Isaiah's Tech

There's a rumour going around that Apple is going to be announcing Safari 5 and even Mac OS X 10.6.4 at WWDC on Monday. Safari 5 is said to "render Javascript up to 25% faster [than Safari 4] bringing it in line with recent improvements to Chrome and Opera." Safari will also bring a new "Reader" feature which will "view articles on the web in a single, clutter-free page." It'll also have a Bing search options, maybe the first of search engine switches from the Apple camp - since Google is their number one enemy right now. Right now there's no word on if Safari will support extensions so that means I'll still be sticking with Chrome.

Surprisingly, the Mac OS X 10.6.4 won't be anything too significant and it doesn't mention adding touchscreen support right now. Other improvements are listed below - thanks to 9 to 5 Mac.

[TUAW, 9 to 5 Mac]

There's a rumour going around that the BlackBerry Onyx II is being worked on right now and it'll be the successor to the Bold 9700. This smartphone will reportedly feature a 360 x 480 resolution, 512MB of RAM, a 5MP camera, BB OS 6.0, and the new WebKit browser. Of course, nothing is confirmed right now but apparently it'll be the first GSM device with OpenGL support.

Update: According to The Cellular Guru, this smartphone will be codenamed the BlackBerry Onyx Delta

[Phone Arena, CrackBerry]

A small company, Realease, is looking to release a tablet in the near future - if everything works out. Dubbed the Shogo, this tablet will be sporting a 10-inch capacitive touchscreen display, Freescale i.MX37 / i.MX51 CPU options, a WebKit-based browser, a front-facing camera, three USB ports, audio jacks, a kickstand, and a Linux OS (in the video below they said that you can get Android on it if you want). Apparently, this tablet is targeted at businesses and it could hit mass-production in a few months. We'll see.



[Engadget]

Another leak of the BlackBerry 9800 aka Mr. T has been spotted and this time it's given us a sneak peak of the upcoming WebKit browser in the new BB OS 6.0. It's showing off tabbed browsing in the photo above and this is great news. As you can see in the picture above, the Acid3 Test shows that BB's new browser scores a perfect 100 / 100.

Update: According to CrackBerry, there have been a couple more pictures of the BlackBerry 9800 in action. Both of the pictures that leaked out are below, showing off the on-screen QWERTY keyboard and the back of the smartphone. It's starting to look like RIM is nearing a final unit because the back of the handset is looking much better than when the pics of this handset leaked out a couple of months ago.

[Engadget]

Apparently, RIM is looking to make a "Bold" move (see what I did there?). The latest rumour states that the BlackBerry Bold 9800 aka the Mr. T will be hitting AT&T in the USA this June. AT&T has reportedly ordered 1,000,000 of this handsets which seems like a lot. This could be a bad move by RIM seeing how the next iPhone is expected to launch in June as well. If this is true that means that RIM's OS 6.0 could be ready earlier than I expected, so let's bring on that new WebKit browser of theirs.

[Slash Gear]

It shouldn't be a surprise that RIM is reportedly working on a new Storm Series handset. Apparently, in the latter half of this year we should expect the BlackBerry Storm 3 to launch and it'll feature a "perfect" SurePress touchscreen system along with their new BlackBerry OS 6.0 with their WebKit browser. They're going to try to focus on gaming with this handset, which I believe will be a challenge to them.

More rumours are stating the BlackBerry Storm 4 will be launching in 2011 and it'll focus on aspects like augmented reality, a magnetometer, a better GPS, and a 5MP camera.

[Slash Gear]

After Rogers launched the BlackBerry Bold 9700 for $299.99 back in November they've dropped the price a number of times. Today marks another drop and it's now just $149.99 on a 3-year contract with Rogers. That's looking like an extremely juicy price, especially when they're about to launch their new Webkit browser. Check it out on Rogers here.

[Mobile Syrup]

Back in August, we heard that RIM acquired Torch Mobile since it would help them develop their Flash-capable Webkit-based mobile browser. Well, a post on LinkedIn clearly states that RIM is looking for someone with "expert knowledge" on C++ to help them develop a Webkit-based browser. If you're game enough, check it out here.

[Phone Arena]

Mozilla's CEO, John Lilly, has just mentioned that they are working on getting their Fennec (Firefox Mobile) mobile browser onto the Android OS. He went on to mention that it took them this long because "Android was Java, but they just released Android NDK which uses C/C++ and that is what we program in." This is great news and we'll just have to see how Mozilla does with this.

[The Unwired]

According to Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt, Google Chrome for Macs will be available in a couple of months. Optimistic people are hoping that it gets released by the end of this year, but it could also be in early 2010. Let's hope that by then, extensions are slowly rolling out for the Windows version of the browser.

[9 to 5 Mac]

If you're on Google Chrome's dev channel, you may have noticed that extension support has been enabled by default. Basically, this means that Chrome is closer to ruling the web browser market. These few extensions can only be found on version 4.x right now, but since the beta is still 3.x, we're going to have to wait a little while for extensions to be available on the stable build.

[Lifehacker, Tech Crunch]

Google Chrome's birthday is today and that means I've been using it for a whole year already. Since the first release I have stuck with Google Chrome because it's just overwhelmingly fast. When I test out another browser I just get impatient all the time. Anyways, Google Chrome has been through a lot in their first year and I actually couldn't believe that it's already been a year. Google has mentioned that extensions are still on the way and they're starting to make some right now, which is definitely great news. Below is a bit of what Chrome has gone though.

• 51 developer releases, 21 beta releases or updates, and 15 stable releases or updates
  
• Over 20,600 bugs filed (4367 of them were duplicates, 3505 have been fixed, which leaves a whole lot left to go!)
  
• 11 external contributors and bug editors
  
• 50 Chrome Experiments
  
• 26 posts on the Google Chrome blog
  
• 12 Chrome Shorts, a collection of short films about Google Chrome
  
• A sequel to the comic in Japanese
  

[Google Chrome Blog]

As promised, Opera 10 is now available. At the time of writing, there were no reviews available, so you can check out the review for the beta here, courtesy of CNet. You can download Opera 10 off of their official website here. I'm going to test it out later today.

[CNet, Tech Crunch, Tech Radar, Mashable, Tech Tree]

According to Financial Times, Google is teaming up with Sony to distribute their browser, Google Chrome. Although having Google Chrome on Sony Vaio's won't push Google Chrome's market share a whole lot, it's definitely a good start. According to Mashable, "the Sony Vaios with Chrome on board have already begun to go on sale. Google indicated it's already in talks with other computer manufacturers to boost distribution through similar deals."

All Google needs to do now is work on those extensions and then they'll be set.

[Mashable]

We've already heard about Microsoft's "ballot screen" for European users in order to choose their browser in Windows 7. Well, Microsoft has just mentioned that Europeans will also get a chance to choose their browser in Windows XP and Vista as well. The browsers on the "ballot screen" will only include ten different browsers that have over 0.5% market share. I'll tell you more about it when it officially launches.

[Engadget]

With Windows 7 launching in Europe, it was said that the OS would not have any browsers built-into the OS, since Internet Explorer truly sucks. Well, now it looks like it will be the default browser, but it will transfer you to a "ballot screen" so that you can easily install a "competing browser" of choice. We don't know what the other browsers on the "ballot screen" will be at the time, but the picture above should be the top five on the list. They should do this in North America too.

[Gizmodo]

"The Gazelle prototype is supposed to do stuff like protect webapps from each other, and isolate different browser tabs (like Google Chrome does now and Firefox is going to do). It's one of the many, many research projects Microsoft has incubating, but might be the one that they trot out next week to show that they're still in the loop in terms of keeping up with Google." It won't be confirmed until Monday, but it looks like it could be a new browser that takes aim at Google Chrome. We'll just have to see what happens on Monday. This would mean that one of my guesses could be correct!

Update on July 14: The official announcement by Microsoft on Monday was that they will offer a free version of online Office 2010 - to directly compete with Google Docs / Apps.

[Gizmodo]