The scams work as follows: First, you’ll see an interesting link in other users’ status updates, but when you follow the link, you’ll be asked to fill out a number of surveys, which are nothing more than ploys to extract your personal data.

Today, we’ve seen two very similar scams, both promising a “shocking video” to unsuspecting users. One message that appears in status updates reads: “I am shocked!!! I’m NEVER texting AGAIN since I found this out. Video here: http://bit.ly/c4SDyh – Worldwide scandal!”

If you click on the link in the message, it’ll lead you to a rogue Facebook application, which will ask you to fill in a couple of surveys before you can actually see the promised content.

Another message promises a shocking video of a teacher that nearly killed a boy; clicking on the link in the status update will, once again, only force you to jump through hoops and hand over your personal data in the process. Graham Cluley from Sophos does a great job explaining the attack in the video below.

Our advice, as always, is not to click on suspicious links if you’re not absolutely sure they’re safe. Do not give away your personal info. If you’ve fallen for these (or similar) scams, remove the offending app(s) from your Facebook, and remove the related status message from your newsfeed.

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(Oh, and Dolfin ought not to be confused with Dolphin, which is a skin for Android WebKit.)

It’s Samsung’s philosophy that it will not compete in a market unless it belongs to the top three of that market. In the case of the mobile browsing market Samsung has succeeded: from nothing, Dolfin has become the third-best mobile browser in the world. Only iPhone and Android are better.

If you’re keeping track of the mobile browser landscape you should add Dolfin to your A-list. It’s easily good enough, and Samsung has big plans with the bada operating system. Somewhere in 2011 the installed base of Dolfin will pass that of Safari iPhone, and bada might even become a competitor to Android. (Samsung sure hopes so.)

I have updated my mobile pages with Dolfin data. (By the way, I also tested Android 2.2 while I was at it: few changes. There’s not a single difference with 2.1 in my great WebKit table.)

The good parts

Dolfin is only the third browser in the world to support the touch events, after iPhone and Android, and that’s a large part of the reason I count it as the third-best mobile browser.

Mobile browsers for touchscreen phones just must support these events by the end of the year, or they’re out of the race. (Opera, Firefox, Microsoft, NetFront, Nokia, BlackBerry, you have been warned.)

Dolfin’s implementation is even slightly better than Android’s. If I do a pinch-zoom test on my touch test page I use two fingers, and during replay I want the browser to show the position of both fingers. iPhone does so, Android doesn’t. Now Dolfin also shows both fingers’ position.

Unfortunately Dolfin is not quite up to iPhone quality: my multitouch drag-and-drop does not work. Still, the stuff it does support is quite impressive for a browser that didn’t exist at the start of this year.

Dolfin’s responsiveness to pinch-zooming is good. One friend who’s used to the iPhone even said it’s better than Apple’s implementation. I’m not quite prepared to go that far yet, but it easily gives Android a run for its money.

Dolfin incorporates a very modern WebKit version, and in my great WebKit table it is the best mobile browser, narrowly above Android 2.1/2.2 and comfortably above the iPhone 3.1 (4 not yet tested).

I’m currently working on a little side project: the perfect scrolling layer script for touchscreens. Obviously it should work in all three browsers that support the touch events. Of the three Android gives me the biggest problems right now, with Dolfin smoothly sailing along in the wake of the iPhone without any serious problems.

Dolfin is just a bloody good browser.

The buggy parts

Still, not all is rosy. I found a few bugs in Dolfin, and I’ll enumerate them here for the benefit of the Samsung team:

• The viewport dimension properties are an absolute mess. Not only do they generally give wrong data, but a few of them change meaning when a <meta viewport> is present in the page. This must be addressed as soon as possible; it’s a show-stopper.
• There’s a bug in the touchstart event. When you assign an event handler to it and execute it once, the event handler is removed. See this test page for the effect. Works fine on iPhone and Android, but fails in Dolfin the second time you want to drag the item.
  The workaround, obviously, is setting the touchstart event handler again ontouchend. That works fine.
• Dolfin is over-eager in firing the scroll and contextmenu events. Basically they always fire, even if an action does not result in a scroll or a contextmenu. (In fact, I haven’t yet discovered any contextmenu on Dolfin.)
  These events should only fire if the scroll or contextmenu action actually take place.
• The event coordinates are wrong: clientX/Y and screenX/Y copy the values of pageX/Y, while they should report the coordinates relative to the visual viewport in CSS pixels and in device pixels, respectively.
• A personal peeve: on the browser software keyboard the “Go” button is located on the left. A standard is emerging whereby it’s the right button that says “OK, do it,” while the left button says “Never mind.” I got confused by Samsung’s button placement more than once.
• Samsung bada is supposed to support W3C Widgets, but there is no way for developers to upload test widgets to the phone. In practice that means nobody will test on Samsung bada. This situation must be rectified.

Still, such bugs are only to be expected from a first release. In general Samsung has delivered a good browser that’s only a few small steps away from becoming excellent. I will follow Samsung’s next moves with interest.

The big advantage of this new embed style is that it can serve content to users using either Flash or HTML5, depending on where the video is being viewed and the preferences of the user. The new embed code is still being tweaked, but developers are encouraged to use it and give YouTube their feedback.

Back in January, YouTube rolled out its HTML5 player, and support for HTML5 has since continued to expand and evolve. However, not all video is viewable in HTML5 in all browsers, and sometimes content needs to use the Flash player.

That’s why the new embed code has so much potential. Right now, the HTML5 player only works on the YouTube site itself. The standard embed code doesn’t display the HTML5 video unless you are on a mobile device that is able to either play in-line or take you to a separate player.

With the new embed, however, it is possible to view video using the HTML5 player, provided you have signed up for the beta version and are in an HTML5-compatible browser. If the embedded video has elements that aren’t compatible with HTML5, the Flash browser will be used instead.

If you want to try out the new player, this is the embed code you want to use. It replaces the VIDEO_ID text with the code from your video (the string after v= in the standard YouTube address):

<iframe class="youtube-player" type="text/html" width="640" height="385" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/VIDEO_ID" frameborder="0">

Eventually these embeds will make viewing on mobile devices much easier in in-line situations. Right now, some videos will play in-line on an iOS or Android device, but more often than not the video is played in its own player.

As a test, I loaded the announcement page on my iPhone 4. Initially, I was shown a black screen instead of the video content. After enabling HTML5, however, the following appeared:

In essence, I was still unable to get the video to play. It looks like all of the bugs haven’t yet been resolved on the mobile side, but I did at least get one step closer.

What do you think of the new embed system and its potential?

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There’s little difference with my earlier reports, except that the new Firefox beta is making a serious effort to support the background module. It’s not there yet, but Firefox is not as disastrously behind as it was a month back.

Firefox

Of course Firefox remains a pain in other respects: still no support for contains(), incorrect indexing of attributes (it’s essentially random), no innerText or outerHTML, no sane second argument for the add() method for select boxes, a colorDepth of 24.

All these bugs are Firefox-only, with the exception of the attribute indexing, which is also a problem in IE. Frankly, I’m starting to get fed up with Firefox and its haughty refusal to implements useful methods and properties found in all other browsers. But maybe that’s a passing phase. Maybe I’ll pick another browser to be annoyed at next time around.

Events

I haven’t yet updated the Events table, partly because it’s such a lot of work (it takes me as much time as all other tables combined), and partly because I do not expect huge changes. I tested various problems in IE9, and sadly found no improvements.

I’m not sure when I’ll have the time to do the Events table; I hope before I leave on holiday in early August.

To make a short story shorter: for the last three days, I’ve been one of but a handful of people carrying around a handset running Microsoft’s unreleased Windows Phone 7 operating system. This specific handset isn’t one that’s ever intended for release, and, while it’s looking pretty close to done, the build running on the handset is by no means finalized.

With these bits in mind along with my new personal policy of not reviewing big-ticket items until I’ve really lived with them (even if that means not being first out of the gate with a review; for logic, see here), I present our pre-review of Windows Phone 7 in its nascent state.

The Handset:

As mentioned, the handset I’ve been carrying isn’t something that’s ever intended to go on sale. Codenamed the Samsung “Taylor”, it’s one of three handsets given to select developers and partners to get a feel for Windows Phone 7 as development is underway. This review is in no way about the handset itself, but for those wondering: for a mostly-internal prototype never intended to hit the shelves, this thing is actually pretty dang decent. Chunky? Yes. Original in its design? Heck no. Would I be ashamed to pull it from my pocket? Not one bit.

The Disclaimer: It’s an early build:

As is to be expected from an Operating System still months from release, there are lots of things that.. well.. don’t work. In the sense of fairness in reviewing this crazy early, we won’t be railing too much on the things that are obviously just unfinished. That’d be like walking in on a sculptor five minutes after they began their latest work only to yell “Hey! This is crap! It’s just a block of cement with dents in it!”

With all that said, lets begin..

The General Rundown:

You tap the power button. A lockscreen appears; a picture of a meadow fills the background, and icons at the bottom tell you that new e-mails and text messages await. There’s no immediate indication as to how to go about unlocking it — but touch it any way but the right way, and it bounces up and down as a way of saying, “Hey. Slide me up.”

Once unlocked, the home screen is two separate entities, represented as separate pages: on the left is your “Start” screen; on the right is the full list of applications installed on the device. If we’re using Windows as an analogy here, the left page is like your desktop, while the right page is like the Start Menu’s “All Programs” option.

The left page is where any applications or contacts you’ve chosen to “pin” show as tiles. These tiles, either one or two squares wide, can be as basic as text and an icon, or as complex as an animated patchwork of profile photos pulled down from Facebook. Microsoft tells us these tiles can display just about whatever a developer wants, and can be updated on the fly with push messages.

Some applications — the alarm, maps, calculator, etc — are just that: applications, with whatever single purpose their name implies. Others, however, are what Microsoft calls “Hubs”. Hubs are centralized places where you can go to find the content pertaining to that given subject, spread out across a seamless series of horizontally scrolling views. The “Games” hub, for example, dedicates one view to my Xbox Live profile/avatar, one to any incoming game invites, one to a list of all the games on my device, and one to show off new games on the platform. Developers can also tie their applications into hubs (Pandora adding radio stations to the music hub was given as an example). We’ll talk more about hubs later.

The Looks – Stunning, yet depressing:

Initially turning on the device, I had two obstacles to overcome:

1) The shock of seeing that this looked absolutely nothing like anything from Windows Mobile of yesteryear — which, by all means, is a good thing. The conversation that went down at Microsoft, as I imagine it: “So, hey. Windows Mobile 6? It looks terrible. Lets get rid of it.” “Okay. Which parts?” “All of it. Get rid of absolutely all of it. I want no similarities.” “But.. then… how..” “Fine. They can both use letters and numbers and other aspects of language. Everything else? Gone!” End scene.

2) The little Human-Interface-Guideline-trained voice inside my head that demands things like standardized margins and consistent font sizes. Windows Phone 7 takes such ideas and more or less throws them out the window.. and yet..

Once I tackled those two hurdles, I realized: Windows Phone 7 is actually really, really pretty. It’s not pretty in the same sense as the iPhone, where its beauty comes from order — and it’s not pretty in the same sense as webOS, where its beauty comes from gradients, translucency, and rounded corners. It’s pretty in its own, intensely-minimalist way. It is, as everyone says when they first see it, very Zune-esque.

Screenshots don’t do it justice, primarily because everything is animated. Tap an icon, and it floats in the air as the other applications glide out of view. Click into a date on the calendar, and the camera zooms through it like it’s a rabbit hole, emerging in front of the respective day’s agenda. There’s a fine line between animations adding to the experience and animations being so overly flashy that they make the entire thing seem unresponsive, and Microsoft is tiptoeing it well.

Alas, animations only go so far. After a few minutes with Windows Phone 7, something clicks: holy crap, they used a lot of black. Nearly every screen of nearly every included application is backed by an endless sea of black, with the alternative being.. and endless sea of white. Some of the “Hubs” have rich, sometimes-customizable backgrounds — but for the most part, it’s a whole lot of black (or a whole lot of white).

While this is undoubtedly an intentional aspect of the minimalist design, it gets, for the lack of a better word, depressing. There’s a reason people generally avoid solid colored wallpapers on their desktops, and it’s not just because of a dire need to have one more place to put a picture of their family or dog: solid colors get old, fast. The empty-void look was something I complained about with the iPhone before iOS 4 introduced custom wallpapers, and that void was limited to the homescreen. Here, it’s bred into the entire operating system

This is offset a bit by the fact that Windows Phone 7 allows the user to pick an “accent” color, which determines the hue of the aforementioned tiles on your Start screen and various bits of text and flavor tucked around the OS. It helps, but only so much.

The Keyboard:

Who the hell did Microsoft hire to make this keyboard? Because whatever they’re being paid, they deserve a raise.

I’ve got no idea what sort of sorcery Microsoft used to build this thing, but it rocks. I’ve typed the character-count equivalent of a novel or two on just about every smartphone platform’s software keyboard, and this … this just might be the best one. I could type as well on this immediately after picking it up as I could on my iPhone after weeks of practice. To say I was pleasantly surprised would be an understatement. Auto-correct works as expected, and if it misfires on a word it just doesn’t know, switching it back is a matter of tapping the word once at any time. The word you originally typed will lead a list of potential alternative corrections — tap the original, and all is returned to normal.

As we already knew, there is no copy and paste. That sucks, a lot. There’s a fully functional highlighting feature, but it seems to only work in the Office application. Still, it gives us hope that a copy/paste mechanism could come in the future — but in the mean time, it’s a rather unfortunate limitation.

Windows Phone, as a Phone:

It’s no secret: over the past few years, smartphones have become more “smart” and less “phone”. Just about gone are the days of little green dial buttons jumping you directly to the number pad, and the number of clicks required to actually use your phone as a phone is going nowhere but up. On just about any smartphone platform around, this number is generally anywhere between 3 and 4; Windows Phone 7 is no different.

(Tangent time! Like those of Windows Mobile before it, the dial tone sounds played when you punch in phone numbers on Windows Phone 7 are ridiculously loud. Gratingly so, even. I barely care to hear the tones as I dial, why the hell would someone across the room?)

Once a call is initiated, you’ve got the standard array of options at your fingertips: speaker, mute, hold, and add call. In other words: Windows Phone is markedly average as a phone. As a contacts manager, however, it shines.

It’s all about the People:

The People Hub is Windows Phone 7’s take on an contact book — and it’s pretty dang slick. Sure, its got your standard list of contacts (all pulled down effortlessly from Facebook and Gmail, with overlapping contacts automatically linked together flawlessly) — but tap into a contact, swipe over to the “What’s New” view, and you’re looking at their latest social network updates. Want a broader view of what’s going on? Pop back to the list of all your contacts, slide over to that layer’s “What’s New” view — tada! It’s a Facebook news feed, comments and all. It’s not the first time we’ve seen an OS try to bring all of this stuff to one place, but Windows Phone 7 does a damned decent job of it.

The Marketplace:

If the “People” hub is the core for whenever you’re feeling talkative, “Marketplace” is the hub for whenever you’re feeling spendy. Be it apps, games, or music, all sales go through here.

Outside of the Music section (which, being based off Microsoft’s Zune store, is pretty much fully functioning already), the Market hub is in a pretty early state in this technical preview. They’ve got a handful of basic applications loaded into the Apps section for testing purposes, but its understandably pretty empty right now. Even so, I’m intrigued.

You see, every app store faces the same problem: discoverability. To be considered successful, an app store needs lots and lots of apps. More apps seems to bring more users to the platform — but as more apps fill the market, it becomes harder and harder for new applications to be discovered.

At least from our cursory glance, it appears that Microsoft is going at this problem with sub-categories. Here’s how it works:

When you first enter the app layer of the Marketplace, you’ll see at least 4 views: Top apps, new apps, featured apps, and categories. Click into a category, and you’ll be offered the same views for that respective category, except with a view of that category’s free apps instead of the featured apps view. Lifestyle category? You’ll see top lifestyle apps, new lifestyle apps, free lifestyle apps, and then a list of sub-categories within that category. These categories, in turn, have their own top lists.

What does this mean? Instead of only battling for the top of an all encompassing “Games” category, developers will theoretically also be able to duke it out for the top spot in the “Action Games” or “RPG” categories. By allowing users to drill down into sub-categories, they’re giving more applications the opportunity to get their time in a spotlight, even if said spotlight is slightly smaller than that of a main category. More exposure = more sales.

As a Camera:

The camera user experience joins the keyboard on the list of pleasant surprises. While the quality of pictures will obviously vary from one piece of hardware to the next, the job of getting the user to the point of closing that shutter is Windows Phone 7’s, and that’s a job it does well.

Here’s how it works: Snap a picture, and it slides almost completely out of view to the left, with the main view returning to a live camera feed prepped for the next picture. Want to see that last picture again? Just grab the little bit left hanging and slide it back into view — bam, you’re looking at a linear film strip of your photos. Want to get back to the camera? Just slide back over to the live view. It’s perhaps the most intuitive photo taking interface I’ve ever seen.

Another neat little trick: even when your phone is locked, holding the camera button on the side of the handset will launch it directly into the photo snapping interface. No more losing that once in a lifetime shot just because you couldn’t unlock the thing and find the camera app in time. If you’ve set a password for the lockscreen, the aforementioned film strip feature will be disabled until you punch in your code; in other words, if you’ve got naughty shots stored on your phone (bad idea!), don’t worry about would-be peepers gettin’ a peek at the goods just by holding the camera button.

E-Mail:

As a long time, devout Gmail user, I’d wrap up the entire e-mail experience thusly: pretty, but basic.

The horizontally scrolling view between sections (all, unread, flagged, and urgent) introduces a pretty pleasing way of perusing messages — but unfortunately, like just about every other smartphone OS that offers Gmail as one of the default configurations, it lacks everything that makes Gmail worthwhile. Archiving? Nope. Labels? Nope — just folders. Starring? Sort of; there’s flagging, but that’s local to the handset. As much as I want to cut Microsoft some slack (Gmail is, after all, a competitor to multiple Microsoft products), I just can’t. Gmail is just too prevalent to not support beyond the utmost basic functionality.

I’ll give the e-mail client one point, though: I can attach images to my e-mails after I start writing them. 3+ years later, that’s something my iPhone still can’t do.

Browser – Internet Explorer Mobile 7:

The subject of the browser is a complex beast, and one worth waiting to really dive into until it’s considered absolutely final. We’ll give it a proper run through once this thing goes gold — but our notes on it in its current state:

• For all the grief we’ve given IE Mobile in the past, IE Mobile 7 carries its own. It’s not the best mobile browser out there, but it’s certainly the best version of IE Mobile to date.
• Across about two dozen speed tests, both the iPhone’s Safari browser and the default Android browser beat IE Mobile 7 consistently. All handsets were on WiFi with cleared caches.
• Multi-touch pan and zoom behaves smoothly, and the kinetic scrolling (where pages scroll a bit based on how you flick’em) is spot-on

Surfing the Inconsistent Seas

There’s a problem with minimalism: At a certain point, you stop stripping away all the stuff the user doesn’t need to see and start stripping away the stuff they do. I’ve been using Windows Phone for a few days now, and there are still plenty of things I don’t entirely understand. Why does a certain group of pictures show up in its own splayed-out view on the top layer of the Photos hub one time, and not the next? Why is it that I can tap-and-hold a note’s icon in one view to bring up a prompt to delete it, but I can hold that same note’s icon until my thumb goes numb on another view without anything happening at all?

These aren’t the only inconsistencies. In single purpose applications, you access the settings screen by tapping a little ellipses (a fancy word for “…”) in the bottom right; in Hubs, you hold your thumb in any open space until the prompt appears. In one view, tapping the hardware search button will bring up a search option relevant to that context; in another view (even within the same application), tapping that same search button will bring up Bing search — and there’s never really any indication as to which you’ll be getting.

Conclusion:

I look forward to Windows Phone 7 with a dash of excitement, and a heaping cup of wariness. Tinkering with Windows Phone 7 is like finding out that the little girl who was kind of a punk to you in second grade somehow managed to grow up kind of cool — and to top it off, she’s actually sort of hot. But is she really that cool, or is she still that little punk deep down? Does she really get you, or does she just read your Facebook enough to pretend she does? Will developers build things for her that make her worthwhile? I think that analogy just fell apart, but you get my drift.

While lovely, Windows Phone 7 has an absolutely ridiculous mountain to climb. Microsoft is returning as an underdog in an arena where they once reigned as champion — and they’re an underdog with weights tied to their feet and a reputation of being too old to fight. They’re miles behind the competition, both in timing and functionality. While Microsoft was busy fiddling with Windows Mobile 6.5 and the travesty that was the Kin, Google managed to build Android’s name, get it onto dozens of devices, fill its Market up with 70,000 applications, all whilst giving the whole damn thing away for free to hardware manufacturers. Windows Phone 7’s biggest strength is that the set-in-stone hardware specifications prevent fragmentation from complicating things — is that anywhere near enough to convince handset makers to shift focus from Android and go back to paying royalties?

With these obstacles in mind and a few days of experience with the platform under my belt, I look at Windows Phone 7 the same way I’ve always looked at webOS: with restrained hope. Given a bit of luck, a monumental amount of resources, and an influx of developer interest, it has the potential to be a massive success. I don’t, however, think it will be.

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Google App Inventor claims to enable non-coders to develop complete, working Android apps by connecting a series of “blocks.” Google has been testing App Inventor in schools for a year, reports The New York Times. At the time of writing, App Inventor is only available to those who apply via a form.

It’s a smart concept. Not only is the Android Market an open platform for developers (with no approval process, a la Apple’s App Store), but now we’ll likely see a vast array of specialized apps built by non-developers. This could radically increase the volume of apps in the Market versus the App Store.

The expansion may, of course, come at the cost of quality. We’ll see thousands of new Android apps, but will they be of a “cookie cutter” nature, offering very little value? There is, however, an upside in the long term: If App Inventor is so simple that schoolchildren can make apps, some those same children will soon become coders themselves and perhaps choose to develop apps for Android rather than iOS.

Google and Apple are currently in a heated battle to win the hearts and minds of developers. Google, it seems, wants to win over the non-developers too.

What do you think? Is App Inventor a winning play on Google’s part?

[img credit: glen edelson]

More About: android, Google, google app inventor, trending

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CyanogenMod-6.0.0 RC1 was released early this morning, with builds for the Nexus One, HTC Dream and HTC Magic.  You can download the new builds both XDA-Developers and Cyanogen directly, this includes the Nexus One rom , XDA Developers (N1, D/M) and the best ROM manager on the planet. Directions are widely available for newbies.

As of now, the ROMs appear to be very stable, although the G1 rom is a bit slow. Remember, flash with caution Androidians! Give us a little comment on what you think of these too!

Source: Cyanogen and Engadget

NOTE: CyanogenMod Froyo ROMs Released for Nexus One, HTC Dream, and HTC Magic originally appeared on AndroidGuys.

AndroidGuys is looking for summer interns! Check out bit.ly/AGinterns

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Teamdouche is a well-oiled machine and is putting the finishing touches on their latest iteration of Cyanogenmod!  As we reported recently, members of the Cyanogenmod community have been hard at work on CM6.0 and now persiansown has posted a Youtube video to take a walk through some of what CM6.0 has to offer.  He covers the extensive additions to ADW launcher, a dedicated menu for CM6.0 customizations, an updated music application, and many other tweaks that make Cyanogenmod one of the most popular custom ROMs.  I can't wait to run CM6.0 and let my G1 feast on some Froyo goodness.  Hit the video for all the details and a prediction about when we can expect CM6.0 to drop.

Is anyone else going to flash this the instant it comes out?

Click here to view the embedded video.

NOTE: Froyo-based Cyanogenmod 6 Feature Walkthrough originally appeared on AndroidGuys.

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• HTC Nike
• HTC Polaris
• HTC Kaiser
• HTC Titan
• Touch Pro
• Touch Diamond
• Touch HD
• Touch Pro2
• Touch Diamond2
• Samsung i900
• Samsung i(10
• Samsung i780
• Samsung i907
• HTC Artemis
• HTC Elf, Elfin
• HTC Excalibur, Dash
• HTC Gene, P3400
• HTC Herald, Wing
• HTC Opal, Touch Viva
• HTC Pharos
• HTC Prophet
• HTC Startrek
• HTC Wizard
• Asus P320, Galaxi Mini

In this period, RIM was still the leading mobile smartphone platform, dropping from 42.1% to 41.7% market share. It was followed by Apple which somewhat surprisingly dropped from 25.4% to 24.4% and Microsoft which dropped from 15.1% to 13.2%. Android was fourth on the list, but it rose from 9% to 13% market share in this same period. It was followed by Palm which dropped from 5.4% to 4.8% market share.

One has to take into account that these numbers are relative; most smartphone platforms actually gained subscribers as the smartphone market overall grew 8.1%, with 49.1 million people in the U.S. owning smartphones during this period. Still, Android is growing faster – much faster – than its competitors at this point.

As far as top mobile manufacturers go, Samsung grabbed the first place, growing from 21.4% to 22.4% market share. It was followed by LG, RIM, Motorola and Nokia, all of which lost a small chunk of their share, with the exception of RIM which grew from 8.2% to 8.7%.

See comScore’s report here.

More About: android, blackberry, iOS, mobile operating system, webOS, windows mobile

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Susannah starts off bravely by showing how Google Maps API v2 takes 17 seconds to load on an iPhone. This was the motivation for the work on v3 – to improve performance. In order to improve performance you have to start by measuring it. The Google Maps team broke down “performance” into three categories:

• user perceived latency – how long it takes for the page to appear usable, in this case for the map to be rendered
• page ready time - how long it takes for the page to become usable, e.g. for the map to be draggable
• page load time - how long it takes for all the elements to be present, in the case of maps this includes all of the map controls to be loaded and working

The team wanted to measure all of these areas. It’s fairly easy to find tools to measure performance on the desktop – the Google Maps teamed used HttpWatch. Performance tools, or any development tools for that matter, are harder to come by in the mobile space. But the team especially wanted to focus on creating a fast experience on mobile devices. They ended up using Fiddler as a proxy to gain visibility into the page’s performance profile.

future blog post #1: Coincidentally, today I saw a tweet about Craig Dunn’s instructions for Monitoring iPhone web traffic (with Fiddler). This is a huge takeaway for anyone doing web development for mobile. At Velocity, Eric Lawrence (creator of Fiddler) announced Fiddler support for the HTTP Archive Specification. The HTTP Archive (HAR) format is a specification I initiated over a year ago with folks from HttpWatch and Firebug. HAR is becoming the industry standard just as I had hoped and is now supported in numerous developer tools. I wrote one such tool, called HAR to Page Speed, that takes a HAR file and displays a Page Speed performance analysis as well as an HTTP waterfall chart. Putting all these pieces together, you can now load a web site on your iPhone, monitor it with Fiddler, export it to a HAR file, and upload it to HAR to Page Speed to find out how it performs. Given Fiddler’s extensive capabilities for creating addons, I expect it won’t be long before all of this is built into Fiddler itself.

In the case of Google Maps API, the long pole in the tent was main.js. They have a small (15K) bootstrap script that loads main.js (180K). (All of the script sizes in this blog post are UNcompressed sizes.) The performance impact of main.js was especially bad on mobile devices because of less caching. They compiled their JavaScript (using Closure) and combined three HTTP requests into one.

future blog post #2: The team also realized that although their JavaScript download was large, the revisions between releases was small. They created a framework for only downloading deltas when possible that cut seconds off their download times. More on this tomorrow.

These performance improvements helped, but they wanted to go further. They redesigned their code using an MVC architecture. As a result, the initial download only needs to include the models, which are small. The larger views and controllers that do all the heavy lifting are loaded asynchronously. This reduced the initial bootstrap script from 15K to 4K, and the main.js from 180K to 33K.

The results speak for themselves. Susannah concludes by showing how v3 of Google Maps API takes only 5 seconds to load on the iPhone, compared to v2’s 17 seconds. The best practices the team employed for making Google Maps faster are valuable for anyone working on JavaScript-heavy web sites. Take a look at the video and slides, and watch here for a follow-up on Fiddler for iPhone and loading JavaScript deltas.

Microsoft has unveiled a new all-in-one web development suite called WebMatrix.

It’s more than an IDE or a framework, it’s a whole suite — a web server, a SQL database, and a database-ready framework, all wrapped up into a single development environment that makes it easy to build, test and deploy some fairly complex web apps.

WebMatrix is free, and it’s available for Windows users as a beta download.

The new suite is especially geared towards developers building web apps that require local data storage. It’s pretty flexible, and you can also use it to build simple websites, then scale up to something mid-weight or incorporate a full-scale app that you could run a business on top of.

The WebMatrix suite is made up of three components: the lightweight Windows-based web server called IIS Express, SQL Server Compact Edition, a simple database server, and Razor, a new templating language based on ASP.NET. The beta version you can download today actually doesn’t have Razor, but it will be included in a future release “later this month,” according to Microsoft.

The three key technologies were previously announced by Scott Guthrie, Microsoft’s VP of its Developer Division. Now, with the launch of WebMatrix, Guthrie has introduced a few new components.

Central to the WebMatrix experience is the Workspace. It’s is basically a singular dashboard inside the app where you develop your site, deploy files, perform various admin tasks, run SEO tests and generate analytics reports.

There’s a web apps gallery that attaches to Microsoft’s Web Platform Installer, so you can browse and install all sorts of open source packages or content management systems like Drupal, Joomla and Wordpress. There are also several templates and frameworks included, so if you need some CSS behaviors or you want to include JQuery interactions, all of those elements can be integrated into your workflow. The ones that aren’t included can be downloaded. You can test your app by automatically launching any of the browsers you have installed on your system.

WebMatrix has been built to let you start out very simply — you can just use it to run a WordPress site if you really wanted to — and then scale up to database-driven web apps. If you install something that requires a MySQL database, WebMatrix will even download and install MySQL for you.

It’s probably not going to eat into the user base of Visual Studio, Microsoft’s full-featured IDE for building apps across the entire Windows platform. But it’s so simple and fluid, it could very well draw some Windows-based developers from the LAMP stack over to the Windows IIS stack. Since everything is integrated — the dev environment, the frameworks, the app gallery and the web server — it’s really meant as a one-stop shop for building a site from scratch.

As a bonus, the files generated by WebMatrix are all just simple text files — HTML, CSS, JavaScript, MySQL and ASP code. So if you want to take all the work you do within WebMatrix and move it over into a different IDE of your choosing, or even a text editor, you won’t end up unnecessarily confused. Anything generated by WebMatrix can also easily be imported into Visual Studio or Visual Web Developer Express 2010, one of Microsoft’s other free tools for building web apps.

See Also

• New Hardware-Accelerated IE9 Preview Arrives
• Bing Maps Gets a Developer SDK
• Microsoft to Double Down on HTML5 With Internet Explorer 9

Of course, JavaScript isn’t the sole dish in your mobile browsing banquet, but the difference should present a notable boost when browsing to any site using it.

The huge difference in scores is thanks to Froyo’s new JIT compiler, as well as some browsing optimisations done in the browser.

Had enough of my preamble? Go check out the results yourself, and be marvelled by the graphs.

The new iteration of the world’s second most popular web browser, which can be downloaded here, has been hotly anticipated for almost a year. Today however, it transitions from concept to reality, with many more betas to come until its official release at the end of the year.

As we have reported in the past, Firefox 4 is a major upgrade from its predecessors. It not only includes a redesign of the user interface (tabs are now on top except for the Mac version), but a wave of additional features, including enhanced HTML5 support, hardware-accelerated HD video, WebSockets and enhanced add-on support via Jetpack.

There’s a lot more to Firefox 4, most of which you can see in this feature spotlight the Mozilla team put together to highlight the many upgrades the new browser contains. However, we want to stress that this is an early beta of the browser — it will crash and frustrate you, which is exactly what Mozilla is hoping to catch now before its final release.

Mozilla needs Firefox 4 to be a winner; in recent months, Google Chrome has been stealing browser marketshare at Firefox’s expense. The new version could either reverse the downtrend or accelerate its fall.

Are you going to download the new Firefox 4 beta? What do you think of the new features? Let us know in the comments.

Screenshots

More About: Firefox, Firefox 4, mozilla

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• 42% don’t GZIP CSS
• 44% have more than 2 CSS external files
• 56% serve CSS with cookies
• 62% don’t minify
• 21% have greater than 100K of CSS

Many of these problems are measured by YSlow and Page Speed, but the solutions still aren’t widely adopted. Nicole goes on to highlight more best practices for reducing the impact of CSS including minimizing float and using a reset stylesheet.

Checkout the slides and video of Nicole and Stoyan’s talk to learn how to avoid having CSS block your page from rendering.

The reliable folks involved with the popular Cyanogenmod seem to be almost ready to push out another ROM update.  This one will be the much anticipated Froyo (Android 2.2) release.  An experimental build for the Nexus One was pushed out midweek, but the MyTouch Slide, G1/Dream, Desire, Incredible, Droid, and Evo can expect to get some CM6 love from this potential weekend update.

Judging from Cyanogen's late night tweets, it looks like we can expect CM6 to fly on the G1/Dream and similarly-powered handsets.  Generally, Cyanogen updates his twitter account first, so for all the up-to-the-second release details, follow him @Cyanogen.

NOTE: Froyo-based CyanogenMod-6 Experimental Builds Hopefully by this Weekend originally appeared on AndroidGuys.

AndroidGuys is looking for summer interns! Check out bit.ly/AGinterns

You May Also Enjoy...

• July 3, 2010 -- Updated Dell Streak Root Method Released (5)
• June 29, 2010 -- Nokia N900 Gets a Taste of Froyo (3)
• June 29, 2010 -- HTC: Desire, Legend, Wildfire Getting Froyo (7)

I have always wondered how much of a barrier the “Request for Permission” dialogue presents to uptake of Facebook applications. So two months ago I set up a simple one-page app to gather some statistics about user behavior.

My sample group consisted of 4000 unique visitors who spoke English, Dutch, Spanish or Portugese. Visitors came from 82 countries but the largest groups were from Portugal, Belgium, the Netherlands and Argentina.

The idea of the application was very simple. Users were asked to enter their birthday with one of two input methods, either (a) through a series of dropdown boxes or (b) with a button that gave the app access to the birthday on their Facebook profile. The app then calculated how many days, weeks and months the person had been alive for and allowed them to post the result to their Facebook profile.

This is what the input screen looked like:

And the resulting profile story:

So what were the results? For whatever reason, 96% of users chose method a – the dropdown boxes. That’s a pretty significant majority, but it doesn’t tell us why users chose this option. They probably had different reasons, but I think some would have been:

• “The dropdown boxes look quicker and/or easier”
• “I don’t want to give this application access to my personal information”
• “I don’t know what will happen if I click the Facebook button”

Personally, I can understand people not wanting to grant the application permission to access their information. Even the lowest level of authorization gives an app access to the user’s name, profile picture, list of friends and other “public” parts of their profile.

Much of the time when we develop Facebook apps we can’t avoid asking users for authorization. But we need to be aware of the barrier this creates. We should delay the authorization request in our application flow until the point where we really need it. And hopefully by that time the user will be able to see the value of authorizing our app.

Probably the most impressive thing (next to the new Add-Ons Builder based on Bespin) was the upcoming Features of Firefox 4:

• HTML5 Video display
• Painting with Canvas
• Image manipulation with Canvas – pixel testing, face detection with opencivitas
• Green screen technologies in images and video by detecting pixel colours.
• HTML5 embedded inside SVG (yes!)
• SVG as an IMG
• SVG as a CSS background
• SVG filter/mask/clip
• SVG animations
• Inline SVG inside HTML5
• CSS3 (selectors, @font-face, 2D Transforms, Transitions, Shadow, Gradients ,calculations – calc(2em-10px) )
• APIs: Geolocation, Offline (IndexDB, localStorage, AppCache, FileAPI – binary content of a file input, file drag and drop, web workers, websockets)
• Websockets controller running the presentation from the mobile.
• WebGL

They proved some of the points with demos:

CSS3 filters and SVG masking on HTML5 Video:

Highly interactive video interface with SVG masking and transitions:

WebGL in Firefox 4 and on Android:

After this, Tristan Nitot covered some of the other features of Firefox 4, especially the upcoming speed improvements:

As to upcoming features to the core of Firefox, we heard about:

• TraceMonkey (a new Javascript engine)
• Lazy Frame Construction
• Reducing I/O from the main thread
• Improved startup Time
• Hardware accelleration
• GPU text/graphics/video rendering
• Using GPU for text rendering
• JavaScript JIT (JaegerMonkey)
• HTML5 parser running own thread
• slicker interface
• no more modal dialogs
• no startup interuptions
• updates in the background

For an in-depth report on all the things shown, check out this live blog post.

In a statement, the company says, “Palm will be responsible for webOS software development and webOS based hardware products, from a robust smartphone roadmap to future slate PCs and netbooks.”

Tablets and netbooks were one of the big reasons we assumed HP bought Palm, so today’s news doesn’t come as a surprise. With everyone from Apple to Dell getting into the game –- and the market expected to shift significantly over the next few years towards these types of devices –- HP had little choice but to make a bold move.

What will be interesting to watch, however, is what devices –- if any –- the company builds for other platforms. HP recently nixed plans to launch a Windows 7-based Slate, a device teased by Steve Ballmer himself back at CES. With HP competitor Dell betting big on Android for both tablets and smartphones, HP’s strategy appears to be a lot more like that of Apple, controlling both the hardware and the operating system. Now that the Palm deal is closed, we’ll wait and see what types of devices come out of the company.

More About: HP, netbooks, palm, tablets

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In a recent podcast, the editor of Mobile-Review.com — Eldar Murtazin — discussed some supposed details of Android 3.0, a.k.a. Gingerbread. While no one has hard proof of his claims, most of what Murtazin says is in line with the evolution of the Android OS to-date.

But these rumors also add up to what is essentially a fork in the technology; Gingerbread would be for high-end, powerful devices, and Froyo would continue to ship on smaller, slower models. If these tidbits of information are true, we can also see Gingerbread as the flagship Android OS for tablets.

So, here are a few highly speculative, if not unlikely, bullet points from that podcast:

• Android hardware will keep getting bigger and better, and Android 3.0 will be tailored for the largest, most powerful devices. Screen sizes will be 3.5 inches and larger, and the OS will require a minimum of 1GHz and 512MB of RAM. This rumor correlates with current Android hardware trends; devices such as the Incredible, the EVO and the Droid X show that Android phones are getting progressively bigger, better and faster. These are the types of devices that would be sporting Gingerbread OSes in the future.
• A new 1280×760 resolution will be available for devices (such as the Droid X and EVO) with displays of 4” and larger.
• The user interface is getting a complete overhaul, with the final product being comparable to the Gallery App on Nexus One. Animations will be light and smooth.
• Gingerbread will be released in mid- October (around 15 -16th), 2010. The first Gingerbread-running handsets would start shipping during the holiday season.

All that being said, Android 2.2, a.k.a. Froyo, hasn’t been rolled out to most existing Android handsets yet; it might be a bit premature to release new OS details when the latest installment has yet to hit most people’s phones.

Still, we think these speculations are exciting, and we’ve reached out to Google to confirm or deny any of the rumors mentioned here. How likely do you think these predictions are? Let us know your own thoughts in the comments.

More About: android, android 3.0, gingerbread, rumor

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Now, thanks to Anandtech’s in-depth analysis, we know a whole lot more about the issue, the iPhone 4’s antenna and, most importantly, about the real-life impact of it all. The folks at Anandtech have employed some tricks and managed to replace the signal bars with a numeric signal strength indicator, meaning that we now have real numbers to compare the reception strength of various smartphone models when held in different positions.

What Anandtech has discovered is that most smartphones have similar reception issues. However, the iPhone 4 is worse than both the iPhone 3GS and the Nexus One in this regard. When you cover the lower-right side with your finger — especially if you clutch the area tightly — signal strength will drop, and not by a little.

However, Anandtech’s tests have showed that the iPhone 4’s external antenna works great — much better than the antenna on the iPhone 3GS. Although the signal drops, which users will notice by looking at the signal bars, in many situations it won’t result in degraded performance.

Finally, using a bumper case with your iPhone 4 almost fully alleviate the issue.

So, there you have it: The problem is real, but may not be a deal-breaker. If it’s really causing you problems (perhaps you’re living in an area with a weak signal, or you’re a lefty), it can be solved by using a bumper case.

More About: apple, iphone, iPhone 4 reception issue

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Man, I am torn. The pragmatist totally gets it. But the guy who realizes that it was the Web openness that allowed the likes of Google come from nothing to the powerhouse that it is today in a decade, gets confused.

If you are a Flash fan you see this as "see! Flash is here to stay!" As someone who wants to see the Web standards get better fast, we see some of the momentum (fact that we have audio and video, and the WebM codec) and features that we need to get in:

Robust video streaming

Closely related to the need for a standard format is the need for an effective and reliable means of delivering the video to the browser. Simply pointing the browser at a URL is not good enough, as that doesn't allow users to easily get to the part of the video they want. As we’ve been expanding into serving full-length movies and live events, it also becomes important to have fine control over buffering and dynamic quality control. Flash Player addresses these needs by letting applications manage the downloading and playback of video via Actionscript in conjunction with either HTTP or the RTMP video streaming protocol. The HTML5 standard itself does not address video streaming protocols, but a number of vendors and organizations are working to improve the experience of delivering video over HTTP. We are beginning to contribute to these efforts and hope to see a single standard emerge.

Content Protection

YouTube doesn't own the videos that you watch - they're owned by their respective creators, who control how those videos are distributed through YouTube. For YouTube Rentals, video owners require us to use secure streaming technology, such as the Flash Platform's RTMPE protocol, to ensure their videos are not redistributed. Without content protection, we would not be able to offer videos like this.

Encapsulation + Embedding

Flash Player's ability to combine application code and resources into a secure, efficient package has been instrumental in allowing YouTube videos to be embedded in other web sites. Web site owners need to ensure that embedded content is not able to access private user information on the containing page, and we need to ensure that our video player logic travels with the video (for features like captions, annotations, and advertising). While HTML5 adds sandboxing and message-passing functionality, Flash is the only mechanism most web sites allow for embedded content from other sites.

Fullscreen Video

HD video begs to be watched in full screen, but that has not historically been possible with pure HTML. While most browsers have a fullscreen mode, they do not allow javascript to initiate it, nor do they allow a small part of the page (such as a video player) to fill the screen. Flash Player provides robust, secure controls for enabling hardware-accelerated fullscreen displays. While WebKit has recently taken some steps forward on fullscreen support, it's not yet sufficient for video usage (particularly the ability to continue displaying content on top of the video).

Camera and Microphone access

Video is not just a one-way medium. Every day, thousands of users record videos directly to YouTube from within their browser using webcams, which would not be possible without Flash technology. Camera access is also needed for features like video chat and live broadcasting - extremely important on mobile phones which practically all have a built-in camera. Flash Player has provided rich camera and microphone access for several years now, while HTML5 is just getting started.

Time to knuckle down and deliver great new video features in the browsers!