Endeavour astronauts take first spacewalk

Two astronauts on Friday embarked on the first space walk of the Endeavour shuttle's final mission to the International Space Station (ISS), according to NASA.

Andrew Feustel and Greg Chamitoff, wearing spacesuits with solid and broken red stripes, respectively, floated out of the station at 0710 GMT to retrieve two science experiments that had been delivered in November 2009.

Review: Acer ICONIA A500: The Honeycomb Debutant

Introduction

Until the arrival of Honeycomb, most tablets were playing catch-up with Apple's all conquering iPad and it's smartphone OSs. Now, in its second generation, the iPad 2 is likely to face some serious competition from the likes of Motorola, Acer, Samsung, HTC, Dell and other manufacturers who are embracing Google's tablet specific Honeycomb OS.

One such might be the Acer ICONIA A500, the first Honeycomb tablet to hit India. Can it take a bite out of the big Apple?

Acer, Asus tablets up for Honeycomb update

Acer and Asus will update the Iconia and Eee Transformer with Android Honeycomb 3.1, according to thisismynext.com. Both tablets are slated to receive the update in June.

After a lukewarm response to their brand new tablet OS, Google had shown-off a myriad of under-the-hood upgrades in the 3.1 upgrade at Google I/O earlier this month. The new upgrade will include resizable widgets, an enhanced app switcher, a movie rental store in Android market and many other changes, which are expected to improve the stability of the operating system.

Previously, Google had announced that the Motorola Xoom on the Verizon network would become the first device to receive an over the air update.

The Sensors are coming!

If you own a smartphone, you probably know just how smart those little gadgets are. They know where you're standing, the direction you're moving in and if you're holding the phone vertically or horizontally.

To perform these clever tricks, the inside of your phone is stuffed with a number of sensors, which are little electronic components that can sometimes be as thin as a piece of paper.

US lawmakers query smartphone 'apps' privacy

Apple, Facebook, and Google on Thursday fielded questions from US lawmakers concerned that smartphones and popular mobile "apps" were putting people's privacy at risk.

"I think online privacy is a basic American right and the companies that produce apps have to be regulated," Senator Jay Rockefeller said at the opening of a hearing on consumer privacy and protection in the mobile marketplace.

"With this new innovation comes gigantic risk."

Amazon says e-book sales surpass printed books

Amazon.com Inc. on Thursday said that, after less than four years of selling electronic books, it's now selling more of them than printed books.

The online retailer said that since April 1, it has sold 105 e-books for every 100 printed books, including printed books for which there is no electronic edition. The comparison excludes free e-books, which would tip the scales further if they were included.

Nokia's mobile market share slips to 25%: Gartner

Nokia's share of the mobile phone market dropped to 25 percent in the first quarter of 2011, the lowest for 14 years, down from 30.6 percent at the same time last year, technology research group Gartner said on Thursday.

"Its market share declined 5.5 percentage points year-on-year, and its share has reached its lowest since 1997," Gartner said in a study.

Nokia had released its own figures on April 21 putting first-quarter market share at 29 percent, down from 33 percent in the first quarter of 2010.

Playboy puts entire 57 years of magazines online

Good news for those who thought their copies of Playboy were gone forever when their moms found them and threw them away.

Playboy launched a Web-based subscription service Thursday called i.Playboy.com that allows viewers to see every single page of every single magazine -- from the first issue nearly 60 years ago that featured Marilyn Monroe to the ones hitting the newsstands today.

"They no longer have to store 57 years -- 682 issues -- of Playboy under their mattress," said Jimmy Jellinek, Playboy's chief content officer.

Facebook's new way to combat child pornography

As online photo sharing has exploded so has, tragically, the distribution of child pornography. But while the rise of the Internet and digital cameras have revived a scourge that had nearly been eliminated in the late 1980s, new technology may also help to beat it back again.

Microsoft says it has refined a technology it created called PhotoDNA to identify the worst of these disturbing images -- even if they are cropped or otherwise altered -- and cull through large amounts of data quickly and accurately enough to police the world's largest online services. And on Thursday, it will announce that Facebook will be the first service to join it in using the free technology, which Microsoft donated to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children in December 2009.

Verizon's LTE is OUT again

Whether you own the HTC ThunderBolt or the Samsung DROID Charge, you might be stuck using Verizon's 3G network for the time being. Reported outages of Verizon's LTE network have been received from Washington D.C. to as west as Phoenix, Arizona. So if you have been trying every trick in the book to get back that 4G speed that you have become accustomed to, you might as well sit back and wait for the problem to be resolved. After all, the last time Big Red's LTE service went out, it was back up and running fairly quickly.

If we can find one good thing to say about Verizon's 4G outage, at least it doesn't affect all of those new Motorola DROID X2 owners who bought the phone when it launched yesterday. If you have been having problems with your 4G service with Verizon, let us know by dropping some words in the comment box below.

source: AndroidCentral

Sprint to benefit from AT&T merger with T-Mobile says analyst

Sprint, through its outspoken CEO Dan Hesse, have been one of the loudest objectors to the proposed buyout of T-Mobile by AT&T. According to Piper Jaffray analyst Christopher Larsen, the nation's third largest carrier is shooting itself in the foot by trying to get the deal quashed. Besides raising his price target on the stock to $6.50 from $5.00, and his rating from neutral to overweight, the analyst says that the deal will actually help Sprint if it gets completed.

Larsen says that by buying T-Mobile, AT&T could become a monolithic unwieldy giant that might not appeal to some customers, who would most likely end up at Sprint. That thinking makes sense, for if some of T-Mobile's current account holders liked the idea of signing up with the smallest of the top 4 carriers, they might feel lost suddenly being a customer of the largest U.S. carrier. And if the deal does go through, Sprint becomes the smallest of the remaining 3 major U.S. carriers.

There is another reason to expect some AT&T and T-Mobile customers to jump ship-although not necessarily by choice. In areas where the AT&T/T-Mobile customer base is too concentrated because of the merger, the combined company might be forced to divest such markets and Sprint will be there with a net to snatch up new customers. The analyst also feels that after the merger, customers might see prices rise with one less carrier to compete against, helping Sprint's profit margin.

Besides possibly benefiting from the merger, Larsen sees Sprint getting the Apple iPhone this fall. Going out down the road, he expects Sprint to develop its own LTE network instead of continuing to offer 4G through Clearwire's WiMax service.

With all of the potential new Sprint customers that could jump to the carrier if the buyout of T-Mobile is given the green light, it might behoove CEO Dan Hesse to just give up and let nature take its course. And who knows, one day it might just be Hesse on the other side of the story, seeking approval for a buyout of Sprint.

source:Forbes via BGR