The Applications store is the heart and soul of every modern smartphone and it’s crucial for Microsoft to get things right it in their upcoming Windows Phone 7 OS. Judging from the video that they showed on their MIX10 event they might just have what it takes to do that.

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On this day, exactly 25 years ago Symbolics computers of Cambridge, Massachusetts, registered the first web address, ending in dotcom. Five more companies dared to go in the dotcom area that same year and nothing suggested the avalanche that was to follow.

Twelve years later the millionth dotcom domain got registered and now there are 668 000 dotcom sites registered every month. In the meantime the world saw the rise of dotcom websites that defined the internet as we know it today.

Google.com (15 September 1997), Yahoo.com (18 January 1995), Facebook.com (29 March 1997) and Twitter (21 January 2000) are probably visited by most of you on a daily basis and one can hardly imagine what the internet would be like without them. Read more »

You might have noticed earlier today that the Apple Store website was down again. And as it usually happens after it went back up again a new product was available for order.

Now my editor doesn’t allow me to open the discussion of why Apple alone in the world needs to take down their whole company website to announce the availability of a new product so I’ll just give you the good news.

The Apple iPad is now available on pre-order and if you really, really want to be among the first ones to have it, you might wanna order it right now. Read more »

So the Apple iPad isn’t even out yet and here goes the first device trying to kill it. Or at least that’s what the guys from Hott have said about their 4.8″ tablet dubbed MD500. Running Android (with a few home-brewed customizations) it packs an ARM9 CPU. Check it out in action in the video after the break.

Coming with a much thinner bezel and at the incredibly sweet price of 92 US dollars (to distributors anyway) it does seem worthy of some attention but I doubt things will be as sweet in the end as they sound now.

Anyway with the lukewarm reception the iPad is getting so far it’s even unclear yet if it will be the device to beat, so we will have to wait and see how this battle develops.

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Apparently every second or so person that this guy working in the Google Maps team knows can’t live without two things – their bike and Google Maps. So they decided to do something about the fellas that pedal their way through the country by including Bicycling directions in Google Maps. True story!

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After five long years of development and several months of teasing, Pentax finally revealed their 645D medium format camera. Built around a 40 megapixel 44 x 33 CCD sensor, the Pentax 645D sports a dust and water-resistant body with solid magnesium-steel-alloy frame and reinforced glass LCD display with 921k dots.

The extra durability suggests that the Pentax 645D is not meant to be held as a prisoner in some photo studio but taken out. The Japanese company also developed a new high-precision 11-point wide-frame autofocus sensor for their first digital medium format camera.

So now all that it takes for you landscape photos to take a huge leap forward is 9400 US dollars and a plane ticket to Japan as this is the only country to get the 645D at launch.

Sigh, I won’t be among the ones on board that plane as I still can’t save enough cash even for a full-frame DSLR…

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The HTC HD2’s evil twin made another public appearance, starring in a short and blurry video. The CDMA-powered full-touch device that runs on Android is still very much a mystery but geeks all around the CDMA-networked world already know they want it.

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Opera might not be the most popular browser in terms of market share, but it certainly isn’t short of innovative features. Its latest 10.5 version was made available for Windows-running computers today and according to the developers it should be the fastest desktop browser alive.

The new JavaScript engine should offer up to 7 times faster performance, which should put it miles ahead of the competitors. Of course, JavaScript is only one of many aspects of a browser’s performance so it might be a bit too bold of a claim but still… Read more »

If you were to name the device with the greatest hacker appeal that would of course be the Nokia N900. The latest portion of dark side programming that we stumbled upon enables the Maemo-powered device to act as a remote shutter for a Nikon DSLR camera.

In theory the widget that the guy from DoItDifferent created should also work with other IR-enabled Nikons so it’s not only the D40 owners (the camera used for the demo) that should celebrate the news. And to sweeten and officially seal the deal you can also make the N900 sync its IR wireless trigger and its LED flash for some creative lighting effects.

Check out this short video of the N900 and D40 in action:

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Fortunately, the introduction of free navigation was only the start of some heavy further development of Nokia’s Ovi Maps mobile application. Just over a month passed since the major 3.03 release and here we are having the first beta of its successor.

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And here we have a contender for the Guinness Book of World Records. An exhibition at Heathrow Terminal 5 sponsored by Heathrow / BAA, Nokia and Skyline Whitespace will be displaying prints of photos taken with the N86 8MP the size of a double decker bus.

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You remember the Parrot AR.Drone, right? The ultra cool four-rotor helicopter (or quadricopter, as they call it) is certainly among the best “accessories” you can get for your iPhone or iPod touch.

An AR.Drone prototype was at the Parrot booth at the MWC but they never really bothered showing it to anyone. Read more »

You might have noticed yesterday that the Apple Store website was down for a while. It turns out that the addition of a new product caused this hiccup – the company is now distributing the new 3rd version of their image processing software Aperture. Just how can Apple be in the business for so long and still not find a way to update their website without shutting it down first is beyond me, but that’s a whole other story.

Aperture 3 features more than 200 new features, the most noteworthy of them being Faces, Places and Brushes. Read more »

Back in the days when Apple announced the iPhone 3.0 OS they promised that it will support loads of smart accessories, starting with the Nike+ personal running system and its monitors. And now, eight months later we are seeing another one of those – the ZoomIt SD card reader. Let’s just hope that the third one won’t need as much to appear.

But let’s not digress – the ZoomIt is really helpful tool that allows you to share photos, music and documents between your iPhone/iPod Touch and the rest of your gear. Read more »

olved thisWith several manufacturers already offering sensors, capable of delivering high-res images and FullHD video, it’s only a matter of processing power until we finally see a mobile phone that has them. And NEC have solved this with their CE151 chip.

Capable of full HD video output and still image processing up to 13 megapixel, it’s something want to see on a cameraphone this year. Read more »