Last week during Microsoft’s financial analyst meeting, company CEO Steve Ballmer said that the upcoming Xbox TV platform will launch this holiday season. He indicated its release while previewing the service in front of a captive audience, but refrained from offering specifics like the actual release date, content partners, pricing and the available content at launch.

Instead, Ballmer told the audience that Microsoft would be working alongside “dozens of hundreds of additional video content providers.” And in addition to video on-demand, the new platform will also provide live TV spanning news, sports, and numerous popular channels. The service will be similar what Microsoft has already done overseas with Sky TV in the United Kingdom, Canal Plus in France, and FoxTel in Australia.

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HTC just officially announced the Rhyme — that womanly handset otherwise known as the Bliss. As it happens, HTC isn’t explicitly marketing this as a lady phone, though it bears all the markers of a device pandering toward those of us with XX chromosomes, which is to say, it’s petite and purple with middling specs.

What you’re looking at is a handset with a 3.7-inch WVGA display, a single-core 1GHz Qualcomm CPU, 768MB of RAM, 4GB of internal storage space, a non-removable battery, microSD expansion slot, WiFi, Bluetooth and GPS radios and dual 5MP / VGA cameras. The phone runs Android 2.3 with “next-generation” Sense (that would be version 3.5) layered on top.

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Obtained by Korean site Money Today, these in-the-wild images appear to corroborate many of the specs we’ve already heard about, including that 4.5-inch AH-IPS display at 720p resolution, eight megapixel camera and 1.3 megapixel front-facing shooter. This device is also rumored to feature a 1.5GHz dual-core CPU, 1GB of RAM, 4GB of built-in storage and will reportedly ship with Android 2.3.5, though it’ll be ready to update to the forthcoming Ice Cream Sandwich, as well. The LU6200 is expected to hit the Korean market sometime next month, where it’ll run on LG Telecom’s U+ LTE network.

SOURCE via Pocket Droid

Samsung invited the world to adventure with its own smartphone OS, Bada almost two years ago and so far most of us have turned down the offer. Of course, that trip could look more appealing if a Wall Street Journal rumor is true and the company is planning to open source it for use by developers and other manufacturers alike next year.

Citing the usual “person familiar with the situation”, Samsung apparently isn’t interested in snagging any outside companies like, say, webOS, but wants to strengthen its independence from Android after Google announced it will purchase Motorola.

Right now, it feels like we’ve already seen this story play out for the still-kicking Symbian. On the other hand, maybe Samsung, with its massive manufacturing capabilities and current hit-making prowess, can strike the right balance of hardware, software and apps to make it worthwhile. If it tries and fails, well, maybe the folks in Redmond will be looking for another close friend.

SOURCE via Wall Street Journal

For those who typically work in a multi-display environment, reducing the desktop real estate to a single laptop LCD is not only awkward, but can slow down overall performance. That’s where AOC‘s new 15.6-inch-inch plug-and-play display comes in: it’s lightweight and features a built-in USB 2.0 port that receives both power and video via a single USB cable — separate power and VGA connections are not required.

Slated for a nationwide release this October for $139 USD, the TFT Active Matrix LCD panel (model e1649fwu) will feature a 16:9 aspect ratio, WLED backlighting, a dynamic contrast ratio of 50,000,000:1, a response time of 5ms, a maximum resolution of 1366 x 768 @ 60Hz, a pixel frequency of 85 MHz and a brightness level of 250 cd/m2. The display won’t be compatible with High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP), meaning that a good chunk of copy-protected video won’t be viewable on the display.

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The Acid3 Test, which was long considered to be the standard browser test for web standards compatibility has been revised and simplified. All current modern browsers, including IE9, IE10, Chrome 14-16, Firefox 6-8 and Opera 11, now score a perfect 100/100 result.

According to Ian Hickson, who maintains the Acidtests website, there have been several revisions, including SVG Fonts, a feature that was criticized by Mozilla. Hickson said that changes also affected SMIL animations, Xlink as well as DOM Range. Overall, it appears that the developers cleaned up the test and removed antiquated and unusual web technologies. I can’t help but feel that much of the changes are a late reply to criticism that has persisted over the past two years.

Acid3 itself is more than three years old and could use an update, possibly in the HTML5 range where the support of confirmed and planned technologies is pretty much a mess. Since all major browsers now achieve a perfect score in Acid3, there may be little reason to use Acid3 in comparison tests at this time.

SOURCE via Ian Hickson

According to IHS, Lenovo sold 10.2 million PCs in Q2, up 26 percent from 8.2 million in Q1 and up 23 percent from 8.3 million in Q2 of last year. Acer suffered from channel oversupply and weaker demand and saw its shipments decline by 20 percent year-over year from 11.1 million Q2 2010 to 8.9 million in the second quarter of this year. Acer appears to be especially affected by the decline of the netbook.

Dell came in second with 3.8 percent annual growth to 11.1 million units in Q2, while HP was in the lead with 15.4 million units, up 2.8 percent from last year. Asus was ranked fifth for the first time with 4.6 million shipped PCs.

IHS also mentioned Apple, which sold 3.8 million PCs, up from 3.3 million last year. “Apple’s growth is attributable to its products being highly desirable and continuing to appeal to consumers, despite the weaker consumer demand environment,” said IHS’s Matthew Wilkins. “The company’s performance was so strong that Apple now is less than 1 percentage point away from having sufficient market share to enter the Top 5 rankings.” Apple was ranked 7th.

Samsung in position 8 posted the highest growth of any Top-10 PC brand in the second quarter, with its shipments rising by 31.3 percent to 3.1 million units, up from 2.4 million during the same period in 2010.