If the software is calling a web service that performs the translation, then on the smartphone the software is trivial--a simple client that gets some user input, sends it to the internet, and receives translated text back. If this is the case, then there's no point in calling it "smartphone software", the brains are all on a server somewhere. And that server software deserves to be compared apples-to-apples to other online translation services like say... Babel Fish, to determine how worthy it is. Adding the "smartphone software" bit seems like a marketing ploy.

The polarized 3D movies are nothing like the anaglyphic stuff that the BBC is planning to use here. Polarized stereooptics (RealD, IMAX3D, and others) works by getting light to arrive at the viewers eyes from two different angles, and filtering so one set of angled light exclusively hits the left eye, and the other hits the right. Unlike anaglyphic, the colors themselves are not used to filter. As a result, it looks vastly better than the anaglyphic filtering you get with the cheapie red/cyan glasses. To set this up polarized stereooptics in the home is currently pretty expensive, like $xx,xxx, so the home viewing experience of 3D TV is going to be cheap and gimmicky until that changes.

Also, the glasses they hand out are big enough to go over your normal glasses. I'm doubling up on the specs myself, and it doesn't bother me.

Battery life on mobile devices is still a large issue, and if you are just connecting headsets and syncing up with PCs the extra range isn't needed. So WiFi Direct sounds better for some applications maybe. But we are all sick of our phones crapping out after an hour or two of "heavy" use, and trading range for battery life doesn't make sense for nearly all of the existing uses.

It might have originally been leaked, and then Google asked for it to be made public. You don't know!

"The government took our filing and then we got back a no-violation letter, which is fantastic.'"

Mozilla basically asked if it would be okay if Mozilla (not you, not me, not everybody else) could put strong encryption in their software. They didn't get a court ruling--they got permission. And there's nothing wrong with that, but it doesn't mean they are some champions of free speech rights. No, it means that they have successfully looked after their own interests. And other, particularly smaller, open source developers shouldn't expect to have the same good fortune in getting permission.

Not to be too grumpy. It is good news that somebody was exempted from a stupid regulation.

I agree. I think the page thumbnails are really just an automated way to create something like an icon or illustration next to each link. The thumbnails aren't actually useful--they are just decoration. It's not a bad way to make the accompanying article descriptions more interesting to read through. But it's silly to portray this small s/w engineering feat as some groundbreaking new way to review information.

Agreed. You could pretty much pick any activity from life, and make cutsey little generalized rules from it...

10 Business Lessons I Learned from Picking Dingleberries Out of My Ass

1. Always Bring the Right Tools for the Job - Blah blah blah blah blah
2. A Small Dingleberry is Often More Trouble Than a Large One - Blah blah blah blah
3. Everyone Has Dingleberries - Blah blah blah blah
4. And so on and so on...

Would someone please pay me to write life lessons from any randomly chosen activity? I will start work tomorrow with a $50,000 advance.

It has Android on it. That was about the only thing that made the G1 phone interesting. The HTC hardware is solid, but nothing groundbreaking. The BREW store has always sucked, because of Qualcomm's unreasonable barriers to entry for developers. They stuck with their gated community of content and buy-before-you-try for years and just figured it was the natural order for most of their users not to care about mobile phone apps.

Arguably, the Java-based Android OS is bad for app performance compared to BREW's native C code. But if you want an exciting console for people that are relatively poor (emerging market), then its fairly obvious to have something like Android Market or iPhone App Store that is full of freeware, shareware, and amateur projects.