THIS PHONE IS REAL.  So I’ve been following Gizmodo’s Liveblog of the android press event right now and they’ve finally gotten to the details I desperately wanted to hear about.  The phone ships TODAY. It seems like the rumors of the prices were true.  $530 dollars for the phone unlocked, and $180 for T-mobile.  The website has gone live, so you can see it now at google.com/phone.

A pleasant surprise though – Vodaphone and Verizon are jumping onboard with the Nexus one and will have plans available sometime spring 2010.  AWESOME.  <3 google.  Also, with Vodaphone – it seems pretty obvious that they’re planning on taking their market globally.

Some other awesome tidbits:

• Does have snapdragon 1 ghz
• Coming with google earth app
• voice recognition for every text field on the phone
• Sync with picasa
• You get all the recognized droid apps with it
• Comes with droid 2.1
• and more…

Follow the live blogging to find out more!

[Content via Gizmodo Liveblog]
[Google Nexus One]

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So omg!ubuntu! has decided to give us a small peek on the current ChromeOS build from google.  A few things about ChromeOS that you may like to note are that it is debian-based and will be an OS that seamlessly stitches together the web-browser and OS.

From a brief look at the article, you can sort of get a feel of the basic features of the OS.  And in case you are an Ubuntu user and you want to try it out, omg!ubuntu! cordially provides some links which I have reproduced here:

• Dev channel (for 32-bit systems): google-chrome-unstable_current_i386.deb
• Dev channel (for 64-bit systems): google-chrome-unstable_current_amd64.deb

[Contents and Image via omg!ubuntu!]

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So, as many of you know, Google Voice is currently invite only.  Until just recently, the invites had to be requested through Google Voice itself.  Well, if you have a friend who has an account and you were too lazy to sign up and wait for yours, it might not be long before you can hassle them for an invite. 

Today, Google has announced that they are going to start giving invites to people that already have Google Voice!  It won’t happen all at once, but if you remember Gmail at all back in the beta stages, people started out with a few invites and then all of a sudden, it exploded into a hundred.  I assume this will be the same sort of deal – so soon everyone will have a Google Voice account.  Just peachy right?  Now if only AT&T would do something about their stubbornness…

[Content via TechCrunch]

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Are you worried about swine flu in your area (even though you really shouldn’t be)?  Then be worried no longer cause lifehacker has found a nice flutracking web app that gives you an easy to read overview of where there are outbreaks and whatnot.  The more you zoom in, the more details you can get.  You can even get as close as to individual cities.

The map was specifically designed to track the progress of swine using Rhiza Labs and Google (which you can easily identify from the google maps control scheme) using data from various sources.  Anyway, as you can see above, there is a key which identifies what each circle means.  There are also more statistics on the website if you want to check it out.  Apparently Bethlehem, PA (where I am currently situated) is pretty Swine-flu free.  I have heard that there was one case on campus, but nothing beyond that, so woo.  Can’t really say the same of New Jersey though.  Not really too worried about it at the moment though since Swine-flu has been determined to be less lethal than the common flu at the moment, so until that changes, I won’t really be panicking anytime soon.

[Content via Lifehacker]
[FluTracking at RhizaLabs]

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TechCrunch has noted today that google maps on the iPhone has recently incorporating ads and user-generated content.  I’m not very surprised about the ads, but the user-generated content does seem slightly odd.TechCrunch notes how it’s slightly unusual that the user-generated content is being incorporated since it doesn’t really bring anything to the table. Also, there is no apparent way to turn it off either.  I think I would have to agree that having a feature where random people are pushing unnecessary content onto your maps is pretty useless.  Granted, if you were looking for a random place of interest nearby, it might actually prove useful; but when you’re actually just trying to find something or go somewhere, then there really isn’t a point.

Hopefully Google and Apple won’t keep pushing these updates onto users without warning.  Also, hopefully, but unlikely, there will be a way to disable the ads on google maps as well.  Or at least filter them to useful ones, such as restaurants, hotels, gas, and whatnot.

.

[Content and Image via TechCrunch]

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Google’s Chrome Frame is an open source plugin for Internet Explorers 6, 7, and 8 that essentially replaces the built in rendering engine with WebKit and Chrome’s Javascript VM.

Get it here.

What’s the point? The only reason anyone ever uses IE is to download another browser or view web pages that were foolishly designed for it.

I think we’ll be seeing this pushed in Google Pack or suggested by GMail, YouTube, etc. alongside Chrome. According to the Google Code page,  developers need to do as little as add a single tag to direct IE users to the Chrome Frame download page. If someone’s too reluctant to use Chrome, adding a plugin to Microsoft’s bulky browser might be a little more painless, from the user’s perspective, and it lets Google control exactly how its applications are displayed.

Update: Although it’s written on the download page, it’s important to note Chrome Frame is for “Windows Vista and XP SP2.” I’ve tried it on both Windows 7 and Windows XP SP3, and it didn’t work in both cases (Windows simply used Trident, even after a reboot, despite Chrome Frame being active in the plugins manager).

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So, Amazon has finally come out and taken a huge step in their fight against the Google Books settlement.  They have filed a brief with the U.S. District Court (of which you can read here).

Now, we all know that Amazon has been scanning books for their Kindle, which makes a few of us ask ourselves “what’s wrong with Google doing the same thing?”  Well, what Google was doing was technically not the same thing as they were scanning books that are now out-of-print without any permission.  Of course, Amazon has not done this, which makes them take up this platform for their opposition.  There were already many others who were against this in the beginning, but I think now that Amazon has formally stated their position on it as well, things are going to get more dicey from here on out.  Apparently there are already more briefs in the making as well from other major companies, including Sony and Microsoft.

I, for one, still thoroughly enjoy reading my manga from physical pages when I can.

[Content via Engadget]
[Amazon’s Brief (PDF)]

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