Source: PC Magazine August 2009 Edition

Google today announced the addition of a couple new features to its Google Mobile App for BlackBerry smartphones. The first addition is the Voice Search service, which as its name implies allows users to conduct searches with the sound of their voice, much like on the iPhone and Android-based T-Mobile G1. To do so, users simply need to hold down the Talk button and then speak any search term into the phone.

Google sees a number of uses for this new feature, such as to help resolve common spelling mistakes or …

Intel’s move into the discrete graphics market is inching closer to reality and the company wants to make sure the gaming industry is paying attention. To this end, the company is revealing at the Game Developers Conference today some additional details of its Larrabee graphics architecture that is aimed squarely at both Nvidia and AMD.
According to the chip maker, Larrabee will be a dramatic shift away from the shader processing designs used today by both major GPU vendors. It will feature a “many-core architecture” based on the original Pentium design …

Skype application for iPhone and iPod touch should be available tomorrow on the App Store at no cost. As expected, the upcoming client will include free Skype-to-Skype calls and SkypeOut support over Wi-Fi only as well as interface integration and instant messaging to other users. Users won’t be able to place calls over cellular networks, which certainly comes as a disappointment, but with Wi-Fi networks becoming so widespread at least some users will save on international calls and roaming costs from time to time.
Users can already get Skype for the …

The next iteration of Windows is evolving at fast pace. With less than two months since the first and only beta was made public, it appears that a release candidate build has already been branched off of the main code tree and is being prepared for release as early as the end of this month to select testers.
Specifically, WinFuture.de claims that an RC1 build (presumably 7048) will be released privately sometime around February 27 to MSDN and TechNet subscribers as well as beta testers signed up on Microsoft Connect and …

Google took the stage at the Mobile World Congress recently to demo several of its latest technologies, perhaps the most interesting of which was an offline version of Gmail for the iPhone 3G and Android built on HTML 5 standards. The experimental web based application lets users access their email offline and also brings support for Gmail’s labels feature.
Unlike on the desktop, where the feature relies on extensions, offline Gmail for mobiles is dependent on HTML5’s AppCache and database standards to keep data available when there is no internet connection, …

It looks like Facebook is finally planning to capitalize on all that precious information that its 150 million users put on their profiles by creating one of the world’s largest market research databases.
“I had tons of people saying ‘this could be so incredible for our business’. It takes a very long time to do a focus group, and businesses often don’t have the luxury of time. I think they liked the instant responses,” stated Randi Zuckerberg, Mark’s sister and Facebook’s global markets director, regarding the possible monetization of the social …

According to the Korea Communications Commission, there are currently plans in place that will enhance the country’s broadband speeds to 1Gbps by the year 2012. For a frame of reference, that’s 200 times as fast as the average 5Mbps DSL connection here in the United States.
In addition to the wired infrastructure, Korea is hoping to upgrade their wireless broadband to at least 10Mbps. The KCC is encouraging the WiBro standard as a way to boost their own speeds to ten times the current rate.
This growth comes as a big part …

It seems like only yesterday that Facebook was slipping past MySpace in terms of global monthly traffic, and yet the popular social networking site is now close to breaking another milestone. According to statistics from ComScore, Facebook is now pulling in nearly twice as many unique visitors worldwide as its News Corp-owned rival, with 222 million people visiting the site compared to 125 million for MySpace.
MySpace still has a notable edge in the advertising race, though. The now second largest social networking site in the world still dominates in …

Samsung’s netbook line will be expanded this year with the introduction of a successor to the NC10. The NC20 is due for launch sometime in February, with little details on hardware revealed aside from rumors that it is based upon the Nano. This puts it at odd with many other netbooks, which are primarily centered on the Atom or occasionally the Celeron. It’s a boon to Via, but it will need to be a cut above the average in order for people to see it as a serious contender.
In addition …