iTechnoBuzz!!

The Apple iPad cat is officially out of its bag, but it’s not going to be the only tablet game in town. There are a number of other devices out there in various stages from “barely announced” to “working prototype,” many of which were shown off at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show.

Apple may have snagged first-mover advantage in this year’s tablet renaissance, and we have scant few details on things like pricing and release date for some of its upcoming competitors. Still, it’s worth a look at what other tablet contenders are going to be emerging with in the near near future, as we already saw the drawbacks of Apple iPad sometime back.

Let’s have a look at what alternatives to the iPad are likely literally just around the corner.

1. HP Slate

HP Slate

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer showed off this HP tablet prototype very briefly at CES this year. It wasn’t the Apple iPad thunder-stealing moment predicted by the media, but it is one of many indications that the tablet form-factor is about to become practically ubiquitous.

This particular HP slate will run Windows 7, setting it apart from the field of tablets running Android you’ll be seeing on the rest of this list.

2. Dell Streak

Dell Streak

During its CES 2010 keynote, Dell talked about working on multiple “upcoming slates,” including one prototype it showed off, which is currently called the Streak. This particular model is only 5-inches, though, which puts it less in the direct path of the iPad and makes it more akin to the existing line of mobile internet devices like the Archos series of Internet tablets. Not much else is known yet about the Streak, or what other kinds of tablets Dell might be cooking up.

3. Asus Eee Tablet

Asus Eee Pad Tablet

Asus is the company responsible for kicking off the entire netbook craze. They were also showing off a prototype of a 9-inch tablet at CES this year. The device has four control buttons reminiscent of the favored layout for an Android-powered phone, leading to the logical speculation that the Asus tablet might well run Google’s mobile operating system.

4. Compal Tablet

Compal Tablet

This working prototype was shown off at CES 2010. Made by Compal, the 7-inch Android 2.0 tablet runs on the new, high-powered next-generation Tegra 2 processor NVIDIA announced at CES. With this chip, a device can support 1080p video playback, yet retain startlingly good battery life. NVIDIA says it already has several partners lined up to make Tegra 2-based tablets, so expect more of this type of device in the near near future.

5. Notion Ink Adam

Notion Ink Adam

Another tablet running Android and powered by the Tegra 2 chip is the Adam, a 10-inch tablet from Indian startup Notion Ink. It uses a screen technology from Pixel Qi that combines the best of a full color multi-touch LCD display with a low-power reflective mode that’s readable in direct sunlight.

Notion Ink says the Adam should come to market in the second quarter of this year, with a target price somewhere between $300 and $800.

6. MSI Tablet

MSI Tablet

It’s another tablet prototype running Android and powered by the Tegra 2, this time from MSI. Engadget found it “a bit thicker and heavier than we’d like,” but on the plus side its 10-inch screen is “plenty responsive.”

7. Google & HTC

Google Tablet

This one is sadly of the purely rumor variety, but it’s worth mentioning for its potentially game-changing effects. Like it did with the Nexus One, if Google were to take a direct hand in developing a tablet computing device with a trusted partner, it could be a serious contender in the newly emerging tablet wars.

The cited report says the Google Tablet has already been in development for the past 19 months. HTC is a plausible logical choice for the trusted partner as well, given its existing relationship with Google and the Android operating system. Still, with nothing yet official on the books, the Google Tablet is the most speculative entrant on this list for now.

Source: Mashable

Hellow Readers!

Apple’s iPad is something every Gizmo Freak is busy knowing about these days. Here are some of its major drawbacks:

Big, Ugly Bezel
Have you seen the bezel on this thing?! It’s huge! I know you don’t want to accidentally input a command when your thumb is holding it, but come on.

No Multitasking
This is a backbreaker. If this is supposed to be a replacement for netbooks, how can it possibly not have multitasking? Are you saying I can’t listen to Pandora while writing a document? I can’t have my Twitter app open at the same time as my browser? I can’t have AIM open at the same time as my email? Are you kidding me? This alone guarantees that I will not buy this product.

No Cameras
No front facing camera is one thing. But no back facing camera either? Why the hell not? I can’t imagine what the downside was for including at least one camera. Could this thing not handle video iChat?

Touch Keyboard
So much for Apple revolutionizing tablet inputs; this is the same big, ugly touchscreen keyboard we’ve seen on other tablets, and unless you’re lying on the couch with your knees propping it up, it’ll be awkward to use.

No HDMI Out
Want to watch those nice HD videos you downloaded from iTunes on your TV? Too damned bad! If you were truly loyal, you’d just buy an AppleTV already.

No Flash
No Flash is annoying but not a dealbreaker on the iPhone and iPod Touch. On something that’s supposed to be closer to a netbook or laptop? It will leave huge, gaping holes in websites. I hope you don’t care about streaming video! God knows not many casual internet users do. Oh wait, nevermind, they all do.

Adapters, Adapters, Adapters
So much for those smooth lines. If you want to plug anything into this, such as a digital camera, you need all sorts of ugly adapters. You need an adapter for USB for god’s sake.

It’s Not Widescreen
Widescreen movies look lousy on this thing thanks to its 4:3 screen, according to Blam, who checked out some of Star Trek on one. It’s like owning a 4:3 TV all over again!

Doesn’t Support T-Mobile 3G
Sure, it’s “unlocked.” But it won’t work on T-Mobile, and it uses microSIMs that literally no one else uses.

A Closed App Ecosystem
The iPad only runs apps from the App Store. The same App Store that is notorious for banning apps for no real reason, such as Google Voice. Sure, netbooks might not have touchscreens, but you can install whatever software you’d like on them. Want to run a different browser on your iPad? Too bad!

Enjoy!

Firefox 3.6 has some cool consumer facing features like Personas and a better Plug-in Updater, but developers have a lot to be excited about too.  Developers will appreciate the increased stability, especially the work done to prevent crashes with third party software.  There are also enhancements like improved JavaScript performance and optimizations to speed up everyday Web tasks to make web applications snappier.  However, what developers will be most interested in are all the new features around CSS3 and HTML5 that bring the future of the Web to Firefox 3.6 today.

This is an exciting release because we have built on the progress we made with Firefox 3.5 just a few months ago and have implemented even more cutting-edge features that will make the Web experience more engaging and interactive than ever before.

Today’s Firefox 3.6 release and the upcoming mobile release of Firefox for Maemo are both based on Gecko 1.9.2 and bring a number of big features including:

• New CSS3 features: Improve your style with support for gradients, multiple backgrounds, pointer-events and more.
• Drag and Drop: It has never been easier to move files from your desktop to the Web.  You can now drag content into the browser window and leverage the FileAPI for instant access to that content.
• File API: Support for the latest HTML5 specification allows Web applications to access local files and interact with them in new ways.
• Web Open Font Format (WOFF): Add a touch of typography to the Web with WOFF support, which makes even more possible than the existing support for OpenType and TrueType fonts.
• Device orientation: Discover new ways to manipulate and interact with Web content with access to the orientation of supported laptops and devices.
• XMLHttpRequest improvements and more…

For a more in-depth look at all the changes that developers will want to know about please check out Firefox 3.6 for Developers on MDC. And if you haven’t already, go get Firefox 3.6 now!

At the beginning of this year, analyst firm Gartner released a report that highlights up-and-coming mobile technologies which they predict will impact the mobile industry over the course of the next two years. According to Nick Jones, vice president and analyst at the firm, the technologies they’ve identified will evolve quickly and will likely pose issues that will have to be addressed by short term strategies.

It includes the following technologies:

Bluetooth 3.0

This is one of the no-brainers on the list. The Bluetooth 3.0 specification will be released this year and devices will start to hit the shelves by 2010. At this point, it’s expected that the 3.0 spec will include faster speeds, reportedly transferring files at 480 megabits per second in close proximity and 100 megabits per second at 10 meters. It will also feature an ultra-low-power mode that Gartner predicts will enable new peripherals, sensors, and applications, such as health monitoring. The technology will be backwards compatible, allowing old devices to communicate with new ones, so there’s no reason for it not take off in the upcoming years.

Mobile User Interfaces & Mobile Web/Widgets

Mobile user interfaces and mobile web/widgets were listed separately, accounting for two items on the list, but we think they can be lumped together. They all point to how mobile computing is rapidly becoming a new platform for everything from consumer mobile apps to B2E (business-to-employee) and B2C (business-to-customer). (Gartner did not include B2B on their list.) Modern day smartphones like the iPhone, Android, Blackberry, the upcoming Pre, and others deliver better interfaces for browsing the web, thus making it accessible to more people. Widget-like applications, including those that replicate thin client technology, will become more common especially in B2C strategies. Yet the mobile web still has challenges ahead. For example, there are no standards for browser access to handset services like the camera or GPS, the report notes.

Location Awareness

Location sensing, powered by GPS as well as Wi-Fi and triangulation, opens up new possibilities for mobile social networking and presence applications. Technology’s earliest adopters are already familiar with social networks like Brightkite and Loopt which let you reveal your location to a network of friends. But we’re still on the tip of this iceberg. Take for example, the iPhone IM client Palringo, they’re just now adding location services to their application. This allows users to see how far away their contacts are, introducing a whole new dimension to mobile communication. Over the next year or two, this sort of technology is expected to become more commonplace, but it will also raise questions about privacy. Will you want your network of online friends and acquaintances to really know your exact location? Will turning off location awareness signal that you’re up to something sneaky (so asks the suspicious wife, husband, boss, etc.)? As a society, we will have to answer these questions and more in the near future.

Near Field Communication (NFC)

NFC is a technology that provides a way for consumers to use their mobile phones for making payments, among other things. It’s something that has taken off in many countries worldwide, but certainly not all, and definitely not in the United States just yet. Unfortunately, Gartner predicts that the move towards mobile payment systems will still not occur this year or the next in mature markets like the U.S. and Western Europe. Instead, NFC is more likely to take off in emerging markets. Other uses of the technology, such as the ability to transfer photos from phone to digital photo frames, will also remain elusive to more developed markets.

802.11n & Cellular Broadband

802.11n, a specification for wireless local area networks (WLANs), initially gave us pause. Although not ratified as an official standard yet, the technology is already commonplace. However, until it “goes gold” so to speak, it won’t really infiltrate the mobile world. Even the ubiquitous iPhone only supports 802.11 b/g at the moment.

On the flip side, the other Internet connection technology, cellular broadband, has the potential to make Wi-Fi almost unnecessary, at least for achieving high speeds. In addition to mobile phones, laptop makers will likely continue to incorporate this technology into their netbooks and notebooks using modern chipsets that provide superior performance to our current crop of add-on cards and dongles.

Display Technologies

Display technologies will also see improvements in the upcoming years. New technologies like active pixel displays, passive displays and pico projectors will have an impact. Pico projectors – the tiny portable projectors we saw being introduced at this year’s CES – will enable new mobile use cases. Instant presentations in informal settings could become more common when there isn’t large, cumbersome equipment to set up. The different types of display technologies introduced in 2009 and 2010 will become important differentiators between devices and will impact user selection criterion, says Gartner.

Hello Readers,

Today I am posting some of the most common SEO mistakes which can spoil your Website or Blog rankings.

SEO Mistake #1: Packing Meta-Tags Full Of Keywords WONT Optimize Your Page

During the 90’s, the extent of “SEO optimizing” for many webmasters was simply to insert relevant keyword phrases into the meta-tags for a page.

There’s nothing necessarily wrong with adding keywords into this field that represents valid information on the page itself, but placing a long list of similar phrases with duplicate words (reaching 10 or 12 phrases) is a major SEO faux pas.

And as of this year, September 2009 to be exact, due to many years of webmasters constantly using meta-keywords to spam keywords, Google no longer even looks at the meta-keywords in order to rank your website.  This doesn’t mean the meta-keywords are not useful for aligning the page with particular valuable search phrases – but it certainly is nowhere near as valuable as it used to be, and overusing it can put your site at risk for a lower ranking.

SEO Mistake #2 & #3: Not Using The Keywords In Your Title & Permalinks

Every SEO guru worth his salt knows that the two most effective areas of a webpage that you can get the most bang for your efforts is the title and permalink.

They don’t always necessarily have to the be same, but they do need to focus on the a primary keyword phrase that you’re trying to target with your article. If you don’t target that phrase in your title and permalink, you’re wasting your time and you’ll only reach a small fraction of your intended online audience. In WordPress, you can set up your permalink to be descriptive like this.

So never set your default Permalink setting to any random numbering system.

SEO Mistake #4 & #5: Using Javascript Or Using Only Flash/AJAX

I would never suggest that a web designer shouldn’t make use of the latest and greatest website scripting languages that offer a more interactive online experience, but to use scripting to serve up all or a majority of your website content is SEO suicide.

Flash and AJAX websites are aesthetically superior to most traditional websites, however they struggle when it comes to search engine ranking because there’s virtually nothing for search engines to crawl. The same goes for websites that utilize Javascript to generate web pages on-the-fly depending on user interaction. Search engine crawlers cannot touch those script-generated pages at all.

SEO Mistake #6 – Keyword Spamming

There is nothing that Google hates more than a website that attempts to hijack the crawler with an overabundance of particular keyword phrases. You can be certain that if you are targeting the phrase “make money online,” and plaster the phrase all over your article a dozen times (this is known as keyword “stuffing”), you may actually see an immediate short term spike in traffic to that page. However, you can also be certain that in time, not only will that traffic drop off quickly, but your entire domain will struggle to rank very highly (if at all) in Google search results under every keyword phrase you write about.

SEO Mistake #7 – Spamming for Backlinks

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’ve always preached that you should post on forums and blogs in order to generate quality backlinks to your own site. This is what I described in my recent article on increasing blog traffic when I mentioned engaging the blogosphere every single day. However, simply posting for the sake of achieving a link back to your site is a major social networking no-no.

Some folks even “stage” conversations within the comment areas of blogs to generate interest. If your only purpose for posting comments to a blog or forum is to generate a link to your site, don’t bother. It won’t win you any fans within the industry or niche that you’re trying to target, and secondly, the transparency of the effort will make most readers skim right past your comment, or even worse you could get banned.

SEO Mistake #8 – Not Optimizing Images

In 2007, on the Google Webmaster Central blog, Google’s own Ríona MacNamara provided a very important clue to SEO enthusiasts with the statement, “As the Googlebot does not see the images directly, we generally concentrate on the information provided in the ‘alt’ attribute.” So, what does this mean for your SEO efforts? It means that you better start taking advantage of your image alt-text tags if you want to have some advantage over your competition.

So make sure you right relevant information about the image in its “alt” tag.

SEO Mistake #9 – Producing Stupid, Poorly-Written Content

One of the worst symptoms of black-hat SEO scammers trying to outsmart Googlebot’s crawl algorithm is the evolution of “content-mills.” Now, given just about every blog out there is a content mill to some extent, at least when there’s a certain level of investment and quality checks in place, you know that the articles you read are going to be written using proper grammar, offer a decent style of writing and provide useful content. However, there are countless blogs and writers out there who simply churn out 500 word blocks of text as fast as they can with the hopes of capturing search engine traffic.

What does this have to do with SEO? The SEO lesson to learn here is this: Yes, Google prefers websites and blogs that are fresh and constantly updated with new content, but that doesn’t mean you should ever overlook quality just to get your content published quickly. Focus on producing high-quality, valuable content that people will want to link to and return to again and again.

SEO Mistake #10 – Submitting Your Website

Do you remember the days when trying to get your website noticed online meant submitting your URL to as many search engines as possible? The fact is, these submission forms still exist on many of the major search engines even though they are completely outdated and unnecessary.

Search Engines rely on crawlers for visiting websites, and flling those silly forms is completely irrelevant.

Thanks!!