April 2, 2012 No. That’s the answer that immediately sprang to mind when I read an article from The New York Times’ Nick Bilton this morning entitled: Does the iPad Have One Button Too Many? In the piece, Bilton describes a week he spent without using the home button. Read more [...]

April 2, 2012 A report in French newspaper Les Echos has said that Sony is planning to launch hardware based on the Google TV media platform in France in September, suggesting that the manufacturer has slipped on the summer launch it promised back in January . Les Echos confirms that two products are initially expected to launch — a standalone set-top box, anticipated to cost around €200 (almost $270) on launch; as well as a Blu Ray player, likely the NSZ-GT1 it showed off in London, which is set to launch for €300 (or around $400). While the report confirms the September launch for France, it also suggests that the UK, Spain, and Germany could also see the hardware at the same time Read more [...]

April 2, 2012 When it comes to browsing, Internet Explorer has stayed consistently on top, but Chrome has been steadily chipping away at its lead — it even overtook IE briefly last month. The latest data from Net Market Share , however, suggests that Internet Explorer may be on the rebound. Read more [...]

April 2, 2012 Today the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) released images of the 1940 Census, and a project is already underway to ensure that the information becomes easily available to anyone who wants to know a bit more about the Great Depression. The NARA has teamed up with leading genealogy groups like Archives.com and FamilySearch.org to create what's being described as a "high quality, searchable database" of the more than one million pages contained in the Census. Read more [...]

April 2, 2012 Late last year, Japanese wireless carrier NTT Docomo announced that it was planning to compete with Qualcomm by producing LTE-capable semiconductors in a joint venture with Samsung, Fujitsu, Fujitsu Semiconductor, NEC, and Panasonic Mobile Communications. The companies said it planned to have the details for the partnership ironed out by the end of March, but we're now learning that the partnership is being dissolved because the companies couldn't reach an agreement Read more [...]

April 2, 2012 Apple has announced that its statutory warranty period in Europe will be extended to two years, following pressure from the European Union to comply with EU law. This doesn't mean that two years of AppleCare now comes as standard, though — the warranty extension only covers defects that were present when the device was shipped, putting the burden of proof onto the customer that the issue is caused by Apple. Read more [...]

April 2, 2012 NASA offered up three sets of its patents at auction last week, but had a hard time finding buyers. While a set of seven software development patents sold for $75,000, two other sets of patents went unclaimed. Read more [...]

April 2, 2012 So far developers have earned 70% of the revenue from application downloads from the App Store and 60% from iAd revenue, however yesterday Apple revealed on its Developer Center that developers will now be earning an extra 10% from iAd revenue, boosting it to 70% in total. The full changes in the updated developers agreement state (a) Apple Campaigns Read more [...]

April 2, 2012 A new five-part documentary series begins tomorrow, exploring the changes in the heavy metal music scene over the last ten years. In On The Record , Metal Injection speaks to musicians, journalists, and record labels to discover how the industry feels that music has changed, with one major theme being the massive impact of the internet on the genre. Each aspect of the music publishing industry has been affected in some way, with both label owners and journalists specifically acknowledging that their jobs have been changed by our increasingly connected lives. Read more [...]

April 2, 2012 Pixel Qi founder Mary Lou Jepsen has taken to her blog to announce that the outdoor-viewable color screen technology is now shipping in "about a dozen" consumer products. These include known quantities like the Notion Ink Adam and One Laptop Per Child's XO 3.0 tablet, along with various Windows and Android tablets from manufacturers such as ZTE. The technology has also found some more niche uses, such as a car wash transaction solution and a golf stroke video training system, and Jepsen says that Pixel Qi screens can be found in classified military devices too. Read more [...]