile menu throws you out of whatever you were doing and re-entering the app — as is par for the Windows Phone 7 course right now — means starting from scratch. The only way you can save you state is by locking the phone, which takes a second or two to resume when unlocked and returns you to the exact point you were at. Great, now let us in, Twitter!
Hold up, reader David Gordon points out that you can hit the live tile menu via the Windows/Start key and then return to Twitter through the Back button, yay, that works too.
Update 2: There are still errors being thrown up, but we finally got ourselves logged in. Well, it looks just like the vid promised it would and the app itself is working flawlessly, there are no processing delays that we can see. Oh, and there’s a landscape mode. Our only bugbear is that there’s no differentiation between your own tweets and those of your friends. Ah well, check out the gallery below.
As you may have heard, Microsoft is having a major event Monday in NYC to announce details surrounding Windows Phone 7 launch dates and devices… and Engadget is going to be there delivering the best live coverage in the universe. In case you don’t already know, Steve Ballmer and AT&T’s Ralph de la Vega will be on stage to delight your senses, and there will likely be lots of new hardware we’ll be getting our hands on.
You can see all of the news unfold in realtime right here at our liveblog post, and the whole thing starts tomorrow, October 11th, at the times listed below. Don’t miss it!
03:30AM – Hawaii 06:30AM – Pacific 07:30AM – Mountain 08:30AM – Central 09:30AM – Eastern 02:30PM – London 03:30PM – Paris 05:30PM – Moscow 10:30PM – Tokyo
In case you’ve been waiting, we can confirm that Facebook Places is now active in the UK. The Daily Telegraph is saying that it’ll also be available “in the rest of Europe” today, though it only seems semi-functional (we can see friends but can’t check in) in The Netherlands. Then again, our friends are only semi-functional too, so maybe that’s the issue.
Guess where we are. Yes, the HTC event important enough to be crashed by Nokia’s guerilla marketing crew is just about to get started and your favorite tech blog is here to bring you the moment-by-moment account. Join us past the break as we set out to discover what desirable new handsets HTC has on tap!
Microsoft has apparently scuppered plans to allow PC and Xbox 360 gamers to take each other on, using the company’s LIVE service to connect titles available for both platforms. According to Rahul Sood, CTO of HP’s gaming business, the Microsoft project was intended to promote PC gaming, but canned after testing showed those using PCs consistently bested their console counterparts.
That wasn’t just because they were better players in general – in fact, according to the rumors Sood has heard, Microsoft purposefully selected mediocre PC gamers to take on “the best console gamers” – but because of the extra accuracy involved when using a PC and mouse versus a console controller. Microsoft supposedly felt that “it would be embarrassing to the XBOX team in general” if they’d gone ahead with a commercial launch, and so the idea was scrapped.
While the authenticity of the rumor can’t be confirmed, if true it’s a disappointing move by Microsoft and one that PC gamers are already bemoaning. Their argument is that Microsoft could have ended up promoting PC title development as the advantages of the platform became so obviously clear.
Well, Steve Jobs just dropped a little nugget of history on us during his chat with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher at the All Things D conference. When asked by Walt why they originally put their new OS on a phone and not a tablet, Steve said, “I’ll tell you a secret. It began with the tablet.” After working on the tablet OS which had a glass display and multitouch, another idea occurred to Jobs. “My God, I said, this would make a great phone … so we shelved the tablet and built the iPhone.” And there you have it.
4,000. That’s how many developers are attending this year’s Google I/O event. Although, Google would love it if more people could make it, they just don’t have the space for it. Although, if you’re a developer that didn’t get lucky enough to go, Google’s making it pretty easy for you, and the rest of the world for that matter.
This year’s Google I/O will feature a live stream of the entire event, which includes two large keynotes on both days. The first keynote, on Day One, will start Wednesday, 9:00AM Pacific, and wrap up around 10:30AM. The second keynote, which takes place on the last day of the two-day event, will start Thursday, May 20th, at 8:30AM Pacific, and end around 10:00AM. As Google puts it, both keynotes feature “exciting new technologies,” and we’re definitely looking forward to what they’ve got under their sleeve.
While some rumors have it that Android 2.2, or Froyo, will be unveiled at this year’s event, we’re sure that that’s not all Google has planned. And, if you can’t make it, just head on over to the Google Developer’s YouTube channel, where they’ll be live streaming both keynotes. Google recommends that you watch it on a high-speed connection, but we figure that goes without saying.
And, don’t forget that SlashGear is going to be there, handling all the gruesome details as they get unveiled, and bringing them here for your reading pleasure. We’d like to field your questions at this year’s event, so if you’re a developer who couldn’t make it, or you’re just curious about the announcements, leave a comment here, and our team will do their best to ask them at the event, and bring the answers back here for you.
