Isaiah's Tech

The rumoured Motorola CLIQ is now official and it's headed to T-Mobile in Q4 of this year. At Motorola's event earlier today, they announced this Android-based phone. The CLIQ will be launched as the DEXT overseas and it'll be hitting Orange, Telefonica, and America Movil. Anyways, the CLIQ / DEXT has: a 3.1-inch touchscreen display with a 320 x 480 resolution, 3G / WiFi 802.11 b/g support, a 5MP camera that can record 25fps video, Stereo Bluetooth, aGPS support, a 3.5mm headphone jack, 512MB of ROM, a microSDHC card slot, 256MB of RAM, a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, and will be available in Winter White and Titanium colours. This handset will be running Motorola's own customized version of Google's mobile OS, called MOTOBLUR, which you'll find below. You can check out the CLIQ on T-Mobile's official website here.

So, this MOTOBLUR - formerly rumoured to be just Blur - will be Motorola's way of customizing Android - since it's open-source and all. Engadget said it best: "It's built around social networking, and it features live widgets that integrate Twitter, Facebook, Gmail, MySpace, Yahoo, Last.fm and more. Like Palm's Synergy, Blur aggregates all your contacts into a single address book, but it shows you recent status updates along with photos when contacts all you -- very slick. There's also remote wipe and GPS tracking like MobileMe." Don't forget to watch the short video of the CLIQ below. Have fun watching it do nothing.



Motorola Cliq: Engadget
Official Specs: Phandroid
Video of the Cliq: Engadget
MOTOBLUR: Engadget

If you're a BlackBerry user you might have already noticed this, but just to inform everyone: BlackBerry App World is now available. RIM launched the service at this year's CTIA Wireless Show which starts today. The applications on App World range in price from $2.99 to $999.99 USD and the developers will have to pay a $200 USD fee to participate in submitting their own Apps. BlackBerry App developers will be earning 80% of the money made from their apps (the other 20% going to RIM) which is a little bit more than Apple's 70 / 30 split. Some apps are already available and the payment method will be PayPal which is a good / bad thing depending on if you like it or not. Get your Facebook, Myspace, Yahoo Messenger, ICQ, etc. BlackBerry apps now.

[Mashable]

These are only United States statistics. After passing Myspace in December 2008, Facebook is now an estimated 20% larger than Myspace. Facebook now earns 10 million more visitors a month than Myspace does. Another notable is Twitter, which is the thin green line at the bottom of the graph. You can only see it when you enlarge the graph. They're growth is expanding and it should hit the 10 million mark soon. The chances of it catching up to Facebook anytime soon (or ever) is unlikely.

You can now attach files or pictures to your Google Calendar events. This includes files from Google Documents and pictures from Picasa. The next subject that should be brought up is Google Eye-Tracking. Somehow Google's team is able to tell exactly where you are looking at on your monitor screen. Is that scary or what? All of this news about Google lately is really starting to scare me. First Google Health, now Google Eye-Tracking. I still love Google, but this is kind of weird. This information could be useful in a way, by detecting what people read and how they read it, stuff like that. Let's move along.

A couple of photos have leaked of a Samsung M7600. It has a design very similar to the Helio Ocean and will, reportedly, have a DJ scratching app. Yes, a DJ scratching app. It has a 3MP camera and a 2.8 inch AMOLED touchscreen. I'll dub it the DJ / rapper phone. Original, am i right?

Just hours after my post about the Kindle 2, the price and availability were leaked to the web. These aren't from the Amazon camp, so there is a possibility that this may not be true. Anyways, the Kindle 2 has a 'rumoured' price of $359 USD and will be available on February 24. The Kindle 2 looks much thinner and sleeker than the first Kindle.

Facebook 20% Bigger Than Myspace (and chart): http://mashable.com/2009/02/06/facebook-myspace-twitter-traffic/
Attaching Files to Google Calendar: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2009/02/attach-files-to-google-calendar-events.html
Google Eye-Tracking: http://www.pcworld.com/article/159117/google_eye_tracking.html?tk=rss_news
Samsung M7600 (and picture): http://www.engadget.com/2009/02/06/leaked-samsung-m7600-phone-sports-bang-and-olufsen-sound-helio-lo/
Kindle 2 Information (and picture): http://i.gizmodo.com/5148568/kindle-2-official-images-and-price-leak-359-on-february-24

There are no more CES press conferences for me to watch and summarize, so it's off to my regular blogs about random news. Whether you have heard of it or not Twitter had an overwhelming growth in 2008. In 2008, Twitter even beat Facebook in growth (percentage-wise). If you don't know what Twitter is, let me tell you what the gist of it is, using Wikipedia's help, since i don't know too much about Twitter myself. "Twitter is a free social networking site and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users' updates [tweets], which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length." It sounds like 'statuses' on Facebook. I, personally, don't use it myself and i also don't really understand why people use it. Anyways in 2008, according to Mashable, Twitter grew a whopping 752%. Twitter started the year with only about 500,000 visitors monthly and by the time it was December that number spiked up to 4.43 million visitors a month. On another note, Facebook finally surpassed Myspace in US traffic, just barely. In the beginning of 2008, Myspace had about 34 million more visitors monthly, but by the end of the year it was a different story. By the time it was December, Myspace had about 59,544,152 visitors and Facebook had 59,675,502 [Edited by: Anonymous]. Close victory for Facebook and congratulations. There are 2 charts above, showing the growth of Twitter and the battle between Facebook and Myspace. In the second graph; Myspace is red and Facebook is blue.

My last two topics will talk about Microsoft. First off, the Windows 7 beta that, originally, had a 2.5 million download limit and was released on Friday, January 9, 2009, have now been changed to having an unlimited download cap. This Windows 7 beta download was only going to be released on the Friday on a first come first serve basis, but Microsoft extended the download until January 24th. So, basically, the Windows 7 beta download is available until January 24 for everyone.

At CES, Microsoft had the infamous RROD in Halo Wars, but they weren't done with failing yet. As they were showing off their Surface Computers, an error occurred. It's not as good as the Red Ring of Death, but it's a decent fail. Looks like Microsoft had a bit of bad luck at CES. It's okay, i still liked their press conference.




Twitter on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter
Twitter's Massive Growth (and charts): http://mashable.com/2009/01/09/twitter-growth-2008/
Windows 7 Beta Download (and picture): http://i.gizmodo.com/5128738/windows-7-open-beta-download-limit-lifted-until-january-24
Microsoft Surface Fail (and picture): http://i.gizmodo.com/5128355/as-seen-at-ces-microsoft-surface-fail