Technology

Technology

Google+ Social Networking Now Open to Everyone, New Features Added

Google opened the gates to its social network, Google+, to everyone today and rolled out more than a dozen new features to the service, many of them aimed at mobile phone users.

For 12 weeks, Google+ has been in “field trials,” Google Senior Vice President of Engineering Vic Gundotra explained in a company blog. “We’re nowhere near done,” he wrote, “but with the improvements we’ve made so far we’re ready to move from field trial to beta.” Now anyone can go to the Google+ site and sign up for the service.

With the new "Hangouts on Air" feature, you can open up a hangout session and as many as nine people can join in.

In addition to open enrollment, Google introduced a number of improvements to the hangout feature of Google+. Hangouts allow people to chat face to face through video. With today’s improvements, users of Android phones will be able to use hangouts on their mobiles.

Google is also expanding the online version of hangouts. Now, through “Hangouts on Air,” you can open up a hangout session and as many as nine people can join it. An unlimited number can watch the hangout session.

Hangouts is getting some extras, too. They allow you to share what’s on your computer in a hangout, scribble with friends on an online sketchpad, share Google docs, and create or join public hangouts about a topic, like the collapse of your favorite sports team or raising alpacas.

Searching, Now Made Easy
A welcome improvement for many Google+ users will be the introduction of a search feature into the social network. Now you can type words into a Google+ search box and find content you’re interested in and as well as people to connect to.

Some mobile phone improvements were announced today, too. Better text messaging (SMS) support is now available in the United States and India. Now, from your cell phone, you can post to Google+, receive notifications, and respond to group messages through SMS.

You can also +mention people in posts or comments viewed on your phone. When you do that, the person will be notified that they’re mentioned in the post or comment. And you can +1 comments, too, but only from iOS devices.

You can take care of more housekeeping of Google+ from your phone now, too. You can edit your profile photo and customize the notifications you receive on your cell, since you may not want your phone flooded with notifications while you’re on the go.

If you have an Android phone, you can now move the Google+ app to a SD card to free up the mobile’s internal storage.

Google+ Vocabulary Changes
..read more at www.pcworld.com

Apple loses another unreleased iPhone

Cava22, the San Francisco bar where another unreleased iPhone apparently went missing. (Credit: James Martin/CNET)

In a bizarre repeat of a high-profile incident last year, an Apple employee once again appears to have lost an unreleased iPhone in a bar, CNET has learned.

The errant iPhone, which went missing in San Francisco’s Mission district in late July, sparked a scramble by Apple security to recover the device over the next few days, according to a source familiar with the investigation.

Last year, an iPhone 4 prototype was bought by a gadget blog that paid $5,000 in cash. This year’s lost phone seems to have taken a more mundane path: it was taken from a Mexican restaurant and bar and may have been sold on Craigslist for $200. Still unclear are details about the device, what version of the iOS operating system it was running, and what it looks like.

While Apple has not publicly announced any plans for future phones, unconfirmed reports in the last few weeks suggest the launch date for the iPhone 5 is likely to be in early October. Other reports from Taiwan have set the date at September or October. (See CNET’s iPhone 5 rumor roundup.)

Apple declined to comment after being contacted this morning. A spokesman for the San Francisco Police Department said the company did not file a police report based on the loss at the bar. Craigslist did not respond to requests for comment.

A day or two after the phone was lost at San Francisco’s Cava 22, which describes itself as a “tequila lounge” that also serves lime-marinated shrimp ceviche, Apple representatives contacted San Francisco police, saying the device was priceless and the company was desperate to secure its safe return, the source said.

Cava22, in San Francisco's Mission District, where another unreleased iPhone apparently went missing last month. (Credit: James Martin/CNET)

Apple electronically traced the phone to a two-floor, single-family home in San Francisco’s Bernal Heights neighborhood, according to the source.

When San Francisco police and Apple’s investigators visited the house, they spoke with a man in his twenties who acknowledged being at Cava 22 on the night the device went missing. But he denied knowing anything about the phone. The man gave police permission to search the house, and they found nothing, the source said. Before leaving the house, the Apple employees offered the man money for the phone no questions asked, the source said, adding that the man continued to deny he had knowledge of the phone.

After last year’s embarrassing loss, Apple reportedly has taken extraordinary steps to protect its prototype devices from leaks. Next-generation iPhones are sent to carriers for testing “inside locked and sealed boxes so that the carriers can carry out checks on their network compatibility in their labs,” according to the Guardian.

Apple developers have been given new iPhones with an upgraded processor — the one that is used in the iPad 2 and is expected to appear in the next-generation iPhone. But the device “is virtually identical to the iPhone 4, and there is no way anyone can tell it’s not an iPhone 4 based on the phone’s exterior,” a report at 9to5Mac.com says. Even last year’s prototype was enclosed in a case designed to make it look like an iPhone 3GS.

Last year’s prototype iPhone went missing when Robert Gray Powell, an Apple computer engineer who was 28 years old at the time, left it in a German beer garden in Redwood City, Calif.

In early August, San Mateo County prosecutors filed misdemeanor criminal charges against two men, Brian Hogan and Sage Wallower, for allegedly selling Powell’s iPhone 4 prototype to Gawker Media’s Gizmodo blog. An arraignment is scheduled for tomorrow.

Prosecutors obtained a warrant to search the home of Gizmodo editor Jason Chen, and indicated they might prosecute Gizmodo, but eventually decided not to file charges.

Under a California law dating back to 1872, any person who finds lost property and knows who the owner is likely to be–but “appropriates such property to his own use”–is guilty of theft. In addition, a second state law says any person who knowingly receives property that has been obtained illegally can be imprisoned for up to one year.

CNET’s Josh Lowensohn and Elinor Mills contributed to this report.

(Report credit: CNET News, Josh Lowensohn and Elinor Mills.)

BREAKING: Google Buys Motorola for $12.5 Billion

Google has purchased Motorola Mobility, a company that makes many of the phones its Android operating system runs on, for $12.5 billion — a 63% premium on its current share price.

The acquisition, Google said in a a statement, “will enable Google to supercharge the Android ecosystem.” The company will continue to be run as a separate business.

Buying a hardware company is an unusual move for Google.

More to come… follow this post for updates via Mashable.

Redsn0w 0.9.8b5 Released To Jailbreak iOS 5 Beta 5 On iPhone 4, 3GS, iPad, iPod touch

Late last week, iOS 5 Beta 5 was seeded to eager Apple developers, As always, many are asked the million-dollar question: can it be jailbroken? As with all previous builds, the answer is yes, with the latest version of Redsn0w which was just released, as long as you don’t mind plugging your device into your computer every time you power it on.

“redsn0w has been updated to 0.9.8b5, adding support for Apple’s new iOS5 beta5 (point it directly at the beta5 IPSW). Please use this only if you’re a jailbreak app developer with a legit Apple dev account, and remember it’s a tethered jailbreak for now!”

iOS5 - Apple iOS

Redsn0w is able to apply a standard tethered jailbreak on almost any iOS device, except for the iPad 2. Since this is an experimental build of iOS 5, iOS jailbreakers will likely be reluctant to disclose vulnerabilities for it yet, making an untethered jailbreak highly unlikely at this point, meaning that the jailbroken device will have to be plugged into a computer running Redsn0w every time it’s powered on, or else it won’t boot into a jailbroken state and won’t be able to run unofficial apps or tweaks.

Redsn0w is incredibly easy to use considering that all the instructions are presented in a relatively well-built user interface. In order to jailbreak your device using Redsn0w, all you’ll need is a copy of the iOS 5 Beta 5 firmware file and iTunes 10.5 Beta 5, which can be both obtained from Apple’s developer website. Some addition iOS skills are recommended, such as switching your device into DFU mode and restoring it with iTunes in case the process somehow fails. You can read our full guide on how to perform this jailbreak here.

It should be noted however that if you jailbreak your device on iOS 5, you wont get future OTA updates from Apple, until and unless you restore your iOS to stock state.

iOS 5 is the upcoming major release of operating system that runs on iPhones, iPod touches and iPads. First unveiled at this year’s WWDC, after months of rumors and speculation, iOS 5 includes several new features that had long been wished for by iOS fans. Among those, there’s a new notification system known as Notification Center which unobtrusively queues up all the notifications issued by apps and services; enhancements to Mobile Safari, especially the iPad version; Newsstand, a special folder on the iOS Home Screen that organizes all magazine apps; and system-wide Twitter integration.

It’s important to stress once again that it’s currently impossible to jailbreak iPad 2(s) on anything above iOS 4.3.3. Redsn0w only works with any iPod touch, iPhone and the first-generation iPad.

>> Redsn0w 0.9.8b5 for Windows OS
>> Redsn0w 0.9.8b5 for Mac OS

Apple Launches iCloud Beta [+PHOTOS]

Apple Launches iCloud!

Apple has unveiled the beta for , the company’s new suite of media streaming and cloud-based services.

The new beta, which is available to all users with an Apple ID, features web-based version of Mail, Contacts, Calendar, Find my IPhone and iWork. They are accessible if you visit www.iCloud.com while using iOS 5 (available to Apple developers) or Mac OS X Lion. It does not include Apple’s cloud music services, including iTunes Match.

Apple also unveiled the pricing structure for iCloud. The first 5GB of storage on the service are free. An addition 10GB will cost $20, 20GB will cost $40 and 50GB will retail for $100. It’s a good deal more expensive than Amazon Cloud Drive, which gives 20GB of space for $20 and lets users store an unlimited amount of music for free.

We’re playing around with the iCloud beta now, and while we’ll have more to report, our initial conclusion is that the iCloud beta is a modified version of MobileMe. It includes similar interfaces, which isn’t a surprise. The addition of iWork support is a welcomed addition though, as is the simplistic and universal interface for all of Apple’s cloud services.

We’ve taken some screenshots of the beta and embedded them below. Check them out, and let us know what you think of the iCloud beta in the comments.

[source: Mashable – Credit: Ben Parr]