Watch Out, Apple.. Google's gPhone is Coming

The G1 may not be as sleek and sexy as the iPhone, but its peppy, easy-to-use touchscreen interface makes mincemeat of all the other iPhone wanna-bes, and it packs in some killer features—like 360-degree Street View—that the iPhone has yet to match.

The G1's 3.17-inch screen is slightly smaller than the iPhone's 3.5-inch display, and at first glance, its interface looks a bit dull compared to Apple's red-hot handset (and unfortunately, my shaky photography skills don't help). But beneath the G1's sliding display, we get a surprise—a full, Sidekick-sized QWERTY keypad, perfect for those who don't want to deal with a touchscreen keyboard. There's also a trackball, a Home key, and physical Call and End buttons.

While the G1's main screen isn't quite as eye-popping as the iPhone's, the Android-powered display was surprisingly responsive—a quick flick of my fingertip opened a windowshade of applications, while tapping the status bar at the top of the screen instantly revealed e-mail, SMS, and voice-mail alerts. Indeed, tapping and scrolling around the G1's various menus was a seamless pleasure, akin to what you'd expect from an iPhone. And while leading iPhone competitors like the Samsung Instinct always felt a bit sluggish to me, the G1's peppy interface responded quickly to my every touch.

The G1's dialer and contact list immediately grabs all your online Google calendar info and contacts—and for those with IM accounts, the G1 will indicate which of your contacts happen to be signed in for chat, an "online presence" feature familiar to anyone with a Helio phone. As with the iPhone, you can flick your contact list with a finger, spinning it roulette-style. Nice.

The Android Web browser on the G1 immediately takes its place as one of the top mobile browsers I've seen, right next to those on the iPhone and Nokia Nseries handsets. Pages rendered quickly (over Wi-Fi, at least) and perfectly; a tap brings up zoom in/out controls, while a touch-enabled magnifying glass lets you quickly scan lengthy Web pages. (No multitouch-enabled "pinching," however.) See a picture you want to save? Just touch and hold; a contextual menu pops up with a variety of options, including saving the image to the phone.

Coolest of all, though, is Google Maps on the G1, complete with GPS and Street View. In the demo I saw (over Wi-Fi), maps loaded quickly, as did Street View images, and they refreshed almost instantly as I dragged maps and images around with my finger.

The best part? Using Street View with the G1's built-in compass. Say you're facing north; you hold the G1 in front of you, select Street View, and you'll see your street from a north-facing vantage point. Turn east—with the phone still in front of you—and the Street View image follows. Angle the phone skyward, and Street View moves likewise. Way, way cool (and impressively fast and responsive, to boot).

Disappointments? Well, the G1's music player is no great shakes; it'll play your standard MP3/WMA/AAC/Ogg Vobis files, but the bare-bones player interface can't hold a candle to the iPhone's. (At least you can buy MP3s wirelessly using the bundled Amazon application.) Also, there's no video player—then again, as T-Mobile reps kept repeating, there's nothing stopping third-party developers from building one (or many).

And while the G1's three-megapixel camera tops the iPhone's 2MP shooter, the G1 doesn't come with built-in video recording—although (yep, you guessed it), third-party developers should feel free to fill the void.

Overall, however, I'm pretty impressed. I wasn't that wowed by the G1's uninspiring design, but Android shows a lot of promise, and its peppy performance on the G1 is a huge plus. (Yahoo! Tech Editor)

Meet your new bestfriend: the Dell's Inspiron Mini 9

Dell’s long awaited entry into the netbook market has finally been made official, and based on the leaks it seems that it comes with little surprise, both in terms of pricing but also overall specs. The netbook has been officially dubbed the Inspiron Mini 9 and its available today with an estimated shipping date of September 16.

The Mini 9 offers a few configurations and will be available in either Obsidian Black or Alpine White, of course the Alpine White comes as a $25 premium. In addition to the outside coloring, the netbook will also offer a choice between Windows XP or Ubuntu 8.04 with a “custom Dell interface.”

The specs inside the Mini 9 are about the same as what we have been hearing around the Internet and include an 8.9-inch display with a 1024 x 600 resolution, 1.6GHz Intel Atom processor, Intel Graphics Media Accelerator (GMA) 950, Wi-Fi 802.11g and a 4-cell battery.

The lower priced Mini 9 starts at $349 and comes with Ubuntu 8.04, 512MB of RAM, a 4GB SSD and leaves off the webcam. However that same model tops out at $494 with an upgrade to 1GB of RAM, a 16GB SSD, built-in Bluetooth 2.1 and an integrated 1.3-megapixel webcam. Other options include a middle of the road 8GB SSD and 0.3-megapixel webcam.

The higher priced, aka Windows XP model of the Mini 9 begins at $449 and features 1GB of RAM, an 8GB SSD, built-in Bluetooth 2.1 and the integrated 1.3-megapixel webcam. This model offers an upgrade for the SSD to 16GB and tops out at $489. (Shared by Bongski)

World's Next Super Scope is 10 Times More Powerful than Hubble

CHAJNANTOR PLAIN, Chile — Sixteen thousand five hundred feet up into the Andes, deep inside the Atacama Desert, lies this barren, windswept plateau of maroon rock and sand. One of the driest places on Earth, the table-top-flat Chajnantor is nothing short of a wasteland, offering few humans reason to tread here. Until now.


High-tech teams from across the globe are racing to 16,000 ft. in the Chilean Andes to erect ALMA, which will become this planet's largest and most advanced radio telescope when it's completed in 2012. PopularMechanics.com heads south—way south—for a field report on what it takes to let astronomers look 14 billion years back in time, with 10 times the power of Hubble.

Giant excavators and construction equipment operate in the distance as I labor to breathe in the thin air while walking toward a gleaming metal and glass building. I've come to get an in-depth progress report on the construction of what will be the planet's most advanced land-based telescope: the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA).

Consisting of 66 radio antennas spread across 10 miles and linked to the world's most extensive superconducting electronic receiving system, ALMA will peer into regions of space never seen before. The Chajnantor Plain was chosen following a worldwide search due to its cloudless skies and razor-thin atmosphere, which will allow the antennas' super-sensitive receivers to detect electromagnetic wavelengths of less than a hair's width, down to 0.3 millimeters. By tapping the millimeter/submillimeter spectrum, ALMA will soon generate images of the cold universe, dim areas of gas and dust where new stars form. For the first time, astronomers should be able to see 14 billion years into the past, to the formation of the earliest galaxies.

Researchers will move the antennas to shrink or expand the array, creating a giant zoom lens with resolutions 10 times better than that of the Hubble Space Telescope. Funded by a consortium of astronomical organizations from North America, Europe and Japan, the $1.3 billion project is scheduled for completion in 2012. But first it must be built.

"Nothing like this has ever been done before," says Adrian Russell, ALMA project manager for the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, one of the American sponsors. "We are delivering a lot of very complex, sensitive and expensive hardware to a remote and challenging site where it all must be assembled."

My visit begins at the Operations Support Facilities site at 10,000 ft., where I arrive following a 9-mile drive up a dusty road after turning off Chilean Route 23 and passing through a guard station. With its modern metal and glass buildings, the OSF site resembles a high-tech campus in Silicon Valley. Known as "the low site," this is the base camp for ALMA with housing for 500, a power station, cantina, cinema, medical clinic, stop signs and streetlights. Technicians will operate the antennas from here. This is also where engineers are assembling the antennas after trucking in the parts from the port of Antofagasta 180 miles away.(By Paul Tolmé; YahooNews)

Large Hadron Collider Project is a Big Success

GENEVA - The world's largest particle collider passed its first major tests by firing two beams of protons in opposite directions around a 17-mile (27-kilometer) underground ring Wednesday in what scientists hope is the next great step to understanding the makeup of the universe.

After a series of trial runs, two white dots flashed on a computer screen at 10:26 a.m. (0826 GMT) indicating that the protons had traveled clockwise along the full length of the 4 billion Swiss franc (US$3.8 billion) Large Hadron Collider — described as the biggest physics experiment in history.

"There it is," project leader Lyn Evans said when the beam completed its lap.

Champagne corks popped in labs as far away as Chicago, where contributing and competing scientists watched the proceedings by satellite.

Five hours later, scientists successfully fired a beam counterclockwise.

Physicists around the world now have much greater power to smash the components of atoms together in attempts to learn about their structure.

"Well done, everybody," said Robert Aymar, director-general of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, to cheers from the assembled scientists in the collider's control room at the Swiss-French border.

The organization, known by its French acronym CERN, began firing the protons — a type of subatomic particle — around the tunnel in stages less than an hour earlier, with the first beam injection at 9:35 a.m. (0735 GMT).

Eventually two beams will be fired at the same time in opposite directions with the aim of recreating conditions a split second after the big bang, which scientists theorize was the massive explosion that created the universe.

"My first thought was relief," said Evans, who has been working on the project since its inception in 1984. "This is a machine of enormous complexity. Things can go wrong at any time. But this morning has been a great start."

He didn't want to set a date, but said that he expected scientists would be able to conduct collisions for their experiments "within a few months."

The collider is designed to push the proton beam close to the speed of light, whizzing 11,000 times a second around the tunnel.

Scientists hope to eventually send two beams of protons through two tubes about the width of fire hoses, speeding through a vacuum that is colder and emptier than outer space. The paths of these beams will cross, and a few protons will collide. The collider's two largest detectors — essentially huge digital cameras weighing thousands of tons — are capable of taking millions of snapshots a second.

The CERN experiments could reveal more about "dark matter," antimatter and possibly hidden dimensions of space and time. It could also find evidence of the hypothetical particle — the Higgs boson — which is sometimes called the "God particle" because it is believed to give mass to all other particles, and thus to matter that makes up the universe.

The supercooled magnets that guide the proton beam heated slightly in the morning's first test, leading to a pause to recool them before trying the opposite direction.

The start of the collider came over the objections of some who feared the collision of protons could eventually imperil the Earth by creating micro-black holes, subatomic versions of collapsed stars whose gravity is so strong they can suck in planets and other stars.

"It's nonsense," said James Gillies, chief spokesman for CERN.

CERN was backed by leading scientists like Britain's Stephen Hawking , who declared the experiments to be absolutely safe.

Gillies told the AP that the most dangerous thing that could happen would be if a beam at full power were to go out of control, and that would only damage the accelerator itself and burrow into the rock around the tunnel.

Nothing of the sort occurred Wednesday, though the accelerator is still probably a year away from full power.

The project organized by the 20 European member nations of CERN has attracted researchers from 80 nations. Some 1,200 are from the United States, an observer country that contributed US$531 million. Japan, another observer, also is a major contributor.

Some scientists have been waiting for 20 years to use the LHC.

The complexity of manufacturing it required groundbreaking advances in the use of supercooled, superconducting equipment. The 2001 start and 2005 completion dates were pushed back by two years each, and the cost of the construction was 25 percent higher than originally budgeted in 1996, Luciano Maiani, who was CERN director-general at the time, told The Associated Press.

Maiani and the other three living former directors-general attended the launch Wednesday.

Smaller colliders have been used for decades to study the makeup of the atom. Less than 100 years ago scientists thought protons and neutrons were the smallest components of an atom's nucleus, but in stages since then experiments have shown they were made of still smaller quarks and gluons and that there were other forces and particles.

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RP Car Sales in 2008

Car sales this year increases in spite of soaring prices of diesels and fuels. Although recent months sales have declined, the car sales in the early part of the year created more than just a cushion that causes still a net increase from prior year’s sales. The Chamber of Automotive Manufacturers of the Philippines (Camp), credits this higher sales to the US dollars remitted by the OFW and the growing middle-income market in the country.

Alfonso Salcedo Jr., president of BPI Family Bank, one of the leading banks in the car loan sector noted that while there is an increase in car sales, the car types that get sold more has shifted from SUVs or bigger vehicles to that of smaller cars. “There has been a very noticeable shift in preference to smaller cars. It’s what’s driving the industry, the under one-million peso cars” Salcedo said.

It’s the big sports utility vehicles (SUVs) that are greatly affected by high fuel costs as the market is shifting to low displacement engines, according to Daniel Isla, first vice president for marketing and sales of Toyota Motor Philippines Corp.

Topping the sales from January to July this year is Toyota Motor’s Vios which is priced below P600,000 each at 6,215 units while Honda Car’s City ranked second in the small passenger car sub-compact category.

Toyota Innova with a retail price around P800,000 leads sale for MPV or multi-purpose vehicle at 6,094 units. MPV’s are getting more popular because of their dual purpose, either for family use or for business.

Toyota’s Avanza is next on the MPV category with 3,317 sold units at a tag price above P500,000 per unit, followed by Isuzu’s Crosswind at 3,219 units. Mistubishi’s Adventure comes in forth with sales of 3,091 units.

Hyundai.’s Getz, priced below P600,000, meanwhile, leads the sale of small passenger car hatchback category with sales of 1,573 units in the seven-month period. SUV’s aren’t totally pushed out of the picture, as they are still the vehicle of choice for the more moneyed buyers. Toyota’s Fortuner, a P1.3 million vehicle, leads at 3,226 units, followed by Honda’s CRV at 2,132. Coming in at third with sales of 1,288 units is Ford’s Everest.

Summary

Small car sub-compact category

1. Toyota VIOS
2. Honda City


Multi-purpoe vehicle category (MPV)

1. Toyota Innova
2. Toyota Avanza
3. Isuzu Crosswind
4. Mitsubishi Adventure


Small Car Hatcback Category

1. Hyundai Getz


Sports Utility Vehicle (SUV)

1. Toyota Fortuner
2. Honda CRV
3. Ford Everest